Many years ago, I was appointed as head of the Media Board of the Dominican Province of the Philippines. The Media Board plans and implements projects and programs related to the media apostolate. Among our programs is the “Siete Palabras” (The Seven Last Words) which...
As far as I can remember, since I was a child, the holy week starts with Palm Sunday, when we buy or make palms made from young coconut fronds and are brought to church to be blessed before the mass. We would go to church...
Growing up as a child in a Catholic family, I have fond memories of the Lenten Season and Holy Week. Days of fasting and abstinence were strictly observed in our house in Malabon, having a very religious paternal grandmother, whose house was just a few...
I cannot now remember when I visited Sagada and the Banaue Rice Terraces. It must have been sometime in the late 1990s or in the early years of 2000. As far as I can remember, I was still using a film camera then, and not...
[caption id="attachment_6064" align="alignright" width="300"] Photo Source: Lakbay Baguio[/caption]Calamba, the birthplace of our national hero Dr. Jose Rizal sits at the foot of Mount Makiling in Laguna, the southern Tagalog region of Luzon. It is in this now highly commercialized city that the Dominican Pre-Novitiate, the...
On December 28, 2014, Air Asia flight QZ8501 from Surabaya, Indonesia disappeared halfway on its flight to Singapore. Days after its disappearance, the wreckage of the airplane and bodies of a handful of passengers were found. Members of a family belonging to the parish of...
It was when I entered the Dominican seminary that I learned that the ashes used to mark the foreheads of Catholics with crosses on Ash Wednesday were from the dried palms blessed on Palm Sunday of the previous year. My teacher in the pre-Novitiate also...
Dominicans consider themselves and have been known as itinerant preachers. From the time St. Dominic established his first band of preachers 800 years ago, they have since gone to places outside their own territories and were dispersed in small groups to preach the truth and...
One of my first assignments many years ago, was at Letran College in Intramuros, Manila. I was given the post of Vice Rector for Religious Affairs and head of the Campus Ministry office. Under that office is a group of college students called Letran Youth...
I entered the seminary after I graduated from high school, at the tender age of seventeen. At that time I did not have a clear idea of what to be a Dominican meant. The only thing I knew then was that I wanted to become...