Bishop Varquez Installed Today Tagbilaran: Homecoming After 19 Years in Borongan

He stepped off the boat at Ubay Port at around 8 PM on Monday night, and the people waiting for him had travelled with him across the sea. Bishop Crispin “Bai” Barrete Varquez arrived in Bohol accompanied by priests, religious sisters and brothers, and lay representatives from Borongan, the diocese he had led for 19 years, and 600 guests were expected in Tagbilaran on Tuesday morning.

Varquez was formally installed as the eighth bishop of the Diocese of Tagbilaran at 9 AM on Tuesday, October 27, 2026, at the St Joseph the Worker Cathedral Shrine-Parish in Tagbilaran City. Pope Leo XIV had appointed him to the post on September 10, and the installation ended a journey that began when the 65-year-old left Bohol nearly two decades ago for Eastern Samar.

The ceremony itself was deliberately simple, at the new bishop's own request. Varquez asked that the occasion be kept low-key, without elaborate displays, including decorative flags along the streets, so that the focus stayed on the religious ceremony rather than the spectacle around it. In a week full of arrivals and meetings, that single request said a great deal about the kind of bishop Bohol was about to recieve.

Varquez Tagbilaran Homecoming: A Son Returns as Father

Varquez is a native of Sevilla, a town in Bohol, and his return has been described by his new diocese as a homecoming in the fullest sense. He was ordained a priest for the Diocese of Tagbilaran on April 14, 1989, and he served the diocese for 18 years before he was named a bishop, including time as a seminary formator and vicar general, in his 37th year as a priest.

The diocese put it simply when the appointment was announced in September, in words that have stayed with the people of Bohol ever since.

For the Diocese of Tagbilaran, this is more than the appointment of a new shepherd. It is a homecoming.

That homecoming carries a particular weight because Varquez is not arriving as a stranger who must learn the island. He knows its parishes, its priests, and its seminary, and many in the cathedral will have known him long before he wore a bishop's ring. For readers following Pope Leo XIV's early appointments, the choice connects with Shevchuk handing Pope Leo a list of Ukrainian prisoners at the Vatican, another moment when the new pontiff's attention to a local church reached far beyond Rome.

Borongan Years: 19 Years in Eastern Samar

Pope Benedict XVI appointed Varquez bishop of Borongan in August 2007. He was ordained a bishop on October 18, 2007, at the Tagbilaran Cathedral, and installed as bishop of Borongan on November 8 that year. He led the Diocese of Borongan for nearly two decades, through the ordinary work of parishes across Eastern Samar.

Before Borongan, his formation work shaped a generation of priests. He served as a formator at the Immaculate Heart of Mary Seminary in Bohol for four years and at St Augustine Major Seminary in Tagaytay for five years, and he later held various diocesan posts, including vicar general of Tagbilaran. In the Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines, he served on its Permanent Council from 2013 to 2017 and chaired its Commission on Women from 2019 to 2025.

Those 19 years in Borongan are the reason the boat from Leyte mattered on Monday night. The priests and lay people who sailed with him were the people he had pastored, and their presence at Ubay Port turned an administrative transfer into a farewell and a blessing at the same time. He spent his first night back at the Bishop's House in Elijah, in the Taloto District of Tagbilaran City.

Tagbilaran Installation: Who Presided and Who Attended

Cebu Archbishop Alberto Uy, whom Varquez succeeds as head of the Diocese of Tagbilaran, formally installed him on Tuesday morning. Uy is himself a native of Bohol, and he has led the Archdiocese of Cebu since September 2025. Manila Archbishop Cardinal Jose Advincula delivered the homily during the installation Mass, and Apostolic Nuncio to the Philippines Archbishop Charles John Brown was also expected to attend.

More than 45 bishops and hundreds of priests from the dioceses of Tagbilaran, Talibon, and Borongan were expected to attend, with at least 600 guests in all, according to diocesan administrator Father Gerardo Saco Jr. Preparations had been coordinated with local and provincial government agencies, and a coordination meeting on October 20 at Mascarinas Hall covered security, logistics, and program arrangements with city officials, police, and highway patrol officers.

What Bohol Will Watch in Varquez First Months

The Diocese of Tagbilaran was established in 1941, and Varquez becomes only its eighth bishop. That small number tells its own story. Bishops here stay, and the people remember them, so his first months will be watched closely, for small signs: which parishes he visits first, and how he speaks when the guests have gone home.

Leadership changes are rarely simple, as readers saw in Marty Grubbs stepping down as Crossings Community Church senior pastor after 45 years, where a long tenure ended with planning and honour rather than sudden change. Varquez faces the opposite shape of the same test: a long absence ending in a return, and a diocese watching to see what 19 years away added to the priest it formed.

The Pope's attention to suffering churches this month, seen in Pope Leo XIV's appeal for Yemen, frames the same test for Varquez close to home.

As the cathedral emptied on Tuesday, the question left behind was not about ceremony at all. It was about what a man does when he returns to the place that formed him, carrying 19 years of another diocese with him, and whether one morning's simplicity becomes the shape of the years ahead. Bohol will find out, parish by parish, and the first answers will come sooner than anyone expects.

But the most surprising part of this story is yet to come — keep reading.