Filipino Catholics hold dear their practice of novenas as community prayer.
By Fr. Seán Coyle

Communal rituals are important in the faith formation of Filipinos. During my time in the Philippines, I’ve learned that novenas are very important in the religious culture of Filipinos.

I was astonished when I discovered that the perpetual novena to the Mother of Perpetual Help came to the Philippines only in 1946. Seeing how packed churches were every Wednesday, I presumed the novena (nine consecutive days of prayer) was an old practice. It clearly has touched people’s hearts.

Some GIs from Boston, remembering the novena led there every Wednesday, introduced it at the Redemptorist church in Iloilo, in the Western Visayas, the islands at the center of the Philippines.

Older people in Iloilo still remember their astonishment at seeing American soldiers not only filling the church, but also receiving Holy Communion. At the time, religion was seen largely as a practice for women.

Fr. Patrick Nulty, an Irish Redemptorist I knew later in life, made the novena popular, and it spread like wildfire. The Australian Redemptorists introduced it into their Manila church.

Soon, their church was too small, so they built a huge church paid for by the offerings of the poor who flocked there. It’s impossible to move on Wednesdays in the area with people coming from all over to attend novena sessions held from early morning until late at night. Priests hear confessions around the clock.

In every Filipino church, there’s at least one celebration of the novena, nearly always followed by Mass. Filipinos have brought this novena with them to many parts of the world. Every Wednesday, Filipinos come together in the cathedral in Reykyavík, Iceland, which I saw when I gave a weekend retreat to them in 2000. About 20 percent of Iceland’s 5,200 Catholics, out of a population of 290,000, are Filipinos.

In the week before Christmas every year, Filipino churches are packed with worshippers for early-morning events known as Simbang Gabi in the Tagalog language and Misa de Gallo or Misa Aguinaldo in Spanish.

The Tagalog term can be translated as “night worship” while the Spanish terms mean “Mass at cockcrow” and “Gift Mass”—the gift being the Catholic faith.

The Misa de Gallo has the spirit of a festive pilgrimage of gratitude to God. One sees many sleepy eyes—worship begins at 4:30 a.m.—especially among the large numbers of teen-agers and children, many of whom go to reconciliation before Mass. Some parishes in Manila have introduced a second Simbang Gabi at night, because churches simply cannot accommodate all who come in the morning.

Filipinos have introduced the Simbang Gabi to some major North American cities with Mass celebrated in a different church each night. The only experience with which I can compare it is the 1950’s weekday Masses in Dublin during Lent. But there was no singing there. The choir never seems to stop singing in the Philippines.

Fr. Sean Coyle traveled with these Filipinos living in England to a pilgrimage to Lourdes, France.

The priest never leads the novena. He might attend one night, but it would be difficult for him to go to every wake and quite impossible to be at the novena each of the nine nights.
In my 32 years in the Philippines, I’ve done that only once: A young man of 25, whose family was very close to me, died in an accident. The whole community was utterly shocked as Jimmy had been like a father to his two brothers and three sisters.

Their father had died in an accident when the youngest was less than a year old. His funeral Mass was the most emotionally difficult I have ever celebrated.

The novena was a powerful help to both the family and the community. They expressed their faith together in prayer and grieved together by sharing stories about Jimmy. Each one knows the day will arrive when others must do the same for their family.

In Jimmy’s novena, I experienced a powerful faith in individuals and the community. Filipinos look death in the face and help each other in Jesus’ promise of our resurrection. By their solidarity with them, the community carries the grieving family during their darkest hours. The Filipino wake in some ways is like the traditional Irish wake, but the novena gives it a much stronger element of faith.

Far-flung Filipinos
In the last 30 years, Filipinos have gone even further afield than the Irish did after the Potato Famine of the 1840s. I’ve celebrated Mass with them in homes in coastal towns of Iceland and the Faeroe Islands, in the grotto in Lourdes, in the shrine at Fatima, and in churches in Ireland, England, the Isle of Man, Italy and Korea.

Fr. Ricci Pajarillo, a young Filipino Columban, has gone to Chad for the last two Christmases to celebrate Mass with the Filipino workers there.

Filipinos working overseas have brought a spiritual dimension of the Catholic faith back to parishes in Europe where the young are seldom seen in church, and Filipino families offer a new vitality to many parishes in the United States and Canada. They’ve brought a great sense of caring and an overflow of faith in a God who loves them and is with them in every adversity.

I was moved to tears by the televised testimony of a Filipina nurse in Ireland. She described how the Filipinos would work on Christmas Day to forget the pain of separation from their families and to enable the Irish hospital staff to be with theirs.

She spoke of the warm welcome and excellent accommodations her employers had given her. She felt and expressed the pain of Mary and Joseph when they could find no accommodation in Bethlehem. For her, Jesus, Mary and Joseph were members of her own family.

These three novenas form Filipinos into a strong, welcoming Christian community. As a final example, I saw this clearly when I celebrated Mass with the Filipinos of Juneau, Alaska, one Sunday in 1990.

A sizeable number of tourists from “The Lower 48,” with no Filipino connections, happened to attend. They couldn’t believe it when after Mass they were invited, not for coffee, but for a communal potluck dinner!

Columban Father Seán Coyle of Ireland is the editor of Misyón, the Columbans’ mission magazine in the Philippines.