Walking with Jesuits

Saul Hofilena, the distinguished lawyer, history buff and art collector, salvaged from a junk shop an old bell that used to toll time at the Ateneo Law School at Padre Faura. He decided to return it to its former site where now the Robinson Twin Towers stand. So recently, he convened his 1985 class with Ateneo President Bienvenido Nebres, Mayor Alfredo Lim and Lance Gokongwei for a brief restoration ceremony.

The compleat Jesuit historian, Jose S. Arcilla and I were there and we fell to reminiscing about the old Ermita, which was destroyed during the Liberation of Manila in 1945. I told Father Arcilla that my little bookshop up the street has a bit of interesting history. When I returned from a foreign posting in Sri Lanka in 1964 I was looking for an office for my new publishing house. My father-in-law, Dr. Antonio Jovellanos, told me to look at the family’s Padre Faura house. All I needed was a couple of rooms; the house was simply too big. My wife suggested that it be made into a bookshop — Solidaridad.

At the time there was no real bookshop in Manila except Joaquin Po’s Popular Bookstore at Doroteo Jose in Santa Cruz. The National Bookstore and Alemar’s in Rizal Avenue sold mainly textbooks, stationery and office supplies.

When the shop opened in 1965, General Carlos Romulo inaugurated it with the launch of the first Solidaridad title, Identity and Change, which he wrote. The Jesuit Fr. Francisco “Fritz” Araneta blessed it.

The Jesuit Institute of Social Order was then close by in a building where Jollibee is now. In it were Fathers Araneta, John J. Carroll, Robert Hogan, Hector Mauri, Jose Blanco, Denis Murphy and others, all of whom were frequent visitors to the bookshop.

There was a much bigger house in the lot built by my wife’s grandfather, Cesareo Jovellanos. It, too, was burned during the Liberation in 1945. He studied at the Ateneo across the street and later on worked at the weather observatory there. All his seven sons went to the Ateneo; the oldest, Jose, became parish priest of Tondo and later on, Vicar General of the Archbishopric of Manila. The exception was the only girl in the family, Sister Bernarda who became head of the Benedictine order of nuns in the country.

My father in-law told me this story: his father, Cesareo, was a classmate of Rizal at the Ateneo — this is mentioned in Rizal’s memoirs. Rizal used to visit the Jovellanos house. He was a “filibuster” — a threat to the state — and his movements were closely watched by the Spanish rulers. Rizal was very considerate. He did not want to jeopardize the residents of the house He would wait for his friend to come down and then they would go elsewhere.

My father-in-law said that, in those days, Ateneo was not the elitist school that it is today. It was a kind of public school and many of its students came from the lower classes. Father Arcilla told me to write about all these.

I studied at the University of Santo Tomas, run by the Dominicans. Looking back, I now realize that, through the years, I have walked with more Jesuits than Dominicans. Of course, they will always be on my VIP list: Juan Labrador, Rolando dela Rosa, Francisco Villacorta, Frederick Fermin, Gaston Petit, the French Canadian artist whose atelier in Nampeidai in Tokyo is where, in the last four decades, I often sought sanctuary to write.

Then there is Pedro Galende who is Augustinian, Bobby Perez who is a Benedictine monk.

And Brother Andrew Gonzalez of La Salle — how he loved good food, teaching, life. Though to the manor born, he was suffused with the egalitarian ethos: he wanted the best education to reach the most number of people. His language was earthy, his mind wide open and warm — I adored the man and dedicated one of my books to him.

One of the first Jesuits I really got to know was the late Horacio dela Costa; together with his contemporary Raul Manglapus, he established a solid reputation in scholarship before the war — a reputation that I held in awe.

I read what he and Raul had written. The growing Solidaridad titles soon included Raul’s book on agrarian reform, and Father dela Costa’s history and Filipino nationalism, both in elegant, felicitous prose brilliant with diamond insights on our past.

Father dela Costa liked a hefty argument and that was what we often had when he visited or when I saw him at the Ateneo. He also liked his Scotch but not once was he inebriated when we talked; like Nick Joaquin, his thinking and speech were never derailed by alcohol.

Once, during his absence, his ever-efficient secretary had the old bell on his desk polished, its dark ancient patina of age removed. When he returned, the secretary proudly showed him the shiny bell. He was vastly amused by the incident.

He was in Rome when Marcos declared martial law in 1972. I was going to publish another of his books and it was already in the press but I had to show the page proofs to the military censor. He objected to this phrase in it: “The military is a good servant, never a good master.” The censor, an aggressive major, wanted it expunged. I told Father Horacio in Rome about it; he agreed with me that we may just as well not publish it anymore.

It was the same with Fr. John Schumacher’s The Propaganda Movement. The censor objected to the title. I had to explain that the book was about the efforts of Marcelo H. del Pilar, Jose Rizal and the other ilustrados who were then propagating for reforms in the Philippines in Spain. It took some doing but that book almost did not get published.

When I started publishing, John Schumacher had just returned from Spain where he did his dissertation on the ilustrados. I told him, since he was going to live in the Philippines and teach here, perhaps it was much better as a teacher if he took on Philippine citizenship.

And so one morning many months afterwards, he came to the bookshop all smiles and announced: “Frankie, I am now Filipino.”

Then after a couple of years, one high noon, he burst into the shop, wet with perspiration and grim faced. I asked what had happened and he said he had just gone to the American embassy, lined up there at five in the morning to get his American visa.

When finally interviewed, the visa officer told Father Schumacher that he was stupid to have changed his citizenship!

I visited Father Schumacher the other evening; he is retired, but still writing. Among other things, we talked again about our history, why we are so divided.

From the Institute of Social Order, all my Jesuit neighbors wrote for my journal Solidarity and/or participated in the seminars I sponsored. At one time, Father Fritz wondered if I was not utopian in my thinking, and I said there is nothing utopian about wanting Filipinos to have three meals a day, safe drinking water. Father Fritz, like all the others was also a social worker. Father Hogan set up the Federation of Free Farmers and the Federation of Free Workers. Father Blanco was shifted to Indonesia where he stirred a lot of dust. And Father Mauri devoted a lifetime in Negros working with the sugar sacadas.

I wrote about it before, how Father Mauri and I were invited by visiting American labor leaders to a sumptuous dinner at a posh hotel in Makati and after that dinner, he said he had to go to confession. He had looked at the menu; his meal cost so much — it would have supported a family in Negros for a month.

Fr. Jaime Bulatao, who survived the 1945 holocaust in Ermita, pioneered in the study of the paranormal phenomena. He explained some of my unusual experiences. Once, we went to nearby Navotas where we witnessed an incredible gathering of hypnotized cult members in a ritual session.

Fr. Arsenio Jesena lived and worked incognito with the sugar workers in Negros to learn more about them. He wrote of his bruising experience in a special Solidarity issue that I later used when I lobbied for reforms in the sugar industry in Washington.

I was so impressed by Father Jesena, I recreated him as Father Jess in my novel Mass. As for Father Schumacher whom I mentioned earlier, I recreated him, too, as the Jesuit scholar John Macher in my novel, Viajero.

Then there is Fr. Joseph Galdon, the literary scholar, who was afflicted with Alzheimer’s, and of course, Fr. Miguel Bernad; both died recently. I first met Father Bernad in the ‘50s when I was with the old Manila Times. He studied classical English literature and was quite apprehensive about the “inchoate” future of our literature. I published some of his essays. In all the years, even when he left Manila to go to Cagayan de Oro where he set up the journal Kinaadman and was the guiding literary light there, his work on our culture was not diminished.

We are aware of the sex scandals that have bedeviled the priesthood, the thievery in some of the Church’s financial institutions and the lofty pomp and ceremony with which the Princes of the Church surround themselves. Those of us who have traveled in the West have also noted that many churches there are empty and, as a matter of fact, in places where religiosity has declined, some have been sold to become restaurants, clubs.

At the same time, too, if we care to notice, all over the world, in despairing and blighted regions, so many solitary priests and nuns work selflessly, tirelessly, even in great danger and personal travail, to help the very poor. In his decrepit old age, I know John Carroll, S.J. still visits that Payatas slum and so do other priests and nuns who nourish the hopes of our dejected and rejected people. I remember my wife’s uncle, Monsignor Jose Jovellanos — such a saintly man! His battered shoes and threadbare soutane, and at his funeral, the grieving masa of Tondo in rubber sandals and shabby clothes. And that dear old friend, Pepino Vinzons Asis sharing the poverty of his poor Bicol parish.

In reminiscing about these priests, particularly the expatriates, I have often mulled over our ideas of nationalism, the noxious politicians who bleat about patriotism then betray themselves and Filipinas. These priests are not native born and yet they devoted their lives to the service of our people. I salute their willingness to be with us when they could have a cozier life elsewhere.

Sometime ago, I met the aging Spanish Jesuit Jose Calle, who, at the moment, is assigned in Taiwan. He said, “I have lived in so many countries in Asia and I have yet to meet a people as warmhearted as the Filipinos.” Indeed, the Australian journalist Greg Sheridan told me way back why he admired us so much. At the end of the Vietnam war in 1975 thousands of Vietnamese refugees who had sided with the Americans were denied asylum in other Asian countries — but they were gladly welcomed in the Philippines although their hosts were themselves profoundly in want.

The astute psychiatrist and writer, Ricardo Suarez Soler, wrote recently of the 6,000 “white” Russian refugees who, after the Russian revolution fled to Shanghai. In the late ‘40s, they would have been returned to Russia to a horrible fate after the communists had overrun China. No country in the West wanted them, but they were welcomed to a haven in an island near Samar.

Indeed, we are a heroic people with a revolutionary tradition; we are also a hospitable race. But what did Bertolt Brecht say in his famous poem, “To the Next Generation”? “We How I wish now for our elites, our callous leaders who have colonized us to be blessed with compassion so that we do not have to seek refuge in other lands as menial laborers, our women as domestics and prostitutes.

For all the drudgery, the arduous toil they sometimes bear, the Jesuits have a robust sense of humor spiced with irony and wit. Father Bernad once described how, during the Occupation, he worked a truck garden planted to vegetables to augment the Jesuit kitchen. Of this effort, he sang, “Bahay kubo, kahit munti, ang halaman doon, ay sari sari, Singkamas, singkamas, singkamas, singkamas….”

I can’t recall who told me this ditty first — Raul Manglapus, Horacio dela Costa, Miguel Bernad? I like repeating it to Jesuits I meet for the first time: “He who walks with Jesuits, never walks with Jesus.”

Maybe so, but I am certain the Jesuits I have walked with walk very, very close behind Him.