Juvenate in Antipolo

MAN OF GOD

How an Australian Missionary
Brought Faith to Filipino Tribals
and Discovered Himself

By Richard Seludo
Asiaweek July 1994

I struggle to keep my footing on the rounded stones and shifting gravel. Waist-high waters tug at we as I stagger across the Lanatan River. Two days of heavy rains, unusual in Manila and its surrounding areas in December, have swelled the 20-meterwide segment between San Andres and Santo Niño barrios. “Don’t go too far to the right – it’s deep!” shouts my companion Nestor from among tall grasses near the opposite bank.

Thrust each step against the current. That was the advice of my brother-in-law Philip before I embarked on my two-day trek to the Sierra Madre foothills near Tanay town, about 50 km east of Manila. On its slopes and in its valleys Father Peter Robb spent the last fifteen years of his nearly four decades in the Philippines as a missionary of the Roman Catholic Redemptorist order. The Australian lived and worked among poor farmers long neglected by Manila, and G-stringed tribals with beliefs and a way of life virtually untouched by the Western culture that deeply influenced most of the Philippines. 

The leaden clouds bearing, down on the late-afternoon sky don’t augur well for my return trek tomorrow. Nestor has assured me that my hosts for the night would lend me a horse for the journey back. But if more rains come, I may need a trained dolphin. Home to between 150 and 400 people each, barrios east of San Andres are cut off from Tanay during the monsoon from June to August. A few hundred farming families have to stock up on food, kerosene and other essentials for the months when the Lanatan swells to a deadly rage. 

In the early 1980s a jeepney laden with fifteen passengers and sacks of rice stalled while trying to ford the very segment I am crossing. Most of the riders abandoned the vehicle; the driver tried to reverse. ‘Men a huge log that had swept down from the mountains crashed into the, jeepney. It capsized and rolled downriver, taking two men. One body, I’m told, was found not far from the coast. 

I grip the travelling bag perched precariously on my shoulder. It contains a notebook that I must keep from the Lanatan’s clutches. Before the trip to Manila, I photocopied all notes from my interviews with Fr. Robb, who moved to Hong Kong in late 1989. But there are no copies of my jottings during the past week, including those from a three-hour session with the renowned lexicographer Fr. Leo English, another Australian Redemptorist. All that work would be literally washed up if I get the kind of baptism Fr. Robb had during his first solo preaching mission to a remote islet back in 1951. 

After a two-week voyage from Melbourne in November 1950, Fr. Robb stayed for three months at the Redemptorist mission house in Baclaran, a district south of Manila. ‘Re 28year-old priest was then sent to Lipa City, about 80 km to the south, to learn Tagalog under Fr. English and preach all over, Batangas province. One foray took him to Isla Verde (“Green Island”) off Ilihan town on the southern coast. A priest’s visit was a rare event in such far-flung places, and rarer still was the sight of a white-soutaned, fair-haired Caucasian in a motorized banca. 

“No, no,” protested several among the welcoming crowd of farmers, fishermen, women and children, as Fr. Robb prepared to wade ashore. “The priest must not get wet.” A short, muscular man asked Fr. Robb to ride piggyback. Impossible, he thought, this man couldn’t possibly carry all 5 ft 11 in of him. But the villagers insisted. He complied and was surprised when his burly carrier, a full head and shoulders smaller, firmly took his full weight. 

“Susmariosep!” screeched the onlookers suddenly, mouthing almost in unison the contracted interjection to Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary and St. Joseph. On their first step toward shore, Fr. Robb and his human mount had plunged head first into the brine. Scapulared old women crossed themselves. Everyone was struck dumb when the drenched priest emerged. After a second or two, as all braced for the wrath of God to blaze forth from the wet white man in white, he laughed. The people promptly joined in. The ice was broken. 

Raised on a dairy farm near Melbourne, Peter Robb was hardly a stranger to the rough and tumble of country life. Or the splashes: he used to catch one-kilo crayfish in the Goulburn River that flowed beside his family’s 35-hectare spread. There lived Norman James Robb, his wife Esther, their four girls and four boys, 20 sheep, 70 cows and a good many pigs, chickens and turkeys. Peter, the eldest child, had been born in Alexandra town on Feb. 9, 1922. After eighth grade, he herded sheep on horseback at his grandfather’s farm. 

The call to become a “shepherd of men” was somewhat thrust upon Peter. When he was 15, a Redemptorist, Fr. John Green, conducted a week of masses and renewal sermons in their town. He noticed a large family that never missed early morning mass – the Robbs. After one session, Fr. Green asked his four altar boys: “Who wants to become a parish priest or a missionary with a cross?” “I’d like to have a cross,” Peter nodded, thinking of the shiny pendants he saw on the black habits of clergymen. 

The priest saw nothing special in him. But that evening Fr. Green talked with Norman and Esther Robb, who asked their son whether he wanted to join the priesthood. “I don’t know,” Peter replied. Several weeks later he was in the first year of high school, at a minor seminary upcountry. Except for some vague doubts before taking his religious vows five years later, Fr. Robb can recall no wavering in his vocation. 

Founded in 1732 by St. Alphonsus Liguori, a brilliant priest of Naples, the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer preaches to the poor and abandoned. That just about describes this hilly, lush land Fr. Robb once walked. If there were a decent road, I’d be just an hour’s drive from Manila. Yet there is no electricity, telephones or running water, though Nestor has pointed to a couple of schoolhouses. 

My pocket flashlight illuminates barely a meter or so of the narrow dirt road. At six in the evening, we’ve hiked about eight kilometers from Sampalok, where our overloaded jeepney broke down at half-past two after a four-hour, 25-km climb from Tanay. Visiting home for a few days, Nestor, who works for the food and beverage giant San Miguel in Manila, is taking me to Mamuyao, twelve kilometers and as many river crossings from where our jeepney stalled. I have a letter from Sister Louie de Guia. who worked with Fr. Robb when he was here. It is for Bert and Rosie Mondejar, who hosted the priest many times during his years here. I hope to stay the night with them. 

The government opened these hills and valleys to homestead settlers in the 1950s. giving each ten hectares, but no means of transport. Logging companies built a one-lane road, but when the timber ran out more than a decade ago, so did they. The Tanay government sends a grader every dry season, but the rains undo its levelling work. Many farmers no longer take their harvest to town; if they did, they would use beasts of burden. The road, cemented in parts when Ferdinand Marcos was president, also makes God harder to reach. The people bring in a priest from Tanay – the only one for many miles in January and during the May fiesta. But in 1994 they can only afford the 1,600-peso round-trip jeepney hire once. 

It was to such inaccessible places that Fr. Robb had reached out since his earliest years in the Philippines. Alone or in groups of two or three, he and other Redemptorists ranged through central, eastern and southern Luzon. On buses, horses, boats and foot, they would travel up to 24 hours continuously through dusty, rough roads and over mountains, rivers and seas. The missionaries visited farming towns and villages not even their provincial governors knew about. In each area they spent between one and three weeks preaching and administering sacraments to rural folk by the thousands.

“I don’t know how I went through it all,” Fr. Robb muses. Before becoming the Baclaran-based Luzon superior in 1964, he visited “hundreds of places” in Luzon. He marvels at the early missionaries who planted the cross in such territory. “Extraordinary men, those Spaniards.” In a village in southeastern Luzon’s Bondoc Peninsula, he found a sturdy but priestless chapel of Hispanic vintage. A septuagenarian sacristan maintained the place, led prayers, baptized the newborn and buried the dead. On Fr. Robb’s tenth day there, a young man told him of two old people too frail to go to the village. Taking half a dozen hosts, they hiked for two hours through the hills. The couple said their last confession had taken place at the turn of the century. 

In most places there were few amenities and many hazards and hardships. At Isla Verde Fr. Robb suffered severe intestinal pains from a meter-long tapeworm. During the 1950s, when gangster violence terrorized Cavite province, south of Manila, gun-toting men once stopped the truck the missionary was riding. “This is it,” shuddered his companion as the leader approached Fr. Robb. Holding a shotgun by the barrel over his shoulder, the headman introduced himself in Tagalog: “I’m the priest around here.” The cleric had been commanded by President Ramon Magsaysay for pacifying bandits. Often out of town, he did offer mass (in Latin then) while Fr. Robb was at the parish – his shotgun standing next to the altar. 

During one mission to Casiguran in the northeast, the Australian and other Redemptorists were dismayed that the parish priest could offer no food after their exhausting journey. So was the American bishop of Infanta, Patrick Shanley, who accompanied them. He had been sending the parish of Fr. Tomas money and supplies every month, yet the old Italian Carmelite insisted he had none on hand. Four days into the mission, there was a loud crash in the parish convent kitchen. On the floor beneath a huge hole in the ceiling, lay a knee-high pile of canned goods, rice and other edibles. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” the old Carmelite repeatedly bleated as Fr. Shanley, a former U.S. military chaplain, fumed at his hoarding. “Be buggered to Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” raged the bishop. 

That wasn’t the end of Fr. Tomas’s woes. For a small parish library Fr. Shanley had funded, the Italian had bought materials he hadn’t bothered to examine. The bishop picked up some well-read pocketbooks and proceeded to read aloud from the works of pornography. Fr. Tornas covered his ears and resumed his frantic pleas to the Holy Family. “Tomas,” thundered Fr. Shanley like an Old Testament prophet, “how many sins have these people committed because of you?” 

Before the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65, which stressed a broader and more socially oriented idea of, Christian life, Catholic preaching was marked by a preoccupation with personal morality and piety. It is hard to imagine today’s Catholics keeping up with Fr. Robb’s old mission regimen. Church bells would rouse the people for mass at five in the morning. While the men were at work, missionaries would visit homes, looking for unsolemnized marriages. After lunch came religious instruction for children. The faithful returned to church at seven in the evening for prayers and sermons until after nine. At times, confessions lasted till 3 a.m. 

There were countless adult baptisms as well as mass weddings for couples not married in church for lack of a priest or in order to avoid what they thought would be a big expense. Fr. Robb performed hundreds of ceremonies for the kasal sa huwes (“married by the justice of the peace”), kasal sa banig (“married in bed”) or kasal sa tabing-ilog (“married at the river bank”). He tells of a triple wedding in Mallows, north of Manila, for an old couple, their son and their grandson. In another town some 50 pairs queued up before a priest. At the end of the ceremonies, one bride was left. The clergyman, Fr. Robb recalls, had missed one groom and matched the rest of the men with the wrong women. People were too polite to point out the mistake. The priest had to, in effect, annul the mismarriages and solemnize the vows of the correct partners. Preachers talked also about such topics as dealing with hardship, avoiding drunkenness and the evils of communism. 

“It was a rich country out there,” says Fr. Robb of the millions of believers. “There was a tremendous amount of work done and an amazing response from the people.” Fr. English, now 87, came to the Philippines in 1936 and is best known for his English-Tagalog dictionary, the most comprehensive work of its kind when it appeared in 1965. Begun in a wartime prison camp, the labor of love took eighteen years to complete. Originally intended to help foreign preachers, it was followed by a Tagalog-English tome in 1987. Yet, says Fr. English, “the happiest years of my life were those I spent as an active missionary – to see people cooperating, with these foreigners, coming night after night for sermons, masses, instructions and confession. He celebrated the first Perpetual Help novena mass at Baclaran in 1948 with a mere 70 worshippers. The novena to Mary now attracts tens of thousands every Wednesday and is one of Manila’s two most popular weekly devotions, along with the Black Nazarene. 

There are fewer missions today. Fr. English blames the lack of priests and the explosion of Christian sects. Fr. Robb reckons that life and society have become more complex. During his first two decades as a priest, “people weren’t so sophisticated. There was no TV, radio, transportation or communications.” In the mid-1950s, Fr. Robb recalls, a cleric on Mindanao island in the south distributed scores of Japanese-made radios permanently tuned to his station. “When the transistor radio became more generally available, they could no longer brainwash people that way.” 

In the 1960s, the Catholic message had to adapt to a more liberal society and compete with other ways of thinking and living. The Second Vatican Council worked to modernize the Church, from the language of the mass to the salvation of non-Christians and even atheists. Around the same time, “liberation theology” from Latin America recast doctrine and social action to fight injustice and oppression. 

As head of the Luzon vice-province in 1964, Fr. Robb, then 42, found himself at the center of Redemptorist efforts to address the sweeping changes wrought by modernization in the Philippines and the Vatican. Despite that challenge, Fr. Robb found his stint as vice-provincial superior neither interesting nor enriching. “I’ve always been an active man,” he says. “I wanted to be with the people in the field. But I spent five years traipsing around attending meetings.” When change came, he said, “I accepted it wholeheartedly.” 

Still, it was hardly gratifying to be told that the messages and methods one had long espoused had become inadequate or irrelevant. Fr. English once argued with a younger priest about current sermons that focused on man’s dignity, not the “four last things” (death. judgment, heaven and hell). “What about death?” he demanded. To him there was only one purpose in working hard in a faraway land. He told one congregation “We’re here to help you in the most important thing in your life – the salvation of your immortal soul.” Years ago he was asked to attend fewer meetings, where he tended to get excited. “I can’t agree when eternal truths are neglected,” he says. 

Redemptorists began to stay for months in one place, immersing themselves in the daily life of the faithful and helping them cope with everyday problems. They began developing and depending more on lay leaders. The trend accelerated with the spread of so-called basic Christian communities, which organized people to help themselves and assert their interests. Unfortunately, BCCs were seen by many in the military establishment as a tool for communist infiltration and organization at the grassroots. Their use of Marxist analysis to help people understand their social conditions compounded the army’s fears. Many BCCs were suppressed and their leaders, including priests and nuns, threatened, beaten, jailed or killed. 

Even so, the communities took hold and influenced the conduct of missions. By the 1980s, recounts Fr. Robb, “we were evangelizing the people and they were evangelizing us. They have just as much to offer us – if we were prepared to receive.” In sum, the traditional mission that preachers of all persuasions had known for ages – holy men herding the heathen to heaven – was changed for good. 

Are you Fr. Robb’s replacement?” Rosie Mondejar and Nestor’s eighty-something mother Ka Lourdes ask me the same question as soon as I say I know the priest. Fond memories of him and the deepest debt of – gratitude still] stir the people of San Andres and nearby barrios, as well as the Tala plateau far beyond where my eight-hour trek has taken me. Yet it was not fire-and-brimstone sermons that etched his memory in the hearts and minds of 3,000 peasants and the Dumagat and Remontado tribes that lived here during his time. 

“Father put many tribals through school,” says Nestor repeatedly during our climb to Mainuyao. They went to a nearby agricultural institute or colleges in Manila, though many married before they could finish. After lending me dry clothes and slippers and serving a dinner of dried fish, boiled gourd and rice. Rosie and her husband Bert sit with me in the spare. kerosene-lit living, room of their 75-sq-meter wooden house. They offer more tales of Fr. Robb’s kindness and perseverance. 

On foot or in his jeep, the priest ranged across the mountains, often climbing “halik-tuhod,” the knees kissing the slope at every step. He saved the lives of many, including diarrhea-stricken children threatened with dehydration. (He told their parents to give them boiled water to replace lost fluids.) He obtained medicine for lepers and drove the gravely ill to Tanay or Manila. He raised 10,000 pesos to buy a village water buffalo and worked hard to organize a rattan cooperative to boost tribal incomes (it foundered on government red tape and the opposition of middlemen who controlled the trade). And there were the countless masses, baptisms, marriages and other sacraments that he presided over. 

Fr. Robb cared for people body and soul – sometimes at his own peril. He vigorously championed local needs and rights, drawing the ire of powerful interests. The national waterworks agency wanted him to convince people to drop their opposition to a massive dam project in eastern Luzon called Kaliwa-Kanan (“left-right”). Concerned about communist rebels passing through, the army invited the missionary for questioning and kept him under surveillance. 

Between 1982 and 1984, Fr. Robb was told of possible threats to his life. A paper he wrote condemning the dam project had mentioned First Lady Imelda Marcos. “Don’t go into the mountain alone,” cautioned a Dumagat. “You could disappear.” ‘Me tribals also advised him to avoid riding his pale cream jeep, which was easy to spot, and tipped him off about tribesmen spying for the military. 

Threats to life and limb are part of many a missionary’s calling, of course, be they Christian, Muslim, Buddhist or Marxist. Philippine Redemptorists have had their share of gore and guts. Luzon superior during World War II, Fr. Frank Cosgrave survived a massacre of civilians by retreating Japanese. When U.S. forces were retaking Manila in February 1945, he was among a large group of men, women and children bayoneted or shot by some 20 soldiers at a chapel. Stabbed in the chest and shoulder, Fr. Cosgrave crawled among the dead and dying, giving absolution and anointing them with holy oil. He would lie still whenever the killers returned to finish off anyone still breathing or twitching. Braving sniper and artillery fire, Fr. English searched for his superior. He found him after two days, recovering at a U.S. army medical facility. 

Around the time Fr. Robb was warned of threats to his life. so was a close friend of his in the Cebu Redemptorist house, the vice-provincial seat for central and southern Philippines. Fr. Rudy Romano hailed from eastern Visayas, then a rebel-infested and economically depressed region. He had organized BCCs among fishermen and tenant farmers. Witnesses recount that on July 11, 1985, soldiers stopped the motorcycle-riding priest on his way home. He was spirited away in a delivery van, and one of the men rode off on his bike. The middle-aged priest was never seen again. 

The army’s insinuations and questions about Fr. Robb infuriated many Dumagats, who were prepared to defend him. One tribesman was among an army detail stationed at an outpost near Barrio Layban near the Kaliwa dam site. When the priest passed one day, the men asked whether he could return the next day to bless the precinct. He agreed and was told to come at four in the afternoon promptly. After the ceremony they chatted over some soft drinks and biscuits. A soldier lowered his voice and confided: “Father, the other day we were called to a meeting. We were told to keep an eye on you.” The priest silently gripped his bottle of Tru-Orange. “We know you very well,” the soldier said reassuringly. “And we know you’ve done much for my people,” added the Dumagat. “But you should be careful,” the first trooper continued. “There’s this young soldier who said after the meeting, ‘If they want me to, I can kill him easily.”‘ 

While Fr. Robb’s deep faith fortified him in the face of danger, it was sometimes a hindrance in the other challenge he encountered on the slopes of the Sierra Madre: preaching to the tribes. It’s central to a missionary’s training – indeed, his calling – to believe he brings to others a higher truth, if not an absolute one. In spreading the gospel among the Dumagat and Remontados, Fr. Robb worked with some 400 families. Most were Dumagat, who number between 8,000 and 10,000 scattered throughout the mountains of eastern Luzon. The priest met some in the 1950s near Fr. Tomas’s parish in Casiguran. In the distant past they may have been seafarers or island-hoppers (dumagat means “go to sea”). Unlike Remontados, whose ancestors lived and intermarried with lowlanders centuries ago, the Dumagat hunt and gather most of their food and do little planting. They live in homes of twig, leaves and grass in the cloud-capped habitat they rarely leave. 

In 1974 Fr. Robb met some tribals and asked to be taken to the Dumagat village. Upon his arrival children fled in fear and women covered their breasts. “Kapre,” whispered some youngsters, referring to a giant of lore who perched atop a tree at night smoking a cigar and preying upon hapless passers-by. The priest quickly worked to turn the initial wariness into friendship. On his third day in the village, he enquired about the tribe’s needs. They were simple: food, clothing, medicine. He organized a volunteer group to work with the tribals. 

Over five years Fr. Robb made many trips to the village staying days or weeks at a time. He ate the Dumagat’s root crops and slept in their flimsy lean-tos. He sat with them around the fire, which bound the tribe together. He would often bring them their favorite eucalyptus candy. Yet Fr. Robb felt something was missing. During a five-month holiday in Australia in 1979, he reflected on what it might be. “The tribals listened to me, but it was one-way traffic,” he concludes. was the good, white father with all kinds of goodies. It was a demeaning attitude. I had everything and they had nothing.” 

On his return to the Philippines, Fr. Robb asked his superior for permission to live indefinitely with the tribals. “No exceptions,” he says. He ate only what they ate, mostly root crops and some snared animals for the Dumagat. Already nearing 60, he moved whenever the tribe did, going on exhausting climbs and treks for days on end. 

With a long bolo blade, he helped Remontados clear areas for rice planting. And he endured the elements in make~ shelters or out in the open. The priest once spent two hours huddled with a Dumagat family of seven on the side of a cliff lashed by driving rain and 200-kph winds. 

Hardest of all, he took it upon himself sincerely to learn from the tribals. “I wasn’t there just to give, give, give,” he says. “I was there to receive from them.” It would not do merely to go through the motions of tribal customs and rituals, or nod in approval and acknowledge their value for the Dumagat and Remontados. To really learn from the tribals, Fr. Robb had to accept sincerely that there were instances when the Dumagat and Remontados possessed a higher truth. To win converts, the missionary had to become one. 

That meant he had to see equal, if not greater, value in ways and precepts that might seem to contradict beliefs long held by Christians as the sole beacon on the road to heaven. He saw, for instance, that teenage Dumagat boys and girls would live together. If a couple had offspring, they would marry when they reached 19 or 20 years of age. If they didn’t, they separated and took up with other partners. Sixteenth-century Spanish friars condemned such practices as works of the devil. Their 20di-century Australian counterpart saw that tribal couples were monogamous and more faithful to their union than many Christians. Nor did they attach a stigma to single mothers, who were accepted and cared for by their families and communities.