Parish of San Francisco de Assisi - Yona, Guam
Between the Pago River and the Togcha River, in the eastern interior of Guam, the parish of San Francisco de Assis of Yona rises. Built for the first time in the 1930s, it suffered serious damage during the 1936 earthquake and was destroyed in the bombing of World War II. The Chamorra community reconstructed it twice and redefied it in 1954, leaving a church of a mission style that is now a monument to the faith and resilience of its people.
🌹 Wonders and anecdotes
- Spanish roots - The evangelization of Guam began in 1668 with the father Diego Luis de San Vítores, a Spanish Jesuit, who traveled all the villages of the island by baptizing and founding the first Catholic communities; Yona was one of them from the first decades of the mission.
- Double reconstruction - The 1936 earthquake ruined the first parish building; before the restoration could be completed, the 1944 bombing reduced it to rubble. The Chammoan neighbors again raised the church with their own hands and bowed it in 1954 with the same name.
- Concentration camps in Yona - In the last weeks of the Japanese occupation (1944), thousands of Chammores were forcibly detained in the camps of Manenggon and Asinan, within the term of Yona; the parish was a place of assembly and comfort for survivors after liberation.
- Missonal style - The present church, around 1954, follows the canons of the Spanish mission architecture: lime facade, sober side towers and wide ship, which evoke the chapels of the Hispanic period in the Western Pacific.
- Patron party - Every year, on the first weekend of October, Yona celebrates the feast of San Francisco de Assis with procession, solemn mass and the Chamorra tradition of the tåotåo Mona, renewing year after year the link between the faith and the identity of the people.
San Francisco de Assisi
The parish of San Francisco de Assis in Yona is a living witness of the Chamorra faith: founded in the 1930s, destroyed by the earthquake of 1936 and by the war in 1944, it was rebuilt twice by the neighbors themselves and surrounded in 1954. His patron party, the first weekend of October, calls the whole community around the saint of Assisi.
"Lord, through the intercession of St. Francis of Assisi, accompanies your people of Yona who twice withhold your house with their hands; may their simple and firm faith always be the foundation of their life.
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