The long journey home for the San Pedro, Balangiga bells

By Wendell Gaa
April 30, 2016 marked one of the most significant days of my time as a political-economic assistant at the Philippine Consulate General in New York, when I got to witness the send-off of the San Pedro Bell from the campus of West Point Military Academy for its shipment back to the Philippines where it would finally return to its original home parish in La Union province.
I had accompanied then-New York Consul General Mario L. de Leon, Jr. for this historic occasion, and learning more about the circumstances which led to the San Pedro Bell being taken from its original parish to eventually finding its way to West Point made me long all the more to see the bell back in its rightful place in the Philippines.
Exactly a year later, that is just what happened when my mother Linda C. Gaa and I were able to stop over at the Saints Peter and Paul Church in Bauang, La Union while we were on the way back from a long weekend road trip to Baguio in northern Philippines. Seeing the 400-year-old San Pedro Bell safely situated right near the front entrance to the church was one of the most satisfying and fulfilling moments of my life, which made me further reflect on the significance of this bell in the context of Philippine-American historic relations.
I learned how the Saints Peter and Paul Church in La Union happens to be one of the oldest cathedrals in the nation, having been canonically erected by Augustinian missionaries on April 25, 1587, and throughout past centuries it has survived a major earthquake in 1892 and the Second World War. During the Philippine-American War (1899-1902) which almost immediately followed the 1898 Spanish-American War which resulted in U.S. victory over Spain, the American Army Lt. Col. Thomas Barry, who had been pursuing General Emilio Aguinaldo, who would later become the first Philippine President, had his soldiers take the San Pedro Bell in 1901 as a “token souvenir,” seeing how it was finely made from an alloy of gold, silver and copper. He would eventually give the bell to his alma mater West Point Military Academy where it would be housed for 115 years until April 2016. The bell was finally ceremoniously reinstalled at the Saints Peter and Paul Church in May 2016.

Yet another symbol of how Philippine and American relations have changed for the better over the past century was demonstrated when the Balangiga Bells, three other historic church bells which were taken by the U.S. Army from the Church of San Lorenzo de Martir in Balangiga, Eastern Samar province, were also finally returned to their rightful homes in December 2018 after 117 long years.
Reading up on how these bells were taken by the U.S. Army as war trophies following the Battle of Balangiga in 1901 during the Philippine-American War was surely a revelation I was unaware of up until that point. I learned how one church bell came under the possession of the 9th Infantry Regiment at Camp Red Cloud, their military base in South Korea, while the two others were on a former base of the 11th Infantry Regiment at Francis E. Warren Air Force Base over in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Thanks to the resolute and relentless work of representatives of the Catholic Church in the Philippines, the Philippine government, and the residents of Balangiga who had been seeking to bring back the bells home since the 1950s, their collective efforts finally paid off in 2018.
I was so blessed to be based back at the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) home office in Manila right at that time, and to take the opportunity to personally view the three bells themselves on display at the Villamor Air Base in Pasay City, along with a couple of my colleagues and friends from the DFA, was also simply one of the proudest lifetime experiences I’ve ever had, given how much it represented the closing of a painful chapter in the long history of relations between the Philippines and the United States.
A future trip to personally view the Balangiga Bells at their home church in Eastern Samar is a must-do on my travel bucket list!