Mindanao’s oldest newspaper marks 60th anniversary today

COTABATO CITY – Mindanao’s longest running newspaper, which The STAR’s former publisher, the late Maximo Soliven, helped as “adviser” to its editors and managers in the 1960s, will celebrate today its 60th anniversary, both as an icon of Muslim-Christian solidarity and pioneer of peace education and conflict resolution.

Soliven, also known to senior members of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate as one of those who helped run the Catholic publication Sentinel both as adviser and writer, was a close friend of the late Bishop Gerard Mongeau, the founder of the 60-year-old national from Quebec, was among the first seven Oblate priests to set foot in the country in the 1930s to take over all of the missionary works of Spanish Jesuit friars in Muslim-dominated areas in Mindanao. Mongeau first thought of establishing the Mindanao Cross in 1947, as a publication that would promote peace, universal love and fraternalism among people of all races, having experienced himself the pain of being imprisoned in different Japanese concentration camps in Mindanao during World War II.

Mongeau and Soliven became close friends after the Korean War in the 1950s. Soon after, Soliven, already a journalist, and Mongeau regularly exchanged ideas on “newspaper engineering,” in support of the Mindanao Cross operation in Cotabato City.

Among the early newsboys that peddled Mindanao Cross on the streets in the late 1940s to the early 1950s were now Cotabato Archbishop Orlando Quevedo, who also belong to the OMI, lawyer Willie Bueno, a retired regional director of the Commission on Elections in Region 12 and now an incumbent city councilor here.

“Today, the Mindanao Cross enjoys the singular honor of being the longest running Catholic newspaper in the Philippines,” said Quevedo, a former two-term president of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines.

Quevedo, who is involved in various peace-building activities complementing the Southern peace process, said although a Catholic newspaper, Mindanao Cross has been respectful of various religious, such as Islam.

“It has fostered the development of different cultures, especially of the marginalized. It has demonstrated a preferential option for taking the side of the poor in the universal struggle for a better future,” Quevedo said, referring to the peace advocacy thrusts of Mindanao Cross.

 The first editor of the Mindanao Cross, Fr. Cuthbert Billman, was also a friend of Soliven, according to senior Oblate members.

Soliven has never left the venue of previous Christmas parties of The STAR without telling this writer to extend, on his behalf, his warm regards and Christmas greetings to the Oblates in Cotabato City when he was still alive. Among those he would want to be greeted always was a fellow Ilocano, Fr. Al Cariño, former editor of the Mindanao Cross who died last year. They traded e-mails on various concerns, including the Mindanao peace process.

The Mindanao Cross and the broadcast outfits across Mindanao of the Oblates, the Notre Dame Broadcasting Corp., suffered “persecution” under the Marcos regime during the dark days of martial law.

The weekly newspaper’s editor in the 1970s, Patricio Diaz, has been allowed to resume with the outfit’s operation by the Department of National Defense, but on condition, based on written agreement, it would not publish anything against the Marcos regime.

The Oblate Media, now comprised of the Mindanao Cross and five stations across Mindanao of the Notre Dame Broadcasting Corp., pioneered peace reporting in the South as part of an advocacy for religious solidarity and cooperation among Muslims and Christians in the South.

Four members of the Oblate congregation, Nelson Jabellana, Benjamin Inocencio, Jolo Bishop Benjamin de Jesus, and, just last Jan. 15, Jesus Rey Roda, were to be killed in separate incidents since the 1970s while performing missionary works and propagating the so-called “culture of peace,” as a tool for religious harmony and co-existence in the troubled south.