By Antonio Montalvan
THAT question continues to loiter in the minds of Xavier U alumni who had expressed open disagreement to then university president Fr. Roberto Yap SJ to sell a sizeable part of the Divisoria and Manresa campuses. Both campuses were to be converted by land developer Cebu Landmasters into a mixed-use district of high-rise hotels, condominiums, and commercial malls.
The opposition to the planned sale stemmed precisely from the counsel of Jesuit superior general Fr. Arturo Sosa Abascal SJ who wrote Yap that all sectors must first be heard. The Concerned Parents, Teachers, Alumni, and Community (COPTAC) against the sale had collected testimonies from alumni and even from tenured faculty that Yap had pre-determined the “consultations” to calculatingly weed out opposing views. COPTAC believed the consultations were mock. A bypassed faculty intimated it took the courage of resistance to oppose the autocratic Bobby Yap.
Sometime in December 2019, COPTAC wrote a letter to Father General Sosa formally expressing its opposing views on the sale. COPTAC by then had already gained the support of the then sitting archbishop of Cagayan de Oro, Monsignor Antonio Ledesma (himself a Jesuit), two former XU presidents, some former provincial superiors of the Philippine Jesuits, and Jesuits who were once alumni of the university.
Writing to Sosa, COPTAC voiced out foremost the violation of the law of donor’s intent. The Divisoria campus, opened in 1935, was actually a donation of the then Diocese of Cagayan under Bishop Santiago Hayes SJ to the Society of Jesus. The Hayes donation letter proved very material to COPTAC’s cause and remains its most decisive piece of historical and legal evidence. The letter states that the diocese was donating to the Jesuits the land and the buildings therein to continue the Ateneo de Cagayan “for the education of the many, especially those who have less in life.”
Sympathetic Jesuits had advised how the letter passed hands. On January 17, 2020, a Filipino Jesuit in Rome messaged that the letter was now in the hands of the superior general. True enough and not long after, two letters arrived in Cagayan de Oro by postal mail. It came from the Curia Generalizia della Compagnia di Gesù, with address at Borgo Santo Spirito 4, Roma. It was postmarked Citta del Vaticano at the Vatican post office on February 6, 2020.
COPTAC had requested the Jesuit superior general to send a delegate or a special commission to Cagayan de Oro to hear out both sides of the issue. Why was this its proposed recourse? COPTAC had made efforts to dialogue with Fr. Yap and the XU Jesuits. Archbishop Ledesma signed the invitations. The dialogue was snubbed. That was quite a disquieting response: open repudiation against a sitting archbishop, something that in earlier days would have warranted closure of the Ateneo and/or expulsion of the Jesuits from the diocese.
In contrast, the letter authorized by the superior general was very cordial and reverent. Fr. Antoine Kerhuel SJ, secretary of the Society of Jesus, signed it. “Father General Arturo Sosa had requested me to respond to your letter of 30 December 2019. Thank you for your letter presenting the result of your meeting, and your proposal for a special commission. Father General will consider this proposal, as well as the other important points you do raise.”
With that, COPTAC was elated. The General Curia took only two days to have the letter signed by Father General and then to mail it to the Philippines. The letter was addressed to Dr. Anselmo Mercado, former director of the Southeast Asia Rural Social Leadership Institute (SEARSOLIN), and former university official Myrna Aboniawan Siose who had facilitated the meetings and consultations of COPTAC. A similar letter was also addressed and mailed to COPTAC as an organization.
A central question to ask: is COPTAC against urban development? The answer is a flat NO. COPTAC is agreeable to developing a new but sustainable Manresa campus. What it protests is to sell the university’s prime properties just to achieve that purpose. Worse, the Yap plan also included the demolition of high-rise buildings of the Divisoria campus, which have either attained the 50-year heritage prohibition of the law, or new buildings that have not yet attained their full economic life (all donated by foreign donors). Yap did not produce impact studies of the plan, something teaching and researching university of note could have done to show good examples: studies, studies, and studies.
Alas, the China virus pandemic trailed the Jesuit general’s very affable response. Now under new university president Fr. Mars Tan SJ, XU remains quiet on the issue. A Filipino Jesuit in the General Curia reveals: “the planned sale is now a vanishing issue,” exactly how a former XU president predicted, that Father General will just relegate it to the forgotten.
However, COPTAC is intact. The issue is not finished. It plans to embark on testing RA 10066, the National Cultural Heritage Law. It envisions for Cagayan de Oro city a cultural category that the law precisely prescribes – a Heritage Zone where demolition of heritage and historical buildings and structures will be prohibited. Cagayan de Oro has such a zone that qualifies: the 1800s St. Augustine Cathedral and Gaston Park complex, then extending to the old City Hall-Burgos Street-Lourdes College corridor, to the entire Divisoria, then to the 1935 Divisoria campus of the old Ateneo de Cagayan. Within that zone are several old structures, including one from the mid-1800s which was the Diocese of Cagayan’s first bishop’s residence, the 1930s art deco Tamparong building, the entire 1901 Plaza Divisoria and its 1917 Rizal monument, many buildings inside the XU campus, the Lourdes College campus, the 1922 Water Tower (now the City Museum) and the 1939 City Hall, among others. This zone may also require several national historical markers from the National Historical Commission of the Philippines, such as one for XU, Mindanao’s first university, its first Catholic university, and the first Ateneo in the entire Philippines to become a university.
