For whom the bells toll
When after 117 years, the three Balangiga bells taken as war booty by the US Army in 1901 were returned to Samar Island, there was victorious jubilation on the Philippine side. In the crack of the Balangiga clash in the midst of the Philippine American War, bolo-wielding Filipino insurgents won over the superiorly equipped American infantry. It is said that in rabid retaliation for the 48 of 74 men of Company C who were ambushed and killed while at breakfast, the US reportedly massacred more than 2,500 of the village people. Historians cannot agree on the numbers. But of course history is written by the victors and rewritten by the losers if given a chance.
It was Fr. Horacio de la Costa of the Department of History at the Ateneo de Manila University who first wrote a letter in November 1957, asking the Thirteenth Air Force at Clark Air Force Base “to return the Balangiga bells because these belonged to the Franciscan community who ran the parish” (McKinnon Jr., Daniel W. “Veterans of Foreign Wars,” Wyoming: 2008, cited in Wikipedia). Fr. De la Costa, the historian, did not judge the moral winner in the Battle of Balangiga. He called down instead the property theft — land and improvements whereupon a parish church and appurtenant structures are titled to the corporation sole that is the bishopric — while alluding to moral turpitude in the desecration of the sacramental that the bells were. Bells, in the Catholic tradition, are the Godly call to worship.
How ironically humbling that the Catholic Church should be “kept whole” by the return of the Balangiga bells, urged as it was seemingly by the rough rhetoric of a man who once publicly called God “stupid.” Why, when all presidents since Fidel Ramos asked for the return of those bells? “Give us back those Balangiga bells. They are ours. They belong to the Philippines. They are part of our national heritage,” President Rodrigo Duterte said in his second State of the Nation Address (SONA) in 2017 (ABS-CBN News, Nov. 15, 2018). US Ambassador to the Philippines Sung Y. Kim was physically in Duterte’s audience at that time. Amb. Kim, American-born of South Korean ancestry, worked on the return of the three Balangiga bells to
Samar. The two big bells were at the former base of the 11th Infantry Regiment (that fought in the Philippine-American War), at F. E. Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The third and smallest bell, the one that pealed the deadly call to action to the Filipino attackers of the US barracks at Balangiga, was at the 9th Infantry Regiment at Camp Red Cloud, their base in South Korea.
When Amb. Kim made his speech for the turnover of the bells, he made no apologies, no explanations for the confiscation of the bells by the US. He simply said, “In World War II and in Korea, our soldiers fought, bled, died, and sacrificed side by side. Together they made possible the peace and prosperity we enjoy today… Our relationship has withstood the tests of history and flourishes today. And every day our relationship is further strengthened by our unbreakable alliance,