Four days ago, we went to Balamban again. The visits to my hometown have become more frequent of late for the reason that my mother, a nonagenarian, desires that we, her children, see her on a regular basis.
This time, however, we came for the fiesta, the annual celebration in honor of the town’s patron saint, St. Francis of Assisi. The wife and I made it a point to take part in the fiesta Mass because the last one I attended, then called a Solemn High Mass in the Tridentine rite, in which the priest and the choir sang most of the parts in Latin, happened over half a century ago.
That Mass transpired in the old church, a Spanish-era baroque building, which had walls of coral rock and boasted of a high belfry housing the most melodious bells, some of which, I hear, have been spirited away by antique hunters.
Except for remnants of the old walls, retained in a stylish manner in their original state, and the bell tower (perhaps minus the stolen bells), I saw an altered church, in most everything different from the one of my childhood, but more beautiful and commodious. The renovation succeeded in transforming it into a spectacular place of worship.
A bishop presided over the Mass. The wife and I, as well as my sister, her son and his fiancée, stood throughout because of the crowd. And when, during the Offertory, the people sang the traditional hymn to St. Francis, I joined the singing with my non-singing voice, but with a heart burning, which at any rate was what the hymn asked the saint to do — to ignite the hearts with God’s love. Ang kasingkasing namo padilaaba sa kalayo sa gugmang dyosnon.
I have always had a devotion to the great St. Francis. Five years ago, the wife and I visited his birthplace in Assisi in the province of Perugia in the Umbrian region of Italy. We spent time in the basilica, in which the body of the saint is interred, and in the church, likewise a basilica, of Saint Mary of the Angels. Within the latter stands a little chapel called the Porziuncula, in which Francis renounced the world and vowed to live in poverty and service of the poor.
Francis had a vision in which God told him, “Francis, Francis, go and repair my house which, as you can see, is falling into ruins.” This he took as a command to repair the church of San Damiano, in which he was then praying. He in fact went around Assisi begging for stones to restore that church. He likewise rehabilitated other chapels, among them the Porziuncula, which became the heart of his activities.
But I think what God meant was that Francis should mend the Church, the People of God, the Body of Christ, through a life renewed in accordance with the Gospels, and this he carried out through the Franciscan movement, whose main rule, which Francis himself formulated, was “to follow the teachings of our Lord Jesus Christ and to walk in his footsteps.”
As I looked around the parish church of my town now undergoing a massive facelift, I thought of the passage in the Gospel of Matthew that tells of Jesus saying, quoting the Psalms, “The stones that the builders rejected, has become the cornerstone; by the Lord has this been done, and it is wonderful in our eyes.”
The foundation of a building had a first stone called the cornerstone which determined the place and position of all the other stones. Consequently, to the cornerstone the builders gave the first importance.
Jesus was referring to himself. The Jews rejected him, not knowing that God would make him the cornerstone of His people, the Church.
After the Mass, before the wife and I left, I asked myself if our parish church building had a cornerstone, and then decided that it was an idle question because I knew, and the important thing was to know, the real cornerstone of the community of churchgoers, Christ. When God told Francis to rebuild his Church, the saint immediately went about gathering stones to repair the church of San Damiano and the chapel, the Porziuncula.
In fact, dilapidated as they were, these structures did not need repair as much as the Church itself. The community of the faithful called for reform, renewal, which Francis carried out by becoming, and by urging every other believer to become, another Christ, another cornerstone in the building of
His Church.
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