Faith, Family, and Filipino American Community Life

8. Growing Presence and Potential Impacts

149  In 1992, Tessie Manuel, with a coalition of other first-generation Filipino Americans that included a small group from Texas, wrote Monsignor Bransfield, the rector of the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, DC, to inquire what it would take to build a chapel for Our Lady of Antipolo—an apparition of the Virgin Mary of Peace and Good Voyage in the Philippines known as Birhenng Antipolo.1 For decades, Filipinos visiting the national shrine had questioned Birhenng Antipolo’s absence and longed for their own faith journey to take a final resting place in the basilica. Diana, for example, a first-generation Filipino American now living in Houston, explained, “It’s hard to believe that for all the years Filipinos have lived in this country and filled its parishes, that our Mother Mary was not welcome on these shores.” Two years after initial conversations began, in January of 1994, the Antipolo Shrine Project Committee started to raise money for the chapel with the assistance of Father Fidel de Ramos, a Filipino American and the associate pastor of a heavily Filipino-populated parish in Oxon Hill, Maryland.A few months later, a draft for the design of the chapel was completed and the project was made the focus of the Fourth National Convention of Filipino Apostolates (SANDIWA IV) in Virginia. The SANDIWA conferences, meaning “of one consciousness or spirit” in Tagalog, helped to raise national awareness for the project in the Filipino American community and dramatically increased its ability to fundraise over the next several years. By 1996, the project met and exceeded its goal of raising $400,000, with the aid of over 8,000 individual Filipinos, twenty-two archdioceses across the country, over forty Filipino American organizations, and thirty Filipino American Catholic prayer groups. That same year the National Basilica officially announced that construction of the chapel to Antipolo would begin. One year later, in June of 1997, a 125-year-old image of Birhenng Antipolo, an exact replica of the original in the Basilica of Antipolo in the Philippines, was enshrined and dedicated by Cardinal Hickey of the Archdiocese of Washington, DC, and c h a p t e r 8 GROWING PRESENCE AND POTENTIAL IMPACTS 150 Faith, Family, and Filipino American Community Life Father Gungon, the bishop of Antipolo in the Philippines. Since the enshrinement , the oratory chapel has been the site of pilgrimage for thousands of Filipino Americans, many of whom have been first-generation immigrants. The chapel also hosts an annual pilgrimage and Feast of Antipolo that draw hundreds of Filipinos from around the country and the Philippines each year. On the eleventh annual pilgrimage to the Oratory of Our Lady of Peace and Good Voyage Antipolo in June of 2008, hundreds of Filipino Americans, mostly first-generation immigrants, gathered to celebrate their Catholic faith and their journey with Mary to America. Although the celebration was perhaps no different in liturgy and attendance from that in any of the previous ten years, the celebrant and host for this particular year was not a Philippine bishop or a non-Filipino representative of the Church but Oscar Azarcon Solis, the auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles and the first Filipino American bishop in the United States. Marking a doubly special occasion, the Hymn to Antipolo seemed to resonate with even greater meaning for the Filipino American immigrants in attendance. Shirley, for example, a first-generation Filipina American nurse and member of St. Catherine’s recalled,“I remember singing the words and thinking about my own journey to this country, how true it is.” O Virgin of Antipolo, to you we lift our every woe May your love and guiding presence remain with us where every we go Ave Ave Ave, Ave Maria light our path and make clear O Mary Mother Dear, You are our guide on our journey, you calm our fears and you light our way. . . . —from the hymn O Birhen Ng Antipolo2 After a long and turbulent history in the United States, through hardships and successes, the growing presence of Filipino American Catholics today has an official voice within the hierarchy of the Church and a national shrine to the Virgin of Antipolo that not only stands as a testament to Filipinos’ faith and devotion but announces that they are an important part of the new American story. Changing the Face of America By 2050, the United States is expected to become a majority minority...