The City of Marikina was my next stop for my Sunday masses in different churches in Metro Manila. One of the city’s oldest churches is the Diocesan Shrine and Parish of Our Lady of the Abandoned. The Our Lady of the Abandoned Church, completed in 1572, is the seat of Nuestra Señora de los Desamparados, the Patron Saint of Marikina.

The church enshrines a venerated image of Our Lady of the Abandoned. During the Philippine-American War in 1898, the first image was destroyed and the image presently venerated in the church was created in 1902. The image was canonically crowned by the Holy See through Pope Benedict XVI on October 23, 2005.

The Augustinian friars were the first to arrive in Marikina constructing this church on 1572 with bamboo and leaves in a place called “Chorillo”, now known as Barangay Barangka. Then, the Jesuits came, established a mission and built a chapel in a place now called Jesus dela Peña in 1630. On 1687, the Our Lady of the Abandoned Church was constructed in its present location to stabilize the Augustinian’s ecclesiastical jurisdiction over the area. This church itself is therefore a testament of a religious battle of the Jesuits and Augustinians over the ecclesiastical control in Marikina.

The present church is constructed in Baroque style characterized by a heavily fortified facade, large-scale ceiling paintings, a round pediment for the bell-tower and the lavish blending of painting and architecture.

Aside from being famous for holding Metro Manila’s longest holy week procession with around 80 floats, the church is in front of Kapitan Moy’s (Laureano Guevara) old house, a National Historical Commision declared National Shrine as Marikina’s very first Filipino-owned leather shoe factory. Since 1887, Marikina had become a town of shoemakers earning its status as the Shoe Capital of the Philippines.