In the much-talked about movie The Priest, we have a priest who gets into a scan­dal for pick­ing up a man and hav­ing sex with him. We also have a father who molests his own daugh­ter. And we have parish­ioners who judged every­thing that happened.

The film ends with a mass. In that mass, every­one is there: the father who had raped his daugh­ter, the mother of the molested child, the daugh­ter her­self. And the priest who had been pub­licly decried in the scan­dal and had been asked to leave the parish.

When I was a Jesuit and assigned to the Ate­neo Chris­t­ian Life Com­mu­nity in Ate­neo de Manila, I directed a first year col­lege stu­dent named Rob­bie Paraan for his first 5 day retreat. We became good friends after­wards. He even­tu­ally became OAC (Over All Coordinator/President) of the orga­ni­za­tion, grad­u­ated from col­lege, and worked in HSBC.

In Cebu where I was assigned as Direc­tor of the Jesuit Pren­ovi­tiate, I met Eric Esteba. Eric is a very tal­ented young man with a gift for the visual arts and the com­puter. Give him a con­cept, a com­puter and some time, and he will cre­ate some­thing won­der­ful out of that. A civil engi­neer, Eric helped in build­ing the new Sacred Heart School-Jesuits of Cebu.

I have left the Jesuits. But Rob­bie and Eric are enter­ing the Jesuit Novi­tiate fif­teen days from now, on May 30.

It’s Mother’s Day today and I’m break­ing my no-post-on-weekends rule again for this spe­cial occa­sion.
This is for my mom, who has always been there dur­ing the most impor­tant parts of my life.
When my mom found out that I wanted to be a Jesuit, I think she was a lit­tle dis­ap­pointed. She feared that I would be lost to her for­ever. But she dreamed my dream, and was one of those who sup­ported me every step of the way. That was why when she found out that I was leaving …

This is one clas­sic break up song. I heard it on the taxi on the way home from work and wanted to write about it. I just love this ver­sion by Regine Velasquez. Regine has gone through bad break-ups and “bad” rela­tion­ships where she was seen as the other woman who broke up cou­ples. She’s in a rela­tion­ship with singer/songwriter Ogie Alcasid right now, which started out weird but is end­ing hap­pily.
When you’re bluer than blue and sad­der than sad, maybe you just need to wait and let things …

For my non-Filipino read­ers, just a short back­grounder: On the Binib­in­ing Pilip­inas com­pe­ti­tion (this is the beauty pageant that chooses the Philip­pine rep­re­sen­ta­tives to the Miss Uni­verse and Miss World tour­na­ment) sev­eral months ago, Miss Jan­ina San Miguel (who will rep­re­sent us for the Ms. World com­pe­ti­tion) got cas­ti­gated for her apparently-stupid answer and “Carabao Eng­lish”.
She has been called many names: YouTube Queen (her video has got­ten 2.3 Mil­lion hits!), and Melanie Mar­quez Jr. (Melanie Mar­quez is another Fil­ipino beauty queen known for her leg­endary and spon­ta­neous Eng­lish) among others. …