Red hat for a son of Mindanao
By Antonio Montalvan II

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MANILA IS BLESSED TO HAVE SUCH A MAN IN its service. I hope the people of Manila will come to realize how blessed they are because of him. Even as I praise Gaudencio Cardinal Rosales, I am aware that there are those who have stereotyped the Office of the Archbishop of Manila as something that can only be filled by the likes of the late Jaime Cardinal Sin. In truth, the world is full of many other possibilities, and Cardinal Rosales is one of the best of those possibilities Manila can ever have.

Let the people of Mindanao speak of Cardinal Rosales, who spent the best years of his apostleship among the people of Bukidnon. As the prelate donned the red biretta in Rome, formally assuming his ministry as a cardinal, the people of Malaybalay had only happy reminiscences of the man who once lived with them, sharing their pain and joy.

More than 20 years ago, in July 1985, Ray Rodriguez was a young civil engineer fresh out of the University of Santo Tomas. Together with a group of seven Catholic lay workers, including two couples and their children, they set out for faraway Mindanao, leaving behind the fast-paced life of cosmopolitan Manila. Their destination was bucolic Malaybalay. They had decided to answer the call of then Bishop Rosales for lay volunteers to work in his mountain diocese.

Out of that mission was born a fast-growing lay community, based in Malaybalay and known as the Buhing Pulong (the Visayan term for "Living Word"). Bishop Rosales, of course, is no longer in Bukidnon but the community that he inspired lives on. Today, Buhing Pulong has about 400 active members. In a sense, the community reflects the character of the man, whose pastoral initiatives in the area remain mostly alive and flourishing. Among these is the bishop's apostolate for the integrity of creation, for which he earned his spur as the "Green Bishop" and where he met his crucible.

Bukidnon's thick rainforests had become a magnet for rampant illegal and legalized logging. Rosales saw for himself the province's deteriorating natural environment, a problem that was driving farmers even deeper into marginal existence. The bishop also saw that working for the preservation of the forests meant being at loggerheads with the powers-that-be behind rampant logging. But still he took up the "green" cause and pushed his advocacy one step further. He asked the government to deputize his priests as forest guards and clothe them with the authority to arrest illegal loggers.

One of the deputized priests, Fr. Nery Satur, crossed the path of illegal loggers and was brutally murdered while riding his motorcycle on the way to minister a far-flung barrio. To this day, the people of Bukidnon have not forgotten the bloody incident. To this day, still etched in their memories is an intensely angry Bishop Rosales reacting to the murder, becoming even more fearless in his defense of the environment. He also immortalized that struggle by writing a book on Father Satur, who is today hailed as the Philippines' Chico Mendes, that martyr of the Amazon who was gunned down in defense of Brazil's rainforests.

The lay volunteers from Manila who went to Malaybalay on Bishop Rosales' invitation left 22 years later. But they continue to pursue their mission elsewhere in Manila and Southeast Asia - all of them, except Rodriguez.

In 1985, Rodriguez was to attend a Catholic youth conference in Cotabato, for which reason he had to go to the bishop's residence for a briefing with the bishop himself. There he met Madelyn Agustin who was also a delegate to the conference. Three years later, they were married. It was the bishop who officiated the wedding.

Of the many things that Rodriguez recalls of the bishop, there is one that probably spotlights Bishop Rosales' style of governance, a quality that, in fact, he has brought with him to Manila. "He was rarely seen at the cathedral because he was always ministering to far-flung barangays and sitios, usually with Bukidnon's indigenous people, the lumads," Rodriguez narrates.

By this account, one can discern the spirit behind the bishop's pet project as archbishop of Manila - the Pondo ng Pinoy - and his insistence that poverty, not politics, is the country's No. 1 problem. He has been in touch with Manila's poor. He knows what he is talking about. Manila is going to have a cardinal-archbishop with a more situated sense of what people power means in today's reality.

Many will be disconcerted with this observation. There are those who expect him to be in the mold of the late media-savvy Cardinal Sin. Politicians, not excluding the ones from Malacañang, would probably make a beeline for Villa San Miguel once he's back from Rome. What they do not know is that Cardinal Rosales is his own man who prefers to work quietly sans the glare of media lights and the false pretenses of politicians.

The Malaybalay-based Rodriguez, together with the other members of the 1985 mission team, recently paid the cardinal a visit. There, at the arzobispado in Intramuros, Cardinal Rosales gave them his full three hours, talking about old times in Malaybalay, punctuating his conversations with fluent Binisaya, sharing jokes with his old friends, whose names and those of their kids, he still remembers.

We live in times when the virtue of humility and the primacy of spirituality no longer have a place in our hierarchy of values. Perhaps it is only fitting that a man like Cardinal Rosales should come into this moment of Manila's history and help play out the city's role in the life of our nation.

Manila, which thinks it has all the answers to our national problems, needs to be humbled.

Comments to monta@cu-cdo.edu.ph

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