The year was 1600. The previous year, the moros sailed on the Quilot river after pillaging Tanauan

settlements. One documented source said the attackers were numerous. Fortunately, Dagamin-ons were forewarned and so prepared themselves on the riverbank with pointed sticks, bamboo lances and arrows about 100 meters downstream from their settlement. When the moros came, arrows and bamboo lances from Dagamin-ons at the riverbank rained on them. This was unex-pected by the moros and so they were not adequately prepared. They retreated back to Tanauan to the sea, never to return.

An American historian who had been researching from Chinese archival sources said these raids were retaliatory attacks of the moros who, in pre-Spanish times, had been targets of attacks by war-riors from Leyte and Samar. The latter traded their captives to China. Years later, their erstwhile victims, the moros, exacted their revenge on the flourishing coastal settle-ments of Leyte in the western coast, trading their captives from Leyte and Samar to Borneo.

The battle of Quilot story must have inspired the Jesuit in Dulag which was vulnerable to these attacks from the sea. A settlement

Chapter 2

the JesuitsThe coming of

that was known to have abundant rice and safe from moro depreda-tions would make for an excellent mission. And so in 1600, a team of missionaries from the Dulag mis-sion, which was established four years earlier, visited Dagami and found the place an excellent site for a mission. The people were already known to be hospitable although in the early years of the encomienda,

Jesuit Founder St. Ignatius Loyola Jesuit missionary St. Francis Javier

galang, Palo, Dulag and Ormoc in its first three years. Carigara served as the residencia for a time, the mission that was in charge of cre-ating other missions. Eventually, it became Leyte’s cabecera or capi-tal town, the seat of the alcalde mayor and the provincial govern-ment. Moros also tried to take Carigara by storm but they were repulsed. As stories go, Carigara

...And so in 1600, a team of missionaries from the Dulag mission, which was established four years earlier, visited Dagami and found the place

an excellent site for a mission.

the natives had executed abusive soldiers.

The Jesuits arrived five years earlier in Carigara, their first mis-sion in Leyte, expanding to Alan-

was saved by a miraculous inter-vention of the Holy Cross.

The Jesuits had negotiated for Leyte, Panay, Samar, Bohol and some parts of Mindanao for

their mission after complaints of abuses by encomenderos reached the Spanish authorities in Manila and eventually the King of Spain. The encomenderos were supposed to provide instruction in the Chris-tian faith to the natives in return for the tributes that they collected. At first they collected gold trinkets, earrings and gold tooth fillings

from the natives. When these were exhausted, they collected food items.

A native economy with little or no food surplus found this intolerable and oppressive, result-ing in the execution of Spanish sol-diers in Abuyog and Dagami. In the former, the perpetrators were caught and punished, but there is

Tributos“Every male Filipino, between the ages 16 to 60, was

compelled to pay an annual tax or tribute to the encomend-ero. When Legaspi settled in Manila, he fixed the amount of tribute at a cavan of rice and a piece of colored cloth two varas long and one wide. Instead of this, the native could pay with six silver reals. In other parts of the island, the tribute was four varas of cloth, 70 gantas of rice, and one hen.

“In the early days of the encomiendas, all this tax belonged to the encomendero. If his encomienda was small, or the tax hard to collect, he sometimes found it hard to live. In other encomiendas, the encomenderos became rich. The tribute was increased to 10 reals in 1590. In addition, the tribute payer gave one real to the church and one real for the support of the government of his town. A single man paid one-half the tribute paid by the married man.”

“This tax seems small, but it was difficult for the Filipinos of that day to pay it. They were not used to laying up goods for the future. Their custom was just to get enough food to live on from day to day. They could not see why they should work for these strangers. So their hearts were bitter toward the encomenderos. Few of them cared for the natives. Once a year, they went through the encomiendas with soldiers, collecting the tribute. The rest of the time, they usually left the natives to themselves. Some natives did not marry on account of the burden of the tribute. Others killed their children to avoid their tax on them. Some burned their houses and fled to the mountains when the tax collector came.”

“Often the tax collector deceived the natives. The col-lector of Dagami, Leyte, used a scale that required double the proper weight to weight the tribute of wax. At times, instead of collecting the tax when rice and wax were plenti-ful and cheap, the encomendero waited till these articles were dear so he could sell them at a high price.”

-From “The Short History of the Philippines,” by Prescott F Jernegan, 1914

no record that the perpetrators in Dagami suffered a similar fate.

The mission grows

The Dagami mission was one of the two missions visited by Jesuits in Dulag, the other being San Salvador (Palo). The first mis-sionaries here were Frs. Melchor Hurtado, Juan de Torres and Fran-cisco Vicente. Of the three, Fr. Hurtado was the one with the most colorful lifestory. On October 28, 1603 when the Dulag mission was raided by the moros, he went back to help prepare the people against the imminent moro raid, evacuating women and children to nearby for-ests when the raiders came.

He was already hidden behind a large banyan tree when a woman with a child came running past where he hid, trying to escape the moro warrior. As the latter swung past the tree, he espied the foot of Fr. Hurtado protruding from the tree and leapt with his kapilan, ready to strike. But when he saw it was a priest, he took him alive and brought him to Mindanao where he was eventually ransomed by the Spanish authorities. Hurtado’s experience with the moros pro-vided ample lessons to the Span-iards, enabling them to understand their enemies better. When he returned, he was assigned to Loboc, Bohol where he died on August 26, 1633.

As was customary, the mis-sionaries at once started building a church made of stone, wood and nipa with the help of the natives. It was dedicated to St. Joseph. This was located at the end of two cross-roads bisecting three parallel roads, that was the highest point of the

settlement close to the river. That was the initial design of the pueblo that the Jesuits wanted to have in Dagami with the establishment of the mission.

But for a good number of years, the natives did not like to live in the pueblo as it was far from their farms where crops needed to be protected from wild animals and

marauding groups. What they pro-duced was barely enough for their subsistence, even without the trib-utes exacted from them by the Spanish authorities. Hence, it is not a surprise if Dagami was for-mally designated as a poblacion or a parish only in the next century. By then, the natives were starting to use the plow and carabao in their rice fields.

Fr. Mateo Sanchez on The Problems of Reduccion

Writing to his Jesuit superiors in Manila in 1603, he said that in his opinion it was impossible to organize any large towns in Leyte, no matter how hard the missionaries tried. The reason was simple; the people had to live in the countryside near their sources of food. They were farmers, but not after the European fashion, living in nucleated villages or townships, cultivating nearby farms and with their surplus production obtaining at a central market the articles they needed. In the first place, their methods of cultivation were such that they produced no surplus.

Even with maximum effort the ordinary Visayan and his family extracted from the soil only enough to support them for two months, and that only if they supplemented it by hunting and fishing. They knew neither hoe not plow. Armed only with the long knife or bolo, they slashed out a little clearing in the jungle, dug holes in it with a bamboo stick, dropped two or three grains of rice in each hole, and covered them up again with the foot.

Having done this, they had to protect what they had sown from the birds, rates, wild pigs and thieves, and to keep their crops from being choked by the lush weeds and creepers that sprang up almost overnight. At the

same time, they had to fish and hunt, for the clearing’s yield would not suffice to feed them. They even had to make salt themselves by boiling sea water. This should explain, said San-chez, the reluctance of the Visayans to abandon their clearings and live in a town.

- By Fr. Horacio de la Costa, S.J., “The Jesuits in the Philippines”

One of the early rectors of the mission was Fr. Pascual de Acuña, who came from Dapitan and arrived in Leyte in 1603, directly coming here for his first assignment. He was assigned in Dulag in 1613, during which time the town was raided twice by Cara-gans from Mindanao headed by a warrior called Pagdalanum. But it was in Palo where Acuña was cap-tured and, like his predecessor from Dulag, Fr. Hurtado , he spent a year and half with the moros as a captive before he was released.

The subsequent batches of Jesuit missionaries assigned here were also scholars in their own right. There was the pioneer Fr. Pedro Chirino who opened the first Jesuit mission in Carigara in 1595. He would write his own experi-ences in his immortal volume Rel-acion de las Islas Pilipinas (1604, ) a record of life in 17th century Philippines.

In 1613, he was assigned to Dagami and became its rector. By then, Dagami had replaced Dulag as one of the two residencias in Leyte the other being Carigara.. Moro raids had become frequent and unpredictable. So it became necessary for the residencia to move inland. Such raids would continue till mid 1700s.

Another scholar who was assigned with Chirino in 1613 was Fr. Mateo Sanchez, who wrote Vocabulario de la Lengua Bisaya which provided Spanish transla-tions to waray words and expres-sions, the first work of its kind in the country. With Sanchez and Chirino were Frs. Ignacio de Acebedo and Francisco Luzon.

The Central Residence

In 1610, Dagami was already being paired with Dulag as a residencia, but by 1630, the Dulag residence - and its six priests - was transferred to Dagami, in all likelihood, because it was relatively safer from moro raids compared to the Dulag residence. During this period, the visitas assigned to the Dagami mission were Palo, Barugo, Burawen, Vincay (Mayorga), Bito, Abuyog, Malaguicay (Tanauan), Basay, Hubong (?), Guiuan and Pambuan. All of these villages had their own small wooden churches.. The missionaries would stay as one commu-nity in the residencia but

Fr. Mateo Sanchez who arrived in the island with Fr. Pedro Chirino in 1595, also served Dagami. Church historian Fr. Felipe Redondo y Sendino described him as a man of solid virtues. He converted many natives of Dagami, as well as in many parts of Leyte Island, into Christianity. He was reputed to have performed a miracle, through God’s intervention, by multiplying the bread in the presence of the natives.

He also wrote the earliest Visayan dictionary: Vocabu-lario dela Lengua Bisaya (1616). It was noted in the Obituary of Jesuit deaths in the Philippines that Fr. Mateo Sanchez, the author of the Visayan dictionary, died in Dagami on February 9, 1618 and was buried in this town.

In 1711, Fr. Joseph de Velasco, the Jesuit Provincial, gave him a title of Venerable.

the mass and ministering the sacra-ments. This way, the rector could monitor developments in the differ-ent visitas or pueblos.

By 1655, practically all coastal settlements had become unsafe from the moro depredations, that Dagami was made the Central Residence of the Order in the Visayas, althougb the residencia in Carigara was still functional. The Dagami residencia had under its care the pueblos or settlements of Malaguicay (Tanauan), Tambuco (Burauen), Dulag, Bito (Vito), Abuyyo (Abuyog), Palu (Palo), Basey, Guiuan and Balanguiga (Balangiga). Six missionaries were stationed here: Frs. Carlos de Lemos, Diego de la Cuevas, Fran-cisco Luzon, Laudencio Horta, Juan de la Calle and Jose de Leon.

A Church historian would also say that during this period, Leyte had the most number of

cabecera churches of the regular clergy among all Visayan Islands.

It may have been also during these years when Dagami became the cabecera of the provincial government. A report in 1661 related that a mission-ary assigned to Burawen during this period, Fr. Fran-cisco Combes, discovered sulfur deposits in one of its mountains, a discovery he reported to Leyte’s Alcalde Mayor Silvestre de Rodas in Dagami.

As the central Jesuit mission, the missionaries endeavored, with the help of the converts, to build

would fan out to their assigned visi-tas to fulfill their tasks of evange-lization, baptizing infidels, saying

structures worthy of that stature. Thus, Fr. Pedro Murillo wrote of a residencia that was “truly mag-nificent.” The residencia was the ancient equivalent of a convent, only that it was meant to provide residence to a community of mis-sionaries who ministered in other settlements and villages. This resi-dencia was built with the generous

support of Gov. Sabiniano Man-rique de Lara, the Spanish governor general for the period 1653 to1663 . That was however lost in a fire. The renovated structure seen by the Franciscan Fr. Felix de Huerta was described as a structure; “with wooden posts and wooden planks, with nipa roofings in bad condi-tion.”

The next century would usher in the building of churches and fortifications made of stone in all parts of the country where Jesuits had their missions. In Dagami, the stone church finished in 1714 must have been started in the previ-ous century since the quarrying and shaping of the stones alone would have lasted several years. In the

Since electricity was not yet available in Dagami before the war, aranas (chande-liers) with oil and wicks were used for

illumination inside the church. During Christ-mas midnight mass, additional quinques (oil lamps) were lighted. In consonance with the old Spanish design, the pulpit was found at the side of the main altar. It was made of wood with silver overlay, the pasamano (rail-ings) also made of beautifully carved wood. The pews and the communion rail were like-wise carved from hard wood (hamurawon).

But the Stations of the Cross were made of carved marble and positioned on designated places around the walls of the church. In between the Stations of the Cross, probably the side where the entrance was located, a beautiful painting (a lamina, to be exact) of the Immaculate Conception was to be found. A stained glass depicting angels and cherubs occupied portions on the upper wall of the church. A cam-panilla (small bells arranged in a circle) was rotated by hand, ring-ing continuously during commu-nion, depicting the solemnity of the occasion.

The main altar retablo had the statues of St. Joseph, Our Lady of the Rosary, Sts. Peter and Paul. The statue of St. Joseph was the original statue from colonial period. Its head was made of ivory. Unfortu-

nately, it was destroyed during the war. The St. Joseph image used during and after the war was the visitadora image, which was used only for processions. The side altars had the statues of St. Roch, St. Anthony of Padua, St. Peter of Alcantara, St. John the Baptist and St. Agnes.

The tabernacle was made of silver with silver overlay design. Big round marble holy water containers were found at the entrances of the church - two stands at the main entrance, and one on the left and right side doors of the church.

The baptistry was located on the left side of the church, outside but still attached to the main structure. It was said to be the same size of the present Adore-mus chapel. Inside the baptistery was an altar made of bronze. A statue of St. John the Baptist baptizing Jesus and with the Holy Spirit depicted descending on the latter was on this altar. The baptismal font was made of carved marble.

There was also a big organ whose sound was generated by air. Guinbubu-tong hin usa ka tawo para tumukar. It was however destroyed during the time of Padre Jose Singzon anytime between 1921-1945. It could have perished in the fire that razed the church during the war. Man Tasyo Aya-ay was said to be the organist accompanying the choir.

(Based on the interview of Bonifacio Justimbaste, who was an altar boy during the war, recalling some details of the church. Such details are included here for posterity.)

Description of

Dagami’s Church before World War II