A day before Labor Day and Comparing Mother Teresa to Saint Cory

BAYANGGUDAW NOTES. 4 SEPT 2016. SUN. N1.
A day before Labor Day and Comparing Mother Teresa to Saint Cory.

[For Sra Delia Caguioa Guran of Madrid: because she wanted me to compare the two women we know in this lifetime of ours.]

FOR REASONS I have yet to understand, I was there in da Pinas when Cory Aquino died and had her services at the Manila Cathedral. I was on vacation from some tra-la-la when she succumbed to colon cancer.

For reasons I do not know, I was there too as a young father and a young instructor at the Royal and Pontifical University of Santo Tomas when EDSA People Power I happened, and a UST contingent headed by my moral theology professor The Rev Fausto Gomez headed to EDSA against the wishes of the two of the most powerful people of that university. The Rev Fr Frederick Fermin, past rector, was there too. While marching, the memo of that Filipino rector threatening those joining the EDSA revolt haunted me so.

For reasons I do not now, Cory Aquino became the yellow president, and Ateneo was in euphoria, with one priest even saying that the whole thing was grace.

By then, a seminary invited me to teach in their philosophy program and head its publications office, and promptly, because of that euphoria, they got Kris Aquino to cut the ribbon of that seminary that had moved its college to an unused hillside lot somewhere in Marikina where by then, with the blessings of Candazo the Yellow Man, all slum dwellers of Metro Manila occupied the unused lands of Marikina, the farmlands on the banks of the Marikina River included.

That is the story of Cory for you that eventually included the massacre of farmers of Mendiola. That is the same Cory that prayed the rosary a lot, but did not understand the meaning of social justice even if she put together a Freedom Constitution and then this 1987 Constitution that declared, among others, so many assumptions as truth.

Now, let us segue to Mother Teresa.

She worked in silence, and at the Tayuman area, in that center of the sick and the dying close to the Tayuman church, I know that her group and her sisters and her volunteers came in to take the sick and the dying from the streets of Manila and took good care of them.

Each time I pass by Tayuman, I would tell my children how I worked there.

The farcical thing is this: one Jesuit priest had the temerity to even consider having Cory Aquino as the next saint of the oppressed peoples of the Philippines.

In all the saintly specializations, what would then be the reason for us to be calling out to Cory? On what ground are we going to ask for intercession for?

Holy carabao and holy cow!