MANILA, Philippines — Leoncio Barcelon was a commandante (or major) in the Philippine revolutionary army and served as secretary of Hen. Licerio Geronimo who fought some of the big battles of the Philippine revolution, including that of Calookan. His troops also ambushed the highest ranking American officer who died in the Philippine war, Col. Lawton. But Geronimo  did not know how to read or write. So he depended on my grandfather a great deal. Or to put it the other way, my grandfather was witness to a lot of important happenings of the revolution. An example was the incident in a tent in Cavite when the irascible Andres Bonifacio slapped the secretary of Emilio Aguinaldo.  And he attributed to this incident why none of the three Bonifacio brothers left Cavite alive although they took different routes in leaving Cavite after the meetings.

Although he came from Pulilan, my grandfather never mentioned it to us. Although that is where he left my grandmother with her year-old son to fend for themselves for the duration of the war. My father remembered hiding under the big mango trees whenever there was fighting in the vicinity. When the war ended, my grandfather worked as a legal clerk to an American lawyer who urged him to take the exam since he was qualified but he refused. Instead he established a 15-hectare fishpond in Bulacan, Bulacan,  with eggs of different colors from wild birds to delight us.

Leoncio probably never stepped into a church after his wedding. But every night about midnight, he spent about an hour praying before a large framed picture of Our Lady of Del Pilar. He also said some prayers which he probably considered as “Anting Anting.” My uncle who studied Latin was able to decipher one of those prayers. It was a regular Latin ejaculatory prayer whose syllables were jumbled up.

When my Papa told my Lolo that I had decided to enter the Seminary, he got angry and told my father to tell me not to go to his house again. He had formed an anti-clerical bias. “What does that boy want? To be a servant of foreign priests?” But when I visited him when I  was a seminarian, he was glad to see me.  On a subsequent visit I brought Fr. Hamilton along, who was chaplain of PGH at the time, and they got along famously. My Lolo hardly knew English while Fr. Hamilton knew little Spanish or Tagalog. Years later when I was abroad he got pneumonia. At 94, he must have felt the end was near. He asked to see  Fr.Hamilton and received the last rites of the Church and rested. <emeterio_barcelon@yahoo.com>