Never an Empire

by James Green

  Father Enrique O’Mara had come to the bishop’s attention as a young priest who was deemed politically safe: that is, he had never been known to express any political opinion whatsoever. In addition he mixed socially with the better elements of Manila society and seemed to be on comfortable terms with any senior Americans with whom he came in contact. Lastly, but by no means least, he was the son of a good Spanish family who had seen to it that he had ample private means. The bishop had kept an eye on him and when a high-level meeting between the top American administrators and senior Philippine politicians was convened in the Catholic church of Pasig he sent Father O’Mara as his official observer. His judgment of Father Enrique proved sound. The young priest proved himself both able and accomplished in mixing among the various exalted notables who made up what became known as the First Philippine Commission. In fact the Monsignor who was in charge of the church was so impressed he requested that the Bishop allow Father Enrique to leave his present position as a junior curate in a central Manila parish and become his assistant priest and secretary. It was just the sort of promotion the bishop would have wished for the young man and he readily agreed.

  Everyone saw that Father Enrique was now marked for a bright, even glowing, future. He had brains, spoke fluent English, was possessed of an outwardly pious disposition, and had civilised manners combined with ease and charm when moving in society, whether Philippine or American. In short, everything a bishop could wish for in his own secretary. All that was lacking was a little experience.

  Father Enrique was a success in Pasig as both priest and secretary and after three years was summoned to the Bishop’s Palace where the bishop himself told him he was appointed parish priest of San Juan Bautista. The bishop went on to make it clear that although San Juan was small, insignificant, and out of the way, it would give him the necessary experience of being a parish priest. If he did as well in San Juan as he had done in Pasig then before too long he would be rewarded with a position in Manila more suitable to the talent and promise he had so far shown. Father Enrique didn’t need to have it spelled out that the position would be that of bishop’s secretary, an appointment which usually marked the holder as a man destined for higher office, even one day becoming a bishop himself.

  Father Enrique arrived in San Juan full of zeal and at once began to show his flock and the bishop what he was capable of. He set about expunging the backlog of omissions which had built up while the town had been left without a priest. He earned the respect and admiration of the people by the long hours he spent in the Confessional hearing and absolving the years’ accumulation of his parishioners’ sins, by the number of times he officiated at the holy water font baptising and at the altar regularising the status of men and women through a long series of nuptial weddings. This hard work was especially appreciated by the poorer element of the town who, in the absence of a resident priest and unable to afford the city prices for the sacraments of Holy Mother Church, had muddled through as best they could, pairing off, having children, and dying with no more than the blessings and prayers of friends and relatives to implore God’s mercy and understanding.

  When all those in San Juan who stood in need of God’s mercy or the Church’s sacraments had been satisfied Father Enrique arranged a great festival lasting over several days to re-dedicate the church, the town, and the people to their patron, St John the Baptist.

  The bishop had thought Father Enrique a man of brains and in the matter of the festival he showed the bishop to be once more correct in his judgment. From an affluent background himself, he moved easily among money and position and knew how the minds of the wealthy worked, so most of his great festival he paid for himself. In doing this he won the unreserved affection of the poor but, more importantly, he also won the respect of the few wealthy families of the town who, on hearing of the planned festival, had fully expected him to come to them to finance it.

  The festival, though magnificent by the standards of San Juan, was in reality a modest affair and dented Father Enrique’s purse hardly at all. But it served its main purpose: it put the mass of the people solidly behind him and made him someone of consequence in the life of the town. It also put the wealthy families off their guard so that when, about three months after the festival, he made the rounds of the fine houses informing them that he intended to establish an orphanage for homeless and abandoned children they found themselves in a difficult position. That something needed to be done about the town’s young vagabonds, of whom more than a few survived by prostitution or petty crime, no one could deny. But an orphanage? That meant a building, furniture, staff, and provisions, all of which would run into serious money, money they were unwilling to see go to a cause which furthered their own interests, so far as they could see, not at all. But their time for reflection was short-lived. Father Enrique made a public announcement from his pulpit at all Sunday Masses that he was opening a subscription to create a building fund. The centavos of the poor he knew he could rely on and God would bless and reward them. His silence on whether he could place such reliance on the pesos of the wealthy spoke volumes and placed the foremost men of the town in an impossible position.

  As Father Enrique had suspected, it was not a real contest.

  It would be heartening to say that the wealthy families gave because they were persuaded of the worthiness of the cause, but that would be an overstatement. There were few positions of real importance and status in San Juan and those that existed were hotly disputed by, and duly distributed among, these families. If one family was generous and another refused, it would be like handing the office of mayor, chief of police, senior magistrate, or whatever was currently on offer to the one who had best supported Father Enrique’s orphanage.

  Privately, in their exclusive club, the men bemoaned this business of an upstart, young priest, arriving from nowhere and at once deciding to set the town on its ear. Why couldn’t he keep to his own affairs, Church affairs? In their homes, however, the men had to listen to their wives and daughters. Father Enrique’s orphanage fund gave the female element of society an unparalleled opportunity for social good works. They could organise fund-raising events: balls, galas. Society in San Juan was, regrettably, rather dull and repetitive and these sudden new horizons had fired up the ladies of the town to an almost white heat of enthusiasm. The men, hardheaded men of business and commerce, might regret their ladies’ petty enthusiasms, but they had the sense not to oppose them. So it was that to a man they all gave and gave generously and after what was, for San Juan, an almost miraculously short time a new orphanage capable of accommodating fifty children from birth to thirteen arose. The bishop himself came from Manila, opened and blessed the building, and stayed the night in Father Enrique’s house where he gave, in the grounds, a small, select party for the major benefactors of the venture. This visitation and party alone, everyone agreed, was almost worth all the money raised and spent. Within a year the new orphanage safely housed twenty children under the care of three nuns brought in from a convent in Pasig where Father Enrique had so successfully served his parochial apprenticeship.

  To the ordinary people of San Juan Father Enrique wore no halo that anyone could see, but that didn’t mean to say they didn’t regard him as a living saint and, as a result, his influence and importance grew to equal and outshine even the most wealthy. He was no longer merely a man to be reckoned with, he was now the man to be reckoned with, and in his regular reports to the Bishop in Manila he humbly but very clearly made sure that the situation in San Juan was thoroughly explained and understood.

  Everyone might have been forgiven for thinking that, having done so much in so short a time, Father Enrique would at least pause before embarking on some new great project. But they were wrong, because Father Enrique was a man in a hurry. He had an appointment with the bishop which he intended to keep as soon as was humanly possible.

  Chapter Six

  Father Enrique’s next bold move was to set about establishing a sewing school f
or the girls of the town’s poorest families. Once again the project prospered not only because it was his but because it made eminently good sense. The orphanage had flourished and, more importantly, was the envy of visitors from more important towns who returned home and spread the news. Why shouldn’t a sewing school also flourish and increase even further the growing reputation of San Juan Bautista?

  This time Father Enrique didn’t need a new building. There were several places standing empty which would serve his purpose. He negotiated the lease at a peppercorn rent of a former store which had closed its doors to trade some two years previously. He made the rounds of the wealthy not in search of money but of ladies who might be interested in supervising the girls. The idea fired the ladies’ imagination once more. This would not be a come and go occasion like the fund-raising fetes had been. This would bestow on the ladies who chose to sacrifice their time and energy the mantle of a supervising committee. They would have to have meetings, take minutes, organise purchases, discharge responsibilities, create timetables, and keep accounts. Moreover, they would be to all intents and purposes doing in their own sphere what their menfolk did in theirs and claimed was so difficult, tiring, and beyond the ability of mere women. Sheer heaven!

  In less than a year items from the school were being sold in the town’s market. They were plain and simple but had the advantage of being cheap, practical, and hard-wearing. The girls accepted into the school came from homes where money was always scarce and knew from personal experience what sorts of things people wanted and needed. The school’s supervising committee consisted of the eight wives of the town’s most important men who, though secretly pleased to have some suitable project on which to spend their more-than-ample leisure hours, gained even more satisfaction by being able to counter their husbands’ claims of fatigue at the end of the day by similar claims of their own. These good ladies were so pleased with the success of their school that they persuaded their husbands to hire the services of an excellent and accomplished seamstress, a young widow with a baby daughter, who, on enquiring, had been recommended to them by the nuns of the orphanage. The young woman was duly approached and gladly accepted the residential position as, one year previously, her husband had been arrested, tried, and hanged by the Americans for giving assistance to bandit known to be based in the Dimasalang mountains. The young woman had had a flourishing business among ladies in Pisag who recognised quality when they saw it and would pay that little extra to obtain it. But that clientele dried up overnight after her husband’s arrest. Under the seamstress the girls’ work progressed rapidly. Those less talented still turned out the simple garments but any girl who showed aptitude was encouraged and guided onto more sophisticated work. The ladies continued in their oversight and it was not so very long before small items from the school appeared in public among their own accessories.

  The money from all the sales was kept by Father Enrique to be used for some purpose of his own which he resolutely refused to disclose. However, when one of the girls announced she had received a proposal of marriage, the whole school rejoiced as Father Enrique announced that if she accepted the young man she would be given a dowry from the fund he had been saving to present to her husband on her wedding day. Not only that, the whole school set to work to provide all the necessities for a young bride. The wedding, not so very secretly funded from Father Enrique’s own pocket, proved another spectacular success and it seemed that Father Enrique as well as being a saint was something of a miracle worker. His Mass attendance rose significantly not only among the population of San Juan but was swelled by people from the countryside who normally considered the journey from their villages or farms too far to attend Sunday Mass. No one actually brought their sick to be cured by his touch, true, but some said it was only a matter of time. Of course such speculations only circulated among the poor and ignorant whose Catholic faith was more a matter of primitive superstition than Church dogma but, as the ladies of better houses said among themselves, stranger things had happened in the Gospels.

  Whatever success he had and no matter how much he was loved and admired, Father Enrique never rested on his laurels. He worked hard, very hard, and for long hours while he waited patiently for the summons back to the bishop in Manila.

  His daily routine was simple. He breakfasted after morning Mass then returned to the church to hear Confessions. After that he made his way to the orphanage to talk to the sisters and to meet with the children. The sisters made a fuss of him and afterwards the superior delivered her brief report over coffee. Then he met with the children who ran to him laughing and shouting. The orphanage had been established long enough for most of the children no longer to contain those originally brought in from the poverty and degradation of the streets. Some of those had stayed, prospered, and left to take the jobs Father Enrique made sure were offered to them. Others, unable or unwilling to adjust to the disciplines and routines imposed by the sisters, had run away to their old life. But the orphanage had never had any difficulty in maintaining a full roll-call. Babies were brought by parents who simply could not afford yet another mouth to feed. Children were brought because they had indeed become orphans and their relatives couldn’t afford to take them in and then, of course, there were the children of fallen women: girls who for love or money had sinned and then chosen to leave their child and San Juan rather than live on in shame and destitution. These girls usually went to Manila where the American troops supplied a ready source of custom.

  Whatever the reason for their being there, the sisters saw to it that all the children understood that Father Enrique was their benefactor, their priest, and a saint.

  At the sewing school, which he visited next, it was the same. He met the seamstress first and discussed business then went to visit the girls who, although less noisy and boisterous in their welcome, were in their own, smiling, giggling way just as enthusiastic. Father Enrique looked at their work, took time to speak to as many as he could, and then spent another quarter of an hour taking coffee with the seamstress whom he knew still grieved for her dead husband and worried about her little girl. She was a quiet, reserved, rather plain woman, who had made no friends in San Juan that he knew of and he thought, quite rightly, that she valued as the highlight of her day his visit, their coffee, and their conversation.

  Father Enrique then made a selection from his list of wealthy households whose financial support he solicited to keep his parish running. Each day he would visit three houses, take coffee and cake with three wives and exchange small-talk, gossip, and, when asked, give spiritual advice. Apart from the excess of coffee it was a simple and straight-forward morning’s work and he usually enjoyed it.

  But now it had all changed.

  One night had destroyed him.

  He was no longer the good priest working hard and waiting for the bishop to summon him. Now he was nothing more than an actor playing a part, the part of a simple, holy priest, a man of God whose only concern was the spiritual and physical welfare of his flock.

  As he made his rounds it was as if he was carrying some great heavy burden which threatened to crush him. At the last house he visited he suddenly felt an almost overwhelming urge to stand up and scream out the guilt of his sin and in his mind, as the good lady talked of this and that, he actually saw in his imagination his doing so. But slowly the gentle trickle of inconsequential words that kept coming from her lips dissolved the image. He was a sinner, not a hero, a Judas, not a repentant thief, and he began once more to sip his coffee, nibble his cake, and listen to whatever it was the good woman was saying.

  As he left the house and headed homewards he felt the burden lighten and his thoughts take a different direction. Would he see her again? Would she still be in his house?

  The crisis had passed.

  Chapter Seven

  With his morning’s pastoral work behind him Father Enrique arrived at the church. Normally he would enter and spend time before the altar with Jesus. He paused at the doorway. Woul
d she still be there? He looked into the dark interior. In the house she might be waiting, in the church Jesus was waiting. Finally he went into the church and knelt as usual.

  His mind, however, seemed not to have noticed that he was on his knees in front of the tabernacle. Last night his world had changed for ever yet today nothing had seemed to be different. How could that be? At the seminary he had been an outstanding student, especially gifted in moral theology. There had even been talk of his going to Rome for further studies although in the end it had come to nothing. Yet now, when he needed his mind to use all those years of hard study, to resurrect some solution to his impossible situation, it produced nothing. He knelt at the altar rails, his eyes fixed on the tabernacle but his thoughts were far from prayer. He forced himself to seek an answer to his problem. What was done could not be undone, but if there was no way to turn the clock back for his body, was there some way it could be done for his soul? He could leave the town on some pretext, go to another priest, confess his sin, and be forgiven. Except that to be truly forgiven one had to feel a sorrow for the sin and have a firm purpose of amendment. And he felt no sorrow, he looked back on his sin as one of the most wonderful things that had ever happened in his life and as for a firm purpose of amendment, he longed to believe that it might happen again, that the young woman might once more slip into his bed and they would come together. His mind began to wander back to the passion of the previous night and he lost himself in remembrance when a hand gently touched his shoulder. He turned and looked up. It was her.