A buoy for the spirit in flood-weary Marikina

MANILA, Philippines — Dave Dela Cruz, dazed and knocked flat, woke up drenched on a chapel floor in Marikina City. He had slipped and bashed his head the previous night, when floods from Super Typhoon Carina (international name: Gaemi) refused to spare even the holiest of places.

But unlike his neighbors hauling appliances to higher ground, Dela Cruz was saving saints.

Before passing out, the 40-year-old lay Dominican had been shuttling between floors to salvage sacred relics from the brown, shin-deep deluge swamping the Blessed Ivan Merz Reliquarium, a Catholic chapel housing over 5,000 relics in gilded glass cases.

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“Relics are more precious than gold,” he told the Inquirer. “I would die for them.”

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Dela Cruz, president of the reliquarium, made it out largely unscathed, leaving the hospital the same day with nothing worse than puffy feet and dull head tingles.

But the same couldn’t be said for the chapel, its tiles hollowed and walls tainted by the faint silt lines of floodwaters that had desecrated so holy a place that night in 2024.

READ: Central Luzon bears brunt of super typhoon Carina

Described by US-based sacred objects library The Relic Project as home to Asia’s largest relic collection, the reliquarium—flanked by a creek in Barangay Marikina Heights—has since weathered several more floods, said David Lumba of the chapel’s administration team.

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“When the creek overflows, we get affected as well. It’s really scary for us,” Lumba, 19, told the Inquirer. “So our protocol has been to bring them all to the second floor.”

Like the reliquarium, many homes in Marikina—a catch basin for waters draining down upland Quezon City and Sierra Madre—have faced perennial flood risks, with thousands of families evacuating when the Marikina River swells past critical levels during heavy rains.

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When the river surged to 20.7 meters during Carina’s onslaught—just 0.8 meters short of Typhoon Ondoy’s (Ketsana) catastrophic peak—at least 10,000 Marikina residents were forced to flee their homes, with around 40 killed and 6 million affected nationwide by the disaster.

Holy hope

For Dela Cruz, the relics offer hope to disaster victims.

“We give catechesis not only on the lives and works of saints, but also on how the saints can help us in our society,” he said.

The chapel, founded in 2018, brings its relics to disaster-struck communities across the Philippines in mobile exhibits that seek to make that hope more accessible to people.

“They can’t go to Europe. They can’t go to the Holy Land. So we go to them to make them feel that God is with them, whatever their problems are,” Dela Cruz said in Filipino.

Most relics at the chapel were donated by European congregations to the canonization cause for Blessed Ivan Merz, a Bosnia-born youth leader beatified by Pope John Paul II in 2003.

Since 2008, Dela Cruz has been vice postulator of the Croatia-based cause, whose first place of worship outside the European country is the Marikina chapel.

The reliquarium, visited by hundreds of pilgrims on Sundays, houses relics of all three classes. These include pieces of saints’ bodies (first class), such as strands of St. Mother Teresa of Calcutta’s hair; objects that belonged to saints (second class), like an alb worn by St. John Paul II; and other items touched by first- or second-class relics (third class).

“Relics are legacies passed down to us by saints—legacies of their holiness,” Dela Cruz said. “They bring faith to the faithless, the sick, and those battling hardships.”

Marian devotee Lilian Andaya, 75, finds refuge in the relics she borrows from the reliquarium when floods surge, calling them her “mediator to God.” Her home in Provident Village—a notorious floodplain tucked inside a major meander of the Marikina River—is among the first to drown when the river breaches its banks.

“God listens through the help of the relics,” Andaya told the Inquirer. “Call me crazy, but that’s what I believe in.”

But faith alone isn’t enough to keep the water out, Dela Cruz said.

Crusade for justice

Persistent flooding erodes the reliquarium and remains the chapel’s biggest challenge.

The reliquarium first stood at low-lying Barangay Talayan in Quezon City, “but it kept flooding there,” he said. “We relocated to Marikina, but it floods here, too.”

Despite trillions poured into flood control projects in the past two decades, heavy rainfall continues to inundate communities nationwide.

Last year’s flood control scandal exposed that funds were being funneled into substandard and ghost projects, with global environmental group Greenpeace saying corruption may have siphoned off at least P173 billion in flood spending from 2023 to 2025.

“Saints teach us not only spiritual things, but also social responsibility,” Dela Cruz said. “This means prayer alone isn’t enough. It must be put into action.”

The chapel has done just that by taking the relics to government offices, including the Senate and House of Representatives, in hopes that the saints will “inspire them to be faithful, truthful, charitable and, most of all, honest,” the theologian said.

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“Where you want to change society,” he added, “bring God there.” /cb