By Trizer D. Mansueto

Despite the appalling destruction or mutilation of the various parts of the beautiful ancient church of Argao brought about by ignorant individuals, there is, however, a cause for joy. Upon the orders of the governor, the authorities in that town had taken down an obstruction that finally revealed to the public a beautiful stone chapel that lay hidden for many years.

Poor Man’s Bible

By “reading” the bas relief located in the pediment of the small chapel, I am in the opinion that it couldn’t be other than a mortuary. There are not many stone mortuaries left in the Philippines today and fewer still are mortuaries that are found close to stone churches. In Cebu, this edifice is only found close to Argao, Dalaguete and Oslob churches.

Burdened by the great task of preaching to people, the Spanish missionaries used visuals in order to teach the tenets of the Catholic faith. In order to ingrain the faith into the heads of illiterate natives, the friars had paintings commissioned or when building churches, had Catechism carved into stone in order to have these teachings “imprinted” in the minds of our forefathers. The practice, however, may be largely seen in Medieval Europe, in their old churches where the “faith was both expressed in and strengthened by the carvings on church portals..” where such “carvings and designs told people the things that the Church felt they should know,” according to Dudley and Fancy in the book The Humanities. These visuals, “for the illiterate people of that age… were a kind of text” that have been known as “the poor man’s Bible.”

Having become literate, as most of us are today, many of us at present had also lost the ability to “read” these formulas set in stone, thinking that this are mere embellishments on church facades and walls so that they wouldn’t look plain and boring. For somebody who might want to know more about what these visual formulas are all about, one must first know Roman Catholic hagiography and iconography in order, for instance, to know the saints carved on our church stone facades.

A Mortuary

According to the carvings on the pediment of the Argao capilla, the stone structure could not be but a mortuario. In older churches in the country, a mortuary is usually built as an added wing to the nave, according to Ricky Jose in the book Simbahan: Church Art in Colonial Philippines. A mortuary is a chapel which used for wakes (pagbilar) or in days passed when cemeteries were still near churches, it was literally a cemetery chapel where masses and prayers for the deceased were recited. In the case of Argao, the mortuary may have lost its function when the cemetery was relocated at the outskirts of the town following regulations on hygiene set by the Spanish king. An article about cemeteries written by Marie Joy Sumagaysay in the journal Pintacasi mentions that “the practice of burying the dead in churchyard eventually ceased in the late 18th century. The colonial government finally realized that having a cemetery beside the church was unhygienic and unsightly. Corpses discharge a putrid exhalation called miasma which permeated the air usually at night…” so “as a consequence, King Charles VI of Spain… ordered the relocation of the cemetery from the church grounds to the outskirts of town…”

Proofs

Anyway, let’s go back to my theory why I believe that the abovementioned chapel is indeed a mortuary. By reading the bas relief of the pediment, we are led to believe that the said stone structure is indeed a mortuario because in Catholic iconography, a soul is portrayed as an infant. The relief shows St. Michael “rescuing” a soul instead of an archangel in battle position. Beneath this relief is one that shows a skull with an hourglass. A skull symbolizes the certainty of the death of man and this is bolstered by the hourglass which represents time which is running out for the world with what looks like a globe. A third evidence may be the carved cross found inside the chapel which had been painted purple to represent the same message: Christian death.