04/10/2026
This year’s La Naval de Manila theme, “Mary: Queen and Mother of Peace,” carries with it a striking irony when one looks back upon the great saga from which that devotion drew so much of its glory. By late 1645, the revered Virgin of the Santo Rosario—the magnet of devotion in the city founded by Miguel López de Legazpi—did not stand over a city enjoying peace, but over a Manila convulsed by famine, want and political turmoil. At that time, Sebastián Hurtado de Corcuera, the famed conqueror of Mindanao, had been cast into prison while his administration was reviewed under his successor, the ever-pious Diego Fajardo Chacón, whose increasingly iron rule, strengthened by the influence of his favourite Manuel Eustacio de Venegas, only deepened the unease within the colony. Men looked towards the coming of a new Archbishop of Manila in the hope that he might restore some balance, yet even that hope was extinguished when Fernando Montero de Espinosa, instead of entering the capital to take possession of his archbishopric, entered it a co**se for his own funeral. Then came the great earthquake of San Andrés in November 1645. Manila was destroyed—six hundred were killed—and the government itself was driven into tents among the ruins. In the aftermath of the earthquake, word of the catastrophe gave rise to rebellion in Nueva Ecija, where the natives, believing that the Spaniards had been swallowed up by the earth, rose against them. That rebellion had scarcely been subdued when another danger appeared upon the horizon: a Dutch armada of fifteen ships, divided into three squadrons, was descending upon a colony with the clear purpose of breaking Spanish power in the Philippines once and for all.
From this point, almost everyone knows the story. Manila equipped two ageing galleons, their timbers strained and their decks already sinking beneath the weight of their artillery, and sent them out against the Dutch in what seemed little short of a battle to the death. Yet it is precisely here that the Blessed Virgin, acclaimed in this year’s theme as “Queen and Mother of Peace,” presents an apparent paradox. In what sense could the Virgin of the Santo Rosario be called the Mother of Peace when her children were sailing towards battle—when Father Baltazar de Santa Cruz himself, in his Historia, referred to her as the “sacred Bellona” of the Catholic fleet, invoking the Roman goddess of war as an image of formidable martial strength?
Perhaps the answer begins with a more fundamental question: what really is peace? For the Christian, the peace we experience in this life can never be the final kind of peace. However calm or secure our circumstances may become, this world remains subject to change, suffering and death. Earthly peace is always fragile. Nations rise and fall, wars end only for others to begin, disasters return, and even the quietest periods of human life remain touched by uncertainty. The peace promised in the life to come is of an entirely different order: the true and everlasting peace of that blessed country of Paradise, where no war can enter, no calamity can disturb, and no sorrow can ever break the tranquillity of those who rest in God.
According to the annals of the La Naval campaign, during the second of what would become five battles, some of the men aboard the Rosario later testified in the investigation of the miracles that a dove had perched upon the mizzenmast of the galleon. During the battle near Marinduque on 25 July, the feast of St James the Apostle, while the ship was being bombarded by the Dutch, one of the sailors—perhaps checking the state of the mast—saw that the same dove was still there, completely unfazed amid the firing. Only after the battle had been won did it finally fly away, to the amazement of the crew of the Rosario.
It is a striking detail, especially because Christian tradition had long found in the dove a fitting image of the Virgin Mary. St Alphonsus Liguori, drawing upon earlier Marian writers, described Mary as the heavenly dove who brought the olive branch to a lost world, while citing St Albert the Great as calling her “the dove of Noe, who brought to the Church universal peace.” In the story of Noah, the dove returned with the olive leaf when the waters had begun to recede, becoming a sign that destruction was passing and that peace could return. In the same way, the Virgin may be seen as the one who heralds peace after calamity, not because suffering has never existed, but because suffering does not have the final word. Francisco Gainza, O.P., would later take up this same image in his 1883 La Naval novena, addressing Our Lady in the beautiful words: “O most pure Dove, who, bearing the branch of the most flourishing olive tree, announced serenity to this our sorrowful valley!”—“¡Oh candidísima Paloma, que conduciendo el ramo de la más frondosa oliva, anunciaste serenidades a este nuestro triste valle!”
From this perspective, the apparent paradox of this year’s theme begins to clear. The Blessed Virgin was the Mother of Peace not because she promised her children a life untouched by conflict or suffering, but because she stood with them at the very moment when peace had been taken from them. She is the Mother who serves as a tower of refuge when all seems hopeless; the Mother who bears before those who fly to her, raised upon her arm, the Prince of Peace Himself. Her role is not to deny the reality of suffering, but to remain with her children through it while pointing them beyond the instability of this world towards a peace far greater than anything this world can give. The defenders of the Catholic fleet in 1646 fought not because they gloried in war, but because they sought deliverance from danger and the restoration of peace; and with them stood the Mother in whom they had placed their confidence, the Mother whom they believed had brought them safely through the storm.
The theme, then, speaks with particular force in the Philippines today. The country has recently been rocked by powerful earthquakes in southern Mindanao, while beyond these natural calamities the nation finds itself again troubled by political discord, public distrust, corruption and divisions among its own people. In some respects, one might almost recognise something of those closing months of 1645: the ground itself unsettled beneath the people, and the life of the nation unsettled above it. And yet it was precisely in such a time that the Virgin of the Santo Rosario stood over Manila as a Mother.
So too today, the title “Queen and Mother of Peace” speaks to a people who need peace, who yearn for it, and who must seek it even amid division and uncertainty. Let us then imitate once more those forefathers of ours: let us throw ourselves again at the feet of the sworn Protectress of the Philippine islands, cling once more to the sweet chain of her Rosary, and ask her intercession before her Son’s throne for peace—a foretaste, at least, of that greater peace which this world can never fully give.
A Reflection by Yours Truly.
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