Mary, Queen of Peace

This Sunday, October 12, Zamboanga City will again celebrate the annual feast of its patroness, Nuestra Senora de la Virgen del Pilar de Zaragosa. The tradition started way back in 1718, when a granite frontispiece with an embossed image of the blue-and-white-garbed Madonna cradling a crowned Baby Jesus was placed atop the eastern gate of the rebuilt and renamed Real Fuerza del Pilar (now simply called Fort Pilar). Devotion to the Lady has since grown, even among a good number of Muslim residents, and the site is today a popular, world-renown religious shrine. The shrine and the fort have become the cultural heart and soul of the city.

The fort was constructed by the Spaniards in 1635 but was abandoned in 1663 when Spanish troops had to be recalled to Manila as the capital faced a serious threat of invasion. According to local historian Dr. Hermenegildo Malcampo, the colonial government since then had no interest of returning to Zamboanga, but the persistent attacks by Moro pirates on Christian settlements in the Visayas and Luzon compelled the restoration of the fort, in 1718, to stop the pirates who were streaming out from the Sulu Archipelago. From this twist of fate, a town steadily grew around the fort as the colonial government as early as those days encouraged migration to Zamboanga.

The indigenous people of the peninsula were the Subanens and nomadic Badjaos. Since those early days, many of them were Christianized, Christians from the North came to settle, too, but all this did not prevent Muslim tribesmen from near and far from making Zamboanga their new home as well. Until the outbreak of the Bangsamoro rebellion, and to some ambivalent extent until today, they all lived happily together  like a better, albeit smaller, version of Jerusalem – under the divine protection of the patroness and the security of the fort and its successor military installations after the Spanish occupation ended.

It is not only Catholics who deeply revere the Virgin Mary  and the locals in her form as the Lady of the Pillar. As the Mother of Jesus, who ranks as high as Prophet Muhammad to Muslims, they greatly respect if not adore her, too. She was a young woman who experienced a jihad, too, when she submitted herself to God through the angel Gabriel, exclaiming, Let it be done to me, according to Thy Word!

Zamboanga in all its extraordinary uniqueness is foremost a city whose superstructure and place in an unending history revolves around peace and security. Fortunately, it has for its patroness the Virgin Mary, whose other famous and tested sobriquet is Queen of Peace. (Our Peace is an occasional editorial of Peace Advocates Zamboanga.)