'Small letter" saints

“We stood next to John Paul II when we sang at Lorenzo Ruiz’s beatification,” our helper Tering from Cebu wrote. She opted to remain in Rome when United Nations reassigned us to Bangkok.

JPII canonized the catechist from Binondo at the Luneta. Benedict XVI canonized Pedro Calungsod of the Visayas yesterday. Will the wife and I glimpse Tering from cameras that pan crowds jammed into Piazza di San Pietro?

In our first Christmas midnight mass at St Peter’s, Tering .clutched passes from the Vatican for the family. That allowed 200, among thousands, to receive communion from John Paul II.

On March 2000, JPII beatified Calungsod with 43 other martyrs. The 17-year old Filipino’s canonization comes 340 years defended his half-blind Jesuit mentor from machete attacks in Guam.

Saints Lorenzo and Pedro underscore that the kid next door can summon up similar grit. “He who is mighty has done great things for me. Holy is his name,’ as the village housewife’s “Magnificat” puts it.”

There are echoes of Tering’s excitement in friends who’re attending rites that will include Calungsod and five others in the roster of saints. The Filipino Karilagan Choir sang “Aba Ginoong Maria” and “One More Gift”, at a Circo Massimo concert, for San Lorenzo .

The Mandaue Youth and Children’s Choir will sang, for San Pedro: at vespers and a thanksgiving mass yesterday. Their songs were: “Mga Pangamuyo”, “Litaniae Sanctoron Pedro Calungsod” by John Pamintuan and Wa’y Sukod ang Pagmahal ( “There is no limit to love “).

Benedict XVI’s approval for Calungsod’s canonization came after Cardinal Ricardo Vidal, who initiated the process, retired. However, Jose Palma, newly-installed archbishop of Cebu , chose to quietly slip below the radar screen. Instead, he asked his predecessor Vidal to complete the work . “In life as in dance, grace glides on blistered feet”.

Was it only yesterday when we watched JPII”s body interred, in a Vatican crypt? Even then, people chanted: Santo Subito (“Declare him saint ---- now!”)? Like Mother Teresa of Calcutta , the 264th successor of Peter.was swiftly beatified in May 2011.

“One felt something authentically human about this smiling man who… treated the world as his parish,” wrote Melba Padilla Maggay of the Institute for Studies in Asian Church and Culture. “Yet there was, in this Pope, a rocklike intransigence, that baffles those warmed by his passion for social reform but turn cold stiff at the hardline conservatism of his theology.”

JPII beatified and canonized more than the combined tally over the last five centuries. He visited 129 countries,..At the 10th World Youth Day at the Luneta , he rocked with the kids.

Would JPII’s beatification occur, if an “accidental fire” in a Pasay apartment didn’t uncover an Al-Qaeda plot to assassinate the pontiff?.

On Jan. 6, 1995,. firemen broke into Room 603 of Doña Josefa Apartments. They stumbled across stockpiled chemicals for bomb-making. A computer revealed a plan to blow up 10 US airlines and kill JPII.

A suicide bomber, garbed as a priest would detonate his bomb when JPII would pass on the way to the San Carlos Seminary in Makati City . But then, “even the very hairs on your head are numbered,” the Galilean assured us.

Ruiz, Calungsod, Mother Teresa and ordinary mortals like us form the “Communion of Saints,” the Nicene Creed tells us A community of believers, share across the divide of death, grace that surges into eternal life.

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“Today, you will be with me in paradise”, the dying thief was assured by his co-crucified. The Samaritan woman had a tutorial “water surging into eternal life from a thirsty Stranger at the well. Paul addressed his letter to “the saints” at Ephesus .

There are capital “S” saints. Their names ring out : Mary, mother of Christ, with Joseph; Francis of Assisi, Teresa of Avila, Ignatius Loyola, Therese of Lisieux; Lorenzo Ruiz --- and now Pedro Calungsod.”

There are small letter “saints”: maids, teachers, barbers to nuns and market vendors. Despite flaws, these obscure men and women serve God in neighbor. “Here comes everybody”s feast,” author James Joyce wrote“ of All Souls Day.”

Like Ruiz, was Calungsod an “overseas foreign worker” His canonization comes to a country of OFWs but “no longer a nation of believers.” Only 21 percent of urban students believe in life after the grave, a survey by McCann Erickson and Philippine Jesuits found. .

Majority (88 believe) believe in a Supreme Being. But only 15 percent were instructed in their faith. ““Their doctrinal foundation and catechetical instruction (are) faltering,” notes Windhover. magazine “The phenomenon of bursting churches is misleading.”

Our houseboy clipped Calungsod’s photo, from the Inquirer, pasted it on cardboard, propped on a makeshift stand. With his wife and two young daughters, Airen says they pray for Blessed Pedro’s intercession.

Isn’t that the “communion of saints?, we planned to ask him.*

( Email: juan_mercado77@yahoo.com ) “

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