Unsinkable Spirit

Because of its diminished state, a sunken shrine in Cabetican, Bacolor, offers a powerful space laden with new meaning for communing with the divine.

- Patrick Kasingsing and Judith Torres

To enter the Sunken Shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes of Cabetican, you have to crouch through meter-high openings underneath the massive walls of the church. On the day of our visit, flooding caused by heavy rain the night before made the east and main entryway impassable, leaving the opening at the west façade the only means of entry. The distance one traverses to get inside the church is a mere 1.7 meters, but the experience can be a transformative one. Shuffling through the truncated space at a crouch, or on hands and knees as some do, the light gets progressively dimmer. In the growing darkness, you hear and feel the grit of the floor and the rough concrete above your head so much more acutely, and imagine the crushing weight of the wall above. The earthy smell of rain, grass, and damp soil takes over. These sensations are not all that alien, but in those few seconds, it is like entering the unknown. One cannot help but feel meek and uncertain. And then, stepping into the vast space of the shrine, your eyes adjust to the muted light coming from the half-disc skylight above the altar, and the feeling of a great burden and unease lifts.

“The lahar didn’t stop after the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in 1991,” says one of the church caretakers, Estelita Panlilio, the mother of the parish priest. “It continued to flow in 1995, and the local government decided to divert its course away from Angeles City and into Bacolor. The diversion resulted in the flooding of most of the villages in the town.”

Hundreds died in the floods. The tragedy forever changed the town, including the relatively new archdiocesan shrine, Pampanga’s first, which was built to take in the growing number of pilgrims who flocked to Cabetican for its miraculous image of Our Lady of Lourdes. Dedicated to the town in 1901, the image was originally housed in a small chapel of bamboo and nipa.