Seventy years ago, in February of 1945, the 337-year old history of Saint Nicholas Intramuros in Manila was crushed under the weight of bombs. It was the mother house of the Province of Saint Nicholas of Tolentino, the missionary province of the Order of Augustinian Recollects.
The Church in the Philippines will celebrate the 5th centenary of the start of evangelization of the islands in 2021. After many vicissitudes, Ferdinand Magellan arrived in that faraway archipelago in the year 1521; the first mass was then celebrated. But half a century would have to pass until 1571, when Miguel Lopez de Legazpi would establish the city of Manila by the bay of the same name.
From that moment on, Manila would become the last link of the route that traversed the whole Spanish empire. It took off from Seville, the Andalusian capital of Spain, where the Archives of the Indies and the Office of Overseas Trade were located; it proceeded to Veracruz via the Atlantic Ocean, with a stop at Canarias; then, it crossed the Aztec country by land, with respite at the Hospice of Mexico City; they would then follow the west-bound route until Acapulco, where they would board the galleon that would cross the entire Pacific Ocean.
Open for almost three centuries, this route was a trade and above all a cultural route in the widest sense of the term. Hence, it was also a religious route through which came and went preachers of the Gospel, mainly those Church vanguards who are the religious.
The pioneer missionaries in the Philippines were the Augustinians, who arrived with Legazpi. After them came the Franciscans (1578), the Jesuits (1581) and the Dominicans (1587). Later, the Augustinian Recollects who arrived in 1606, then barely twenty years old, having been born in 1588.
Since 1579, Manila was already a diocese, dependent on the archdiocese of Mexico. The Philippine archipelago was at the vanguard of evangelization then, and the religious who volunteered for this mission knew that their route to the Indies, once they boarded the Manila galleon, had no return journey. They committed their lives, their vocation, their whole life-project, their everything, to this assignment which began with this one-way ticket.
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