The Augustinian Father P. Piernavieja was another victim to
fanaticism. This Father has been termed medio loco [85] and in
all truth he was so if the possession of a presence of mind such
as that shown by P. Piernavieja is to be termed craziness. True
it is that he was at times gifted with a strange turn of mind. He
had, during the many years he administered the parish, established
therein a christian communism. When the revolt broke out he was
held as a prisoner and obliged to invest himself with the authority
of an Archbishop. Had the revolt prospered and P. Piernavieja lived,
undoubtedly he would have been made Archbishop of Manila by the Tagalog
discontents. P. Piernavieja was shrewd enough to take well to his new
office. He was once called upon to anoint the chiefs and rulers, as the
kings and emperors of olden time were anointed by the Church. Padre
Piernavieja told them that olive oil was not suitable for such a
purpose and therefore proceeded to anoint them with cocoanut oil such
as is used by the natives for their lamps! Under pretext of his office
of Bishop this strange old man claimed liberty to make his pastoral
visits and when he succeeded in securing this liberty which was readily
granted to him, he overran all that part of the province in the hands
of the insurgents, secretly collecting all kinds of information, which
he immediately sent his superiors in Manila. This information reached
the military authorities and would have become of utility to them for
the carrying out of the campaign had it been prosecuted as a military
campaign should have been. But the Padre's messenger was eventually
captured with messages in his possession. When questioned as to the
source of the information, and where he was taking it, he told all,
and as a result Padre Piernavieja was condemned to death as a traitor
to a cause to which he had never held allegiance. As a punishment he
was tied to a tree exposed to the burning rays of the tropical sun,
and thus left to the mercy of the voracious birds and insects, dying
of hunger, thirst and of terror in the midst of inconceivable torments.
Padre David Veras, Dominican, was another of the many victims of
the Katipuneros. He was the parish priest of the pueblo of Hermosa
in the province of Bataan. When the insurgents attacked the pueblo
they captured P. David, and after cutting off both his hands, dragged
him to the most distant of the ten barrios of that pueblo, and there
hacked him to death with bolos and hatchets mutilating his body in
a horrible manner, and throwing the corpse on to a dung heap.
In the early dawn of the 25th of December 1896, in Morong province
of Bataan, Padre Domingo Cabrejas, Recolet, was murdered at the altar
while offering up the holy sacrifice of the Mass, his blood staining
the sacred linen and the steps of the altar. The katipunero murderers
hurriedly hid the body in the church and fled.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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