Gospel Flourishes in Soil of Filipino Faith

By Francis M. Orquiola

A detachment of artillerymen from Utah who arrived during the Spanish-American War, near the end of the last century, are the first Latter-day Saints known to have set foot on Philippine soil.

It was a curious harbinger of the part war was to play in bringing the gospel to this nation of Pacific islands after World War II.

By then, the Philippines were ripe for the gospel. Years of United States government after the Spanish-American War had spread the English language throughout the islands. In addition, Filipinos have a long history of Christianity and a love of learning.

The Filipinos’ first contact with Christianity came in 1521, when Spanish explorer Ferdinand Magellan arrived on Samar, one of the central islands. It was the beginning of nearly four hundred years of Spanish rule, and Spanish administration brought with it the Roman Catholic church, making the Philippines the only Christianized nation in Asia. Explorer Ruy Lopez de Villalobos gave the nation its name, in honor of the Spanish prince who was to become King Philip II.

The restored gospel first came to the Philippines through LDS military personnel stationed there during World War II. Among those who prepared the way were the late Peter Grimm, a resident of the Philippines from the 1920s (and a U.S. Army colonel during the war), and his wife Maxine Tate, who was in the American Red Cross hospital service.

Dean Franklin Clair, a U.S. Army medic who married Filipina Leona H. Seno, was another LDS pioneer in the Philippines; the Clairs reared their family in Cebu, then settled later in Davao. Brother Clair presided over the first branch and district in Mindanao, and tutored numerous converts in the ways of priesthood leadership.

Full-time proselyting began in 1961 when two pairs of missionaries rented a house on Taft Avenue in Manila. On their first tracting day, one pair walked out the door and turned left, while the other pair turned to their right. That proselyting has seen Filipinos baptized at the rate of a stake a month during peak periods in recent years.

Today, it is expected that there will be more than 85,000 members in the Philippines by year’s end. There are sixty-four Church-built chapels, with requests coming in continually for more.

Several major milestones highlight the recent growth of the Church in the Philippines. The first was the establishment in 1983 of the Manila Missionary Training Center, a satellite of the Missionary Training Center at Provo, Utah. There are now about four hundred full-time Filipino missionaries.

Another major indicator of Church advancement in the Philippines is the new Manila Genealogical Service Center, in the Church Administrative Offices in Makati. Most family group records on file are up to two generations only. Members will have to use available genealogical resources, through their local branch libraries, to complete four generations.

The genealogical center’s volunteer staff is gearing up to service branch genealogical libraries which will be organized in the country’s sixteen stakes and twenty-two districts, providing a decentralized name extraction program.

The Manila center’s microfilm collection includes nearly ten million pages of raw data from Catholic parish and Spanish civil records, containing about seventy million ancestral names and other bits of information pertinent to the present generation of Filipinos.

LDS students of high school age from Laoag, in northern Luzon, to Zamboanga, on the southern tip of Mindanao, highlight a third major milestone for the Philippines—early morning seminary. Some students slip into school uniforms and walk to seminary at 4 A.M. because they cannot afford to ride.

The Home Study Program—the forerunner of seminaries and institutes—was first introduced in the Philippines in 1972, and enrollment leapt to 4,000 by 1979. Introduction of early morning seminary in 1981 was a surprise for Filipino homes, where many students’ parents were not Church members, and enrollment dipped by 19 percent. By the following year, it was back to the 1979 level. Most of the new generation of instructors are parents who were students themselves when the program was initiated.

Meanwhile, one floor of a building in the middle of Metro Manila’s “University Belt” (the student population is estimated at half a million) has been remodeled into a facility for institute classes. LDS students from Metro Manila’s six stakes, enrolled in one of the belt’s three dozen universities, colleges, and vocational schools, take their choice of morning, afternoon, or evening institute classes.

And now there is the temple!

The view is especially stirring at dawn or sunset, when the Far Eastern sun daubs the spires, walls, and grounds with varying hues of amber. A nine-foot gold-leafed statue, witnessing angelic visitations of the last days, stands in heraldic majesty atop the temple’s 114-foot spire, a beacon to nonmember and member alike. When the 13,000-square-foot sacred edifice is dedicated this month, it will cap nearly forty years of gospel growth in the Philippines.

Photography by Kurt Soffe and Richard Romney