5 Piso Lorenzo Ruiz

Lorenzo Ruiz, the Filipino martyr canonized by John Paul II in October 1987, gave this note its name almost immediately after issue — the BSP moved quickly to honor the first Filipino saint, and the timing meant the 1987 series effectively inaugurated his image in Philippine currency. Ruiz had been executed in Nagasaki in 1637 alongside Dominican companions, his beatification having come only in 1981 after centuries of regional veneration in the Philippines and Japan.

The Security Plant Complex, established in 1978, made the Philippines one of relatively few developing nations printing its own banknotes domestically from that period onward. Pick #176 carries only a watermark among its security features — modest even by late-1980s standards.