A Record of the Early Years
By Charlie Avila – The Gardener
Dedicated to Ermelina “Elin” Belamide Mondejar Adopted Member of this Class
I Early Exposure
To “begin at start,” my memory goes a couple of years before Tagaytay, when we were in Second Year College (1961) at “Christ the King” (CKMS). We had a caroling group that was invited to sing for Misa de Gallo at Camp Panopio. Father Garduce, a PC Chaplain, who was a friend of our mentor, Father Braganza, SVD said we’d get to meet Luis Taruc, Alfredo Saulo, and some other political prisoners – actually Chinese students from Cebu accused of doing propaganda activities for the Communist Party of China – really far-out accusations even then. In any case, they all looked gentle and proper and pious that I had a hard time processing the concept “crime” and the phenomenon of kindness embodied right before me by these detainees.
Luis Taruc was the only name that I recognized easily. Saulo was a scholar, a historian, a compleat nationalist. Even now I still hear his passionate lines on practice: “Christianity is great but Christians do not practice what they preach. Unlike communists, who practice what they do preach. Practice what you preach and you will be quite effective when you preach what you practice. Be like Christ. He was a real communist,” Saulo said, “because his unity of theory and practice was total and absolute.”
In 1961 those lines were quite a shocker and a challenge, given, too, that the sincerity of the speaker was indubitable. He was in effect also telling us that Christians were usually not good Christians while communists were usually good communists. What an insult! Yet, we thought, how true! And, therefore, what a challenge!
This must be why it happened that some of us found ourselves going rather frequently to Camp Panopio. Later, newly arrived Austrian Father Josef Taschner, the SVD Focolarino, one of whose first recruits we were, often joined us. Before long we hit on the idea of a signature campaign to free these political prisoners – a campaign started by us religious teenagers then that proved rather impressive and effective although it took three to four years total and two Presidents in all, the first Macapagal and the first Marcos, before their freedom was gained. The first Aquino (Ninoy) was not yet all that prominent in our universe but he was already there, as you will see in a while.
Within the SVD community, our practice met with mild opposition. But we also got more than moderate support from seniors who must have been amused with both our naïveté, and our native talent for alliance building because they had seen how we succeeded in recruiting to our side “heavyweights” like Father Horacio de la Costa, SJ and Rufino Cardinal Santos of Manila, nuns, priests and other seminarians, and the Jesuits of the Chinese Province headquartered at Xavier School but not all of the SVDs at St. Jude’s.
We were in Novitiate this time and the prison apostolate under Father Braganza’s guidance and with Frater Fernando Villones as companion focused on Quezon City Jail. The older sister of (here it is) Ninoy Aquino, Mila Albert, accompanied sometimes by her mother Aurora Aquino of the Catholic Women’s League, at other times by her husband Charlie Albert, a city councilor belonging to the QC Citizens’ League, would pick us up at Christ the King early Sunday morning for liturgy at city jail. Between this jail and Camp Panopio we were learning a lot not merely about different kinds of prisons and local politics but about a broader Philippine sociology and particularly how the land question affected both barrio and urban folk. When Taruc first explained to us the true nature of agrarian problems, our profound ignorance must have made him the most patient teacher in town. Between him and Saulo as tutors some of us sure got a good dose of Filipinism, united in theory and practice.
II New Home
We moved to Tagaytay in late 1963; we were that seminary’s pioneer class. We joined the Brothers who had come in even earlier than us. We were second year novices and first year philosophers at the time: also part-time gardeners and amateur carpenters, feeling oh-so-far from the Manila we had left behind but whose lights we could see at night in the distance when we were not busy identifying the stars and constellations whose even sharper and brighter lights never failed to attract us, Astronomy students of Father Theodore Kalwey that we were.
Our class was very supportive of each other; so, we did not mind being carted out to a “foreign land,” like dark and cold and very quiet Tagaytay seemed then, to physically and academically build a new school. We had our books and our teachers, excellent all in their various fields of expertise, and all classes talked of what was the latest, what was going on in the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council that had just opened the year before.
The rest of the Scholasticate joined us in 1964. Very soon, a kind of system was developed by our superiors that enabled easy physical “toing”-and-“froing” between Tagaytay (DWST) and Manila (CKMS), all necessary permissions strictly adhered to – to do research work for dissertations in the various libraries, to assist out-of-seminary Sunday Masses, to attend meetings of an academic or spiritual purpose, or, (“illegally” for some) – purely to be out of the Tagaytay barrio and get a chance to re-experience big city. There was a drive “ad extra,” for better or for worse, that was blowing across the globe as the Council deliberated, and we felt Energy Uncreated (the Holy Spirit) help us with proper discernment, gifting us with a kind of indefatigability.
III The summer of Sixty Four
1964 was the banner year. Dean of Studies Braganza, quick on the draw and with lots of personal contacts in high places, organized seminars at CKMS to utilize productively the time gap afforded by a decision of Education Secretary Anding Roces to move the start of school year from June to September (a move, by the way, being tried again now but did not succeed then).
Easily the most impressive, inspired and the most inspiring of the speakers we had was the Dean of Law of the Ateneo de Manila at Padre Faura who was at the same time Founder and President of an organization called the Federation of Free Farmers. He was a close-degree cousin of Braganza with whom he grew up in the town of the Hundred Islands. Those of us who had been exposed to the Taruc-Saulo private teach-ins became fertile ground for the Montemayor sowing of the seeds of Catholic Social Teaching.
Here was a man who I thought was our guest but effectively showed us our own house, which was also his. One hour after another in this summer workshop he uncovered for us in depth and with simplicity what he suggested might as well be called the best-kept secrets of the house, namely, Catholic Social Teaching, and with particular reference to the nation’s majority populace, the Filipino farmer.
This layman’s conversance with Scripture and the social encyclicals not merely in the abstract but incarnate in the particulars of Philippine society, economics and politics was so powerfully communicated that we finally had an experience of the Word as a Two-Edged Sword: the message of social justice in the mid-1960s. He quite succeeded in making some of us look seriously and in-depth into the “hated ground” of ownership and ask the basic moral question: “What is just with regard to the land?” To the philosophically inclined, here was the basic relation between being and having, explained quite simply in the Philippine setting: can any society attain well-being thatdoes not care for what is just in the concept of having?
In the Philippines of those years the mighty were the big landlords who also became the big capitalists: middlemen, money lenders, bureaucrats, industrialists, educators and ecclesiastical leaders. Ownership of land led to ownership of varied kinds of capital. Because of the agrarian nature of the economy, land wealth was the prime source of all wealth and privilege, and the basic status of the deprived and the oppressed was landlessness. The Church as a moral institution offered anything but a warm welcome to the urgent moral question of the day. Its heart lay where its treasure was – in the contributions of the landlords and in the wealth accumulated through centuries of sword-and-cross methods of grabbing the lands of the peasants.
With the summer of sixty-four our academic and spiritual world would never be the same again, never so smug or so comfortable again. The challenge had been effectively hurled. Vatican II was thousands of miles away. But now a man, close by, standing tall in flesh and blood – a scholarly activist and an activist scholar – had been sent our way effectively opening our windows to RELEVANCE. That word, “relevance,” would later become a fashionable buzzword but for many of us during this summer seminar it was the equivalent of REAL, it denoted MEANINGFUL, it meant AUTHENTIC, and it seemed to us like the very aggiornamento or updating that a beloved Pope far away was urging us to undertake. Christianity, anyone? Christianity now? Montemayor had an answer: go to your “Mother and Teacher” now. Here she is, “Mater et Magistra.”
IV The Struggle for Balancing Academia and Social Action
Nonoy Bastes and I, two Visayan boys, translated the encyclical into Question and Answer format in English and Tagalog – an effort that rather touched Montemayor. Why not, indeed, share “the secret” directly with the farmers themselves? Weekends, he said, we had a standing invitation to go with him to the various barrios within a few hours’ drivable range from Metro Manila. We were now being exposed directly to the wisdom of the peasants, to Mang Igui and Mang Peping, to Mang Asis and Mang Perino, to Aling Sion and Fred Tolentino, to so many leaders with the bare minimum of formal education who were much earlier movers and catalysts among the Huks, the Colorums and the Sakdalistas: folk-Marxists, millenarians, bible-quoters who hardly read the bible, all so serious and yet never without the quality of humor.
But, of course, we always had to go back home to Tagaytay. We were students, then, weren’t we? We had to find a way to harmonize these obligations with the pastoral accent of the on-going Vatican Council whose caritas urgebat nos. Although we found all kinds of excuses to spend weekends with FFF work in Laguna, Rizal, Batangas, Bulacan or Pampanga, we were now also spending weekday afternoons roaming the barrios surrounding the seminary buildings – Mag-asawang Ilat, Maitim Primero and Segundo, Buho, San Jose, Ulat, Pasong Langka, Lumil. Talk of brisk walking in cassock and carrying an all-purpose staff – that was us innocently, quietly, carrying out in practice the adage enshrined in the pages of Mater et Magistra: “See, Judge, Act!”
My Visayan Tagalog carried me fine to great story-telling sessions with the people in the barrios, on the pathways, in the field, getting to know whom they considered their leaders, formally and informally, their economic and social activities, the depth and style of their faith and religiosity, etc. The wonder of wonders was that most of the time we managed to be on time for the common activities of the seminary community. We tried to excel (and largely succeeded) in our academic duties; so, we were not missed. But, before long, we were noticed.
Two senior Fratres about to be ordained, Aloysius Rodriguez and Pio Eugenio, on two separate occasions walking from the main highway to the seminary were greeted by ordinary folk, some neighbourhood farmers, who felt comfortable enough to try to engage them in conversation and ask whether they knew me as they were sure we lived together in those big buildings. Remember again, this was still the time when we wore cassocks almost all the time we were in public. And we were supposed to be busy with our studies inside those comfortable seminary buildings, and strictly follow the rule – no leaving the seminary grounds without the Prefect’s permission.
V The Social Action Committee
Aloy and Pio confronted me. What had I been doing all this while? After listening to me they suggested that I go ahead and organize a “Social Action” Department in the Militia Regis Mission Club that had a prominent bulletin board in the dining room. The Club President Louis Lapuz and his successor Renato Paras enthusiastically welcomed this development. Now we were “legit” in our social action thrust. The clandestine character of our ministry we now considered ended. Tensions with Father Prefect Frederick Scharpf simmered down a bit. Heretofore we were often charged with exaggerating the application of a humorous adage that in matters ad extra it was often better to ask forgiveness than to ask permission. Now we could transparently program concerns and activities and get so many volunteers. And we could have one of the faculty (in the first instance Father Manfred Mueller) give us full support and guidance. He even ordered a special vehicle from Austria for our use, a cute “Haflinger” as it was called, that definitely had more power than a lawn mower and took us kilometers around.
The Social Action Department became a Social Action Committee because SAC sounded better than SAD. The word “Committee” also became a misnomer because although it was supposed to be a division of the Club, a mere committee, it nonetheless functioned more often than not as a committee of the whole.
“Social” became a word with a wide application. We agreed that catechetical work (teaching catechism to children and youngsters), an end in itself, was also an effective means to reach the adult and older folk. The main characteristic of the social action effort was precisely that: it was no mere theory, it was praxis – it was for real. It was not a distraction from our studies; it was an inspiration for our studies.
For instance, the barrio folk around who, by the way, were now coming around to our Sunday liturgy in big numbers had a big common concern in health and medicine. In the beginning our style was to “hassle” the medical Doctors Velasco, Belamide and Taningco in not-so-nearby Silang for assistance: assistance in terms of free medical care for the very poor people we brought to them from the barrios around as well as free sample medicines and vitamins.
At the Belamide-owned “Cavite Institute” one “COO” (“Child of Owner”) named Elin was such a big help in this and other concerns. We also sent seminarians to Lourdes Hospital to train in basic health care. With Father Manfred as Adviser, our ministry went one step higher. We imported intra societatem a full-time medical practitioner, SVD Brother Ignatius from Germany, and set up a clinic near the entrance to the seminary grounds which became so useful to the communities around. The arrival of Brother Ignatius retired our “faith-healing” activities in the barrios for good.
As for their other urgently felt need, easier access to potable water, we asked our Brother Engineer, Brother Joseph, to have the community requirements in mind when the seminary-still-under-construction had to find ways to be self-reliant in water in any case. Assisted by Frater Conrado Balweg who surprised us with his gift of water divining, Brother Joe dug deep and deeper and still deeper, with total faith in Balweg, and hit water in abundance more than 700 feet below surface. What a boon to our peasant neighbors and what a boost to an incipient ministry of cooperation between seminary and community.
The folks in the barrios around through their own leaders began to experience a new élan in looking for what their community needed for progress. There was power in informal meetings. Aloy Rodriguez, who was the natural “politico” in the social action committee, made sure the local politicians appreciated rather than feared the gentle breeze of organizing blowing across the barrios of an otherwise sleepy city. With the election and swearing-in to office of the first chapter of the FFF in Mag-Asawang Ilat sitio of Baryo Maitim Segundo, a discussion with Mayor Isaac Tolentino followed regarding the barrio’s urgent need for a road connecting their isolated existence to the mainstream. It may look small, said the Mayor, but for a small sitio what they are asking is such a big deal given the city’s meagre budget. You need to convince landowners to cede right of way and donate land rather than the city expropriating and paying just compensation, which kind of money it did not have. Aloy and I assured the Mayor that the local organization of the FFF would make all this their problem.
FFF’s Montemayor, in response to his Tagaytay chapter’s request, looked around and then wrote JUSMAG ( the Joint US Military Advisory Group), and faster than the Mayor could imagine, graders and what-have-you came on Maitim Segundo and opened up the community in a physical sense – to the world. Easier marketing of their goods by renting a jeep and bringing them to Baclaran FFF cooperative-style increased the income of our neighbors. Their marketing consultant was Ahte Fely Arquillo, Taruc’s niece and virtually adopted daughter. All was well with the world.
VI Lux in Tenebris
More local politicians now took note of the SVD seminary. There were many religious houses around; this one was different. We did not only study and pray; we were involved in community work. And we were “politicized” – oriented not merely to do-gooding but to enabling the people to feel their own power in their own “polis.” Beyond Isaac Tolentino, came Governor Delfin Montano and would-be-Board-member Johnny Remulla – seeking whom to talk to in the SVD seminary as, indeed, they felt the influence our social action work was having on more and more barrios around. The PC Commander, Captain Stefani Domingo, remarked that the “hueting” agents of the area had now also become coop organizers of SVD change agents. The murders within the Tagaytay-Calamba-Talisay triangle were gradually diminished. Carnapped vehicles in Manila were more easily recovered hereabouts if victims went to Father Anselmo Bustos, SVD and the latter coordinated with Aloy and me to negotiate crimeless recovery. Social Action’s “wasting time with the people” policy necessarily led to mutual trust and confidence between the seminary and the community. When the NBI and later Father Bob Garon were looking for “local contacts” to help them set up a drug-rehab center, the local contacts who could also access the Visayan streets of Tondo were the SVDs social action agents – under the collective leadership of Aloy, myself and Noel Mondejar.
Montemayor came a second time to talk to us, this time here in Tagaytay, during the seminar season which invited Father Francisco Senden, CICM of the Asian Social Institute, and another Braganza cousin, Father Jaime Bulatao, SJ of the Ateneo’s department of social psychology. Montemayor all but consolidated his intellectual “hold” on Tagaytay. Pio assured me that the most brilliant student of our community, Edicio de la Torre, had now also become a Montemayor enthusiast and so did newly arrived Irish student Charles Mooney. Fratres who volunteered for mission work among the Mangyans of Mindoro or in our Abra missions invariably came back active and raring to do much more in our Social Action efforts. Aside from de la Torre we had earlier gained Noel Mondejar. Pio was always counting and evaluating.
The vibrations we were creating in terms of the unity of Tradition and Development were quite powerful. By “Tradition” we meant academic and prayer life – activities ad intra, and by “Development” we meant pastoral and social action – activities ad extra. We were going to be a vibrant, active missionary concern – starting with the communities around us though surely not ending there but going beyond to wherever our assignments would take us. This was our consciousness as we engaged in our chosen praxis.
In dialogues with Montemayor regarding our precise role in the total movement for social change, he placed accent on getting assistance in the formation of peasant leaders. “The role of the clergy is to form the lay leaders and the role of the lay leaders is to transform the world,” Montemayor emphasized.
Our “committee” energized even more now by increasing number of volunteers, raised funds by holding concerts in Metro Manila. Bart Tadeo disciplined our voices, Charlie Mooney did a lot of marketing, the Belamide sisters of Silang who were now also quite involved with the Focolare had Joy for a singer and composer – and voila, we had enough money to put up the house of formation very close to the seminary premises – which of course kept Pio, Vic Manuel and Edicio quite busy especially after their ordinations.
VII Inter-Seminary Forum
The Inter-Seminary Forum which often met at Loyola House of Studies in the Ateneo de Manila premises in Quezon City got more and more interested in the SVD charism of social action (“those seminarians in the mountain outside Manila”).
Edicio and I got quite aggressive in a sense regarding getting more religious orders and diocesan seminarians to a new mode of theologizing and in a contemporaneous way of understanding and practicing the fresh-from-the-oven teaching of Vatican II. We affirmed that the practice of FFF organizing (with the clergy helping in the task of leader formation) was the most congruent in the church-as-people new emphasis of Vatican II. In fact, later in his book on this topic, Jesuit Bishop Francisco Claver would expressly write that, in the Philippines, it was our FFF’s style of people’s organizing that started out the Basic Ecclesial Communities. We knew it was also the most real way of realizing true democracy and moving to scrap oligarchy in Philippine society.
We maneuvered as often as we could to get Montemayor to talk to our groups, to different seminaries and colleges and fora. Then we noticed Montemayor was also maneuvering as often as he could to get me and Edicio to give talks all over the place. Soon, young Tony Pernia, his classmate Mario Bolasco, aside from my classmate Sammy Yap were recruited to this informal pool of speakers on call by Montemayor. And the unstoppable German Cabillo joined Pio and Vic Manuel in doing direct formation work of peasant leaders.
In 1967, the ISF was faced with its most dramatic challenge of witness. The most powerful oligarchic family in the country, the Lopezes, were set to flaunt their “hard-earned” wealth, as ostentatiously as you wouldn’t believe it, on the occasion of the fortieth wedding anniversary of Tycoon Eugenio and spouse Pacita Moreno Lopez. Edicio and I moved to have the ISF organize a protest demonstration against the party. Pope Paul VI had just published the latest update of the Church’s social teaching and we had every possible appropriate quote from the encyclical and Vatican II to back up the correctness of our motion.
The whole thing was not easy. The Lopezes were presumed and perceived to be good Catholics and experienced to be even better Catholic donors. Controversial as the Lopez party might be, the protest against what we saw to be scandalous might itself be more controversial per se, and therefore might end up as the bigger “scandal,” since the dominant view of ownership was absolutist in character. They owned their wealth and they could do whatever they wanted with it, including showing it off amid so much poverty around.
We knew the joke that “there are three great virtues – faith, hope and charity. But the greatest of these is prudence” during times of demonstrations and protests. So, the ISF, under the leadership of Tony Ledesma, SJ debated, and reasoned with each other, and cautioned, and challenged, but the SVDs carried the day; our resolution was carried. But very few carried it out. The details of this chapter are very interesting, which I will not have time to go into today. It was all over the papers and we did not know it immediately. So, when we quietly came back to Tagaytay to resume “normalcy”, I was completely unaware of our instant celebrity status on the front pages of the newspapers. Good Father Prefect Frederic Scharpf, however, definitely was and when he called me to his room about it, it was clear he was not exactly pleased. This had never been done before. We did something major and did not seek prior permission. At the same time, however, it now became clear among a growing number of religious orders of men and women that it was mainly the SVDs who were the prime movers in the national movement to implement Catholic social teaching.
VIII Evolving a New Synthesis
We were focused on practice, but we were equally concerned with theory. Montemayor introduced us to Mao Tse-tung Thought, so we would know the thinking of “the other side”- only to realize that a big part of the so-called other side was really part of our side. We even published Mao literally on the fringes of the extra paper at Catholic Trade – and called the pamphlet “the black book” because of the color of its cover, compliments of Brother Andre, Brother Tom, Edicio, Noli Masamayor and Luke Abaya.
We were enamored of the down-to-earthness of Mao’s epistemology. His focus on concrete analysis of concrete conditions, on the process of knowing from the particular to the universal with the latter precisely lodged in the particular, on biases that must be overcome by merely being part of a certain class, on recognizing practice as the true source of theory, in addition to its being the criterion and verification of theory, and, not least, on practice being the very purpose of theory – all this fit in so well with the spirit and the signs of the times, the times that were “a-changin.” It was a philosophy that did not contradict but reinforced perennial philosophy’s own epistemology of critical realism. Its emphasis on concreteness was a perfect fit into our own incarnational perspective – the Word must become Flesh and dwell among us. It cannot remain an uncrucifiable generality. Its focus on an evolutionary rather than a static point of view, on the inevitability of the New we warmly welcomed into our own new contexts in a theology of Hope and Liberation.
In the years to come, some would be ordained and others would merely have been “cold” but not “frozen” (called but not chosen but called nonetheless and chosen for something else, the Lay Society of St. Arnold Janssen, for instance). Aloy’s ordination would be delayed and I just enjoyed explaining to the farmers why so: “because he is special; he has to have his own solo occasion, to be owned mainly by you.” For my part I would quite consciously, deliberately choose the priesthood of the laity. My superiors were right, it turns out.
On the other hand, on hindsight now, it seems I never really left. I left without leaving. Leaving became another form of staying more intensely in the same mission, the same call that I had originally responded to. In the years before martial law when I had already left Tagaytay I experienced the best coordination of efforts between my lay work and Tagaytay’s own – with Ed, Pio and the rest. I also realized this in the times I was clandestinely using one or the other SVD establishment in various parts of the world. We blazed so many trails in the activist pursuit of implementing Christian social teaching at all levels – local, national, global. We struggled. We networked. We published. We organized marathon demonstrations, political actions, international advocacies – we continued our work together and separately. We set up new organizations and animated existing ones – all towards advancing the objectives of Christian social teaching. We littered the whole country with our essays and cast on sleepy areas a plague of meetings. We distributed healthy doses of experiments in alternative development building. We speechified. We dialogued. We studied. We determined. We acted. Was there anything we did not do?
And, among us ( inter nos), we sometimes agreed to disagree on ideological nuances, even at times on serious strategies and tactics – “natdems,” “socdems,” “chrisdems,” goddems”; many were imprisoned, many lost their lives, many were exiled. In the SVD praxis there was no lack of confessors and martyrs so that our light might really shine before all (luceat lux nostra coram omnibus). The SVD praxis had become salt and light. But I think that at a much deeper level, amid a diversity of gifts and insights and talents, shortcomings and limitations, we felt our oneness of being, our having been formed by the Word (Verbum) into a real Cor Unum (One Heart), our consciousness of our unique role in building the cosmic and mystical living and real body of Christ.
So, then, may the darkness of sin and the night of unbelief vanish before the light of the Word and the Spirit of grace, and may the heart of Jesus live in the hearts of all (Coram lumine Verbi et Spiritu gratiae, recedant tenebrae peccati et nox infidelitatis, et vivat Cor Jesu in cordibus omnium). -Finis-