Half a million Filipinos jostled to touch a 200-year-old ebony statue of Christ on Sunday, two days after police said they had foiled a plot by Muslim militants to attack the Roman Catholic festival.
"I'm not scared of anything, even bombs," said Zenaida Gutierrez, a housewife. "I am with the Lord."
Vice President Noli de Castro was among the devotees at the colourful and chaotic Feast of the Black Nazarene, held every year on Jan. 9 and again just before Easter, at a church in the Manila suburb of Quiapo.
Police arrested 16 Filipinos in a raid on an Islamic information centre in the capital on Friday, seizing homemade bombs and other weapons they said may have been part of a plan for a suicide attack on Sunday's festival.
Five men were charged with illegal possession of firearms and explosives, while the eight other men and three women were released from police intelligence headquarters.
Police said the suspects, part of a group of Christians who had converted to Islam, were also being questioned about the February 2004 bombing of a ferry by homegrown Abu Sayyaf rebels that killed at least 100 people.
After the arrests, security was stepped up at the church in Quiapo and in the streets where the life-sized statue of Christ with a cross was paraded through a crowd estimated by police at 500,000.
The faithful, many of them barefoot and in maroon tunics, surged to get near the religious icon in the belief it has miraculous powers.
"I feel the comfort in life, even though we are poor," said Evangelina Jacobo, 63, who has attended the event since she was a child. "Our problems are gone after the procession."
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Most of the 84 million people in the Philippines are Catholics, with a small Muslim minority concentrated in the south. Long-running Muslim and communist insurgencies have hampered foreign investment and rural development.
Some senior police officials said the suspects were also part of a group funded by Diral Hijra Foundation, an Islamic organisation thought to be a front for militants backed by the regional terror network Jemaah Islamiah.
Abu Sayyaf, a small Muslim rebel group known mainly for kidnappings for ransom before last year's ferry attack, has also been linked to Jemaah Islamiah.
While some police officials described a plot to send suicide bombers into the crowd in Quiapo, others said it was not certain that the festival was the target.
The government did not make any mention of a possible attack on the Feast of the Black Nazarene in a statement on Saturday congratulating police for Friday's raid.
Nash Pangadapun, secretary general of a Muslim community group called Maradeka, accused police of "fomenting religious violence" with the arrests.
"Muslims have never disturbed the Black Nazarene festival," he told the Philippine Daily Inquirer. "We only watch and focus on our business."