BEYOND the crass commercialism, the worldly spectacle and the temporal madness for what fiestas are being wrongly celebrated for, the fiesta of the Nuestra Señora de Peñafrancia every September endures to become a distinct Bicolano historico-religious celebration “welled up by the spontaneity of human emotion borne out of centuries-old traditions of faith and love.”
Regardless of whether times are good or bad, where the latter is more often than not, the devotion to the Virgin of Peñafrancia becomes even more deep-seated among Bicolanos and non-Bicolanos as well who come to celebrate her feast day with us.
In Naga City and in continents where there are Bicolano communities and where there are bodies of water for the traditional fluvial procession, the Peñafrancia fiesta becomes a unifying rite, nurturing a sense of brotherhood under one beloved mother whom we fondly call “Ina”. Thus, to devotees and guests, the Peñafrancia fiesta in Naga today is the grandest and yet most solemn of the Marian festivals throughout the country. This became easily evident in last Friday’s Traslacion which traditionally is the opening salvo for the nine days of prayer or novena.
The crowd of devotees and voyadores has multiplied by the years and yet the conduct of the otherwise rowdy foot procession has of late been transformed into a generally peaceful and orderly rite of passage. This augurs well for a more religious observance of a truly religious tradition that dates back to almost three centuries when Bicolanos of then Nueva Caceres, Naga’s old Spanish name, first carried out what has to become a long, continuing and enduring romance with the Virgin of Peñafrancia, the Queen and Patroness of Bicolandia.
Writing a book on Bicol history and culture, Bicolano historian Jose Calleja Reyes conceded that “because of this centuries-old attachment to the Blessed Virgin Mary as their “Ina”, the Bikols have been richly blessed by the mother of God.”
He recalled that this uniquely famous devotion to “Ina” dated back to 1710 when her image was first introduced to Bicolanos by a devotee-priest of Castillean lineage, Fray Miguel de Cobarrubias of the port of Cavite. A sickly man whose pains have been soothed by mere pressing of the stampita of the Virgin on his aching body, Miguel who was then studying as a seminarian at the Universidad de Sto. Tomas in Manila vowed to build a chapel by the Pasig River. But as the heavens would have it, the young devotee-priest was to be assigned and given a small parish in Naga. Wondering where he could fulfill his vow to build the chapel of Nuestra Señora de Peñafrancia, a group of cimarrones by Mt. Isarog where his parish was near gave him the cue. Soon a chapel was constructed near the mountain people’s haunts in the outskirts of Ciudad de Nueva Caceres. There, these mountain people or cimarrones conveniently prayed without having to feel inferior if they had to go to the cathedral by the centro where they hesitated to kneel side by side with the better-dressed churchgoers there.
The Blessed Virgin’s munificence spread such that everyone, including the people in the centro, went to her chapel by calesas or boats along the river to pray and ask for her benevolence and kindness, too. In time, they asked that every September the Virgin be brought to the cathedral via the traslacion for the parishioners’ novena.
