Columbans in Negros: Under the Acacia, 20-23 October 2008

My column in Negros Times for 20-23 October 2008.

Columbans in Negros

The writer edits Misyon.

This week sees the culminating activities of the year-long celebrations for the 75 years of the Diocese of Bacolod. Columbans have been very much part of the history of the diocese since July 1950 when we were given responsibility for the southern part of Negros Occidental that was to become the Diocese of Kabankalan in 1987. They also took care for some years of Ma-ao Central and of Canlaon, now in the Diocese of San Carlos. For a while too the Columbans provided chaplains to St. Paul College, now St. Paul University, Dumaguete City, and to Sta. Theresita’s Academy, Silay City.

I was totally unaware of the Columban connection with Canlaon City until I got a phone call last year from Sr. Susan Turingan, FAS, of St. Joseph’s College there asking if a Columban could be present for the Golden Jubilee of the school. It had been started by the late Fathers Colum O’Halpin and Patrick Hynes, both of whom spent all their active lives as priests in Negros. Indeed, Father O’Halpin was serving in Biscom, Binalbagan, when he died in 2003 and is buried in Kabankalan.

My lack of awareness as a Columban of our Canlaon connection reflects a characteristic of the members of the Missionary Society of St. Columban. We are secular priests – not religious – with our roots in the diocesan clergy of Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and the USA. The men who came to Negros in 1950 had inherited a tradition of “rugged individualism”, getting on with the job and responding to the needs of the people. One of the greatest needs they saw was to enable poor children to have the chance to go to high school.

My first assignment in the Philippines was in Tubod, Lanao del Norte, from 1972 to 1973. My parish priest, the late Fr. James Flynn, one of whose classmates, Fr. Patrick Hurley, is still serving in Biscom, once told me of an encounter he had on the launch crossing Panguil Bay from Tubod to Ozamiz City. He happened to be sitting beside a young man who was a journalist. When this man learned that Father Flynn was a Columban he told him to read The Manila Times during the next few days.

A few days later Father Flynn found an article there about the largest chain of Catholic schools in the Philippines – those run by Columbans – and the writer was the late Max Soliven.Yet the Columbans have never run “Columban” schools. They established parochial schools in Zambales, Pangasinan, Rizal, Negros and northwest Mindanao. Very few were called “St. Columban’s”. The priests used to spend much of their annual vacation in Manila going from one office to another filling up forms and going from one supplier to another to get what was needed for the coming school year. In at least one instance a school was burned down in March and a new school was up and running by June. This was done through the hard work of local people and generous benefactors from overseas, often people struggling financially themselves.

I sometimes get annoyed and frustrated when Catholic schools are presented as “exclusive”. Some are. I’ve no difficulty whatever with that. But the typical Catholic school is a parochial one, run by the parish priest or by a religious congregation of Sisters or Brothers. Some religious schools that charge higher fees use some of their income to support schools for poorer children. Many schools struggle to pay their teachers a decent salary while not keeping out students from very poor families.

In the last few decades public high schools have spread to more remote areas where there were no such schools before. But in many instances it was Catholic missionaries who first made it possible for the poor to get a second-level education. There are many such groups in the Diocese of Bacolod and thank God for all of them.During the Martial Law years Columbans were very much involved in the struggle for justice, in response to the grave needs of the people and to the call of Vatican II and of Pope Paul VI in particular. Pope John Paul II reinforced that call in Bacolod in 1981. On that visit he met the widows of Alex Garsales and Herman Muleta, from Barangay Tanawan, Kabankalan, two men whose bodies were found in shallow graves in 1980 months after they were murdered. Alex had played the part of Jesus in a Good Friday Passion play that year a few days before he and Herman were abducted from their homes. In 1983 the “Negros Nine” saga started with the arrest of Columban Fathers Brian Gore and Niall O’Brien, diocesan priest Fr. Vicente Dangan and six lay leaders, falsely charged with the murder of Mayor Pablo Sola of Kabankalan. This was to draw international attention to Negros, with media people coming especially form Ireland and Australia, because of the two Columban priests. Eventually the charges were shown to be the travesties they were.

Father Dangan has since died. So has Fr. Niall O’Brien. In 1988 he became the founding editor of Misyon, the bi-monthly magazine of the Columbans in the Philippines. Earlier this year it ceased to be a printed magazine and is now primarily online.

Another need seen by a Columban in Negros was that of the Deaf. The late Fr. Joseph Coyle established Welcome Home in Puentebella, Bacolod City, a residence for out of town Deaf students who attend public schools in the city. During the nearly 17 years since his death the work he began has grown under the direction of Mrs. Salving V. Tinsay who died recently. Your columnist regularly celebrates Sunday Mass in Sign Language in Welcome Home.

As a Columban, I am grateful to God for the faithful service of so many Columbans here during the last 58 years and for many blessings we Columbans have received from God through the people of Negros.

Email: mailto:mundertheacacia@gmail.com

'Under the Acacia' - my new weekly column, 22-23 September 2008

I've been invited to write a weekly column by the Negros Times, a new newspaper here in Bacolod published every Monday, Wednesday and Friday and aimed mainly at business people.

As you can read below, I'm taking up something I did before when I was based in Cebu City.

Introduction

The author is a Columban priest from Ireland who has been in the Philippines most of the time since 1971. Since October 2002 he has been based in Bacolod City as editor of Misyon www.misyononline.com, the magazine of the Columbans, and also has a personal blog at www.bangortobobbio.blogspot.com.

"When I was in Tangub City, Misamis Occidental, from 1978 till 1981, I often found myself chatting with people under the big acacia outside the old convento that was built by Japanese carpenters before World War II under the direction of the then parish priest, an American Jesuit. I’m sure the Japanese carpenters sat in the shade of that tree, as did Jesuit parish priests from the USA and Columban priests from that country and from Australia, England and Ireland down the years, chatting with their parishioners.

The Columbans took over the parish of St. Michael in the town of Tangub in 1938 under Australian Father Francis Chapman who later led the first Columbans in Negros in 1950 in what is now the Diocese of Kabankalan. He died in Cagayan de Oro in 2004. I happened to be the last Columban parish priest in Tangub City, holding that position for less than three months. However, I stayed on there for two more years in the newly-established Paul VI Formation House set up by the bishops of the “DOPIM” area – Dipolog, Ozamiz, Pagadian, Iligan and Marawi for their post-college / pre-theology seminarians. The one-year program there was moved to St Mary’s Seminary, Ozamiz City, in 1982.

When my late father John, who spent all of his working-life as a carpenter and as a foreman on construction sites, visited the Philippines in 1981, he spent about a month with me in Tangub. Though he didn’t have a word of Visayan and those who spoke English couldn’t understand him because of his accent, he was able to communicate friendship, especially to children, sitting on one of the benches under the big acacia, even though he was basically shy. His visit, in particular, made me aware of the acacia as a meeting-place.

When Juanito V. Jabat, then editor, now publisher, of The Freeman in Cebu invited me in the late 1980s to write a weekly column, I chose the title Under the Acacia. I wrote every week for about nine years. Editor-in-chief Edwin Karl G. Ombion of Negros Times has kindly invited me to appear every Monday in the paper and so after a break of nine or ten years I take my place “under the acacia” once again.

Until 1994, when I moved from Lianga, Surigao del Sur, to Manila, I relied on a sturdy typewriter which I had used for more than twenty years. Lianga didn’t even have a single telephone that time and I knew nothing about computers. I left my old typewriter with a parishioner who was trying to make ends meet by typing term-papers for students. She had been using an old machine in the convento, as I recall. I was delighted at not having to take my typewriter to yet another location. But I was even more delighted that it could help a hardworking person to earn an honest living.

I visited Ireland between Lianga and Manila in the summer of 1994 and took a short course in computers for missionaries. Our instructor was a religious sister who had worked in an African country for many years. She wasn’t great at teaching computer-skills but was a great motivator, telling us stories of lives that had been saved because of modern communications. I’m grateful to her for that. I learned how to use the computer mainly by practice, often feeling frustrated, as I still do on occasion when I’m trying to learn some new procedure.

When I started as editor of Misyon six years ago, we had only dial-up service on the internet and often it was impossible to connect. Broadband has been a blessing, not only in terms of speed and accessibility, but for research and, at times, even crisis counseling with persons on the other side of the world. I’ve also found the PLDT service here far more reliable than in Manila, especially at weekends.

The editor, like the editor of The Freeman before, hasn’t asked me to write on any specific topics. My column before wasn’t a “religious” one nor will it be now. I believe in the opening words of Gaudium et Spes, The Church in the Modern World, issued by Pope Paul VI and the world’s bishops on December 7, 1965, at the end of the Second Vatican Council: “The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ. Indeed, nothing genuinely human fails to raise an echo in their hearts”.

Each of us has many layers of identity. When I travel abroad I identify myself as an Irishman living in the Philippines. I’ve spent nearly all of my adult life here and so have developed a different identity in some ways from that of my brother, who has never lived outside of Ireland. But he and I, as the sons of the same father and mother, share an identity that goes far deeper than being Irish.

A basic part of my identity is being a priest. Holy Orders touch and change a man at the heart of his being. But even more fundamental than that identity, because without it I could not be a priest, is being a Catholic Christian, by virtue of my baptism, a son of God the Father.

It is my hope that whatever I write, on any topic, will somehow reflect that basic identity and the words of St Paul: “And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him” (Col 3:17). undertheacacia@gmail.com.