THE church front

IT is the Benedictine Monk’s Church. It is also called Our Lady of Montserrat Church and even has a third name: the San Beda College Chapel.

On Mendiola Street near Malacañang, just beyond the small Chino Roces Bridge, where many a violent confrontation has taken place, “a Neo-Gothic façade with twin towers and slender spires announces the presence of a church,” writes Dom Bernardo Ma. Perez, OSB. Informally, he likes to call it “a Gothic Revival-Survival structure.”

Under the auspices of the Filipino Heritage Festival celebrated the entire month of May, Father Bobby toured a group through what has to be one of the loveliest churches in the Philippines.

Akin to viewing large paintings in an old museum, every bit of the nave’s upper walls and ceiling is covered with the amazing work of Father Lesmes Lopez, OSB, a Spanish Benedictine monk who came to the Philippines expressly to paint religious art in the church. Assisted by another Spanish Benedictine monk, Dom Salvador Alberich, who rendered the decorations around the paintings, the two worked from 1931.

Father Lopez composed 16 Allegories, one on each panel starting with Peace, completed three months later. Then followed Innocence, Meekness and Penance, then Prudence, Temperance, Justice and Fortitude, Faith, Hope, Charity and Religion, and Theology, Mystical Theology, The Church and Heaven and Hell.

Adorning the sanctuary’s ceiling is the Apotheosis of the Holy Name of Jesus. Based on Philippians 2:10 in the Bible—“At the name of Jesus every knee must bend in the heavens, on the earth and under the earth”—the heavenly court with God the Father and the Virgin Mary, angels and saints are depicted on the upper section.

The lower left section represents races from various nations, including the Maori (Father Lopez had painted murals in a monastery in Western Australia, as well as others in Montserrat, Samos and Monfort in Spain), and hell’s flames, dragons and tormented souls on the lower right. Encircled in the middle are Jesus’s name in Greek, JHS.

“The totality of space, color and light suggest a double movement, downward and upward,” Father Bobby said: “The life of heaven flowing down to earth and humankind, represented by worshippers, and life on earth gathered and lifted up to the glory of eternity.”

Completed in 1925, the church was designed by Swedish architect George Asp, who also designed the earliest buildings of Holy Spirit College and Saint Theresa’s College on San Marcelino (now Adamson University).

Enshrined on the main altar are the images of the Santo Niño de Praga carved by Maximo Vicente Sr. in 1903, which occupies the chief place in the center, and the founders of the Benedictine Order, the twins Saint Benedict and Saint Scholastica. Our Lady of Montserrat occupies her own spot left of the altar. Sanctuary panels depict the eight events in the child-life of Our Lord.

Completing the artistic sweep of the church, 14 additional paintings around the sides of the main altar depict incidents in the Lord’s Way of the Cross, probably rendered from 1937 to 1939. A choir loft wraps the interior of the church on all three sides.

Father Lesmes Lopez remained in Manila and died in 1943. His bones rest in the cemetery beside the apse of the church. Dom Salvador Alberich returned to Spain in 1939 and died there in 1956.

“This lovely church is certainly one of Manila’s best-kept secrets—one Filipinos may take great pride in by visiting it,” Anna Maria Harper, the festival director said.

For his part, Father Bobby, whose full name is Rodrigo Perez III, and his religious name is Dom Bernardo, is himself a living heritage—one of three authors of the book Folk Architecture, a famous journalist in the ’50s and ’60s writing about and reviewing cultural events, the stage manager of the Bayanihan’s first New York performances in the Winter Garden in 1959, a former trustee of the Cultural Center of the Philippines, and a former rector of San Beda College.

The Filipino Heritage Festival is sponsored by the National Commission on Culture and the Arts and the Department of Tourism.

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