1. FIRST MISSIONS (1581 - 1596)
In September 17, 1581, three Jesuits from Mexico arrived in Manila. They were Fr. Antonio Sedeño, the superior of the group, Fr. Alonso Sanchez and Brother Nicolas Gallardo and were sent at the request of Don Guido de Lavezares, the second governor of the Philippines, and Fray Domingo de Salazar, O.P., its first bishop. Father General Mercurian’s instructions were that they should familiaries themselves with conditions in the colony and report on the advisability of establishing a permanent Jesuit mission.
While carrying out these instructions, they made themselves useful in many ways. They had been given a house outside the walled city in a fishing village called Lagyo, between the present districts of Ermita and Malate; but they went daily into the city to perform their priestly ministry among the Spanish settlers, their Filipino domestics, and the Chinese and Japanese immigrants who were beginning to flock to the Philippines, attracted by the trade.
Father Sedeño is credited with having introduced the arts of stone-cutting and brick-making to the Philippines, and with having supervised the construction of the first stone buildings in Manila. Father Sanchez was entrusted with highly important tasks by both the civil and ecclesiastical authorities. When Bishop Salazar convoked a synod in 1582, he appointed Sanchez its secretary. Later that year, Governor Ronquillo sent him on a delicate mission to Macao. Philip II of Spain had just won the disputed succession to the crown of Portugal, and it was important that the Portuguese of Macao should be persuaded as quickly as possible to give him their allegiance. Sanchez accomplished this mission successfully. Upon his return, the Spaniards in the Philippines met in an assembly to deliberate on their necessities, and sent him back to Europe as their accredited agent with the king and the pope.
Meanwhile, a few more Jesuits had been sent to assist Sedeño, and it now became possible to undertake mission work in the provinces. In 1591 the missions of Taytay and Antipolo, in the present province of Rizal, were founded, and in 1593 Father Pedro Chirino was sent on a temporary mission to the island of Panay. It was here, in the village of Tigbauan some miles west of the modern city of Iloilo, that Father Chirino established the first Jesuit school in the Philippines, an elementary school for Visayan children.
After finishing his business in Madrid on behalf of the Philipine colonists, Sanchez reported to Father General Acquaviva at Rome. He strongly recommended that the Society establish itself permanently in the Philippines. Father Acquaviva concurred and raised the Philippine Mission to the status of vice-province dependent on the Province of Mexico. Word of this decision and the appointment of Father Sedeño as vice-provincial reached Manila in 1595 with a large contingent of missionaries: eight priests and one brother.
THE COLLEGE OF MANILA
With these welcome reinforcements, Father Sedeño did two things. He informed the governor, Don Luis Perez Dasmariñas, that he was now ready to comply with the government’s request that a Jesuit college be opened in Manila. Ever since 1595, not only the government but the bishop and the colonists had been urging him to take this step, but uncertainty as to the status of the Jesuit mission and lack of personnel obliged him to refuse. He now had the men he needed, and in September 1595 Father Juan de Ribera, professor of moral theology, and Father Tomas de Montoya, professor of grammar, delivered the inaugural lectures of the new College of Manila. By this time, the Jesuits had transferred their residence to a large compound just inside the southwest gate of the walled city, then called Royal Gate. Sedeño had built a church there, facing northeast along what is now called General Luna Street, and the attached residence was enlarged to accommodate the college. Not long afterwards a wealthy settler, Don Esteban Rodriguez de Figueroa, gave it a generous endowment which relieved the government the burden of supporting it.
SAMAR AND LEYTE
Father Sedeño’s second step was to request that the vice-province be entrusted with the evangelization of Samar and Leyte, where no permanent mission stations had as yet been established. Upon the request being granted, he ordered Father Chirino to proceed there immediately with a small band of missionaries and to select suitable sites for the first stations. They chose Carigara on the north and Dulag on the east coast of Leyte. While these stations were being opened Father Sedeño personally went to Cebu to establish there a central mission house. He had barely completed the arrangements for it when he fell sick and died (2 September 1595), only a few days before the formal opening of the College of Manila.
Some years later, Father General Acquaviva directed Diego Garcia, a priest of wide administrative experience in Peru and Mexico, to conduct a vistation of the Philippine vice-province, organize its expanded work on a sound basis, and determine along what lines further expansion should proceed. Father Garcia arrived in the Philippines in 1599. He reported to the General that the vice-province now had five mission stations in Leyte, one in Samar and one in Bohol; and that these, together with the mission in Antipolo near Manila and the mission of Mandaue near Cebu, comprised 54,330 souls, of which 12,696 were already Christians. One of the Leyte missionaries, Father Alonso de Humanes, had opened a boarding school for boys at Dulag. This produced such excellent results that Garcia himself opened a similar school at Antipolo.
THE COLLEGE OF SAN JOSE
At the College of Manila the need for boarding facilities for the students was felt even more keenly. In the opinion of the professors, unless the students were withdrawn from the numerous distractions of life in a colonial outpost, they could not be made to pay proper attention to their books. Garcia took immediate steps to remedy the situation. In 1601, with the full approval of the ecclesiastical and civil authorities, he founded a residential college attached to the College of Manila, and this residential college was named the College of San Jose. It occupied a separate building in the Jesuit compound. Here the resident scholars lived under the supervision of Jesuit prefects, though they attended classes in the College of Manila with the day scholars.
Like the College of Manila, the College of San Jose received its endowment after it had been founded, and from the same source. Rodriguez de Figueroa, who had endowed the College of Manila, drew up a will in 1596 in which he set aside a sum of money to establish and maintain a boarding school in Manila under Jesuit auspices. This grant was, however, conditional, for the testator wished in the first place to provide for his children, and it was only in the event that his daughter Juana should die in her minority that the endowment would actually take effect. Juana perished in a shipwreck while being taken by her tutor to Mexico, and thus part of the Figueroa estate, consisting of a cattle ranch in Panay and properties in Mexico, became an obra pia or trust fund administered (not owned) by the Society of Jesus for the pious purpose indicated by the its donor. This is important to bear in mind in view of the later fortunes of the College of San Jose.
