Manila St. Andrew's Society, Founded 1879

Welcome to the website of the Manila St. Andrew's Society.

For updated British Embassy messages go here....

I hope that you find the website interesting and informative and that you will visit regularly to keep up to date with the activities of the society.

I am delighted to have taken on the role of Chieftain and look forward to continuing the good work that the outgoing Chieftain, Mr. Ian Meikle, did tirelessly for and on behalf of the Manila St Andrew’s Society. Ian’s Chieftainship saw the Society maintain it’s reputation for organizing great events and supporting local community projects and I am delighted that Ian will remain on the committee to continue that good work.

I am also delighted that the committee retains all of the members who worked hard to make last year’s social events and community projects so successful. We are lucky to have some new members join the committee to help develop family events and grow our membership and details of the committee can be found here...

The next event of this year will be the Casual Ceilidh to be held on Friday 6th May 2011 and it promises, as ever, to be a great night of good, old-fashioned, socializing – Scottish style. Details of the Casual Ceilidh and other events can be found here...

We plan to hold a number of family and social events, including a Treasure Hunt, over the next few months and details will be posted here on the website and circulated to members as soon as they have been confirmed.

We would be delighted to hear from members with any suggestions for social events, large or small, formal or informal. My contact details are at the foot of the page.

We will hold our next formal event, the annual St Andrew’s Ball on Saturday 19th November at The Manila Polo Club. The St Andrew’s Ball is always a wonderful affair at which we celebrate our patron saint in true Scottish fashion with fine food and drink, traditional reels and some less traditional, but no less Scottish, dancing for the more energetic amongst us. Please put the date in your diary and details will be circulated in due course.

I am sorry to note that the Society’s Honorary Patron, Mr. Alistair Macdonald, has moved on from his posting as EU Ambassador to The Philippines and returned to Brussels. I would like to thank Alistair and his lovely wife Brigitte for their enthusiastic support over the last few years. They will be very much missed from our social events where Alistair has been a very willing and entertaining guest speaker and enthusiastic participant in the reels.

I look forward to seeing you at our events throughout the year and welcome any comments or suggestions that you may have for events, website content or any other matters relating to the activities of the Manila St Andrew’s Society.

Slainte Mhath,

Andrew Prentice, Chieftain 

Cell: 0927 284 7430

Although Andrew and his brother Peter were two of the original apostles, very little is known about Andrew. He was a fisherman from Galilee, who went on to spread the Christian religion in Greece and Asia Minor.

He is believed to have been killed by being crucified by the Romans on a diagonal cross in Patras in Southern Greece Some 300 years after his death, the Emperor Constantine was going to move the saints bones, and legend has it that a monk was warned of this in a dream by an angel, who told him to remove the saints bones to the "ends of the Earth" to keep them safe.

Scotland was as near to the ends of the ancient Greek world as you could get, and that is how his remains came to be taken to Scotland. The monk brought the holy relics ashore at what is now St Andrews A chapel was built to house them, and by 1160 a cathedral. St Andrews was the religious capital of Scotland, and the goal of many pilgrims

The saints remains have now disappeared, probably destroyed during the Scottish Reformation, when the strictures of Calvinism tended to wish to remove traces of Catholic "idolatry". The site of the relics is now marked by a plaque in the ruins of the Cathedral in St Andrews.

Interestingly, some of Saint Andrew's bones were taken to Amalfi in Italy. From there the church sent some fragments in 1879 to Scotland. And in 1969, Pope Paul VI gave some further relics to to the Catholic church in Scotland during a visit to Scotland Saint Andrew's Day is celebrated on 30th November each year