FIGURING CATHOLICISM: AN ETHNOHISTORY OF THE SANTO NIÑO DE CEBU

This book is about a statue of Christ as a boy who is worshipped by millions of Filipinos from all
walks of life. Today, the Santo Niño de Cebu—said to be the same wooden figure brought to the
islands by Ferdinand Magellan during the very moment of his 1521 “discovery” of the Philippines— AN ETHNOHISTORY OF THE SANTO NIÑO DE CEBU JULIUS J. BAUTISTA
is enshrined in bullet-proof glass case in a Basilica that hosts throngs of devotees in its
Friday novena.

While this study is concerned with describing the various ways the figure is revered, its aims
extend beyond this. The author combines ethnography with historiography and discourse analysis
to analyse how our most prevalent assumptions about the figure are produced and disseminated.
What ideas have sustained such assumptions after all this time? How did the figure become
such a popular “national” treasure? To what can we attribute the Santo Niño’s appeal outside
the official doctrines of the Catholic faith? This book looks at historical documents, popular
songs, news articles, poems, and oral accounts to address such questions. In doing so, this book
describes the contours of a ‘figured’ Catholicism as the context in which we can think about the
Santo Niño in ways we have not done before.

JULIUS J. BAUTISTA is Lecturer in Religious Studies at the Southeast Asian Studies Programme at
the National University of Singapore (NUS). He concurrently holds a Visiting Research Fellowship
at the Asia Research Institute, NUS. He is coeditor of Christianity and the State in Asia: Complicity
and Conflict (2009). Bautista is an anthropologist with degrees from the Australian National
University and the University of Sydney. He has published on religious practice in Southeast
Asia, with a focus on Christian iconography, religious piety, and the relationship between religion
and politics.

FIGURING CATHOLICISM BAUTISTA

ATENEO DE MANILA
UNIVERSITY PRESS

ATENEO DE MANILA UNIVERSITY PRESS

Bellarmine Hall, Katipunan Avenue
Loyola Heights, Quezon City
P.O. Box 154, 1099 Manila, Philippines
Website: www.ateneopress.org

Cover photograph by Jacob Maentz

Cover design by Karl Fredrick M. Castro
AN ETHNOHISTORY OF THE SANTO NIÑO DE CEBU • JULIUS J. BAUTISTA

ATENEO DE MANILA UNIVERSITY PRESS

ATENEO DE MANILA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Bellarmine Hall, Katipunan Avenue
Loyola Heights, Quezon City
P.O. Box 154, 1099 Manila, Philippines
Tel.: (632) 426-59-84 / Fax (632) 426-59-09
E-mail: unipress@admu.edu.ph
Website: www.ateneopress.org

Copyright 2010 by Ateneo de Manila University

and Julius J. Bautista

Book and cover design by Karl Fredrick Castro

FOR MY PARENTS
The author would like to acknowledge Mr. Ben Farrales, Jacob Maentz and
Erlinda Alburo for giving their permission to use photographs in this book as cited. VICENTE & MARIA VICTORIA
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored
in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written
permission of the Publisher.

The National Library of the Philippines CIP Data

Recommended entry:

Bautista, Julius J.
Figuring catholicism : an ethnohistory of the Santo Niño
de Cebu / Julius J. Bautista. -- Quezon City : Ateneo de Manila
University Press, 2010.
p. ; cm.

ISBN 978-971-550-612-0

1. Holy Childhood, Devotion to. 2. Catholic Church--History--
Philippines. 3. Catholic Church--Doctrines--History. 4. Cebu (Philippines)
--Church history. 5. Philippines--Church History.

BX2159.C4 232.927 2010 P102010703

 CONTENTS

Preface vii
A Note on Orthography x

INTRODUCTION 1
Tracing the Santo Niño’s Filipino “Figuring”

1 THE “INS” AND “OUTS” OF THE SANTO NIÑO DE CEBU 19

2 AN ARCHIPELAGO TWICE “DISCOVERED” 47

The Santo Niño in the Discourse of Discovery

3 THE ICON SURVIVES 73

The Santo Niño and the Clash of Christianities

4 THE PHILIPPINES FOR CHRIST 97

The Santo Niño de Cebu’s National Figuring

5 THE SYNCRETIC SANTO NIÑO 123

‘Folk Catholicism’ as Religious Discourse

6 THE REBELLION AND THE ICON 151

The Religious Contextualization of
Popular Uprising in the Philippines

7 THE PRODIGIOUS CHILD AND BATA NGA ALLAH 179

Locating the Santo Niño in
Filipino Projects of Soul-Searching

8 WHO FILIPINOS SAY CHRIST IS 207

Notes 211
Appendices 219
References 233
Index ???
 vii

PREFACE

T his book is about Roman Catholicism in the Philippines as it is

manifested in a little statue called the Santo Niño de Cebu. In writing
it, I drew upon my life experience as a Cebuano migrant to Australia
who was uprooted from a childhood spent in a coastal town in Cebu, and
finally transplanted as an adolescent to the western suburbs of Sydney.
The motivation for this book was a sense of reflexivity about a certain
identity politics. In the mid–1990s—when Australian Parliamentarian
Pauline Hanson’s tirade against Asians and Aborigines was allowed by
the then Howard government to percolate—those who complained about
Asians who “form ghettos and do not assimilate” became emboldened
to portray “mainstream Australia” as an intolerant society. Thankfully,
it did not take too long for this “Hansonite” view to become refuted
by Australians’ appetite for Asian life worlds, for which, among many
Australian friends, I was often an immediate and initial point of contact.
Being part of multicultural Australia under that political climate gave
me the opportunity to reflect upon the contours of my own alterity, so
that in constantly having to respond to the (usually follow-up) question
of “but where are you really from?” I was able to think more concretely
about what “home” actually means.
I could well have decided to direct my research towards this very
issue of fragmented identity, which can itself qualify as a topic in its
own right. There are not a few “heritage scholars” who have forged
entire careers from writing about the turbulent experience of living as
an immigrant in a land uncomfortable with, if not hostile to, otherness.
What’s more, the trend towards postmodernism in the academe has
viii FIGURING CATHOLICISM • BAUTISTA
provided conditions conducive to the unpacking of the vicissitudes of
multiplicity and plurality. Dealing with identity is a good platform from
which one can channel an instinctive and nostalgic insight about home—
an intuitive knowledge that is maintained by intermittent (if tenuous)
connections to one’s heritage. As such, this book is a journey sustained
by the dislocated migratory sensibility that runs as an undercurrent to
my understanding and analysis of religion in the Philippines.
Many people have helped me along this journey, which may not have
even begun were it not for my family’s encouragement and unstinting
support. I dedicate this book to my parents, Vicente and Maria.
I owe a profound debt of gratitude to my principal advisor and
colleague, Reynaldo C. Ileto, who was the first to encourage me to
channel my raw, gut instincts towards scholarly research. Resil Mojares,
with his comprehensive and intuitive knowledge of Cebu, was likewise
a source of inspiration and insight. Erlinda Alburo at the Cebuano
Studies Center, aside from facilitating many practical and intellectual
requirements, has given me numerous opportunities to test out those
instincts and gut concerns. From a greater distance, Takefumi Terada
and Vicente Rafael had significantly influenced the production and
shape of this book.
In Canberra, Greg Dening, Tom Griffiths, Virginia Matheson Hooker,
Peter Jackson, Oscar Florez-Marquez, Donna Merwick, Anthony Reid,
Mandy Thomas, and Caroline Turner have lent me their time, support,
and valuable insights. My colleagues at the Faculty of Asian Studies have
indulged me in discussion so that my ideas (about Cebu or otherwise)
became situated within a broader intellectual universe. To Christopher
Collier, Rommel Curaming, Mark Emmanuel, Deborah Johnson, Mary
Kilcline, Yasuko Kobayashi, Amrita Malhi, John Monfries, Shun Ono,
Jacob Ramsay, and Lorraine Salazar, I offer my thanks and best wishes.
In other parts of Australia, I’d like to acknowledge the support of
Ghassan Hage, Jadran Mimica, Raul Pertierra, Michael Pinches, and
Yao Souchou.
Financial support for this project was made possible by an
Endowment for Excellence Scholarship from the Alumni of the
Australian National University, which made it possible for me to travel
to conferences and research trips in the Philippines and Spain as well
as around Australia. Twelve months of fieldwork in the Philippines did
much to bridge the gap between the Cebu of my nostalgic imagination
and the one that is a living, breathing reality. In Cebu City, I benefited
PREFACE ix
greatly from my time at the University of San Carlos where, in the
Departments of History and Anthropology, I held joint teaching
appointments in 2000 and 2001. I express gratitude to my colleagues and
intellectual cohorts: Jovito Abellana, Rene Alburo, Jose Eleazar Bersales,
Aloysius Cañete, Harold Olofson, Jojin Pascual, John Peterson, and
Robert Rublico. Archival research in Madrid was more productive with
the assistance of Michael Cullinane, Sean Retana, Florentino Rodao,
and Jaime Veneracion. In Nuevos Ministerios, Catalina Billar deserves
special mention both for her intellectual generosity and heart-warming
hospitability. In Manila, I benefited from the kind assistance and
friendship of Etsuko Rodriguez, Yoriko Tatsumi, and Lydia Yu-Jose.
A joint appointment at the Asia Research Institute and the
Southeast Asian Studies Programme at the National University of
Singapore enabled me to put the finishing touches on the manuscript.
I acknowledge the support and collegiality of scholars in both these
institutions, particularly Bryan S. Turner, who has encouraged me to
fathom the broader reach of this book’s ideas.
Countless others have contributed to enriching this journey, none of
whom should be implicated in any of my errors in fact, interpretation,
or translation. Friends and family, casual and unlikely acquaintances or
even chance encounters have been invaluable towards making what this
work now is. I offer my heartfelt gratitude to those nameless others,
those who helped me to appreciate that Cebu still resides in me, even
though the reverse is no longer the case.
 1

INTRODUCTION
Tracing the Santo Niño’s
Filipino “Figuring”

T he focus of this book is a statue of Jesus Christ as a boy housed

majestically in a glass-panelled shrine in Cebu City (fig. i). The Santo
Niño de Cebu is an object of devotion for millions of Filipinos, many
of whom believe it to be well over four hundred years old. Every year,
thousands upon thousands of people journey to attend its feast, while
every day hundreds queue for as long as an hour to spend but a few
silent seconds praying and reflecting in the statue’s presence.
Numerous tales of the statue’s miraculous capacity for survival
encourage widespread adulation. Whether it is through the account of
the burning of an Augustinian monastery in the 1600s or through the
tale of the American bombardment of the Santo Niño Church in World
War II, the Santo Niño’s antiquity is premised upon its outlasting both
its custodians and the edifices that have housed it. It might seem unlikely
that a small wooden statue would endure, among other things, the harsh
natural elements and the depredations of successive colonial regimes.
Yet the Santo Niño is today accorded the same degree of reverence
as a priceless national treasure or an irreplaceable historical artifact.
A scientific dating of the figure’s age—a detail left out of virtually all
accounts of its provenance—seems less important when one inquires
into the reasons for its popular appeal. What most Filipinos agree
upon is that the Santo Niño, or the Niño for short, stands as a tangible
representation of Filipinos’ Catholic identity, such that its survival
is itself a metaphor for how the faithful have fared amidst the many
tribulations in their tumultuous history.
2 FIGURING CATHOLICISM • BAUTISTA
What compels such widespread devotion to this particular
diminutive statue? What kinds of ideas underpin the prevailing belief
in its importance, even though the explanations of its origins might
seem improbable? What does this devotion show about the nature of
Catholicism in the Philippines, then and now? This is a study in which
the Santo Niño is used as an entry point into describing what it means
to be Catholic in the largest Christian nation in Asia today. In studying
the figure I am, in fact, challenging long-held theoretical and theological
inclinations, citing discursive trends and deconstructing stories about
Filipino religious belief and practice. What I seek to do in this book is to
understand how icons have provided for Filipinos a means of negotiating
the various social, political, and even economic challenges that beset
them. In this way, I argue that icons like the Santo Niño manifest, in ways
that find expressions in areas outside of Cebu, a “figured” Catholicism
both in a literal and metaphorical sense.
By “figuring Catholicism” I mean two things specifically: first, I
refer to the statue that can be understood as an ethnographical subject.
As a tangible thing, the “stuff” of the Santo Niño carries enormous
significance in Filipino worship and religiosity. Every inch of the figure’s
physicality—from the contours of its face, to the numerous vestments
it wears, to the podium on which it stands—denotes something specific
about the Filipino devotion to it. In this sense, the Santo Niño figures in
Filipino life worlds when the statue is appealed or, prayed to, invoked, or
reflected upon as part of Filipino religious belief. The Santo Niño figures
in Filipino sensibility when its replicas are displayed in people’s homes,
given as presents for good tidings, or kept as valuable heirlooms passed
down the generations. I describe this kind of figuring most prominently
in the first chapter.
In the second sense, figuring refers to the Santo Niño that can be
understood as subject of religious discourse. This is to ask how the image
is imagined as metaphorically, sentimentally, and discursively entwined
in Filipino understandings of their own faith. The involvement of the
figure in the most momentous events in Philippine history—something
that is seen as providential and divinely inspired by Filipinos of all walks
of life—is something that sets the Santo Niño apart from any other
religious statue in the nation. When I ask in chapter 2, for example, how
the Santo Niño figures in the remembrance of the event of Cebuano
conversion to Christianity, I argue that the remembrance of religious
upheaval is mediated through certain stories (some apocryphal, others
INTRODUCTION 3
historical) of the figure’s “double discovery.” Similarly, in chapter 7,
where I ask how the Santo Niño figures in Filipino attempts to foster a
civilizational identity, I endeavor to explain how the icon contextualizes
Filipino thought and action through the localized rendition of its origins.
These two heuristic strategies manifest my own desire to understand
how and why the Santo Niño figures so prominently in Filipino religious
life. The underlying rationale is the movement back and forth between
figuring as a tangible, solid thing in the practice of Catholicism; and
figuring as the ways in which an ensemble of ideas about the Santo Niño
recur repeatedly in the cultural and historical potraits people paint of
and for themselves.
Very few religious icons in the Philippines are as widely worshipped
and sentimentally revered in quite the same way as the Santo Niño de
Cebu—the “original” among many Christ Child statues in the country.
Many articles, reviews, reports, and personal testimonies attest to the
icon’s place in the hearts and minds of the Filipino people. There are
many prevailing ideas about the icon that, because they have existed
“since time immemorial,” have not been contested or even questioned.
By discussing, in the chapters that follow, the conditions in which those
ideas are produced and circulated, I intend simply to make people think
about the Santo Niño in ways that they have not done before.
POWER, DISCOURSE, AND THE SANTO NIÑO AS SYMBOL
The figuring of Catholicism as a scholarly project finds reverberation
in the disciplines of anthropology and history. I agree with Maurice
Bloch (1987, 6) who said that it is “in the rapprochement between
anthropology and history that the really exciting things seem to be
happening” (cf. Ortner 1989, 16). Similarly, Greg Dening (1980, 1988)
and the “Melbourne School” of historians have been pioneers in this
intersubjective convergence between history and anthropology. While
this work is decidedly historical in breadth, looking at the ways in
which the Santo Niño is embedded in reflections and recollections of
the Cebuano past, it is also anthropological in placing methodological
primacy in prolonged periods of fieldwork and linguistic proficiency.
The anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1973, 91–94), who focused
on Southeast Asian life worlds in Bali, had famously defined religious
symbols as “tangible formulations of notions, abstractions from
experience fixed in perceptible forms, concrete embodiments of ideas,
attitudes, judgments, longings, or beliefs.” This study, similarly, conceives
4 FIGURING CATHOLICISM • BAUTISTA
of symbol as the objectification of ideas in religious iconography and
statues. We shall see, particularly in the first chapter, how the Santo
Niño figures as the physical embodiment of Filipino attitudes about
things beyond their immediate experience. Inscribed in the figure’s
miniatureness—in the sheer compactness of its physique—is an
anthropomorphosis of religious sensibility; a “deep play” of Filipino
Catholicism manifested in the corporeal likeness of Christ.
Yet as much as symbols are constituted by human thoughts and
attitudes, they are also constitutive of how people perceive, think,
and act upon their world. Geertz (96) defines symbols as “models,” or
templates, from which are induced religious “moods and motivations”
that, in turn, influence how humans negotiate the contradictions of
their experiences. In this regard, as Pierre Bourdieu argues (1977, 71),
symbols are intertwined with people’s “dispositions” such that they are
also the basis for ongoing processes of structuring experience (a dynamic
Bourdieu calls “structuration”). Chapters 2 and 5 describe how the Santo
Niño framed and conditioned Filipino attitudes and responses during
events of momentous social and political upheaval. The “doubleness”
of Geertz’s formulation—that symbols are both models of and models
for a peoples’ reality—underlies the importance of icons like the Santo
Niño in the practice and propagation of religion, particularly where its
adherents are challenged and in crisis. This process underlies the second
kind of figuring of Catholicism that I speak of here.
In the examination of the Christian Philippines, however, I seek to
expand upon the theoretical implications of Geertz’s ideas. Does the
Santo Niño as a model of the social world simply reflect the affective
sensibilities of the Catholic faithful? Conversely, will it, as a model for
their world, always order and regulate Filipino perceptions of reality
immediately and automatically? Geertz’s dialectic formulation suggests
that symbols operate upon certain mental processes intrinsic and specific
to humans. Characteristic of American cultural anthropology’s focus on
“meaning,” Geertz’s influence encourages us to focus analytical attention
on processes of cognitive stimulus—on how people interpret symbols.
As we shall see in the chapters that follow, however, the transcendent
physicality of the Santo Niño itself is critical to its potency. In this book
I focus on the material and the tangible aspects of the figure, and not
just upon the cognitive, the symbolic, and the semiotic.
There is a danger in assuming that the Santo Niño has only one
consistent meaning among Filipinos. There is also a danger in thinking
INTRODUCTION 5
that there is only one group of people who have a more legitimate
interpretation of the meanings of the Santo Niño than others. A
major objective of this study, as such, is to argue that there is often an
incongruity between the Santo Niño’s official or doctrinal meanings on
the one hand; and how ordinary people actually regard it in everyday
practice on the other. That is, there is often a lack of fit in religious
devotion that reveals the agency of a group of people in interpreting
icons in ways that sit awkwardly with the intentions that foregrounded
its production. Filipino historians such as Ileto (1979) and Rafael (1988)
and anthropologists such as Alejo (2001) showed that religion in the
Philippines is often characterized by slippages between intention and
interpretation, thereby drawing attention to the creative (and reactive)
strategies upon which Filipinos made use of Christian icons and
doctrine. Following on from their work, I look beyond the Geertzian
notion of symbol, focusing also on discursive processes of resistance,
intervention, suppression, or naturalization of ideas. In other words, the
focus is not merely on the Geertzian symbol as such, but also on those
historical relations of power upon which ideas about figures like the
Santo Niño are produced and construed.
It is important at this stage to discuss how “power” corresponds to
the scholarly project of figuring Catholicism. Another anthropologist,
Talal Asad, raises important issues in inquiring into the specific
conditions under which religious symbols can produce religious
dispositions. Reflecting specifically upon Geertz’s views on religion,
Asad (1993, 35) problematizes the exclusive primacy of symbols in
determining the range and scope of human thought and agency: “It is
not mere symbols that implant true [Christian] dispositions,” he argues,
“but power ranging all the way from laws and other sanctions . . . to
the disciplinary activities of social institutions and of human bodies.”
Asad’s conception of power echoes that of Foucault (1979, 202) who
located the principle of power “in a certain concerted distribution
of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes, in an arrangement whose internal
mechanisms produce the relation in which individuals are caught up.”
For both Asad and Foucault, power exists in “disindividualized” form;
as a repressive and constitutive force exerted not just through symbols
and actors, but in diversified institutional structures such as prisons
(colonial), governments, or indeed in the Church itself.
In this study, Geertz’s concept of symbol is brought to bear on
relations of power in the poststructuralist sense. It also brings to bear
6 FIGURING CATHOLICISM • BAUTISTA
the concept of “symbol” on the everyday practical (and in many ways
contradictory) experience of Catholicism in the Philippines today. All of
the chapters of this book focus on the genealogies of “regimes of truth”
upon which Filipino moods and motivations concerning the Santo
Niño are defined and mediated. Figuring Catholicism, I argue, is not
merely about analysing the Santo Niño as a symbol driven exclusively
by an essentially cognitive dynamic; as though autonomous from the
discursive epistemes that Foucault describes. The chapters that follow
are formulated upon the notion that the meanings of symbols are not
automatically generated in a cultural ontology but, rather, can be traced
to “conventional projects, occasional intentions, ‘naturalized’ events,
and so on” (Asad 1993, 13).
Indeed, it is productive to describe the nature and history of Filipino
devotion to the Santo Niño. What I seek to do in this book, however,
is go beyond that by asking why certain ideas about the Santo Niño
are more accepted than others. What are those historical, political,
and cultural circumstances in which some versions of the Santo Niño’s
story are considered more dominant, more official than others, thereby
facilitating their transmission among Filipinos across time and space?
Asking these kinds of questions entails an examination of power,
and invites us to elaborate on how discourses are formed or promulgated
in the context of Filipino Catholicism. “Discourse” typically refers to
speeches and the performative act of articulating ideas. By discourse,
however, I am referring to the systematic interconnection of a wide
corpus of statements, so that a discussion of a “discourse of discovery”
or a “discourse of syncretism” refers to an interrelated ensemble of
thinking about the Santo Niño over time. Discourse is the site in which
power is exerted upon knowledge, so that certain claims about the
Santo Niño have become naturalized as truths. The validity of certain
values about the Santo Niño may not be divinely sanctioned or inherent
in a miraculous grace, but often results from intentional technologies
of promotion, inculcation, or sanitization. This is a theme that runs
through all the chapters. The vital point about discourse as it is used in
this study is that it demonstrates how objects of (religious) knowledge
are produced and disseminated in accordance with specific institutional
agendas. In other words, there are traceable processes that determine
how the Santo Niño can be meaningfully talked and reasoned about,
and influence how agendas are enacted through devotional practice in
order to regulate the conduct of its participants.
INTRODUCTION 7
These chapters are concerned primarily with those discourses
whose genealogy can be traced to Spanish and American colonialism as
the original purveyor of religious truths. It is not my intention, however,
to argue that all knowledge about the Santo Niño is simply contingent
upon colonial agency. The chapters that follow concern not merely the
discussion of those dominant discourses inspired by the convergence of
missionization and imperialism, but also the ways in which Filipinos
sought to subvert their primacy in the crafting of their own counter-
discourses. In the performance of “folk religiosity” such as those I
discuss in chapters 1 and 5, these attempts at subversion themselves
are the conditions of possibility of new regimes of truth. As such, the
task here is not just to engage in a discursive comparison of texts and
claims, but also to ask how competing discourses are constitutive of
other regimes, paying specific attention to the motivations of the agents
who use and deploy them.
This study, then, describes the Santo Niño beyond its purely
phenomenological manifestations. It discusses iconography as a set
of relationships between objects and events, whereupon discursive
power creates religious “truth.” This is a study about those intentional
processes in which religious icons are co-opted in designating experiences
as “religious,” “holy,” “divine,” or “sacred.” What, for example, are the
discursive conditions in which the Santo Niño is widely believed to be
over four hundred years old? What are the regimes of truth that underpin
the popular conviction in its “miraculous” powers of survival? This
work addresses such questions by being attentive to relations of power
and discourse, thereby going beyond a scientific or statistical evaluation
of the Santo Niño’s provenance, or a conventional ethnography of the
practices of its devotees.
THE EPIC AND THE EPISODIC
The structure of this book reveals the extent to which figuring
Catholicism also has an important historical component. “An historical
situation,” writes Stephen Greenblatt (1993, x), “is never simply that
of the moment: it is the expression of long-term trajectories, material
necessities, social structures, enduring, largely unconscious patterns
of will and constraint, not necessarily identical with the culture’s own
understanding of itself or others.”
This work traces over four hundred years in the history of the
Santo Niño, moving strategically back and forth across time and event.
8 FIGURING CATHOLICISM • BAUTISTA
As Greenblatt suggests, the general aim is to depict the Santo Niño’s
“historical situation” by locating cross-temporal and cross-cultural
patterns of recalcitrance and appropriation, pragmatic acts that subvert
even people’s self perceptions. As such, the chapters of this book are
not meant to follow a pre-given chronology. They are structured, rather,
to challenge the deterministic causality of progress and development—
something that can be approached by juxtaposing significant events of
the Santo Niño’s history, taking heed of the sometimes ironic relationship
between them. The chapters that follow, each evoking specific issues or
events, are united by the Santo Niño as both a topic of research and as
a heuristic anchor.
In this respect, this book is different in scope and methodology
from other works on the Santo Niño. The works of Tenazas (1965) and
Florendo (2001), if only for the breadth and depth of their inquiries,
stand out as the most popular among an assortment of essays, coffee
table books, and commemorative albums about the Santo Niño. A
prevalent characteristic of these works is the “epic” and lineal rendition
of the Santo Niño’s history, in which it is depicted as having emerged
from the fires of a Golden (European) Age, and brought to different
corners of the globe by the emissaries of the Christian faith. Upon this
act, the figure is shown to have been seamlessly implanted into various
local cultures, framing the universal acceptability of the Christian
doctrine it symbolizes. Its European lineage notwithstanding (it is
usually identified as of Flemish origin) this conventional history of the
Santo Niño posits the Philippines as the home ground in the figure’s
literal and symbolic journey. From the Santo Niño’s arrival in Cebu, to
its numerous feats of survival, to the adoption of its devotion across the
rest of the archipelago, a more or less predictable narrativity recounts
the nation’s progression from the paganistic and profane (the Dark
Age), to the “spiritual” and “sacred” (the onset of a kind of Filipino
Enlightenment).
In this sense, a wide array of Santo Niño literature can be situated
within a tendency in postwar Philippine historiography to examine
religious change within the template of the causal and the linear. As
Ileto (1997, 99) has observed:
The operations by which some events are highlighted while
others are suppressed, the division into arbitrary historical
periods, the establishment of chains of cause and effect, the
INTRODUCTION 9
evolutionary ordering of phenomena such as from primitive
to advanced, religious to secular—all these are obscured in
textbooks and teaching methods. The student is made to learn
the facts as they are strung out in some linear fashion, not the
relationship of histories to power groups, the silences of the
past, or the history of the linear scheme itself.
In elucidating his prescriptions for a “nonlinear emplotment of
Philippine history,” Ileto demonstrates how some eminent Filipino
historians have forsaken an attentiveness to the construction of
knowledge in favor of fostering the “epic” of Filipino religious history.
Most works on the Santo Niño are particularly susceptible to a grandiose
historiographical lineality, given that the figure is conceived of as a kind
of trans-temporal, heroic relic of the Filipino past.
It is upon a dissatisfaction with such modes of metahistory that this
book has been conceived.1 This is a project that displaces the primacy
of the epic by engaging in the “thick description” of the various events
of Filipino engagement with the Santo Niño.2 It proceeds upon the
anthropological notion that sees constructions of cultural reality as
compressed and expandable. In practice, this means engaging in the
analysis of synchronic clusters of historical minutiae—historical events,
episodes, or anecdotes—which, when “unpacked,” reveal the complex
social fields within which they operate.
I am not proposing an analysis of the elements of myth or narrative
in a Levi-Straussian sense. Rather, this is an act of using the event as
a heuristic device towards understanding how ideas about the Santo
Niño have gained institutional sanction (from the Roman Catholic
Church, for example) and general acceptance among people at large.
The second chapter, for example, examines the event of mass baptism
during which the Santo Niño was first “bequeathed” unto Cebuanos
in 1521. The analysis of this episode enables us to gain insight into
the specific constructedness of the connection between “discovery”
and “salvation”—continuities that pervade even modern Filipino
understandings of baptism and conversion. Figured, as these concepts
are, in the image of the Santo Niño, the question we ask by focusing on
the event is what imbues the conception of the event of the first native
baptism with an aura of “salvation” or “sense of destiny”? It is not upon
the emplotment of history into a deterministic chain of causality that
this question can be addressed. It is, I argue, in being cognizant of the
10 FIGURING CATHOLICISM • BAUTISTA
discursive density of events (to its thickness) that the genealogical study
of the Santo Niño’s contemporary meanings can be engaged.
This attentiveness to the hermeneutic potential of the episode is a
prevalent characteristic of Vicente Rafael’s work (2000, 2006). For him
(2000, 4), the usefulness of an “episodic history” “lies in its ability to
attend to the play of contradictions and the moments of non-heroic
hesitation, thereby dwelling on the tenuous, we might say, ironic
constitution of Philippine history.” Linear history’s alignment towards
tropes of progress and development hampers our understanding of
instances of silence or recalcitrance that do not easily fit into larger
metanarrative structures. For Rafael, it is by drawing out the ironic
relationship between the historical epic and moments of passive
resistance or creative sedition that one is able to truly appreciate the
richness the archives have to offer.3
In the same vein, this study transcends metahistory’s inhibitive
structures by setting one historical episode against another in order
to flesh out the ironies manifested therein. Hence, the “heroic” event
of the Santo Niño’s discovery in the sixteenth century stands in ironic
disparity to the 2003 event of its “demotion” as patron saint. Similarly,
the tales of the Santo Niño’s survival stand in stark and ironic contrast
to the event of a hundred of its replicas being dumped in a Cebuano
garbage heap in 2003. This study concurs with Rafael’s conviction
that “[i]rony forestalls and interrupts the establishment of a single,
overarching narrative about the nation” (ibid.). For it is upon allowing
for the emergence of irony in our work that history can be fostered as a
dialogical praxis: as a dialogue within the past (wherein each historical
episode is characterized by a conflict of voices), and a dialogue with the
past (where synchronic events are juxtaposed with each other to account
for either continuity or change).
This use of synchronic historical events as a specific methodology
has not been without criticism. Rafael’s “episodic history” has been
interpreted as promoting a haphazard voluntarism of interpretation
that opens up a kind of authorial arbitrariness. For in the choosing
of which episodes are to be mined for their interpretive and ironic
significance, is not the author himself in danger of imposing his own
sense of value upon historical categories? It is not immediately clear
whether an episodic history offers a method beyond what Hunt (1991,
97) has described as “individual virtuosity in which history is simply a
storehouse of interesting anecdotes available to an exceptionally talented
INTRODUCTION 11
writer.” Furthermore, while Rafael’s approach might imply that episodes
are chosen randomly and that others would be just as likely to furnish us
with insight, some episodes seem far more condensed than others (that
is, some texts seem “thicker” than others) as Greenblatt has suggested
(1997, 17). How does one decide which episodes are to be singled out for
thick description, considering that the act of choosing is itself subject
to various authorial strategies and agendas? Among the plethora of
episodes in history, are the ones chosen for analysis contingent solely
upon the author’s predilections? As Dirlik (2001) suggests, it seems
that there is a need for episodic history to be combined with careful
consideration of how the historian deals with issues of the interpretive
significance and value of each event.
In response to these, I argue that episodic history must be an
anchored project, one that specifies the linkages between the synchronic
events chosen for analysis. That is, the events chosen for analysis in an
episodic history should all be associated with a tangible object around
which events and discourses circulate. In this study, therefore, the Santo
Niño is not merely the topic of discussion, but also the heuristic object
by which episodes and discourses are unpacked and examined. It is the
binding constant throughout the book that connects the events chosen
for analysis. In chapter 5, for example, the analysis of the discourse of
syncretism is anchored on the event of the Santo Niño’s controversial
effective demotion from patron to sainthood. The main feature of
episodic history is in its furnishing insights about syncretism that would
otherwise have been impossible if not seen in the context of the Santo
Niño’s contentious relegation. A focus on the event of this demotion
reveals a syncretism characterized by a politics of institutional regulation
over the definition of the Santo Niño’s sainthood or divinity. Again, the
irony of the event of demotion (juxtaposed as it is within a long period
of the Santo Niño’s symbolic dominance) imbues interpretation with a
depth absent from a deterministic epic history.
This historical anchoring I advocate here already finds expression
in Filipino cultural history. The potential arbitrariness of choosing
episodes for analysis is tempered with the Santo Niño as an analytical
bedrock upon which investigation can be deployed. I am not the first
to employ such an approach. In explaining why he chose to ground his
genealogy of modern Filipino knowledge on the lives of three pioneering
intellectuals, for example, Mojares (2006, ix–x) identifies the need for “a
specific, historicized cultural site from which one can look out into the
12 FIGURING CATHOLICISM • BAUTISTA
world. Even as one must acknowledge that it is a position neither pure
nor unassailable, it is ground under one’s feet, mooring and haven in
which one can orient oneself in relation to the territory covered or yet
to be traversed.” In this book, which can be described as an episodic
history and ethnography of Filipino Catholicism, the Santo Niño is
that heuristic mooring from where explorations into the temporal and
cultural vistas of Filipino Catholics can be engaged in a measured and
productive way.
ALTERNATIVE DISCOURSE AND FIELDWORK “AT HOME”
Although many of the observations made about Cebu City in this book
find parallels in the outlying regions of Cebu Province, ethnographic
research was conducted mainly in the urban setting of Metro Cebu
where fieldwork was undertaken for a period of eleven months. Cebu is
an island with a land area of 508,844 ha located in the central part of the
Philippine archipelago. The province has a population of 3.86 million
people (2007 Census), over 85 percent of whom are Roman Catholic.
Cebu City, the capital of the province, is a metropolis populated by
around 799,762 people.
Though the location of this work is clear, I find it slightly
discomforting to talk about fieldwork in the conventionally
anthropological sense of participant observation, particularly as it was
conceived by the pioneers of British social anthropology. “Fieldwork”
suggests periods of displacement from the ethnographer’s comfort
zone (that is, her or his “home”) for the sake of prolonged and coeval
exposure to the life worlds of those she or he is studying. It implies
the ethnographer’s engagement with “informants” who act typically to
assuage the anthropologist’s linguistic and logistic vicissitudes. There
is a sense, furthermore, that fieldwork is some kind of rite of passage,
the completion of which signifies the ethnographer’s coming of age as a
legitimate anthropologist.
I raise the issue here because I feel that this discomfort with
fieldwork is a common one among “heritage scholars” in Western
academic institutions who have chosen, for either sentimental or
professional reasons, to conduct research in their “home” countries.
I believe that meaningful work can be produced by harnessing a
disposition in which the distinction between “home” and “fieldwork”
is itself a subject of intellectual reflection. Having been born in Cebu
and raised in both Manila and Sydney, my experience with fieldwork
INTRODUCTION 13
can be located somewhere in between “coming home” in a sentimental
sense and “doing fieldwork” in a professionally academic sense. Such a
disposition is not uncommon and has been the source of cathartic and
even self-indulgent research premised on addressing protracted identity
crises. This kind of displacement does not have to be disconcerting,
however. On the contrary, the value of extended periods of research
lies in having the opportunity to learn to trust and harness one’s own
instinctive knowledge and intuitive feel for local life worlds. It can also
encourage the impetus for thinking about the importance of metatheory
in the praxis of research activity. This is not to say, however, that the
knowledge produced from this disposition is one that is the same as a
“native ethnographer” who may be motivated by a different sentiment
and idea of home. The experience of heritage scholarship is fuelled,
I submit, by a certain kind of nostalgia that has a great capacity to
produce unique insights into many facets of local experience, in spite of
foreign passports and dual allegiances. The chapters that follow reflect
this sense of comfortable, intellectually productive displacement.
Having said this, however, it is important to point out that this book is
not merely one that applies Western-derived theories and methodologies
to the local context of Cebu.4 To be sure, many works have diagnosed
the shortcomings of non-Western social sciences, decrying tendencies
towards mimicry, irrelevance, and intellectual dependency.5 However,
works that prescribe exactly how alternatives to such tendencies can be
fostered, or even what such alternative works might look like are the
exception rather than the norm. As Alatas (2006, 64) observes:
There is hardly any original metatheoretical or theoretical
analysis emerging from the Third World. While a significant
amount of empirical work is generated in the Third World,
much of this takes its cues for research agenda, theoretical
perspectives and methods from research in the West. Dependence
on ideas is the general condition of knowledge in the Third
World. Although scholarly communities have tirelessly pointed
out ethnocentric biases in the Western social sciences, the
emergence of autonomous and alternative theoretical traditions
are yet to be seen.
What I aim to contribute in this figuring of Catholicism is to foster
an alternative discourse for Asian social sciences that may serve as a
14 FIGURING CATHOLICISM • BAUTISTA
form of liberation from a certain kind of academic dependency inherent
in works produced in the Third World. As Alatas notes (172), works
must seek ways to redress the influence of Eurocentrism in the social
sciences, such that “the quest for alternative discourse is simultaneously
the quest for a liberating discourse because of the specific historical
circumstances in which the Third World finds itself.”
What would such an alternative discourse look like? How can we
produce work that counteracts Eurocentric or essentialist tendencies
typical of knowledge produced in and about the “Third World”? By
the same token, how can we produce work that avoids the tendency to
prioritize the use of Western sources? Alatas has itemized the features
of such alternative discourses. He defines (83) “alternative” as “that
which is relevant to its surroundings—is creative, non-imitative and
original, non-essentialist, counter-Eurocentric, autonomous from the
state and autonomous from other national or transnational groupings.”
The agenda to redress Eurocentric discourses should not necessitate
a kind of nativist analysis that rejects Western thought outright. This
book does not seek to replace the indigenized discourse of the West
for the nativist Filipino discourse.6 What I seek to foster, rather, is an
expansion of our intellectual horizons in displacing and decentering
the epistemological primacy of a Western intellectual tradition. At this
stage, only one indigenized body of social theory, that of the West,
takes pre-eminence in works dealing with the Santo Niño. Alternative
discourse in this context refers to gaining knowledge about Santo Niño
through a heuristic that, as Charkrabarty (2000, 22) has discussed,
“provincializes Europe”:
Provincializing Europe both begins and ends by acknowledging
the indispensability of European political thought to
representations of non-European political modernity, and
yet struggles with the problems of representations that this
indispensability invariably creates.
Chakrabarty here acknowledges that an alternative discourse for
understanding non-European realities does not necessitate a recourse
to nativist polemics. What is necessary, however, is a certain kind of
reflexivity that goes beyond being honest and explicit about our limitations
as scholars. Rather, provincializing Europe is an acknowledgment of the
need for a certain scholarly eclecticism that tempers the use of Euro-
INTRODUCTION 15
American frameworks with the considered appropriation of scholarship
produced in the locality in which one is studying.
While I relate, or at times stand critical of, American cultural
anthropology, French Poststructuralism, and the New Historicism of
the “Melbourne school,” this book takes as much critical insight from
the capacity of local Filipino scholarship as sources for analytical
frameworks and data. Historians such as Reynaldo Ileto, Vicente Rafael,
anthropologists such as Albert Alejo, S.J., and cultural critics such
as Resil Mojares exert equal, if not more influence in the intellectual
moorings of figuring Catholicism. And while the fostering of a truly
alternative discourse requires more than just citing organic scholarship,
I hope to begin my own journey in this endeavor by invoking at least
in spirit the call for a decentering of European scholarship articulated
so well by the likes of Chakrabarty, Alatas, and the Filipino scholars I
mention above.
ETHNOGRAPHY AND DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
We shall begin the discussion by focusing on the more tangible (as opposed
to rhetorical or discursive) figuring of the Santo Niño. The focus here
is on various devotional activities that surround the statue enshrined in
Basilica Minore of Cebu City today. A depiction of different organizations
worshipping the figure will be made in the context of a theoretical
discussion of Christian iconography in the Philippines, conditioned as
they are by successive foreign colonial regimes. In enacting a literal and
metaphorical distinction between the Santo Niño inside and outside the
Basilica, the first chapter will examine both the organized forms of Santo
Niño devotion as well as those spontaneous and on the ground. How
are the figure’s devotees distinguished according to the descriptive and
semantic categories imposed by the Church authority? The chapter will
examine how the various modes of worshipping the Santo Niño bring
issues of class and ethnicity into stark and often contesting distinction.
The second chapter focuses on two periods of Spanish arrivals
in Cebu—1521 and 1565—as they are remembered through popular
history, the landscape, and religious iconography. It is not so much a
background history to the Santo Niño as it is an elucidation of the
underpinnings of a discourse of discovery, describing its allegorical
and metaphorical links to the figure today. Here I will trace the lineage
of the discourse of discovery in the ways in which Cebuanos became
emplotted into European conceptions of paganism, and how their
16 FIGURING CATHOLICISM • BAUTISTA
exoticism was domesticated into the discursive universe of Spanish
missionaries and colonial administrators. As will be seen, this was not
always a straightforward process in light of Cebuanos’ own actions of
hostility and recalcitrance to Spanish designs.
The third chapter questions how the Santo Niño fared during
a time when American expansionism and Protestant missionization
presented challenges to its continued existence. I seek to describe a
political and social environment that sought to promote an American
“Christianization” of Filipinos in ways that redressed the perceived
moral and political decadence of the Spanish Friarocracy. In this regard,
prevailing ideas about idolatry had provided a context in which the
moral and doctrinal differences between Spanish Roman Catholicism
and American Protestantism could be articulated. Such differences
complimented the rhetoric of the “benevolent assimilation” of the islands
whose inhabitants were manifestly destined towards liberal democracy.
The Santo Niño’s emergence from this period of social and political
turmoil becomes remarkable in this sense. As we shall see, the survival
of the Santo Niño is seen as a metaphorical and literal manifestation of
the victory of Catholicism in the Philippines.
Having described the triumphalist platform on which the Santo
Niño stood, it becomes possible in the fourth chapter to discuss
the circumstances in which the icon had transcended its provincial
identifications to become a nationally revered icon. In describing
events of great religious and national significance—primarily the
quatercentenary celebrations in 1965 and, to a lesser extent that of
1921—this chapter suggests that the Santo Niño’s popularity can be
traced to acts of promotion and inculcation that sought to link the
history of the Santo Niño to the history of the nation itself. In this
sense, this chapter connects very strongly with the second.
While the first chapter laid the groundwork for an understanding
of the complex interplay between folk and official Catholicism, the
fifth is a discussion of the notion that the Santo Niño is a harmonizing,
syncretic deity. In this chapter, I inquire into processes by which the figure
symbolizes a distinctive type of Filipino Catholicism that synthesizes the
modern and the ancient, the official and the sensational, the pagan and
the enlightened. I will argue against the conception of the Philippine
Catholic Church as a monolithic entity that is largely intolerant of folk
religious practices. Insofar as the official stand of the Catholic Church
in the Philippines is one of contextualization and accommodation, the
INTRODUCTION 17
chapter will point out some ways in which it positions itself as the sole
source of tolerating unorthodox means of worship, thereby preserving
their semantic and discursive powers of authenticating and legitimizing
Filipino religious belief.
The subject of the sixth chapter is the history of use (or misuse) of
religious iconography, focusing on the Santo Niño and, to a lesser extent,
the Our Lady of EDSA in Metro Manila. Through the semantically
open appropriation of their meanings, these religious icons have become
utilized by Filipinos as symbols of protest against the State and, indeed,
against the Church institution as well. The question here is how these
icons are brought to bear on revolutionary causes and agendas, in ways
that have outstripped the spiritual and theological functions for which
they were intended. What are the ways in which religious iconographies
contextualize and figure mass action in the Philippines? What are the
semantic and discursive processes by which revolutions are designated
and conceived of as holy while others are not?
The final chapter asks where the Santo Niño figures in Filipino
attempts to foster an identity in opposition to their colonizers. In
engaging in literary and historiographical acts of “soul-searching,”
Filipinos constructed and revived a glorious past autonomous from and
recalcitrant to the colonial-prescribed renderings of their racial and
ethnic origins. An associated project in this regard was the discursive
localization of the Santo Niño through works of scholarship that
sought to deny its foreign affiliations while supplanting to it a distinctly
Filipino or Asian origin. In this sense, the task of this chapter is to
trace how Cebuano devotion to the Santo Niño became allegorically
and metaphorically associated with Cebu’s own claims to political
legitimacy. But it will also elucidate the friction that exists within the
project of fostering a Filipino nation as a collective united in an over-
arching metahistory.
O utside the Philippines, Cebu is better known for the beach resorts
found across the island and its surrounding areas. Such idyllic
settings, however, belie the ghastly events of violence that characterize
the past of Cebu. It is somewhat hard to picture that in the very shores
where tourists frolic and play, the foremost emissary of the Spanish
Empire was brutally vanquished by Bisayan warriors in the sixteenth
18 FIGURING CATHOLICISM • BAUTISTA

century—an event that encouraged even further the Iberian Court’s

imperialistic resolve, and had influenced the course of history of the
whole archipelago for centuries to come. Venturing deeper inland, one
is able to bear witness to another intriguing side to Cebu. There are still
many who visit here because it caters to more carnal pursuits that today
seem an indelible feature of the seedy undercurrent of any Southeast
Asian city. Yet in the same humid spaces, where vice and indulgence
are accommodated for a price, can be found the spiritual soul of the
Philippine nation whereupon Christianity is said to have first made a
profound impact in the hearts and minds of its citizens. It is on this
at times contradictory, spiritual plane of Cebu that the Santo Niño
is located, and from where we seek to embark upon the journey to
understand the various ways in which the figure itself is “figured.”
FIGURING CATHOLICISM: AN ETHNOHISTORY OF THE SANTO NIÑO DE CEBU
This book is about a statue of Christ as a boy who is worshipped by millions of Filipinos from all
walks of life. Today, the Santo Niño de Cebu—said to be the same wooden figure brought to the
islands by Ferdinand Magellan during the very moment of his 1521 “discovery” of the Philippines— AN ETHNOHISTORY OF THE SANTO NIÑO DE CEBU JULIUS J. BAUTISTA
is enshrined in bullet-proof glass case in a Basilica that hosts throngs of devotees in its
Friday novena.

While this study is concerned with describing the various ways the figure is revered, its aims
extend beyond this. The author combines ethnography with historiography and discourse analysis
to analyse how our most prevalent assumptions about the figure are produced and disseminated.
What ideas have sustained such assumptions after all this time? How did the figure become
such a popular “national” treasure? To what can we attribute the Santo Niño’s appeal outside
the official doctrines of the Catholic faith? This book looks at historical documents, popular
songs, news articles, poems, and oral accounts to address such questions. In doing so, this book
describes the contours of a ‘figured’ Catholicism as the context in which we can think about the
Santo Niño in ways we have not done before.

JULIUS J. BAUTISTA is Lecturer in Religious Studies at the Southeast Asian Studies Programme at
the National University of Singapore (NUS). He concurrently holds a Visiting Research Fellowship
at the Asia Research Institute, NUS. He is coeditor of Christianity and the State in Asia: Complicity
and Conflict (2009). Bautista is an anthropologist with degrees from the Australian National
University and the University of Sydney. He has published on religious practice in Southeast
Asia, with a focus on Christian iconography, religious piety, and the relationship between religion
and politics.

FIGURING CATHOLICISM BAUTISTA

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