AS 201 Paper

The Dynamics of Mediating Power within the Baclaran Church Complex

By: Myra Elisse M. Anit
I.

Baclaran Church

As a predominantly Catholic nation, churches are considered to be one of the

most meaningful spaces in the Philippines. Four Philippine Baroque churches have
even been included in the list of UNESCOs world heritage sites as a testament of
how these structures have withstood time and several manmade and natural
disasters. Long after the Spaniards have left the country, churches remain to be an
important structure, if not the most, of every Filipino town or city.
Even in urban areas such as in Metro Manila, numerous churches both old
and new continue to be flocked by devout Catholics not only every Sunday but also
during special Novena days of the specific churches. One of the most numerous in
attendance is the National Shrine of our Mother of Perpetual Help or more
commonly known as the Baclaran Church.
The church is located in Baclaran (where it got its name), Paraaque City,
which used to be an unknown area fronting a portion of Manila Bay. Now, it is one of
the most famous places in Paraaque not only because of the National Shrine of Our
Mother of Perpetual Help but also because it has now become a famous shopping
district and a transport hub for the south. All sparked by the presence of the church.
Through the course of the paper, one can see how the icon and the church became
the catalyst for the transformation of the area of Baclaran, from a relatively
unknown area to a well-known and a distinct place in Metro Manila. It has become a
notable district in Metro Manila which features what Dovey describes below,
Architecture and urban design frames space, both literally and
discursively. In the literal sense everyday life takes place within the clusters
of rooms, buildings, streets and cities that we inhabit. Action is structured and
shaped by walls, doors and windows, framed by the decisions of designers.
As a form of discourse, built form constructs and frames meanings. Places tell
us stories; we read them as spatial text.
The built environment reflects the identities, differences and struggles
of gender, class, race, culture and age. It shows the interests of people in
empowerment and freedom, the interests of the state in social order, and the
private corporate interest in stimulating consumption.
Because architecture and urban design involve transformations in the
ways we frame life, because design is the imagination and production of the
future, the field cannot claim autonomy from the politics of social change.
(Dovey, 1).

Through a reading of the Baclaran Church and how it has been shaped by the
history, culture and society of Filipino church-goers, one can get a glimpse of how
Filipinos adapt and Filipinize the foreign inheritance from the Spanish colonizers
and how the Baclaran Church strongly reflects the Filipino culture of worship and
community.
To further understand the meaning behind spaces, space theories from the
book, Framing Places: Mediating Power in Built Form by Kim Dovey, will be used to
further understand the concept of power in built spaces. Dovey offers valuable
insights coupled with space theories and concepts from other philosophers and
space theoreticians to effectively explain how spaces consciously and
subconsciously influence the activities and the behaviors of the users.
II.

Power of the Church

The Catholic faith is undoubtedly the strongest legacy left to the
Philippines by Spain. As a testament to this, are the numerous churches that
they put up all over the country which have become important landmarks
and structures of every city and town. The Spaniards employed religion as its
device to lure the Filipinos into their reign and churches in parallel became
the vessels through which this new culture propagated.
Dovey expounds on the idea of how built spaces can be instrumental in
influencing its users. With his borrowed definition of the term, power which
says,
According to Rorty (1992:2) Power is the abilityto define and
control circumstances and events so that one can influence things to go in
the direction of ones interests. The capacity to imagine, construct and
inhabit a better built environment is what we mostly mean by
empowerment here. The capacity to appropriate a room, choose a house,
walk to a beach or criticize an urban design scheme are all forms of
empowerment. When we say that someone is empowered, we mean their
capacity to act is increased. (Dovey, 9).
In this case, churches empowered Filipinos to become true Catholics,
taking part in the Eucharistic celebrations and being assimilated into the
religion. The Spaniards made sure to emphasize the importance of the church
not only by building a lot of them but by locating them at the center of the
town right across the government buildings.
To have a better understanding of the dynamics of power in built form,
Dovey cites five (5) forms of how power manifests itself through force,
coercion, manipulation, seduction and authority. Interestingly, these forms
could well be traced in the history of how Baclaran Church transformed itself
over time.

To further concretize the methods as to how power is mediated through

built form, Dovey introduces the various dimensions through which power
manifests itself.

Orientation/disorientation
Publicity/privacy
Segregation/access
Nature/history
Stability/change
Authentic/fake
Identity/difference
Dominant/docile
Place/ideology

The case of the Baclaran Church will be examined using these terminologies
and concepts in an attempt to understand the dynamics of how power manifests
itself in the structure. Through the exploration of the dimensions mentioned above
it will be easier to sift through the spaces and isolate the levels by which power has
woven its way through the space.
III.

Shaping the Baclaran Church

Through the use of Doveys concepts of the forms of power, the

transformation of how the Baclaran Church evolved from being a relatively unknown
space into a place embedded with meaning and even considered historic can be
mapped. The forms of power can be discussed as to how the process of power is
most effective which is inversely proportional to its visibility. As Dovey quoted from
Bourdieu,

The most successful ideological effects are those that have no

words, and ask no more than complicitous silence. (Dovey, 1).
The most effective influence of power is when it appears to have no
influence at all; when power is seemingly non-existent in a way that
everything seems natural. In line with this idea, the forms of power will be
separated according to the degrees of their influence and apparent strength
of presence. The first three forms, force, coercion and manipulation possess
the strongest presence and therefore have the least amount of effect.
Seduction is somehow the transition stage wherein strength of presence and
effect almost equal out. The last form, authority has the least strength of
presence but has the strongest effect. The dynamics of how these ideas
manifest in the entangled web of the history, culture and the built
environment of the Baclaran Church will be investigated and analyzed
through the use of Doveys dimensions of how power is mediated through
built form. Here, it can be seen how a reading of the built environment allows

a panoptic view of a certain aspect of a nation and its people, in this case the
aspect of religion and community-life.
Force, Coercion and Manipulation
Dovey defines force as,
the overt exercise of power which strips the subject of any choice of
non-compliance. Typical examples in built form include all kinds of enforced
spatial confinement (prisons and institutions of incarceration) and of enforced
spatial exclusion (the medieval fortress; the housing enclave; locks, bars and
walls). (Dovey, 10).
The building of churches and their designs clearly demonstrates the use of
force to make the Filipinos accept the religion of Christianity. From the macro scale
to micro scale, enforced spatial confinement, (bringing the setting of gatherings
indoors as opposed to the usual pre-colonial practice of being outdoors) and
enforced spatial exclusion (placing churches on the center of the town/community
and designing them with thick walls and minimal openings as compared to the airy
and light architecture of the pre-colonial period), it was controlled to give way to an
expected outcome that of which to make the people accept and assimilate into the
new religion and way of life.
Coercion and manipulation are tamer variations of force in terms of strength
of presence but have more effect to propagate power, the difference is with
coercion, awareness is still present and perceived while with manipulation it is
almost not.
Coercion can be defined as the threat of force to secure compliance.
It may be construed as a latent kind of force. Coercion is more effective than
overt force because it operates under the cover of voluntarism. It gains its
power from implied sanctions, which often prevent the subject from ever
forming any intention of resistance. (Dovey, 10).
manipulation a form of coercion which operates primarily by
keeping the subject ignorant. The exercise of power is made invisible to its
subject and the possibility of resistance is thereby removed (Wrong 1979).
(Dovey, 11).
In the case of the Baclaran Church, unlike other churches, although it
was primarily built as a place for worship, it was also meant as a church for
the people.
Orientation/disorientation

Built form can orient, disorient and reorient its subjects through the spatial
framings of everyday life. It constructs a cognitive map through which we imagine
our world and give it our attention. (Dovey, 15).
The reorientation from the outdoors to the indoors echoes the contrasting
character of Catholic religion with the traditional religion practiced by pre-colonial
Filipinos. Sheltering the people and their activities and somehow taking them away
from nature reinforces the new setting, behaviors and practices of the new religion.
Publicity/privacy
Built form segments space in a manner that places certain kinds of people
and action under conditions of surveillance while privileging other kinds of people
and action as private. (Dovey, 15).
The placement of the altar in front and with everybody (including the priest)
facing it, emphasizes its sanctity --- that the Catholic God alone is the most
important and so all have a private relationship with him.
Certain parts of the church are for private use of the priests and their staff
only while the people only have access to the nave.
Segregation/access
Boundaries and pathways can segregate places by status, gender, race,
culture, class and age, creating privileged enclaves of access, amenity and
community. (Dovey, 15).
Nature/history
Built form inevitably uses metaphor and constructs mythology through a
politics of representation. Historically constructed meanings can be naturalized to
legitimize authority. (Dovey, 15).
With the advent of the housing of the Icon of the Mother of the Perpetual Help
at the Baclaran Church came the novena that sparked the major change in it.
Seduction
The statue of the Mother of Perpetual Help and the novena said in its name
came right after World War II. A time when most Filipinos have already been devout
Catholics and in need of something to bring back hope --- they were waiting for a
miracle. So, when the icon of the Mother of Perpetual Help and its novena started it
was described to have grown in unanticipated ways. More and more people
attended the novenas and soon the small church was not enough to accommodate
the growing number of devotees.
Such is the nature of seduction which Dovey describes as,

a practice which manipulates the interests and desires of the subject.

This is a highly sophisticated form of power over hinged to the constructions
of desire and self-identity, and with significant implications for the built
environment. (Dovey, 11).
From a form of oppression to a means of salvation, the Catholic faith has
become deeply ingrained in the Filipino. It is not anymore seen as a foreign,
unnatural concept but a familiar and friendly even inherent practice Filipinos have
always had.
Stability/change
Built form produces illusions of permanence, of a stable social order, of the
impossibility of change. Likewise, images of dynamism and innovation can produce
illusions of progress. (Dovey, 16).
As the statue and the novena to the Mother of Perpetual Help came after the
World War II or the Japanese occupation in the Philippines, it effortlessly projected
an image of salvation and a way to rebuild their lives. And true enough as more and
more people become devotees, the church structure also grew along with the
people. Through the donations of the church-goers, the Baclaran Church has been
able to be expanded into a bigger church.
The present church building is the third built on the site in Baclaran.
The first was a small wooden structure dating back to 1932 when the
Redemptorists moved into Baclaran. It was in this small church that the first
novena was conducted by Fr. Leo English on June 23, 1948. By the end of
1949 the novena had grown to eight sessions with about 60,000 people
attending. To meet this demand the church was extended to double capacity
by Frs. Taylor and English. This was the second building. (Hechanova, 20).
Authentic/fake
We inhabit a world saturated with simulacra and representation. The quest
for authenticity is a quest for authority, enmeshed in issues of power. (Dovey, 16).
The novena was said to have granted miracles to whoever fervently prays it.
Apart from faith, testimonials from people whom actually experienced miracles
granted by Our Mother of Perpetual Help are also shared during novena sessions.
Identity/difference
Places symbolize socially constructed identities and differencesof persons,
cultures, institutions and nations. The politics of identity and difference is mediated
in an arena of spatial representation and the inertia of buildings can fix identity
over time. (Dovey, 16).

As the strong sense of faith and community slowly develops in the Baclaran
Church, it is no longer an issue of force. People have accepted assimilated the
validity of the Novena and have been attached to the community that is the
National Shrine of the Mother of Perpetual Help.
Authority
With the forging of religion and community, the highest form of power was
achieved,
Authority is a form of power over which is integrated with the
institutional structures of societyprimarily the state, private corporation and
family. Authority is marked by the absence of argument, it relies on an
unquestioned recognition and compliance. Based on socially acknowledged
rights and obligations, authority is the most pervasive, reliable, productive
and stable form of power. It embodies the power to circumvent argument and
to frame the terms of reference of any discussion. Yet authority rests upon a
base of legitimation (Arendt 1986:65).
Legitimation is what connects authority to the public interest. We
recognize authority as legitimate because it is seen to serve a larger interest;
in the case of the state this is the public interest. Yet legitimation is one of the
means by which might is transformed into right (Wrong 1979); the inefficient
exercise of force is transformed into unquestioned authority. The key linkage
to built form here is that authority becomes stabilized and legitimized
through its symbols. These trappings of authority are important forms of
legitimation which become crucial to the exercise of authority (Olsen
1993:33). (Dovey, 12).
Without question and complete veneration to the power and influence of the
Mother of Perpetual Help and with the attachments and relationships forged through
time and amidst various catastrophes, wars and government destabilizations, the
Baclaran Church is a place that is not only sacred in terms of religious aspects but
also because of its stature in the history.
Authority relies on legitimizing symbols in proportion to the
vulnerability of that authority. This is precisely why monarchies, dictatorships
and military states are so full of monuments, parades and ritual strutting
the demand for legitimation exceeds that in a democracy. And these forms of
legitimation service the self-deceit of powerful and powerless alike. (Dovey,
14).

Dominant/docile

A dominant built mass or volume signifies the control over resources

necessary to its production. Relative scale in mass or volume, cannot be divorced
from discourses of domination and intimidation. (Dovey, 16).
During more recent times, the Baclaran Church being one of the largest
churches in Metro Manila and open twenty-four hours a day, have become a favorite
among prominent people particularly politicians and actors. In a country which have
equal measure between the Church and the State, the Baclaran Church has attained
that status of being a dominant religious institution that have played a historic role
in the collapse and formation of governments; further cementing its image not only
as a religious institution but reaching out into the political community as well.
Political groups and groups of concerned citizens conduct prayer rallies in the
church to express political sentiments or to air grievances about political and moral
injustices.
Place/ideology
The experience of place has the capacity to move us deeply, to ground our
being, to open the question of spirit. Yet the very potency of place experience
renders it particularly vulnerable to the ideological appropriations of power.
(Dovey, 16).
With the seamless intermingling of the Self (personal adoration to the Mother
of Perpetual Help), the community and the Spirit of the Place, the Baclaran Church
attained the status of the highest manifestation and impact of power. Deeply
ingrained and seemingly natural and inherent, the evolution of the quaint church
across the Manila Bay is now the unshakeable center not only of worship and
community but is also one of Manilas economic hub and transport gateway to the
South.
The presence of the Baclaran Church with its space embedded with meanings
and experiences activated the untapped potential of the areas surrounding it. It
provided economic opportunities for nearby areas and became an ideal transport
hub catering to the provinces in the South. It created a domino effect that started
out with the basic activity of worship and gave birth to myriad of activities and
experiences as well.
Space is therefore the product of an interaction between the organism
and the environment in which it is impossible to dissociate the organization of
the universe perceived from that of the activity itself. (Norberg-Schulz, 17).
IV.

Conclusion: Images of the Filipino seen through the Baclaran Church

The continuous evolution of Baclaran Church reflects how Filipinos seamlessly

connect religion and community and even economy. It shows how Filipinos value

religion and extend it into other aspects of society such as government, social
relations, economics and even public spaces.
The power of religion over the Filipino culture is undoubtedly one of the
strongest and continues to influence the people over time. The core belief remains
there but it also shows how Filipinos adapt it to changing times and tastes.
The Baclaran story shows the ingenuity of the Filipino when it comes to
assimilating different influences and making it work to their own tastes and
preferences. Here one can see how spaces become places when embedded with
meaning and when people identify with them. One can also see how people value
places which they have formed attachments to. If only all our public spaces were
treated with the same fondness and respect as with the Baclaran Church, the
Philippine urban landscape would look and feel far better than its current condition.

Works Cited:

Dovey, Kim. Framing Places: Mediating Power in Built Form. London:

Routledge, 1999.
Hechanova, Luis G. The Baclaran Story. Quezon City: Claretian
Publications, 1998.
Norberg-Schulz, Christian. Existence, Space and Architecture. London:
Studio Vista, 1971.