Baclaran Church

The National Shrine of Our Mother of Perpetual Help, also known as the Redemptorist Church (Spanish: Iglesia Redentorista) and colloquially as Baclaran Church (Filipino: Simbahan ng Baclaran), is a national shrine dedicated to Our Lady of Perpetual Help along Roxas Boulevard in Baclaran, Parañaque city of Metro Manila, Philippines. It is under the jurisdiction of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Parañaque. The church enshrines the icon of Our Mother of Perpetual Help, and is one of the largest Marian churches in the Philippines. Devotion to Our Mother of Perpetual Help is popular amongst Filipino Catholics, who flood the church on Wednesdays to attend Mass and pray the Novena to Our Mother of Perpetual Help. In Manila, Wednesdays are popularly called "Baclaran Day" due to congested roads near the shrine. The original icon enshrined above the main altar came from Germany before priests of the Redemptorist Order brought it to what was then the United States territory of the Philippine Islands in 1906. Since 1958, the shrine has been authorised by the Holy See to remain open 24 hours a day throughout the year. The wider shrine complex also serves as the headquarters of the Manila Vice Province of Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer, while the Cebu Province of the Redemptorists is headquartered in Cebu. The shrine's current rector is Rico John Bilangel. The shrine celebrates its annual feast day on June 27, the liturgical feast day of the icon. The Bantayog ng mga Desaparecido, dedicated to victims of the brutal Marcos dictatorship and located on shrine grounds, was inscribed in 2019 in the CIPDH-UNESCO Memorias Situadas, which maps international sites of memory linked to serious human rights violations.

The shrine and its attached convent were initially dedicated to Saint Thérèse of Lisieux; a grotto statue of the saint on the shrine grounds memorializes her patronage. The first Redemptorists came to the Philippines in 1906 and set up a community at Opon, Cebu. The Redemptorist community arrived in Manila and settled in Malate in 1913, where they built a small, popular shrine to Our Mother of Perpetual Help. By 1932, the community moved south to the Baclaran neighbourhood of Pasay. Denis Grogan, the builder, was devoted to Saint Thérèse of Lisieux and made her patroness of the new church and parish house. However, the Ynchaustí family, longtime supporters and friends, donated a high altar on the condition that it enshrine the icon of Our Mother of Perpetual Help. When the church opened, the shrine became very popular. During the Japanese occupation of the Philippines during the Second World War, invading Imperial Japanese troops overran the church, and the priests dispersed. Australian and New Zealander priests were interred in the concentration camp at University of the Philippines – Los Baños. The icon was meanwhile removed from the church and given to a family for safekeeping; their home was later burned and ransacked towards the end of the Occupation. The icon was initially thought lost until a De La Salle brother found it among other valuable objects that the Japanese had seized and abandoned at the Old Bilibid prison in Manila's Quiapo district.

Church data from Wikidata (CC0). Summary from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).