The foundation of another church in Pangasinan, and the first
visitation of the father provincial
[After the chapter, father Fray Bernardo de Santa Catalina and
the new vicar of Gabon set out for Pangasinan, taking with them as
their associates father Fray Luis Gandullo and brother Fray Juan de
Soria, a novice in the order. These recruits were greatly needed,
and lightened the work of those who were there. In Pangasinan,
being unable to attract to baptism those who were of full age,
they gave their energies to obtaining children--generally failing
but succeeding sometimes. At the feast of our Lady of August [44]
they baptized sixty, all they could get together. The Indians who
promised their children often failed to let the religious have them,
thus getting rid of the importunity of the fathers; or they would be
perverted by heathen Indians, who abhor baptism. The fathers prayed
to the Lord that they might not lose any of their number; He heard
them, and a sufficient number of children were voluntarily offered
to make up the total of sixty. The people came together to see what
the religious would do to the children; and father Fray Pedro de
Soto preached to them upon the workings of this holy sacrament,
and miracles were afterward wrought in support of his words.
The Lord softened these hard hearts, and in Binalatongan and some other
villages, where none of the adults were converted, they did not look
upon the religious with such hatred as at first. Only those of Gabon
were as obstinate as ever, and were unwilling to admit to the village
the new vicar, Fray San Pedro Martyr, and his companion. They could
get for their habitation only one small hut, where they could hardly
put up an altar and build a fire. Accordingly they decided to go to
a hamlet near there, called Calasiao, where the Spaniard to whom the
Indians gave tribute bought a hut for them, for four reals. When they
had added a shed, it did not make so bad a lodging as the other, and
they could inhabit it with less peril to their lives; for in Gabon the
Indians had planned to kill them. When the fathers heard this news, it
was midnight. The people in the town were drinking, and, as the friars
were told, were planning their death. The news was totally unexpected
to the friars, and they could not have made their escape because they
did not know the country. They waited that night, offering themselves
to the Lord, for whom their lives would have been well expended in
preaching His gospel. The next day they went to Calasiao. The Indians
are extremely jealous, and though they were pleased that the religious
had left their village, they were vexed that the fathers had gone to
Calasiao--a village smaller than their own, where they thought they
would have to carry for burial those who died in the Christian faith;
so they held a council, and determined that no one, whether in health
or sickness, should be baptized, and that no sick person should dare
to have a father come to see him. If the fathers had known of this
decision and its cause, they would have remedied it by going back to
live or die at Gabon. So they remained in this other little village,
though they went daily to Gabon and the other villages near there, to
render aid in the necessities of the Indians, and especially to visit
the sick. On one of these visits father Fray Luis Gandullo and Father
Marcos de San Antonio saw a man who was very sick. When they urged him
to be baptized, he responded with abuse and insult. The fathers asked
the people in the house with what illness he was afflicted, and they
said that he was troubled with a very great swelling, and would not
let them treat it. The fathers then examined him carefully, and found
a dreadful abscess extending from the thigh across the abdomen; they
opened it by force, and let out a great quantity of matter. Those in
the house, when they saw this rotten and offensive matter, fled away
from the religious, while the man himself abused them. They answered
him humbly, telling him that they had given him his life. "Even though
I should die," he said, "never come back again." The man recovered, and
in course of time was converted. This and other works of charity, and
in especial the cure of a woman afflicted with a disgusting leprosy,
who had been abandoned by her relatives, won for the fathers the love
of these Indians. At last even the chief of those who had planned to
kill the religious gave his child to be baptized, and finally offered
himself for baptism. Baptisms in the church were begun in the month of
October, 1588. When the perversity of this region was overcome, many
other churches were built in the neighboring villages, the mildness
of the sheep sent forth by the Lord prevailing, as it always has
prevailed, against the bloodthirsty wolves of heathendom. About the
same time the new provincial--if he can be called new who had already
held the position of provincial twice before--undertook a visitation
of his new province. This was the second year since he had come, and
the province had greatly increased; while at the same time his sons
and brothers were suffering great hardships, in living among a race
without God or law or justice. To participate in their discomforts,
and to aid them in their difficulties, he set out to visit them. At
Bataan he found all things in as good order as if the new converts
had sucked in Christianity with their mothers' milk. The Lord began
to show these Indians great mercy, both spiritual and temporal. He
gave them a succession of fertile years, which, being farmers, they
estimate more highly than anything else. They also saw the land
visited by a great plague of locusts, which attacked the fields of
the heathen but left those of the Christians untouched. From this
time on there were also fewer sicknesses and deaths than when they
were heathens. To this improvement in health the diligence of the
missionaries contributed, who ordered houses to be built in all the
villages to serve as hospitals. Here they caused the sick poor to be
carried, devoting themselves with diligence to the care of their bodies
and souls, and taking the food out of their own mouths to give it to
them. By this devotion and piety they prevented many deaths, and many
most horrible deaths; for, since this is an agricultural tribe, the
sick suffer much, and often even die without the sacrament, because
their kinsmen are obliged to go out to their fields and leave no one
to care for the sick person. So they had in these hospitals and still
have, all that was needed, for the hospitals are still in existence;
and the sick are cared for in them, bodily and spiritually, better
than in their own houses. The value of these hospitals was experienced
during an epidemic, in which few of those who were in the hospitals
died, while in the neighboring villages where they had no hospitals
there were numberless burials.
When the holy provincial reached Pangasinan, he saw his religious
persecuted by the Indians, upon whom they were heaping benefits--not
only to their souls but to their bodies, which were the only things the
savages understood and esteemed. He saw them without the necessaries
of life, lacking even food in sickness as well as in health; he saw
their dwellings so small that four reals was too much to pay for
them. Yet with all this he saw them happy and active, traveling from
one village to another as if there was nothing that they lacked. Still
there was nothing to be wondered at in all this, for God's mercy to
them was so clear that not only they but the heathen Indians were
obliged to recognize it. Thus, against their wills, their hearts
were softened by the good that the fathers did to them. The good old
man saw with tears of delight the many miracles which the Lord had
wrought to give authority to His preachers and His gospel among these
tribes; the flight of the devil from those villages where before he
had quietly reigned, the baptisms which began to be performed, the
devotion of the newly baptized. He saw the many new churches built
in the villages, poor as buildings, but rich in the fruits for God
to be gathered from them.]