The Doors of Calape

When I was in the Philippines in December 2007, I was impressed by the church of St. Vincent Ferrer in Calape, Bohol. We visited it when our family was traveling to Talibon to get some Moron, a local delicacy that (apparently) is similar to the farina we make at home with chocolate. On the way home we stopped to see the church.

The first thing that impressed me was the doors. When we arrived, I noticed that there were pictures on the panels of the doors.

The doors on this side had pictures of various popes, in this case Pius V, the saint and reformer, who changed history by bringing together the coalition that won the Battle of Lepanto. Here's a picture of the door with a beautiful woman to make it interesting..

The front doors of the church (in the first photograph) had Eucharistic designs of wheat and grapes, while the doors on the other side (if I remember correctly) had old-testament saints, including Moses.

You could see that the work was never completed; toward the end of the church, the popes become less well carved, and eventually are just scratches in the wood. These scratches were painted over, so one would infer that the project was abandoned. Perhaps the artist died during the Japanese occupation in World War II.

The Calape church is more recent than most of the churches in Bohol. It is the only church I saw there with a gothic design. Most of them are Spanish in style and quite impressive.

A photograph of the Calape Church from Wikimedia Commons

For a short explanation of the importance of art in a church, I recommend Ugly As Sin: Why They Changed Our Churches from Sacred Places to Meeting Spaces and How We Can Change Them Back Again, by Michael Rose.

EWC