THE CURSILLOS IN CHRISTIANITY IN THE ARCHDIOCESE OF DAVAO 1964 – 2014

(compiled, researched and written by Bong Baldoza MC #188)
4th of a series

The Birthing

With fourteen candidates, the very first Cursillo Weekend in history was held, not in a grand monastery but in a small chalet named ‘Mar y Pins’, situated on a rocky bluff, between the sea and the pines. The small town where the chalet is located, is called Cala Figuera de Santanyi, a small fishing village in the south east corner of Mallorca.

On August 20 to 23, 1944, Eduardo Bonnin, as rector, and Jose Ferragut and Jaime Riutort as leaders, with the help and spiritual Fathers Juan Hervás, Juan Julia, Juan Capo, Sebastian Gaya, Cesario Gil, and many others, presented the message using the same rollos that are still given today in Mallorca, to this group of fourteen young men aged 13 to 28. The Spirit was present during those days in Cala Figuera. From that point on, with simplicity and the power of the mustard seed, the method, the essence and purpose of the Cursillo Movement, born from the spirit of pilgrimage and structured by Eduardo Bonnin, spread throughout the entire world, acquiring a universal reality.

At the onset it was called “Cursillos for Pilgrims Leaders’ or Guides’” as the intention is to prepare leaders for the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, but a deeper meaning enunciated by Bonnin, that is of preparing the pilgrimage to our Heavenly Father. Then later, it was called “Cursillos de Conquista” and finally, on December 20, 1953 in a genereal meeting, it was officially called “Cursillos De Cristiandad”, or in English “Cursillos In Christianity”, as Bishop Hervas spontaneously thanked God for the courses “in Christianity,” a word used a lot in that time by Pope Pius XII.

In his own words, Bonnin says: “All of the structure of what is today a ‘Cursillos In Christianity’ was forged in the weeks leading up to the Cursillo at Cala Figuera. We used a good number of the organizing techniques from the preceding ‘cursillos’ for Pilgrim Leaders and Guides but we modified all those which seemed unsuitable or not useful for people without faith. We shortened the duration to three days, added the first night of retreat, and for the rollos, we incorporated a few of the ideas, keeping the names of some of them, Piety, Study, Action, and Leaders. We provided the priests who were willing to help us with outlines on the subject of Grace, from the Catholic Action cursillos.”

On 14 December 1963, Pope Paul VI signed a Pontifical Decree in latin, and was translated in English which reads: “In Rome, near St. Peter, after much thought and fulness of our pontifical authority, We name and declare the Blessed Apostle Paul, heavenly patron saint before God for the Cursillo Movement”.
Much later, on May 31, 2004, the Cursillo as a Movement was offcially recognized by the Holy See’s Pontifical Council for the Laity through the Organismo Mundial de Cursillos de Cristiandad (OMCC), which is at the service of the dynamic unity of the movement worldwide, and is responsible for coordinating its initiatives and its policy and organizational directives.

This is an accounting of how the Cursillo was born and this is what it really is. It is based on one objective which one of its main founders, Eduardo Bonnin, expresses in this way. “The objective of the Cursillo Movement consists in facilitating people to encounter Christ, and to let this encounter grow, developing it through living in Grace in a conscious, deep, and contagious way. Cursillo is the best news that God loves us, shared by the most human of all means, friendship, directed towards the best thing that each person possesses, himself or herself.”