The Rebuilding of the Cathedral of Manila – Written in Manila

PHILIPPINES. Solórzano y Salcedo, Juan de

Gloriosos desempeños de las mas ardiente caridad, y exemplos del mas generoso çelo, con que los Ilust.mos Señores Doctor D. Miguel de Poblete Arçobispo de Manila, ya difunto; y M. D. Joseph Millan de Poblete, su Sobrino, Electo Obispo de la Nueva-Segovia: resucitaron del tumulto de sus ruynas al trono de la mayor grandeza, la Cathedral Metropolitana Iglesia del Archipielago Philippino. Descripcion breve de la Magestuosa pompa, y lucido aparato con que vltimamente el dicho Ilustmo. Señor M. D. Joseph Millan de Poblete la dedicò con vniversal aplauso. [With, as issued] Pizarro de Orellana, Francisco (Manila, 1630 – d. Vigan 1683) Sermon, que predico el Doctor Francisco Pizarro de Orellana, Maestrescuela desta S. Iglesia de Manila, Provisor, y Vicar General del Arçobispado entonces, y al presente Comissario, y Juez Subdelegado General de la Santa Cruzada en estas Islas, del Consejo de su Magestad, &c.

Mexico: Por la Viuda de Bernardo Calderon, 1674.

Price: $10,500.00

Quarto: 18.4 x 13.2 cm. Pt. I: [iv], 11 lvs.; Pt. II: ff [1], 9 lvs.

FIRST (and apparently only) EDITION.

Bound in modern red morocco gilt. With a woodcut vignette at foot of last page of text. A little light soiling. Title page with slim rust stain causing small hole, not affecting the text; short worm trail to lower corner of first 2 lvs, far from the text. Some sidenotes slightly shaved in the second part. I have located no copies in the U.S.

The book was printed in Mexico by Paula de Benavides, the widow of Bernardo Calderón, with whom she began printing books and pamphlets in Mexico City in 1631; widowed with six children, she took over the business in 1641 and died in 1684.

An extremely rare record of the rebuilding of the Cathedral of Manila after the disastrous earthquake of November 1645 utterly destroyed the previous church. The Relación is both a narrative of the cathedral’s destruction and rebuilding — which took nearly thirty years — and an eyewitness account of the dedication festivities of August–September 1671. It offers a remarkably precise architectural description of the new building, one of the fullest contemporary printed accounts of a major Philippine colonial church. The new cathedral, Manila’s fourth, stood until June 3, 1863, when it too was destroyed by an earthquake.

The dedication letter is addressed to Don Pedro Portocarrero, Count of Medellín and President of the Royal Council of the Indies — the most powerful colonial administrator in Spain — and is signed by the likely author of the Relación, Juan de Solorzano y Salzedo, chaplain to the family of Archbishop Poblete, who began the work of rebuilding cathedral. The dedication is dated Manila, December 31, 1671, just months after the ceremonies and festivities described. The sermon preached at the dedication, by Francisco Pizarro de Orellana, Maestrescuela of Manila Cathedral, concludes the volume.

The Earthquake and the Destruction of the Cathedral:

The Relación begins with the disaster that struck Manila on the night of November 30, 1645 — the feast day of Saint Andrew the Apostle, patron of Manila — a little past eight o’clock in the evening. A fierce and prolonged earthquake brought down the greater part of the city’s buildings with a terrifying crash, their ruins becoming “an ill-fashioned sepulcher for those who but a little before with ostentatious show had inhabited them.”

Due to the destruction of the cathedral, the clergy were left without a place to worship. They were obliged to erect in the middle of the plaza a temporary open-sided structure (camarín) “where with such decency as that unexpected accident permitted they celebrated the Divine Offices.” This arrangement continued until Los Hermanos de la Santa Misericordia lent their church to the cathedral chapter for worship.

Construction formally began on August 31, 1653, eight years after the earthquake and shortly after Archbishop Miguel de Poblete arrived in Manila to take possession of his See. Poblete first ordered that whatever fragments the earthquake had left standing be completely demolished — these remnants being regarded as fit only “as a fuel for grief, stirring in all such painful memories, or as a monument eternizing for posterity the astonishments of its force.”

The story of the rebuilding is told as an extended parallel with David and Solomon — Archbishop Poblete as the zealous David who begins the Temple and exhausts himself in its service, and his nephew Joseph Millán de Poblete as the Solomon who completes it. It is a narrative of extraordinary financial strain, personal sacrifice, and institutional persistence across nearly thirty years.

The reconstruction was funded from four sources: royal grants channeled through the Viceroy of New Spain; income from vacant Philippine ecclesiastical estates applied by the Crown; public alms solicited in the streets of Manila; and the personal estates of the two Pobletes themselves.

The text is careful to note that Archbishop Poblete’s personal resources were so entirely consumed — both by the fabric and by his legendary care for the poor, for which he was known throughout Manila as the “universal Father of the Poor” — that he left his nephew, in the author’s phrase, “as inheritance only glorious debts.”

Sustained by the royal remittances of 1655 and 1658, the work of building the new cathedral advanced steadily through the first five bays of the church and the Sagrario chapel. By 1660 the Divine Offices were being celebrated in the building again, though it remained unfinished. By 1662 the five arches or first bays were complete, and the Sagrario had been erected in the last of them. On June 8, 1662, the feast of Corpus Christi, “the veneration of the sovereign Sacrament was begun with most devout rejoicings” — the first time the Sacrament had been properly housed since the earthquake seventeen years earlier.

The bays, arches, and spans of the main chapel were still incomplete when Archbishop Poblete died, his stipends and charitable donations having been thoroughly consumed by the building. The Archbishop’s nephew, Joseph Millán de Poblete, then Dean of the Cathedral and later Bishop-elect of Nueva Segovia, took up the charge. The author of the Relación presents him explicitly as Elisha to his uncle’s Elijah — the spirit of the master passed entire to the disciple. He secured further royal funds, raised additional alms from the Manila community, and contributed substantially from his own estate. To the structure he added four massive buttresses, each approximately eleven feet square — two against the lateral walls and two on the Sacristy side — explicitly designed to resist the seismic forces that had leveled the previous cathedral. The work was completed and the cathedral dedicated in 1671, twenty-six years after the earthquake.

The Relación offers a precise architectural description of the new building. The cathedral has three spacious naves, carried on twelve columns each approximately eight feet in diameter. Along each side four great and majestic chapels run gracefully, together with the Sagrario, which “for its size and elegance alone could be the envy of many Churches.”

The main nave is some twenty-two feet wide and rises to approximately fifty-six feet in height. The lateral naves rise to around forty-seven feet and are roughly nineteen feet wide — sufficient on busy days to give “comfortable passage to the multitude.” The entire building, including the eleven-foot-thick walls, measures approximately two hundred and thirty-two feet in length and ninety-nine feet in width. It is served by five great doors and illuminated from above by seventeen finely-crafted skylights set above the arcading.

The roof is of wood, lath-work, and tile — the same treatment for the Sagrario as for the main nave — its interior facing (i.e. the ceiling of the church) was beautifully painted. The main altarpiece, entirely gilded and of fine relief work, was raised under royal patronage. The seven arched openings between the pillars were, like the bands of a rainbow, each a marvel of art — ‘a sweet delight to the eyes and an invitation to wonder’. The four anti-seismic buttresses added by Millán de Poblete are noted as a specific structural improvement — a pointed reminder that the building was designed with the memory of 1645 explicitly in mind.

The celebrations surrounding the dedication of the cathedral, which included processions, fireworks, and the performance of plays, ran for eight days, beginning on the eve of August 29, 1671, and concluding September 7.

On August 29th the Cathedral bells rang out and the other churches of the city responded in echoing concert. At two in the afternoon a general procession was formed, with throngs of people from “so many nations (i.e. from every ethnic community and class, Spaniards, creoles, mestizos, indigenous Filipinos, etc.), that it rivalled all those that Manila had seen since its founding.” The Cathedral “for all its capacity, was too small for the great throng.” All the nobility of the city attended, along with all the communities of the religious orders, “in a numerous assembly illuminated with candles of the whitest wax.” The Blessed Sacrament “under a rich Canopy was borne in the hands of our Bishop,” attended by the Royal Audiencia with its President, and other dignitaries. The miraculous image of Our Lady of Guia was carried “on the shoulders of those who by their spirit, authority, and learning worthily are held in highest esteem in these lands.”

Along the processional route, four rich and finely-crafted Altars had been erected, at which “various keen and spirited motets were sung to the Sacrament.” The processional route was richly and colorfully adorned, “The ground carpeted with the strewn flowers of April, and the balconies in a varied flutter of silks.” That night, Manila staged an extraordinary display of luminarias so dense that the sun’s absence was “not a little suspect.” Then followed eight well-devised fireworks displays:
The fireworks, longing to enthrone themselves as comets in the blazing sphere of the firmament, spat great bursts of ardent flame, their explosions awakening thrills, stirring a little fear even in those who already knew them soulless thunderings. … Sparks fell to the ground — darting like vipers between the feet of the distracted and bedazzled crowd — scattering the multitudes.

The Dedication Day (August 31): Mass, Sermon, and Comedy

Dedication day opened with the sound of music emanating from the cathedral tower “flooding the City in surging seas of rejoicing,” Two skillful clarion-players “their playing striking the air competitively in sonorous challenge to the winds, compelled them to cease their blowing and listen.” The Bishop sang the High Mass:
Responding to five well-attended and well-tuned choirs of instruments, enlivened on the air by subtle voices, and alternating so many organs struck by the art of exquisite players — a concord harmonizing with the adornment of the Altar, columns, and walls.
The sermon was preached by Dr. Francisco Pizarro de Orellana, Maestrescuela of the Cathedral, in “a style so elegant, so profound in its concepts, and so apt to the occasion, that it was the just reward of his Panegyric that the one printed [in this volume] should consecrate it to eternity with due respect.” In the afternoon, a Comedy was performed — “the spectators, dressed in embroidered finery, gleaming as morning-stars despite of the splendor of the Sun.” A second Comedy was performed on the eighth day, this time staged inside the Cathedral itself. The costs of both Comedies were borne by the two canons Herrera and Baranda.

The Relación ends with a summation naming both Pobletes as the men to whom all credit is owed: the Archbishop who began it and the Bishop-elect who brought it to its “happy conclusion with general admiration.” The author closes with two lines from the Aeneid (VI.143–44) — Virgil’s golden bough passage — applied to uncle and nephew as twin instruments of Providence:

Quo avulso non deficit alter Aureus, & simili frondescit virga metallo. (When one [bough] is torn away, another golden one does not fail to appear, and the new bough puts forth leaves of a similar metal.”

A note on the financing of the cathedral construction:

The Relación tells is that the reconstruction was funded from four sources: royal grants channeled through the Viceroy of New Spain; income from vacant Philippine ecclesiastical estates; public alms solicited in the streets of Manila; and the personal estates of the two Pobletes themselves.

In 1655 and 1658 the Viceroy of New Spain, the Duke of Alburquerque, remitted 23,299 pesos and 4 tomines from the Royal Treasury — funds which Philip IV had applied from the vacant estates of two deceased Philippine prelates. A further 4,968 pesos and 5 tomines was obtained from the Royal Treasury by Joseph Millán de Poblete, Solicitation of alms raised 1,909 pesos and 2 tomines. Archbishop Poblete contributed 12,985 pesos and 4 tomines from his own household during the first phase of construction, and Joseph Millán de Poblete a further 799 pesos and 7 tomines from his own estate in the final phase. Total expenditure on the first phase alone, up to 1662, was 53,441 pesos and 1 tomín; the final phase cost a further 7,677 pesos and 6 tomines.

Medina, México, Vol. 2, 1115; Palau 319004 ("private collection"); USTC 5103891; Catálogo Colectivo de Impresos Latinoamericanos hasta 1851, BSF-15277