The Museum Comes Alive

Museums are by their very nature, a repository of a culture, a time a people that once was, for present daily inhabitants of this world to look at in order to reflect, think back, be inspired and perhaps be in awe of what once was.

The Santo Niño Museum is no exception a repository of the accouterments of the

Can stay that way day after day and, for quite some time it had so that a museum goer who had seen it in a previous year would find the same things again this year and might no longer want to go there a third of fourth time.

But this year I've found myself there at least three times. And that's because the relatively new museum curator, Fr. Dominador Besares, OSA has made the museum lively with changing exhibits. First there was the exhibit of Santo Niño images from the varios parts of the Philippines and the world. Now there is the exhibit aptly titled Ang Santo Niño nahimong Nazareno, with the Santo Niños de Pasion as its key figure. The exhibit seeks to “highlight the salvific mission of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, who grew up from childhood and fulfilled His Messianic role of redeeming mankind from the bondage of sin through His Passion, Death and Resurrection.”

Fr. Besares hails from Maasin, Iloilo , and will celebrate 25 years of his being an Augustinian priest this year. Among other places he has been assigned to as priest were Milan , Italy and Sydney , Australia . For four years during a sabbatical leave, he took up fine arts at PWU's Institute of Fine Arts and Design, which served him well as a curator.

He says that “When I arrived, I was a little bit discouraged about how it was displayed. It was mere repository of Santo Niño things. But a museum should be more than that-it's a place where you can also inform, inspire the faith of the devotees of the Santo Niño through the things seen in

Of the current exhibit, he says, “The Black Nazarene of Quiapo is celebrating 400 years in the Philippines . We would also want to propagate the devotion of the Black Nazarene because the devotion of the Santo Niño and the Black Nazarene are the two most popular devotions in the Philippines .”

He has a wish list for the museum: a bigger space (right now it is located at the basement if the Pilgrim Center in the Santo Niño complex) and a timeline of images of the Santo Niño as the devotion spread in the Philippines : from Cebu in Tondo, to Pandacan, to Tacloban and elsewhere. His other wish is a procession, sometime during the Santo Niño fiesta celebration, of these different images.

That's a wish list. What he can and will do, with the support of rector Fr. Andrew Batayola is a series of comic books of a little known recent miracles of the Santo Niño and, if that should be well received, perhaps a book of the same. That's something all Santo Niño devotees should look forward to. (The Ang Sto. Niño Nahimong Nazareno exhibit is ongoing til April 30)