A Father's Day tribute: When dads teach us courage
On this day of honoring fathers and the men who nurture and guide us, I think of my own dad, Eduardo “Ed” Olaguer, who passed away in August 2017.
Papa lived an extraordinary and complex life. A successful corporate executive and businessman with a Harvard MBA, he chose to oppose the Marcos dictatorship during Martial Law—not because he was directly persecuted, but because he believed silence in the face of injustice was wrong.
Guided by a Catholic upbringing and the influence of Jesuit mentors, my dad embraced the belief that faith demands not only prayer, but courage and sacrifice. This eventually led him to help organize the Light-a-Fire Movement, a Christian resistance group comprising prominent figures from business, academia and Catholic clergy.
Eventually, several members of the movement were arrested. My father was one of them.
He was taken into custody on Christmas Eve morning in 1979, when I was only 15 years old. Despite being given an opportunity to escape through the “backdoor,” he chose to face the consequences of his convictions.
For more than six years, Papa and his companions were held in a Bicutan prison facility for political detainees and sentenced to death by a military tribunal.
As a teenager, I did not fully understand politics, ideology, or history. What I understood was absence.
I knew what it felt like not to hear my father’s footsteps climbing the stairs late at night. I understood what it meant to miss Sunday mornings as he read the newspapers while my four siblings and I crowded around the bed beside our parents. I distinctly remember prison visits, guarded conversations and watching someone you love leave again after a few precious hours.
Despite everything, Papa rarely spoke with bitterness. What I remember most was not anger, but his quiet steadiness.
He prayed deeply and constantly. Even in difficult times, he remained calm, hopeful and surprisingly joyful. He often joked about his situation and would simply say, “It could have been worse.”
After the 1986 People Power Revolution, he accepted government positions during the Cory Aquino administration. Disappointed by the politics, mudslinging and personal ambitions he witnessed, he decided to step away from public life.
Instead, he devoted himself to family, private work and service to God through Marian organizations and Catholic movements.
When he died, there were no grand tributes honoring his role during Martial Law. But recognition was never what he sought.
What he truly left behind could not be measured by titles, wealth, or acknowledgment. His courage, rooted in faith, taught me that integrity sometimes requires sacrifice and that a clear conscience is worth more than wealth, comfort, or applause.
Most of us grow up admiring heroes we’ve never met. I was blessed to know mine personally.
In college, I shared a poem about his imprisonment in the Ateneo Guidon student newsletter. Reading it again, I realize it was never really about politics. It was about longing, love and the lingering ache of waiting for someone to come home. With Cardinal Sin’s intervention, he was released a few months before the EDSA Revolution.
Even today, a part of me still remembers waiting anxiously for him to return.
And in many ways, despite his loss and absence, Papa still comes back—in memory, in faith and in the many lessons he left behind.
