Of Our Precious San Pascual Icon. . .

January 17, 2014. Today marks three years and seven months since our 110 years old San Pascual Baylon de Guinarona icon was lost in June 2010. Our case is akin to the murder of our parent, and we don’t know the murderer and justice is still a long way off. The murdered parent, meanwhile, is restless and haunts the place in the form of calamities galore.

For when you have been praying to an object for millions of times, the object is empowered to the point of making its presence felt in a million ways, much like the fetish in African traditional religions. Your prayers and intentions are energies–for everything is energy–and they take a life and power all their own. In the case of our San Pascual Baylon icon, the energies of our forebears are in it, so much so that it was bought with their blood, sweat and tears. And amid a pervading cholera epidemic at that.

The power that we have imbued our San Pascual icon is such that our prayers and wishes get answered; at the same time, any negative action towards the fetish comes back in the form of disasters and calamities. Such is the way of energies. Such is the way of karma.

Chronicling the instances where our San Pascual icon gets stolen, each time a payback ensues. In 1963, the icon also disappeared, after which a violent storm hit Leyte on May 16-17, coincidentally San Pascual’s feast day in Guinarona. In 1966, the icon was also briefly lost and a typhoon hit Leyte, also on May 16-17. Now, with the protracted absence of our icon, a typhoon to end all typhoons hit Leyte on November 8, 2013, with billions of dollars in damages, not to mention the monumental loss of life.

Harking back to the circumstances behind San Pascual’s latest disappearance, the following obtains:

The theft occurred at dawn of June 13, 2010.
That seconds after the caper, some inside group cleaned away the crime scene, such that all traces of evidence were forever lost.
That concurrent with the heist, the parish priest disappeared as well, surfacing in Guinarona only on the 6th day.
That with a gated church, and with locks at that, and the San Pascual glass enclosure on the altar being locked as well, it baffles that such brazenness could occur.

Is there such a thing as a perfect crime, especially if it involves a sacred object? The ways of man say yes, but in the universal law of cause and effect, a perfect crime does not exist. For sooner or later what you did will bite you in the butt.