MANILA (UCAN): On September 28, Filipinos flocked to churches for Mass and joined fluvial parades and street processions to mark the feast day of the country’s first Catholic martyr and saint, Lorenzo Ruiz.
In Manila, students lined up at the Church-run Holy Family School in the capital Manila to welcome the image of the saint on their campus. Meanwhile, members of the San Lorenzo de Manila group, an all-male organisation dedicated to propagating the devotion to St. Lorenzo, organised a procession that ended in the Payatas slum, near the largest dumpsite in Manila, after Mass at Binondo church, where the saintr was baptised.
The group distributed food and canned goods to 800 slum dwellers during the visit. Traditionally, they carry out “corporal works of mercy” during the feast of the saint, which was halted for two years by the Covid-19 pandemic.
In Samar province, the Visayas region of the central Philippines, fisherfolk joined by priests placed a statue of the saint on their boats for a fluvial parade.
Bishop Pablo Virgilio David, president of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines, wrote on Facebook: “Lorenzo was escaping death in Manila, only to end up with a worse kind of death in Nagasaki. He was a victim of his life’s circumstances. One might say he moved from one kind of victimhood to another,” the bishop added.
St. Lorenzo Ruiz was born to a Chinese father and a Filipino mother on 28 November 1594. In 1636, he was falsely accused of murdering a Spaniard. To protect himself, he fled home and boarded a ship with the help of three Dominican priests.
He was martyred in Japan during the Tokugawa shogunate following prolonged torture on 28 September 1637.
