Archive for 2018

THE WAY OF EL SALVADOR

By | Published Wednesday, October 31, 2018


 – Fr. Reuter speaks about his martial law experience.
Inspired by Ana Marie Pamintuan 
There are widely divergent versions of why nine members of a farmers’ group were murdered on Saturday night in a sugar plantation in Sagay, Negros Occidental. All the versions, however, bear a common thread: the victims wanted a piece of that land.
Whether they were promised ownership if they simply pitched a makeshift tent on the land – and they naively believed it - or they deliberately set off to occupy and seize private property, the slaughter dramatizes the sad plight of the poorest of the poor in our country.
Poverty is no excuse to illegally occupy private property, or jump the line in occupying subsidized housing meant for government workers, many of whom are also living below or near the poverty line. Yes, Juan and Juana, these include cops and soldiers.
But murdering nine individuals for encroaching on a sugar plantation is overkill, no pun intended. A hacienda owner who resorts to mass murder to keep the militant poor from grabbing land should know the country enough to worry about lethal retaliation from the New People’s Army (NPA).
Maybe the owner of the plantation called Hacienda Nene, identified as Carmen Tolentino, has her own armed security group to keep out trespassers and even NPA raiders. But under normal circumstances, the constant threat of retaliation should be enough to compel a reasonable businesswoman to seek government help instead in evicting illegal land occupants.
Who would massacre nine impoverished people? In the age of Tokhang and Double Barrel (although these are directed at drugs, not insurgencies) and the continuing skirmishing between government forces and the NPA, suspicion falls quickly on the military and police. Left-leaning groups have pointed to militias of the Philippine Army as the prime suspects in the murders of the National Federation of Sugar Workers’ chair for Sagay, Flora Jemola, in December 2017, and member Ronald Manlanat on Feb. 21 this year. Most of the nine victims last Saturday reportedly belonged to the NFSW.
Those who reject this premise, however, point out that precisely because government forces are expected to get the blame, it’s not entirely implausible that certain elements in the insurgency were behind the massacre – to stoke anti-government sentiment and generate sympathy for the rebel movement.
Hacienda Nene covers 75 hectares and has avoided redistribution. The nine fatalities, according to initial reports, were part of a group that occupied what they considered idle land to till for their personal use.
These are people who can easily buy the promise of ownership if they simply pitch a tent and occupy the land.
This murder of the 9 Sagay farmers is reminiscent of what happened in El Salvador around 1980 where Archbishop Oscar Romero was shot dead while saying Mass. The following is his story. Let us pray the Sagay murders will not bring us to this situation as evidenced by our Marcos Era Martial Law

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How to Distinguish Between Alzheimer's and Natural Aging

By | Published Tuesday, May 8, 2018


Our memory capacity changes as we get older, but memory loss that adversely affects everyday life is not an ordinary sign of aging and may actually be a symptom of the onset of dementia. This phenomenon causes a slow deterioration of memory, reasoning, and logic, with the most common type known as "Alzheimer's" - a serious disease that disrupts the functioning of brain cells and even stops their activity.
 So how can you tell whether the source of memory problems is the natural aging process or the development of dementia when signs appear that may indicate both? Using the information in the next article you should be able to distinguish between a situation that requires attention and natural processes that affect everyone.

What is the difference between natural aging and Alzheimer's?
We all know that as we get older, our brain and body become weaker. In a natural aging process, it means that we may experience a slowdown in thinking and movement, but our intelligence is not be affected. On the other hand, in the case of Alzheimer's disease, damage to nerve cells in the brain will cause memory changes to worsen as more cells are damaged. Although it is possible to develop Alzheimer's at the age of 30, 40 and 50, in most cases it affects people aged 65 and over. 

Changes in memory caused by old age will be related to the names of people or places, but changes caused by Alzheimer’s are expressed through forgetfulness that severely affects one’s ability to work and even engage in a social life and hobbies. It is recommended that you familiarize yourself with the following 10 sections to help you determine whether what you are experiencing is a natural aging process or the development of Alzheimer's disease. If you notice these signs in yourself, it is recommended that you see your doctor to confirm or refute your concerns.
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HORACIO DE LA COSTA

By | Published Wednesday, April 18, 2018


MAKATI QUEZON CITY THE GUIDE JANUARY 17, 2015

If you were one of those who caught Pope Francis’ mass at the Manila Cathedral last January 16, you may have chanced upon the words of Manila Archbishop Luis Antonio Cardinal Tagle in which he quoted a fellow named Fr. Horacio de la Costa who said that the resiliency of the Filipinos can be traced to “music and faith.”

While there is little argument to be made about that statement, some have raised a question as a consequence of the Cardinal’s statement: who is Horacio de la Costa? Today, this edition of The Guide will try to answer the question about this man’s identity and his contributions to religion, history, and even the landscape of the metropolis.

Born on May 9, 1916 in the town of Mauban in Quezon Province, Horacio Villanueva de la Costa was born to Sixto de la Costa, a judge, and Emiliana Villamayor. He spent his early education in Batangas before moving to Manila where he was eventually admitted to Ateneo de Manila.

It was in Ateneo where de la Costa shined, having displayed “excellence” not only in academics but also in student leadership. But it was in writing that he came to be well-known for as he served as a writer and eventually becoming the editor of the school’s newspaper, The Guidon.

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THE ROLE OF RELIGIOUS WOMEN IN ASIA TODAY

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A conference given by Horacio de la Costa S.J. to the Sisters of the Generalate Communities, 1974, Typrwritten, 5 pp., AdM Archives

You asked me to say something about the role of religious women in Asia today. If you will pardon my saying so, I don’t think that’s a question you should ask a man. Especially not during International Women’s Year. You shouldn’t ask us men what your role is – you should tell us.

But you asked, so you must take the consequences. The first consequence is that you will rephrase the question. Instead of asking myself what the role of religious women in Asia today, I will ask myself what the role of the Religious of the Virgin Mary is in the Philippines today.

The first thing I notice about you is that you are the only religious congregation of women in the Philippines founded by a Filipina. I don’t know of any others. If there are, I humbly beg their pardon, and I say to them that what I say to you applies to them also. It seems to me that since you are a Filipino religious congregation in this special way, not only by your membership but by your very origins, you have a special mission: the mission of showing the world that there can be, that there is, an authentically Filipino way of living a authentically religious life. If you do this, you will be making a valuable contribution to what the 1974 Synod of Bishops considered to be one of the principal tasks of evangelization in the world today. What is that task? It is the task of making the Gospel incarnate in the particular cultures of the different peoples that make up the world, by building up local churches capable of making, each one of them, its own unique contribution to the rich variety of the one universal church.

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Dr. Google

By | Published Tuesday, April 17, 2018


We usually meet traditionalist doctors who would laugh when patients appear to know what ails them after consulting the internet. But modern medicine is no longer laughing: “big data” which is the back bone of Google is getting to be the gold standard in the practice of modern medicine.

How Big Data Is Transforming Medicine by  Bernard Marr  

When we visit our doctor or go into hospital, we have faith in the knowledge that the healthcare professionals involved are treating us according to proven scientific methods, otherwise known as evidence-based medicine (EBM). This means they’re prescribing drugs or selecting treatment methods that have proven successful in clinical research.

Although the term ‘evidence-based medicine’ only dates back to the early 1990s, the concept itself is much older. Controlled trials were routinely being conducted as early as the 1940s, and clinical knowledge and expertise was already being disseminated in medical journals and textbooks long before that. (In fact, the oldest medical journal still running today, The New England Journal of Medicine, was founded in 1812. Even older, the first official clinical trial was conducted in 1747, into the treatment of scurvy in sailors.)

Clinical trials and studies are all about conducting research into disease and conditions, and the various treatment methods that may ease symptoms or eradicate the illness altogether—they explore which treatments work best for which illnesses and in which groups of patient. All around the world, EBM is the established standard for the provision of healthcare. But, in the age of big data, that might be about to change.

Clinical trials work by testing new treatments in small groups at first, looking at how well the treatment works and to identify any side effects. If a trial proves promising, it is expanded to include larger groups of people. Often the trial will include comparing the new treatment to other treatments by separating patients into different groups, each trialing a different treatment. This is usually done by a process called randomization, where patients are assigned to the various groups randomly.

In order to safeguard participants and improve reliability, clinical trials have to meet rigorous scientific standards. However, that’s not to say there is no risk of methodological flaws, or that the small-ish populations used in clinical trials always generalize well outside of a particular study. This is where big data can help. By mining the world of practice-based clinical data—i.e. actual patient records—for information on who has what condition and what treatments are working, we could learn a lot about the way we care for individuals.

One company, California-based cognitive computing firm Apixio, has firmly set its sights on enabling healthcare providers to learn from practice-based evidence to individually tailor care. As Apixio CEO Darren Schulte explains, “We can learn more from the practice of medicine and refine our approach to clinical care. This gets us closer to a ‘learning healthcare system’. Our thinking on what actually works and what doesn’t is updated with evidence from the real-world data.”

A staggering 80% of medical and clinical information about patients is formed of unstructured data, such as written physician notes, consultant notes, radiology notes, pathology results, discharge notes from a hospital, etc.

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THE FREEDOM OF THE CITY by Horacio de la Costa S.J.

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I was not born in Manila; but having lived in this city for so long, I have acquired a strong affection for it. No matter what part of the country we came from originally, we have all become, as it were, naturalized Manileños, proud to say of ourselves, as a certain Paul of Tarsus once said of himself, that we are citizens of no mean city.


The juxtaposition of “citizen” and “city” will try to remind us of a number of other words, familiar to us from daily usage, which are really derivatives of the Greek or Latin names for “city” such as “civitas,” and “polis.” Thus to be “civil” to someone is to treat him with the respect and regard with which a citizen treats a fellow-citizen; to be “urbane” is to have the good manners that may be expected of a city dweller; and this is the same as to be “polite.” “Police” comes from the same root as “polite,” although you may have had encounters with the police in which this was not immediately apparent. At any rate, the police is that body of men upon whose vigilance, courage and integrity the good order of the city depends.

What the police enforce is the “civil” law, the law of the citizen, the law to which city people freely subject themselves. This they do because they are “civilized”; because, unlike barbarians, who respect only force, they have learned to live under law; and this they have learned by living together in peace in the city. Living together thus, cheek-by-jowl to one another in a relatively limited area, they have also learned to govern themselves, and so take part with great gusto in the process by which they form, dissolve, reconstitute, supervise, control and clean up their own government – the process familiar to us all under the name of “politics.”

If these derivatives of the word for city suggest anything, it is surely that men have generally have found great advantages in being part of a city; that many of the good things they enjoy they owe to their city; and hence that their city is something worthy of their loyalty and love. And so we see that before there was love of one’s fatherland, or patriotism, there was love of one’s city, or citizenship; the first was, historically, merely the extension of the second. Indeed, the ancient Greeks identified what we would now call a nation, or the state with the city; they found it difficult to conceive of a nation or state larger than a city. I believe it was Aristotle who said that a state should not be so big that you could not walk from one end of it to the other in a single day. The thinking behind this was that what binds the people of a state together is mutual respect, esteem  and affection; and how can you love someone you do not know?

Manila is a city with a great past. This year, we celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of the founding of Manila as a Spanish city. But the history of Manila goes back much further than that, so far back that we cannot set a definite date for the founding of the Tagalog citadel on the site of which the Spanish conquerors built Fort Santiago.

Of that citadel, the first Spanish captain ever to set eyes on it, Goiti, said that “it was situated on the bank of the river,” and was “defended by a palisade all along its front. Within it were many warriors, and shore outside was crowded with people” – the civilian population, presumably, who could not be prevented from rushing out of the citadel to gape at these strangers from the West. Trust Manilenos to break through police lines whenever there is a site to be seen! At the same time, Goiti continues – pieces of artillery stood at the gates, guarded by bombardiers, linstock in hand.” So there was someone in authority in the city who thought it prudent to take precautions.

We know who this someone was – a young rajah named Sulayman, whom we can picture standing very straight before Captain Goiti and saying to him what is, to the best of my knowledge, the first recorded speech of a Manileño – a speech recorded for that reason, and also because it was so unexpectedly short. As Goiti reports it, Sulayman said “that he was pleased to be the friend of the Spaniards; but . . . that (they) should understand that he would not tolerate any abuse . . .; on the contrary; they would repay with death the least thing that touched their honor.”

We would be hard put to it, I think, to find a briefer or a better statement of the foreign policy of this country that these words of the Gatpuno of Maynila whose name has gone down to us. Perhaps the Department of Foreign Affairs should inscribe its substance on Romblon marble in its Hall of Banners

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RIZAL AND THE ATENEO

By | Published Monday, April 16, 2018


Homily delivered by Horacio de la Costa  S.J. at the Ateneo Alumni Mass on Rizal’s birthday, June 19, 1952

Alumnus Jose Rizal kept in touch with the Ateneo mainly through four men. There was Father Faura, who prophesied that he would end up on a scaffold. There was Father Pastells, who sought to restore his Catholic Faith by patient argument.  There was Father Balaguer, who reconciled him to the Church before he died.  And there was Father Sanchez, who was his friend.

I think it can be said that these four men, each in his own fashion, express what the Ateneo should mean, and would like to mean, to all its alumni.  The Ateneo is a school; first and foremost, it is a body of teachers; and the essential duty of a teacher is to speak the truth.  The truth is often unpleasant, often unpopular; but the teacher, if he wishes to be faithful to his profession, cannot afford to dilute or debase it.  He must speak the truth as he sees it, no matter how much it hurts.

Rizal had worked out during his sojourn in Spain a thoroughgoing plan of colonial reform.  Whatever Father Faura thought of that plan, he saw at least one thing clearly – that the Spanish government would never stand for it.  Sooner or later it would try to crush both the plan and its author. That was what he meant when he said that Rizal would end up on a scaffold.

We could wish that Father Faura could have put it a little less bluntly, a little more diplomatically.  He might have spared Rizal’s feelings.  But there are times when to spare a man’s feelings is to betray his friendship. What Father Faura said was shocking; he meant it to be.  He wanted to shock Rizal into seeing that he was faced with a choice, and that his very life depended upon what he chose.  He did not tell him what to choose. Rizal was not a boy any longer but a man, and it was a man’s privilege to choose; but it was also a man’s privilege to be told the consequences of his choice.

Rizal saw and chose; and the fact that he chose with his eyes open, with the scaffold at the end of the road having been pointed out to him, is his claim to be our greatest alumnus.

All of us, at some time or other in our lives, will be faced with the necessity of making a similar decision. Beset by fears and forebodings, we shall go to seek strength and comfort from those we miss.  I do not think we shall ever lack friends who will try to soothe us with ambiguities, who will blur alternatives, dull the horns of a dilemma on the mistaken principle that what we don’t know won’t burn us, on the childish principle that medicine doesn’t taste half as bad if taken with eyes shut.

But rare indeed is the friend who will tell us the truth; who will pay us the supreme compliment of assuming that we are not afraid to act on our principles.  It is our hope as alumni that we shall always find such a friend where Rizal found him – at the Ateneo.

However, it is equally important to remember that respect for the truth must go hand in hand with respect for the individual conscience.  To force the truth on the people’s minds, to ram the truth down people’s throats, is not only unjust: it is unwise.  Nothing breeds error so quickly as truth accepted under constraint.  It was to be regretted that Rizal lost the priceless heritage of the Faith; but granted the fact that he lost it, there was only one way of restoring it to him: by convincing him, by convincing his mind, that he had erred.  There were easier ways; threats, cajolery, flattery, the emotional argument; but Father Pastells used none of these. He chose the hard way; he appealed to that in Rizal which was hardest, diamond-hard – his mind.  For he knew that a faith based on anything else but conviction would be of no use to this man who lived solely by his convictions, and who would not hesitate to die for them.

Jesuits believe that their system of education is fashioned to produce men of this calibre, rational men, men whose faith, while fully supernatural, is based on reason.  Whether that system actually does so or not, is not for them to say.  But this certainly can be said: that if the schools of the free world do not produce such men in greater numbers than hitherto, that world is doomed.

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PHILIPPINE JESUITS IN LOYOLA HEIGHTS CAMPUS

By | Published Sunday, April 15, 2018


The Padre Faura campus continued to house the professional schools until 1976. Fr. Francisco Araneta, S.J., was appointed as the Ateneo de Manila's first Filipino Rector in 1958.   In 1959, its centennial year, the Ateneo became a university.

Late 20th century
Gonzaga Hall
The following decades saw escalating turbulence engulf the university as an active movement for Filipinization and a growing awareness of the vast gulf between rich and poor gripped the nation. Throughout the 1960s, Ateneans pushed for an Ateneo which was more conversant with the Filipino situation and rooted more deeply in Filipino values. They pushed for the use of Filipino for instruction, and for the university to implement reforms that addressed the growing social problems of poverty and injustice. During that time, the Graduate School split into the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the Graduate School of Economics and Business Administration, which eventually became the Graduate School of Business.

In 1965, Fr. Horacio de la Costa became the first Filipino Provincial Superior of the Philippine Province of the Society of Jesus.  On September 25, 1969, Pacifico Ortiz, S.J., was installed as the first Filipino President of the Ateneo de Manila.

Ateneans also played a vital role together with student organizations from other prominent colleges and universities as student activism rose in academe in the 1970s. Students faced university expulsion and violent government dispersal as they protested the dismissal of dissenting faculty and students, oppressive laws and price hikes, human rights violations, and other injustices. On September 21, 1972, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law. The university administration had great difficulty reconciling the promotion of social justice and keeping the university intact. They locked down on the more overt expressions of activism—violence and miltancy—and strove to maintain a semblance of normalcy as they sought to keep military men from being stationed on campus.  In 1973, Jesuit Superior General Fr. Pedro Arrupe called for Jesuit schools to educate for justice and to form "men and women for others." The Ateneo college opened its doors to its first female students in that same year.

Fr. Horacio de la Costa died on March 20, 1977 and was mourned by not only the Atenean community and the Jesuits, but by historians and others who have come to appreciate his writings on Philippine history and culture. 

The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences moved to Loyola Heights in 1976, and the Padre Faura campus finally closed in 1977 as the Graduate School of Business and the School of Law moved to H.V. de la Costa St. in Salcedo Village, Makati. That same year, the Ateneo, then the "winningest" school in men's basketball, left the NCAA, which it co-founded, due to violence plaguing the league.  In 1978 the Ateneo joined the University Athletic Association of the Philippines. In February 1978, the Ateneo opened the Ateneo-Univac Computer Technology Center, one of the country’s pioneering computer centers, which later became the Ateneo Computer Technology Center.

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THE ATENEO MUNICIPAL DE MANILA by Horacio de la Costa, S.J.

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To return for a moment to the Escuela Municipal: in 1862 the city council of Manila, pleased with the way the school was being conducted, invited Father Cuevas to submit a plan for its expansion to a school of secondary instruction.  Two years later he did so.  The plan, modelled on that already in operation in Cuba, called for a modification of the last two grades of the existing five-grade curriculum and the addition of three more years.  Latin and Greek grammar would be added to the subjects of the superior and suprema grades, while the additional years would be devoted to the standard “college-level” subjects of the Jesuit system, namely, poetry, rhetoric and philosophy.   Thus, the original five grades would be preserved as a terminal course for those who did not intend to make any further studies, while boys preparing for university studies would be ready for them upon the completion of the entire eight-year curriculum.  The plan met with the government’s approval and went into effect in 1865. To fit its new status, the name of the school was changed to Ateneo Municipal de Manila.


That same year, the acquisition of additional property in the same block enabled the Ateneo to offer boarding facilities.  In 1870, the first ten students to complete the secondary curriculum received the degree of Bachelor of Arts.  Two years later, a new boy entered who was later to make history, Jose Rizal.

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THE EXPULSION AND RETURN OF JESUITS IN THE PHILIPPINES

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Spain was in the throes of revolution, with anti-clerical liberals arrayed against clerical conservatives.  The restored Society had barely returned to Spain when it was again expelled in 1822.  Readmitted, it was suppressed by royal decree in 1834; restored in virtue of a concordat with the Holy See in 1851; expelled a third time in 1868; and permanently legalized in 1880.

The suppression of the Jesuits in the Philippines covering the whole Spanish Empire (1767) as well as the various European monarchies is a complex topic. Analysis of the reasons is complicated by the political maneuvering in each country which was not carried on in the open but has left some trail of evidence. The papacy reluctantly went along with the demands of the various Catholic kingdoms involved, and advanced no theological reason for the suppression. The power and wealth of the Jesuits with their influential educational system was confronted by adversaries in this time of cultural change in Europe, leading to the revolutions that would follow.  Monarchies attempting to centralize and secularize political power viewed the Jesuits as being too international, too strongly allied to the papacy, and too autonomous from the monarchs in whose territory they operated.  Soon after their restoration by Pope Pius VII in 1814 they slowly began returning to most of the places from which they had been expelled.

Soon, after one its short-lived restorations, the Jesuit Province of Spain was specifically asked by Queen Isabela II to return to the Philippines to undertake, or rather to resume the evangelization of Mindanao and Sulu.  The Spanish Jesuits accepted the commission, along with the attached condition that they would not try to recover any of the property confiscated by the government from the Old Society.  On 4 February 1859, 6 priests and 4 brothers under the leadership of Fr. Jose Fernandez Cuevas set sail from Cadiz for Manila.  They landed on 14 April, being received  with great charity by the Augustinians, who had them stay in their house at Guadalupe until they could set up for themselves.

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FIRST 100 YEARS OF JESUITS IN THE PHILIPPINES Part 3

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3.  TAGALOG AND THE VISAYAN MISSIONS

Yet, although raiding Moros remained an ever-present peril, the Visayan missions made considerable progress during the 17th century.  The massive mission churches of Bohol, Leyte and Samar, many of which still stand, though they only now are beginning to be appreciated as particularly splendid examples of Philippine colonial architecture, prove that in the latter part of the 17th century when they were built, the Jesuit missionaries had largely succeeded in transforming the semi-nomadic tribes they had found upon arrival into a settled Christian population.  Among the Tagalogs, they added to their original mission of Taytay-Antipolo the towns of Silang, Indang and Maragondong, in the present province of Cavite, besides accepting the chaplaincy of the troops and shipyard workers in the great naval base of Cavite proper.  They also took charge of the island of Marinduque, off the southern coast of Luzon, and mission stations along the east coast of Mindoro.

NON-SPANISH JESUITS
This, in spite of the fact that the supply of men from the Spanish provinces of the Society was thinning down to a trickle.  The noble Spanish nation, exhausted by its magnificent effort to provide missionaries for half of the world, could do no more.  Fr. General Oliva sent out a call for volunteers for the Philippines to the rest of the Society, and the provinces of northern and central Europe rose to the challenge.  It is not generally known that the Philippine Province of the late 17th and early 18th centuries, though still largely Spanish in composition, had a generous admixture of Jesuits of other nationalities.  The reason is chiefly because these Belgian, Italian, German and Czech Jesuits sank their individuality in the common cause to the extent of adopting not only the Spanish language and Spanish ways, but even Spanish names.  Who, without access to the catalogues preserved in Jesuit archives, would suspect that Father Pable Clain, for instance, was really Paul Klein of Bohemia, or Father Ignacio de Monte was really Walther Sonnenberg of Switzerland, or Juan de Pedrosa was really Adolf Steinhauser of Austria?

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FIRST 100 YEARS OF JESUITS IN THE PHILIPPINES Part 2

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2.  PHILIPPINE NOVITIATE & THE MORO WARS

Garcia had the vision to foresee that the Philippine vice-province could not adequately supplied with men from Europe and America; it should as soon as practicable draw at least a part of its membership from the Philippines itself.  To do this, Garcia conceived the plan of establishing a separate novitiate in Antipolo, but he ran into financial difficulties and had to postpone his plan until 1606.  Two years later, Captain Pedro de Britto and his wife offered their huge estate in San Pedro Makati, a district near Manila, for a novitiate.  The offer was accepted but the construction took so long that the novices were unable to occupy it until 1622.  Less than a decade later the novices had to go back to the College of Manila because it was more economical to support them in the College of Manila than in the separate community.  The estate however remained obra pia under the auspices of the Jesuits.

THE PHILIPPINE JESUIT PROVINCE
In 1605, the Philippine Province of the Society of Jesus was erected with Fr. Gregorio Lopez as first provincial.  It had a membership of 67, distributed among 11 residences, namely, a college of secondary and higher studies (the College of Manila), a residential college attached to it (the College of San Jose), seven mission residences and two mission stations.  Ten candidates, six for the priesthood and four for the brotherhood, were undergoing their novitiate.

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200 Years of Jesuits in the Philippines

By | Published Saturday, April 14, 2018


FROM MISSION TO PROVINCE (1581-1768)
In 1581, the first Jesuits from the Province of Mexico arrived in the Philippines. The mission was headed by Fr. Antonio Sedeño, the Superior. His companions were Fr. Alonso Sanchez and Brother Nicolas Gallardo. A fourth member, Scholastic Gaspar Suarez de Toledo, had died during the voyage from Acapulco. In 1585, the first novice was accepted, Juan Garcia Pacheco, a Spaniard. In 1591, mission stations were established in Balayan, Batangas, in Taytay, and in Antipolo, Rizal. In 1593, the first Jesuit mission stations were established in the Visayas in Tibauan, Panay. There, Fr. Pedro Chirino opened the first school of the Society of Jesus in the Philippines. It was a catechetical school for natives. Later the school was expanded with an elementary school both for Spanish and Filipino boys. The first Filipino in the Society of Jesus was a certain Martin Sancho or Sanchez. He was received into the Society in Rome. In 1601, he returned to the Philippines but died shortly thereafter of tuberculosis.

In June of 1595, Fr. General Claudio Acquaviva made the Philippine Mission into a Vice Province dependent on the Province of Mexico. Fr. Sedeño was its first Vice-Provincial. In September of the same year, the College of Manila was opened in the Jesuit compound in Intramuros on Calle Real (later Calle General Luna). The College offered courses in grammar, philosophy, theology, and canon law.

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FIRST 100 YEARS OF JESUITS IN THE PHILIPPINES Part 1

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1.  FIRST MISSIONS (1581 - 1596)
In September 17, 1581, three Jesuits from Mexico arrived in Manila.  They were Fr. Antonio Sedeño, the superior of the group, Fr. Alonso Sanchez and Brother Nicolas Gallardo and were sent at the request of Don Guido de Lavezares, the second governor of the Philippines, and Fray Domingo de Salazar, O.P., its first bishop.  Father General Mercurian’s instructions were that they should familiaries themselves with conditions in the colony and report on the advisability of establishing a permanent Jesuit mission.
While carrying out these instructions, they made themselves useful in many ways.  They had been given a house outside the walled city in a fishing village called Lagyo, between the present districts of Ermita and Malate; but they went daily into the city to perform their priestly ministry among the Spanish settlers, their Filipino domestics, and the Chinese and Japanese immigrants who were beginning to flock to the Philippines, attracted by the trade.
Father Sedeño is credited with having introduced the arts of stone-cutting and brick-making to the Philippines, and with having supervised the construction of the first stone buildings in Manila.  Father Sanchez was entrusted with highly important tasks by both the civil and ecclesiastical authorities. When Bishop Salazar convoked a synod in 1582, he appointed Sanchez its secretary.  Later that year, Governor Ronquillo sent him on a delicate mission to Macao.  Philip II of Spain had just won the disputed succession to the crown of Portugal, and it was important that the Portuguese of Macao should be persuaded as quickly as possible to give him their allegiance.  Sanchez accomplished this mission successfully.   Upon his return, the Spaniards in the Philippines met in an assembly to deliberate on their necessities, and sent him back to Europe as their accredited agent with the king and the pope.
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THE MEDIA AS MENACE by Horacio de la Costa S.J.

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A submission in lieu of a Paper to the General Assembly of UNDA, Dublin, 1974; AdM Archives

(*As national director of mass media of the Philippine hierarchy, Fr. James Reuter’s mandate was expanded to include the entire Roman Catholic Church in the Philippines, thus, making him the Church’s all-around media expert.)

This communication is the result of a breakdown to communications.  Owing to the disabilities to which the Roman postal service has for some time been subject, Father Reuter* and I were unable to exchange the necessary information regarding my attendance at this Assembly in time for me to attend it.  All I can do, therefore, is to send in this submission through the courtesy of Father Tucci, along with my best wishes for the success of the Assembly.  It is a very sketchy submission, hastily written to raise a few questions on the relationship between the mass media and the process of development.  Since they are question born of ignorance and hence more likely to confuse than to clarify issues, more likely to infuriate than to inform, it may be just as well that I am compelled to raise them from a distance. 

As Catholic broadcasters, you are of course aware that this is the centenary year of the birth of that remarkable Catholic journalist, Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874 – 1974).  It will thus be appropriate, and may even be entertaining to recall a piece “On Broadcasting” which he wrote in the 1920’s for the Illustrated London News. 

The tenor of G.K.’s remarks is that this new-fangled instrument called the radio may possibly be useful to the aged and infirm, but bids fair to be a menace to those who are neither.  He recommends that the radio receivers be distributed as an act of charity to the immobilized – the sick in hospitals, crippled old ladies crouched by the fireside – but strictly forbidden to anyone who can walk.

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THE FILIPINO: AN IDENTIKIT by Horacio de la Costa, S.J. (Part I)

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When all is said and done, what is a Filipino?  How do you identify him in a lineup that includes an Indonesian cabinet minister, a Hongkong taxi driver, an Indian guru, a Neopolitan monsignor, a banderillo from Seville, and a Puerto-Rican bus boy from New York Hilton?  Can one do so simply from Bertillon measurements, skin coloring, shape of nose, and the presence (or absence) of the Mongolian eyefold?  Or does one have to resort to more intangible indications, “mindset”, “spiritual profile,” or whatever is the currently fashionable term for speculations not subject to measurement and hence more enticing to the essayist, as being more difficult to dispute?

Allow this essayist to attempt the latter option – the line of least resistance for one who, after four years in the hard-driving, task-oriented West, has returned to the shade of his native mango tree to recover in a supine position his Filipino identity.

This particular mango tree happens to be within sight and sound of the sea; and so the first thought that comes to one is that Filipinos were in the beginning a sea-faring people.  They had to be, for how else could they have populated an archipelago?  There are, of course, those earlier Filipinos  who came dry-shod (or barefoot) over the land-bridges of some forgotten ice age.  But even they, who claimed for themselves the proud title of Lords of the Land, will admit upon reflection that the Filipino identity begins with the sea-faring Malay, the adventurer who named his settlement on sheltered beach or river-mouth, as a matter of course, after his sailing vessel, his barangay.  

Barangay: the name today of a community of peasants – of landlubbers.  Which is a puzzlement.  Where on earth (or sea) did the seamen go?  Before the Spaniards came, they were still there; very much so.  We have fleeting glimpses of them trading from Batangas to Sabah to Malacca; a triangular trade, as economists are at pains to inform us, except that these venturesome spirits did not hesitate to protract one or the other side of the triangle.  Coasting, it would seem, up to the Malay peninsula and down the Indian subcontinent, they ran before the wind to Madagascar, where as a result, people still speak a sort of Tagalog called Malgache.

Even after the Spaniards came the seamen survived – after a fashion.  If the Filipino Muslims of the south were able to successfully to resist Spanish domination, it was in part because their light swift caracaos were more than a match for the lumbering Venetian galleys of the colonial government’s interisland fleets.  And the historian Delgado goes on record that if the Spaniards officered the fabulous Manila galleons, those who built them, and sailed them, and manned their guns, and sent Dutch raiders yelping back to Batavia with their tails between their legs, were Filipinos.

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THE FILIPINO: AN IDENTIKIT by Horacio de la Costa (Part II)

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THE PROBLEM OF ASSIMILATION OF MINORITIES

The ultimate answer to this question of unassimilated minorities, Muslim and Chinese, is fairly simple.  They must be assimilated – or, more precisely, integrated – into the national community.  The problem is how.  The problem is the process.

Whatever shape that process may take, it will take consensus on a least two points
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First: on the part of the national community, an effective willingness not only to accept but to welcome pluralism.  We should make it perfectly clear to all that in this national community, historically Christian, there is today, if there was none yesterday, a secure and honored place for Islam.  At the same time, we should make it perfectly clear to ourselves that our indigenous culture has been modified by techniques, attitudes and insights derived from cultures other and older than our own; specifically, from the Chinese culture; and that this contribution is truly an enrichment, not a negation or distortion, of our national values.

Second: on the part of the minorities, an effective willingness, not only to suffer but to seek integration.  They must realize that the only way to win full acceptance in a national community is to swear allegiance to it, an allegiance as irreversible as the vows of marriage: “for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part.”  And to make good this oath by deeds.  And to be convinced that by this oblation, they do not diminish but, on the contrary, enhance their particular cultural personality, since they make it contributory to a culture still in the making; a civilization that may be (who knows) the equal of that which began as a small settlement in a fertile bend of the Yellow River and became in due course, China.

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WHAT ARE WE UP TO

By | Published Thursday, February 1, 2018

Horacio de la Costa S.J.

When I was younger, and Father [Robert] Gannon was younger still - that is to say, a very long time ago -  mention of the Philippines inevitably evoked in the American imagination a picture of blue skies and palm-fringed shores, with every palm tree held upright by a Filipino leaning against it, strumming a guitar.

Whether or not it had any relationship to reality, that was the image. One wonders what the American image of the Philippines is today. Perhaps none whatever; simply a blank. Why should there be? Americans have a lot more important things than the Philippines to think about these days. But if image there is, it must be a quite different image from that of former years, if only because the realities are different.

Certainly, despite typhoons, earthquakes, and assorted calamities, the palm trees are still there, as befits the world’s largest exporter of copra. But of the guitar-strumming boys, one has probably gone off to manage a copper mine, another is a Jesuit running for the Constitutional Convention, and a third commands a unit of the New People’s Army, and has a price on his head.

It is still possible for an airline (which shall be nameless) to describe the Philippines in a television advertisement as “a lovely cluster of islands peopled by lovelies,” for there are, admittedly, a few lovelies scattered about. But it is no longer possible, if it ever was, to think of the Philippines as the most carefreee of combinations, a land of the morning where it seemeth always afternoon.
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THE CHURCH AND DEMOCRACY

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 by Horacio de la Costa S.J.
Paper written in 1954, typewritten original in AdM Archives; published by 2B3C Foundation in the volume entitled “Selected Essays and the Filipino and His Problems Today”
The basis for a discussion of this subject may be provided by endeavoring to define the two terms involved and the nature of the relationship between them.
By the Church is meant, I would suppose, the Roman Catholic Church; if so, our discussion will prescind from other forms of organized religion and even of organized Christianity.
What is the Church? We should first define it non-commitally; in terms which would be acceptable even to the unbeliever. In this sense, the Church is an association which has for its purpose to satisfy the religious needs of its members, or what those members consider to be their religious needs.
To the believer, that is, to the Catholic, the Church is, in addition, a society founded by Christ the Son of God, and by Him endowed with all the means necessary to attain its end, which is the supernatural salvation and perfection of the members in this life and in the next.
What is democracy? All will accept, I think, the sufficiently distinctive yet non-commital definition that it is that form of political organization in which the authority resides in an inherent and permanent manner in the people, that is, the generality of citizens. “Inherentally and permanently”; that is to say, the citizens of a democracy; while designating certain periodically elected  representatives to conduct in their behalf and with their authority the actual operations of government, do not thereby divest themselves of that authority, but retain at all times the power to recall such representatives, replace them with others, and supervise and control their actuations in office.
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TSINOYS AMONG US

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THE CHINESE BEARING GIFTS  by Horacio de la Costa S.J.

Somewhat revised from an address to students and their parents at Xavier School, San Juan in 1971.

May I make some preliminary statements about Philippine culture?  The first remark would express an  obvious but important fact, namely: Philippine culture is in the process of development, just as is every aspect of our country. It is not, in other words, a culture which has reached full development, like that of China or Japan, but one that is in the course of development.

There are two ways of conceiving this development, and the course it should take. One way is to claim that it ought to be a process by which we gradually get rid of what we consider alien to our culture, as though we were peeling off the successive skin of an onion, in the end we would be left only with what is truly indigenous and Filipino.

That is one way of conceiving it, and you have probably had experience with or have read and listened to people who conceived of the development of our culture this way. “Let us get rid of what we imitate from other culture,” they say and “hold fast only to what us truly native to our culture.”

The other way of conceiving our cultural development is accept the fact that over the course of time we have borrowed many things from other nations and other cultures.

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Kidney Disease and Virgin Coconut Oil

By | Published Saturday, January 6, 2018

Virgin Coconut Oil because of its high TOCOTRIENOL content treats type 2 diabetic patients. Hyperglycemia is an abnormally high blood glucose (blood sugar) level. It is a hallmark sign of diabetes (both type 1 diabetes and type 2 diabetes) and prediabetes.

Coconut oil has been known to clear up and heal urinary tract infection (UTI) and kidney infections. The Medium Chain Fatty Acids in the oil work as a natural antibiotic by disrupting the lipid coating on bacteria and killing them. Research also shows that coconut oil directly protects the liver from damage.

Coconut water also helps hydrate and support the healing process. Doctors have even injected coconut water to clear up kidney stones. Coconut is a powerful superfood, which is evident given all these tremendous coconut oil benefits.

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