Cager no model for future saint Calungsod

Blessed Pedro Calungsod FILE PHOTO

The portrait of the Philippines’ soon-to-be second saint, Blessed Pedro Calungsod, was not modeled on a basketball player, an authority on Calungsod said Tuesday.

Any similarities between the likeness of Calungsod in the portrait and basketball player Ronald Tubid of the Barako Bull Energy team were coincidental, said Msgr. Ildebrado Leyson, who wrote a book on the martyred 17th-century missionary.

Tubid has been nicknamed “The Saint” for looking like Calungsod.

“There was this talk that the painting was based on a real person, on Tubid,” Leyson told a media forum Tuesday.

Based on imagination

But Leyson said painter Rafael del Casal, who did the Calungsod portrait, had told him the painting was not based on an actual person.

“I’ll tell you in advance that he [Del Casal] said ‘no, it’s not true.’ He painted it out of his own inspiration,” he said.

There is no record or drawing of Calungsod’s likeness. Church officials have had to depend on their imagination and written records on Calungsod’s appearance to portray him.

Del Casal painted the official portrait of Calungsod for his beatification in the Vatican in 2000. The painting was hung in the balcony of the Vatican. It will be used again during Calungsod’s canonization in October, Leyson said.

Leyson said he was consulted when the portrait was being painted. His only reservation about the finished portrait concerned the build of the young man represented. He said he believed Calungsod was more “robust” than the lean youth in the portrait.

The Calungsod painting shows a young man with black hair and with a stare fixed beyond the frame. The figure is wearing a white long-sleeved shirt with his right hand over his heart.

Born in what was then the diocese of Cebu in 1654, Calungsod was engaged in missionary work in Guam in 1672 when he was killed at age 17. The diocese of Cebu at the time covered the islands of Panay and Mindanao, as well as the Pacific island of Guam.

Pope Benedict XVI will declare Calungsod a saint on Oct. 21, 2012 at the Vatican. His canonization takes place more than a decade after he was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 2000. Kristine L. Alave