A Woman's Impression of the Philippines

by Mary H. Fee

At midnight the church bells began to toll, and the three or four hundred ball guests adjourned en masse to the church. This building is larger than any I can remember in America, except the churches of Chicago and New York, and was packed with a dense throng. It was lighted with perhaps two thousand candles, and was decked from lantern to chapel with newly made paper flowers. The high altar had a front of solid silver, and the great silver candlesticks were glistening in the light.

The usual choir of men had given place to the waits with their tambourines, though the pipe organ was occasionally used. The mass was long and tedious, and I was chiefly interested in what I think was intended to represent the Star of Bethlehem. This was a great five-pointed star of red and yellow tissue paper, with a tail like a comet. It was ingeniously fastened to a pulley on a wire which extended from a niche directly behind the high altar to the organ loft at the rear of the church. The star made schedule trips between the altar and the loft, running over our heads with a dolorous rattle. The gentleman who moved the mechanism was a sacristan in red cotton drawers and a lace cassock, who sat in full view in the niche behind the high altar. There seemed to be a spirited rivalry between him and the tambourine artists as to which could contribute the most noise, and I think a fair judge would have granted it a drawn battle.

Mass was over at one, and we went back to our ball, and the supper which was awaiting us. I shall speak hereafter of feasts, so will give no time to this particular one. Dancing was resumed by half-past two, and shortly afterwards I gave up and went home. Sleep was about to visit my weary eyelids when that outrageous band swept by, welcoming the dawn by what it fancied was patriotic music—“There’ll be a Hot Time,” “Just One Girl,” “After the Ball,” etc. It passed, and I was once more yielding to slumber, when the church bells began, and some enterprising Chinese let off fire crackers. I gave up the attempt to rest, and rose and dressed. Then the sacristan from the church appeared in his scarlet trousers and cassock. He carried a silver dish, which looked like a card receiver surmounted by a Maltese cross and a bell. The sacristan rang this bell, which was most melodious, went down on one knee, and I deposited a peso in the dish. He uttered a benediction and disappeared. After him came the procession of common people, adults and children, shyly uttering their Buenas Pascuas. We had, forewarned by the sagacious Romoldo, laid in a store of candy, cigarettes, cakes, and wine. So to the children a sweet, and to the parents a cigarette and a drink of wine,—thus was our Christmas cheer dispensed. Later we ate our Christmas dinner with chicken in lieu of turkey, and cranberry sauce and plum pudding from the commissary. The Filipinos honored the day by decorating their house-fronts with flags and bunting, and at night by illuminating them with candles in glass shades stuck along the window sills.

The church in the provinces is at once the place of worship, the theatre, the dispenser of music and art, the place where rich and poor meet, if not on the plane of equality, in relations that bridge the gulf of material prosperity with the dignity of their common faith.

So far as the provincial Filipino conceives of palaces and architectural triumphs, the conception takes the form of a church. There are no art galleries, no palaces, no magnificent public buildings in the Philippines, but there are hundreds of beautiful churches, of Byzantine and Early Renaissance architecture. You may find them in the coast towns and sometimes even in the mountainous interior, their simple and beautiful lines facing the plaza, their interiors rich with black and white tiling and with colored glass. The silver facings of the altars and their melodious bell chimes are the most patent links which bind the Philippines to an older civilization.

As far as he has ever come in contact with beautiful music, the provincial Filipino has met it in the church. Nearly every one boasts its pipe organ imported from Europe, and in the choir lofts you may find the great vellum-leaved folios of manuscript music, with their three-cornered, square, and diamond-shaped notes. They know little of the masses of Mozart, Gounod, or more modern composers, but they know the Gregorian chants, and the later compositions of the Middle Ages. Often badly rendered—for nowhere are voices more misused than in the Philippines,—their music is nevertheless grand and inspiring.

On the walls of churches and conventos too are found pictures in oil, often gloomy, full of tortures and death, as Spanish paintings incline to be, yet essentially true art—pictures which it is to be hoped will survive the inundation of American commercial energy. The extract-of-beef advertisements and the varied “girls” of all pursuits have found their way into the Philippines; and the Filipino, to our sorrow be it said, takes kindly to them.

So far as the Filipino knows pageantry, it is the pageantry of the Church. He knows no civic processions, no industrial pomp, such as exploits itself in the Mardi Gras at New Orleans, or the Veiled Prophet of St. Louis. He is even a stranger to the torchlight procession of politics, and the military displays of our civil holidays. Neither the Masons, nor the Knights Templars, nor the Knights of Pythias, nor the Ancient Order of Hibernians, with their plumes and banners, have any perceptible foothold in the Philippines. But in Holy Week and certain other great festival or penitential seasons of the Church, the great religious processions take place—floats sheathed in bunting and decked with innumerable candles in crystal shades, carrying either the altar of the Virgin or some of the many groups of figures picturing events in the life and passion of the Saviour. Almost every provincial family of wealth owns one of these cars, and the wooden figures surmounted by wax heads, which constitute the group. At the proper seasons the figures are clothed in gorgeous raiment decked with jewels, and the car is put at the service of the Church for use in the procession. The floats are placed about a hundred yards apart, and between them the people form in two parallel lines, one on each side of the street, every person carrying a lighted candle. When there are twenty or thirty floats, and half as many bands, the glitter and brilliancy of it all strikes even our satiated minds. What must it be to the untravelled child of the soil?

A Family Group and Home in the Settled Interior