Series: The Gospel of the Rose

History is the story of how the nation came to be, and more often than not, history illustrates how people fail to be the nation they want to be. History is not the only way to learn love of country, but it has a unique way of showing the different ways we see and deal with the past. These different ways of seeing is also a lesson in being Filipino.

On an Easter Sunday, almost five centuries ago, Ferdinand Magellan participated in the first mass on Philippine soil. It is not difficult to see in this first communion between Europeans and natives the “birth certificate” of Christianity in the Philippines. And the first step of a fertile cultural encounter, even with all the shadows that, together with the mutual enlightenment, usually surround this kind of asymmetrical meetings.

As a young boy, I used to hear my teacher say that history knows no if. But let us pretend that this exercise is legitimate. Why is the Philippines the biggest Christian country in Asia? Would it be, if it were not for the heroic and tragic expedition led by Magellan and the Spanish colonization that followed? Real history tells us that, for centuries, there were Muslim sultanates in the Sulu archipelago and Mindanao. “Fictional history” can tell us that what happened to the biggest Muslim archipelago in the world, Indonesia – where the other Catholic country in Asia is Eastern Timor, a tiny spot on the map – could have happened to the Philippines. The seeds of the Gospel were also planted there but are now concentrated in just a small corner of one of Indonesia’s thousands of islands.