One fact of life is that we often get to know a person more when he or she has passed on from this life. How many wakes have we gone to only to hear the many stories of the deceased person from family, relatives, friends, officemates, and even kasambahays? Sadly, in that regard, we get…
Category: Church Traditions
Love for God and Love for Country
On one of my pilgrimages, I had a conversation with our tour guide about the different people and different cultures that she handles. She said that every year they would have a convention of tour guides and when they are asked which group they loved to handle the most, the response would unanimously be Filipinos….
Return of Investment
I once came across a video explaining why some people are rich and the rest are not. The gist of the video is that when the rich spend, their frame of mind is, “what is the Return of my Investment (ROI)?” Hence, If a flashy car will not give a good ROI, what is the…
Evil and the Unfaithful Generation
Matthew 12:38-42 In the Gospel, we are told of the reality of how man’s sinfulness led to experiencing punishment. During the time of Noah, the whole world experienced flooding. Sodom and Gomorrah experienced God’s wrath, as did Bethsaida, Chorazin, and Capernaum. Eventually, as Jesus predicted, Jerusalem also was destroyed. Fr. Richard Heilman wrote an article…
Mary Mother of The Church
There is a saying, without a mother, there is no life. It is the mother’s womb that takes care of us for nine months and throughout our lives, the mother continues to care for us. Even if we reach 50, 60 or even 70 years old, in the eyes of a mother, we are still…
Fr. Ronnie
Fr. Ronnie is a friend and fellow priest. This entry is from the mass of his 14th Anniversary of Ordination. A Priest is always wrong because . . . If he begins his mass on time, his watch is advanced; if he begins a minute later, he keeps people waiting. If he preaches too long,…
The Harvest is Great, the Laborers Few
Matthew 9:32-38 When one goes through the daily news, I guess one cannot refrain from the question, “What are all these things going on in the world today?” When earthquakes are just around the corner… When violence is on a scale that is unthinkable… When world leaders act like dictators… When morality is based on…
Are You Prepared?
One of the questions often asked to me is if the end near. The bible says that on the last days: There will be false prophets and false messiahs There will be wars and rumors of war Nations will rise against nations Christians will be persecuted Indeed all of these are happening so one might…
Following Jesus
Luke 9:57-62 My brief vocation story is that before entering the seminary, I worked for PLDT. One reason for the difficulty in discernment is that back then, there was nothing to compare my life in PLDT to the life of a seminarian. Had it been transferring from one company to another, the decision-making would have…
God’s Ways
As human beings, one of the things we naturally resist is being told what to do. This usually happens when we outgrow our childhood. As teenagers, we thought we knew it all. We thought we figured out life. Life though, has ways of humbling us. It is only when we grow old and have children…