I HAVE never attended a Jewish service in my entire life until last summer  when my friend Armando invited me to a Shabbat while spending a week-long of vacation in San Francisco and in the Bay Area. “Sure, I’ll go,” I responded quickly to Armando’s invitation. “I’ve always wanted to experience a Jewish service and…

THE Church sees the homily as an opportunity to address a “people hungry, sometime desperately so, for meaning in their lives.” The homily attends to feeding that particular hunger.  In offering the gathered community a word of meaning, a scriptural interpretation of human existence, it empowers them to be active participants in the Liturgy of…

SHE exuded passion and love for her ministry to undocumented migrants as she spoke powerfully to the participants of the Biennial Consultation of the Association of Theological Field Education last week in Santa Fe, New Mexico. “Jesus is a migrant too,” she proclaimed, “and so we need to treat migrants, those who illegally cross the…

I FOUND myself in the middle of a wave of people, mostly young men, parading barefoot the image of Black Nazarene. We were like bees or small fishes swarming around the image. For some outsiders, this piety is crazy but as one devotee paraphrased Pope Francis’ famous quote, “Who are we to judge?” For me…

POPE Francis spoke as a revolutionary reformer in his homily when he celebrated his first Mass in the Philippines at the Manila Cathedral on Friday, Jan 16. Tender but challenging and truthful, he told bishops, priests, and religious men and women, and seminarians to live the radical call of the Gospel.  He addressed these words…

The Philippines is gearing up for the arrival of Pope Francis on Thursday, January 15.  Drivers, newscasters, government officials, street vendors, Catholics, non-Catholics and just about everyone in the country are talking about the madness of traffic during the Papal events due to the expected millions of people that will be participating. Manila Bulletin, the…

HAPPY New Year to all! I hope that our hearts are filled with gratitude to God for all the blessings that we received from him last year. And like  Mary who “kept all these things, reflecting them in her heart,” I hope that we recognize the hand of God working mysteriously in our lives to…

FILIPINOS are excited about the coming of Pope Francis to the Philippines on January 15-19, 2015. As many Filipinos would say, “This is a good start for the New Year!” The Holy Father will bless our nation and express his “malasakit” (compassion) to our people, especially the poor and those whose lives have been devastated…

I SPENT most of my time this week visiting our seminarians who are on parish internship this year.  As always, I feel happy when I hear them express their excitement and joy in ministry. This makes me hopeful about the future of the church; we’ll have happy priests! As a priest involved in seminary formation,…

“ Advent is the time to strengthen the uneven and crooked shapes of our lives, to broaden our horizons, and to reform of our ways.” THERE is still a great need for conversion in each of us. When we think that we’re doing well with the practice of our faith, other people call our attention to…

MY fellow priest in the seminary, Fr. Leon, gave a beautiful homily last Tuesday, the day that the seminarians left for Thanksgiving break. He said that we’re like grains of wheat waiting to be harvested and to be ground so that we can become loaves of bread. We’re also like grapes waiting to be crushed…

MY dear friend, Prosy Delacruz, pleaded that I respond to Rodel Rodis’ column, Pope Francis’ View of God on Inquirer.net.  My tukayo’s column reflected on Filipinos’ perception of God in the light of a study conducted by sociologists from Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion on people’s various images of God: authoritarian, benevolent, critical, and…

WHENEVER I go to the airport these days, I would always see a group of Chinese teenagers.  And I would always wonder how their parents are able to send them to the US as tourists or as students. I’ll also get annoyed at seeing each one of them busy looking at their cell phones, either…

I’M writing from Orlando, Florida while attending the 2nd General Assembly of the National Association of Filipino Priests—USA. I remember fondly the first assembly that we held three years ago in Los Angeles. It was a historic moment because approximately four hundred of us, Filipino priests, ministering in different parts of the nation, gathered for…

WE don’t like to talk about death, especially one’s death. We try to ignore it because it brings us to the hard reality of the end of life.  But we can’t totally ignore it because it’s the absolute and sure stage that will occur to each of us later after birth. Perhaps, this is why…

I LOVE to rise up early in the morning like at four or at five o’clock. It’s quiet and serene; most people are still asleep. It’s the best time to walk around the house or to sit quietly in a room with a cup of coffee or tea. It’s the best time to pray, to…

“SO what did you talk about?” I asked a Catholic school teacher who came from a whole day of Religious Education conference. “We talked about unity,” she answered. “Unity? What’s that got to do with teaching religion,” I responded, intrigued by her answer. “Well, we learned that it is important to work together with parents,…

“I KNOW how to live in humble circumstance; I know also how to live with abundance. In every circumstance and in all things I have learned the secret of being well fed and of going hungry, of living in abundance and of being in need.” (Philippians 4:12-14) Such were the words of St. Paul in…

AS I minister to seminarians, I can’t help but thank God for the generosity of their hearts. They have responded to the call of God to be priests. They’re willing to make the sacrifice of not having the pleasures of this world to follow Jesus, to be his missionary disciples to the world. It’s quite…

HAVE you ever wished that a delightful experience that you had recently should have happened earlier in your life? Well, I had this experience a few days ago. I was planning to attend the funeral of a former classmate in another city with a colleague when a well-known Church leader decided to join us. As…

HAVE you ever thought if anyone has found the true cross on which Jesus was nailed and died? History says that in the 4th Century, St. Helena, mother of the Roman Emperor Constantine, went to Jerusalem in search of the holy places of Christ’s life. And legend has it that while her workers were razing…

TWENTY seminarians from St. John’s Seminary have started their parish internship this week.  They are excited and happy about this new experience. After four years of academic work, the seminary is giving them a one-year break to experience parish life, to gain pastoral skills, and to continue their discernment on their vocation to the priesthood….

IT’S not easy to become a priest. Although I know this first-hand, it became clearer to me this week while listening to seminarians share their struggles of priestly formation. One seminarian spoke about his continuous experience of being “broken” in his calling. Coming from a poor immigrant family, he worked hard to finish college to…

AS a group of scholars in theology and veterans in seminary formation were preparing for a new school year, a discussion at a breakout session came about between two professors.  “There are some seminarians that we do need to advise to leave if they don’t have the proper skills and the good attitudes to be…

I HAVE never attended a Jewish service in my entire life until two weeks ago, when my friend Armando invited me to a Shabbat while spending a week of vacation in San Francisco and in the Bay Area. “Sure, I’ll go,” I responded quickly to Armando’s invitation. “I’ve always wanted to experience a Jewish service…

I REMEMBER the years that I spent in the minor seminary, particularly those times when I would walk around the grounds of the seminary on a stormy morning, singing psalms of praise and writing poems to God. They were fresh periods of conversion, of feeling God’s personal love. Those days revealed to me a simple…

FR. RONALD Rolheiser, O.M.I. contends that there is an important distinction between “amazement” and “wonder and awe.”  He says that wonder and awe stop the flow of energy passing through us; amazement facilitates it.  Wonder and awe “literally paralyze us so that we become reflective by conscription. Amazement does the opposite. It turns us into…

“BY and large the world is a good place,” claims Fr. Ronald Rolheiser, author of Sacred Fire: A Vision for a Deeper Human and Christian Maturity.  “But among all those good people, only a select few stand out as truly exceptional in both their humanity and other virtue. Many of us are good, few among…

“BUT though you are master of might, you judge with clemency, and with much lenience you govern us; for power, whenever you will, attends you. And you taught your people, by these deeds, that those who are just must be kind; and you gave your children good ground for hope that you would permit repentance…

REMEMBERING Barbara Brown Taylor’s book, “An Altar in World,” I caught myself saying to a friend as we were driving along California coast that the world is my “tabernacle.”  By these words, I was referring to my favorite form of prayer. Absolutely, I like to pray inside a church, before the Blessed Sacrament, or in…