National Day of Mourning

Pres. Aquino declared today, August 25, as National Day of Mourning in solidarity with the people of Hong Kong, especially the families and loved ones of the victims, over the 8 Hong Kong citizens who were killed in the hostage-taking of a bus by a dismissed police officer.

This is a good start. We mourn and grieve with the victims and their families. We call for the needed reforms to be made, especially at the Philippine National Police, so situations like these may never happen again.

However, several reactions to the incident were definitely not good.

Requiescat in Pace, Mamo Enzo (+)

DIOCESAN CIRCULAR NO. 17, Series of 2010

To: All Clergy, Religious, and Lay Faithful
Re: Rev. Fr. Lorenzo C. de Leon (+)

Your Reverences, Brothers and Sisters in Christ:

Peace in the Lord!

Our beloved REV. FR. LORENZO COLIPANO DE LEON passed away on 13 August 2010 at 10:30 p.m. He suffered a massive heart attack and was pronounced dead on arrival at the Aquinas University Hospital in Legazpi City. He was 66 years old.

Mamò Enzo was born on 10 March 1944 in Tiwi, Albay. He was ordained priest on 28 November 1970 by His Holiness Pope Paul VI at Rizal Park in Metro Manila, on the occasion of the Pope’s visit to the Philippines.

He has served the Local Church of Legazpi as a priest for close to 40 years. During this long and fruitful ministry he was assigned as Rector of St. Gregory the Great Seminary in Tabaco City; Vice-Rector of Holy Rosary Major Seminary in Naga City; Pastor of the Parishes of Manito, Tiwi and Camalig; Vicar Forane of the Second Vicariate; and Member of the Diocesan Presbyteral Council. He also served as Chaplain to overseas Filipino workers in the Archdiocese of Paris in France from 1997 to 2003.

Requiescat in pace, Bishop Francisco Claver (+)

Bishop Francisco Claver, SJ, DD (1929-2010) passed away today, 1 July 2010, at 2:41 am, at the Cardinal Santos Medical Center, Metro Manila. The immediate cause of death is pulmonary embolism.

***
Former Provincial of the Philippine Jesuit Province Fr. Danny Huang, SJ's Facebook status message says:

The Task of the Next Generation of the Catholic Commentariat

Rev. Fr. Robert Barron
Posted: 1/27/2009 9:21:48 PM by Word On Fire

.......
Here is a belated re-posting of an important observation on certain movements within the Catholic Church. Father Robert Barron calls attention to a changing of the guards among the so-called Catholic commentariat, himself one of today's leading commentators on things Catholic, deftly engaging pop culture with solid theology.
.......


This past year, we have witnessed the deaths of a number of prominent commentators on things Catholic. William F. Buckley, who died last spring, was, of course, primarily a political observer, but he also frequently and incisively weighed in on ecclesial and theological matters. Tim Unsworth, who passed away several months ago, was a long-time writer on religion for the left-leaning National Catholic Reporter. And within just the past few weeks, Cardinal Avery Dulles and Father Richard John Neuhaus—stalwarts on the Catholic right—went to their maker. The deaths of these major players in the religious commentariat prompts some reflections on the changing nature of the Catholic intellectual conversation in our country.

For the coterie of Catholics that is now fading from the scene, the dominant fact was the Second Vatican Council. That coming together of bishops, abbots, theologians, and members of the press was, as John O’Malley recently argued, “the greatest meeting of all time,” and historian Barbara Tuchman characterized it as the most significant event of the twentieth-century, surpassing in importance the two world wars and the dropping of the atomic bombs. It is not surprising in the least, therefore, that it preoccupied the minds and hearts of an entire generation of Catholic intellectuals. Vatican II has been described as the council of the church, for ecclesiology and liturgy were its major themes. How does the church worship? What is the nature and purpose of the church? How is the church governed and structured, and what is the correct manner of its relationship to the modern world? These were the central questions that beguiled the minds of the council fathers. Some have argued that Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae was even more determinative of the Catholic conversation than were the conciliar documents themselves, but discussions of that famous letter often turned on the fundamentally ecclesiological question of the range of the magisterium’s authority.

And so, in the wake of Vatican II, the commentariat turned with enthusiasm to a range of ad-intra questions: women’s ordination, the possibility of married priests, changes in the liturgy, developments in regard to the exercise of episcopal authority, sexual ethics, the nature of Catholic marriage, the adjustment of Catholic practices to modern styles, etc. To be sure, there were a variety of views on these matters, from hard left to hard right and every possibility in between, but the focus was on the household of the church. I remember these arguments well, since they dominated the years that I was coming of age. I recall the church of the late sixties and seventies as a community at war with itself, struggling to get its own affairs in order. But through all of this, the members of the Vatican II generation—whether on the left or the right—seemed to hold to the basic narrative of Catholic Christianity. There did not appear to be major disagreement in regard to God’s existence, the Trinity, the sacraments and the eucharist, redemption, Mary and the saints, eternal life. The center held.

But my growing conviction is that, as the Vatican II generation fought with itself over intra-ecclesial matters, the basic story became less and less convincing to the culture. As the commentariat bickered about the household of the church, they, perforce, spent little time presenting a compelling, coherent version of Catholicism to a world grown increasingly skeptical, secularized, and materialist. Mind you, I’m not suggesting for a moment that the questions they debated were unimportant or that they themselves were anything less than serious in their endeavors, but I am arguing that something extremely important was allowed to slip on their watch.

And therefore I believe that it is the task of the coming generation of Catholic intellectuals to offer a convincing apologetic for the basic narrative of the faith. To a scientific culture, we have to show how only a properly transcendent and intelligent cause can explain the contingencies and intelligibilities of the finite world. To a materialist culture, we have to show that, in the words of our present Pope, Logos is more metaphsyically basic than mere matter. To a skeptical culture, we have to show that belief in the resurrection of Jesus is intellectually coherent and historically defensible. To a bored culture, we have to demonstrate that life in the Spirit is a high adventure, corresponding to the deepest longing of the human heart. The new Catholic commentariat has to return, I believe, to the style of the first preachers and teachers of the faith, those who were trying to beguile the bored and materialist culture of their own time with the impossibly good news of a God who raised his son from the dead.

As we say farewell to a generation of Catholic intellectuals, we realize that for the next generation, important work remains.

Remembering Tom Green

(March 19, 1932 - March 13, 2009)

From Fr. Danny Huang's Facebook:

When I woke up this morning, I was shocked to discover—from Facebook updates, of all things—that Fr. Tom Green had passed away. I had known, of course, that he was sick; but the suddenness of his passing away still came as a sad surprise.

Soon after I had texted my condolences, the present Rector of San Jose Seminary, Vic de Jesus, kindly called me up long distance to inform me of the details of Tom’s passing: how Tom had come home from the hospital last night; how one of the seminarians had peeked into his room this morning and found him sitting in his chair, with his pipe on his chest. He went very quickly, which is a real mercy.

I first met Tom Green thirty years ago. In my senior year at the Ateneo, school year 1979-80, I was in Fr. Green’s philosophy of language class. It was a wonderful course, and thirty years later, the fact that I can still remember so much—of the logical positivists, of Wittgenstein, that language is inescapably metaphorical, that some concepts are essentially contested—is surely testimony to the outstanding clarity and excellence of Fr. Green’s teaching.

My second encounter with Fr. Green was through his books. Opening to God, which I read twice—once as a college student, and more seriously, as a novice in the Society—was a deeply influential book in my life. I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that it taught me how to pray. I read all his other books too, but my personal favorite, the book which I think is his best and wisest, is When the Wells Run Dry.

Two key insights from that book have remained with me through the decades. The first insight: that darkness happens, not just in prayer, but in life, to move us, in his words, from “loving to truly loving.” I still recall, more or less accurately, a sentence from the book, in which he reflects on a married couple’s promise to love each other “for better or worse”: “The better, the good times are there to teach us the joy of loving; the worse happens to teach us to love truly.”

The second insight: at the end of the book, Fr. Green uses the image of floating (as contrasted with swimming) as a metaphor for the mature life of faith. You give up control over your life (“swimming”); you remain active (otherwise you would sink), but you allow yourself to be led; you let go and entrust yourself to the unpredictable flow of the sea of love that surrounds you, and you let it take you where it wills.

My third and most lasting encounter with Tom Green happened in the eight years, from 1996 to 2004, when we lived together in the same community and worked on the same formation team in San Jose Seminary. At that time, we were also co-faculty members of Loyola School of Theology. From 2000 to 2004, the years I served as Rector of San Jose, Fr. Green was my Vice-Rector. He had the room right above mine in those years.

For eight years, we shared meals and attended many staff meetings together. With the rest of the Jesuit team, we processed hundreds of applications to the Seminary; sat through hours of semestral and yearly evaluations of seminarians; discussed and occasionally argued over Seminary policies. Almost every Monday evening, for eight years, we had common prayer together in the BVM chapel on the third floor of San Jose, and after prayer, shared a special meal in the Jesuit community recreation room.

When you live that long with another Jesuit, you get to know him quite well. I got to know about Tom Green’s legendary regularity of life. He followed the same schedule or cycles almost every day, every week, every year. If it was 130 PM, he could invariably be found in his rocking chair on the fifth floor reading the papers. If it was the third (I forget which, actually) Sunday of the month, he would have Mass in Balara or for the L’Arche community. If it was summer vacation, then he would be giving a retreat somewhere in the United States. And woe to you, if you moved that rocking chair, as one unwitting minister did!

I remember pleasant and witty Jesuit banter from those rec-room meals involving Tom Green. Once, Roque Ferriols was talking about Jesuit Bishop Honesto “Onie” Pacana, but kept on referring to him as “Honey Pacana.” The rest of us—Art Borja was there, I remember—corrected Fr. Roque and told him that the bishop’s nickname was pronounced “Onie” not “Honey.” When Roque said that he had always thought the bishop’s nickname was “Honey,” Tom Green quipped in a deadpan way: “Oh, I thought you were just close.” That brought the house down.

Tom was not perfect, I discovered. (His devoted lay friends, “the Golden Girls,” who took such good care of him, also knew that.) He tended to want things his way. He got cross and cranky when things did not go the way he wanted them to. He could express his opinions a bit too dogmatically. He did not admit his mistakes easily.

And yet, I appreciated his presence in the community and on the Seminary formation team. He was a very generous (he had so many directees!) and wise spiritual director. He was a man of very good and balanced judgment where persons were concerned, and I always valued his perceptions of applicants or seminarians. When I consulted him as Vice-Rector on issues of the Seminary, I usually received very sensible counsel.

By the time I got to San Jose, Tom was a grandfather figure to the seminarians, and his cheerful and easy manner of dealing with them, and the personal witness he gave of a man who had grown old—and happily so—in the priesthood was something, I think, of inestimable value for San Jose. Having been part of San Jose for over three decades, he had become for generations of Josefinos, an icon, a living link between the past and the present, a symbol of their happy years in the Seminary. With Tom’s passing away, an era in the history of San Jose comes to an end, a presence that cannot be replaced has been lost forever...

In all my years as Rector and as Provincial, Tom always told me that he hoped he could die in San Jose. He got his wish. I am glad for him. Now, I trust that he is in the presence of the One whom he wrote about, spoke about and served so faithfully and generously for so many years. Now, I trust the darkness has become light for him, and, with a joy no words can describe, he can let go and, at last, float.

....
http://www.jesuits.ph/articles/tomgreenremembered

FR. THOMAS H. GREEN, S. J. died on Friday morning, March 13, at San Jose Seminary. Fr. Tom would have been 77 on Thursday. He entered the Society on 7 September 1949 and was ordained a priest on 19 June 1963. Requiescat in pace.

Wake:
San Jose Seminary Chapel
Ateneo de Manila University
Loyola Heights, Q.C.
Daily wake Masses will be celebrated at 8:00 p.m.

Funeral Mass:
Thursday, 19 March at 8:00 a.m.
University Church of the Gesù, Ateneo de Manila University

Interment:
Sacred Heart Novitiate Cemetery
Novaliches, Quezon City
immediately after the Funeral Mass

bishops and deacons

“I cannot as a priest but be poor. It is in being poor that we can better live out our vocation and be more effective in our ministry. People can see Christ better in us and can have a clearer idea of who Jesus really is if we are poor priests."

bishop-elect broderick pabillo, auxiliary bishop of manila, speaking at the national clergy congress 2005.

last sunday, 28 may, i read the happy news on pdi, via my favorite columnist (and future presidential candidate?) randy david, of the election by benedict xvi of two new bishops - fr ambo david (randy's brother) and fr broderick pabillo. fr ambo is well-known in my circle - alumnus of san jose, scripture scholar & prof at LST, sought-after talk-giver and retreat-master. unfortunately for me, i never had him as prof in any scripture course at LST (it was a tough choice between him & fr vic salanga, sj).

fr or bp-elect broderick is also an in-demand talk-giver and retreat-master. i only know him from afar. but whatever distance there may be, what i know of him is enough to leave me highly edified. he was an sdb priest who left the relative comfort of his don bosco community to become a diocesan, devoting himself to one of the poorest parishes of palawan. it was his experience of poverty & sanctity in palawan that was the context of this blog's intro quote.

last 24 may, my bishop ordained 4 seminarians to the diaconate. rev deacons dok arroyo, gboy avila, joey baranda & roque patanao. incl myself, there are now 5 of us, deacons, serving legazpi - yey!

the recent ordination brings back memories and insights from discernment and prayer periods past. i remember finally getting over the fear of not choosing the 'better option' in favor of the road less traveled. i remember struggling over celibacy before getting to accepting it, first, as a means that i need to appropriate in order to realize a life lived more fully, then, at last, as God's gift to me. i remember one contemplation: on the feeding of the 5000 in matthew - Jesus speaking, 'these are my people and this is my work, from them will rise my dream, the coming of the Kingdom; would you dare join me in this dream?'

after almost 9 months as a deacon, i still shudder at all these remembering. at present, with the realities of ministry in my diocese gradually, sometimes jarringly, beginning to unravel themselves in ways perceived only vaguely before, remembering becomes an exercise that brings both comfort and perplexity. most return journeys, this one a return to ideals, are both comforting (because it brings us back to places and states we have become accustomed to, to our comfort zones) and perplexing (because our lofty ideals get measured up by how we have fared so far in taking on 'the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune', otherwise known as - reality).

my ideals regarding the ordained ministry:

1. it is the choosing of a life less ordinary - of becoming agents of the sacred, purveyors of hope, firesetters for the Kingdom.

2. it is all about making a sacrifice. & by sacrifice i mean not just enduring the regular hardships that accompany any self-giving, but more about 'making holy' one's humble efforts because they are, after all, but a sharing in Christ's work.

3. it is a witnessing to that 'something more', i.e., that there is something more than the usual pursuit of power, prestige, or financial gain. it is about how one strives to be poor and to serve in a church that professes to become one with the poor, indeed, become poor itself. sadly, in this regard, many of us, ordained ministers, have been measured & found wanting.

that is why, frs david and pabillo becoming bishops is a happy occasion. for we need more men like them to make us pause & reflect & get fired up once more in our own witnessing and sacrificing. we need to attend more ordinations so we may remember how, for every deacon, priest and bishop, his ordained ministry started by dreaming Christ's dream.