Two saints

TWO MEN. Two missionaries. Two martyrs. They lived their lives several centuries apart. But in a span of a few days, the two were brought together in a most fortuitous and meaningful way.

Pedro Calungsod was recently canonized as the Philippines’ second saint, a few days after the 16th death anniversary of Richie Fernando. And I will dare say that those of us who still remember Richie are blessed with a special insight into the witness of San Pedro.

After the festivities of his canonization in Rome, Pedro Calungsod needs little introduction.  As the ward of the Jesuit priest Blessed Diego Luis de San Vitores, the young Pedro volunteered for the Marianas mission. There he served as a catechist among the Chamorros.  Faithful to the last, he would die together with Father San Vitores, killed by the very same people they tried to bring to Christ.

Richie, on the other hand, may have to be introduced to a new generation unfamiliar with his story.  As a Jesuit seminarian, Richie answered the call for mission volunteers to Cambodia. There he worked in Banteay Prieb, a school for the disabled, many of them victims of the land mines that have been the scourge of Cambodia since the 1970s.  One fateful day, a disgruntled former student wielding a grenade threatened Richie’s class.  As Richie tried to restrain the student, the grenade fell and exploded.  Richie was killed as his body absorbed the blast, thus saving both the assailant and the other students.

Two offerings of self separated by hundreds of years, brought together in a week celebrating youthful sanctity and zeal.  Little is known of the early life of San Pedro Calungsod—and even his hometown remains contested.  But I suspect the days of his youth would have been very similar to that of Richie’s.

I cannot claim to have been among Richie’s closest friends.  But I knew him well enough to share the same pedestrian concerns of our younger days.  He was three years behind me at Ateneo de Manila College.  I remember the long hours he would spend hanging out at the organization room of Ateneo Catechetical Instruction League (I was a member, he was not), sharing gossip and corny jokes with anyone who cared to listen.  I can still recall long discussions about the rock music we both favored, where we deliberated the merits of Metallica and Nine Inch Nails (he thought they were great, I did not).

He entered the Society of Jesus several years after I did.  Some of the most memorable seminary experiences I had with Richie were in the basketball court, where I would often be at the receiving end of his wayward elbows. Richie had an amazing knack of getting away with three-second violations and offensive fouls.  And long before it became fashionable among NBA players, Richie was an expert at taunting and trash-talking the opposing team.  These intense games, however, would always end with good cheer.  Richie was friendly and gregarious, and it was difficult to stay angry with him for long.

But there were serious and solemn moments as well. During a 1995 Christmas meeting of Jesuit regents (seminarians assigned to teach and work outside the seminary) held at Ateneo de Zamboanga, we were privileged to listen to Richie’s moving account of his work among the disabled at Banteay Prieb.  Ever eager to learn, he also had enthusiastic questions about my fledgling work with the urban poor at that time.  But true to his happy spirit, he would be dancing and singing the “Macarena” (the popular ditty of those days) in wild abandon during breaks in the meeting.

That gathering would be the last time many of us would see him alive.  He laid down his life for his students the following October. The initial shock of the news was ultimately replaced by consolation over the heroic circumstances of his sacrifice.  The inspiring witness of his whole life became even more evident as close friends, family, and associates shared their experiences of Richie’s holiness.

How consoling it is to imagine Pedro Calungsod being ordinary in the same way Richie was—exuberant, fun-loving, perhaps even irreverent.  How inspiring it is to see, emerging from deep within this bundle of ordinariness, extraordinary goodness and courage.  For in the end, isn’t this how the Lord of martyrs works, He who sides with the lowly and the innocent to teach the strong and the wise?

Richie has not been officially raised to the altars in the same way San Pedro was, although a cause for Richie’s sainthood has begun in earnest.  But I would like to think of both of them as saints in the original sense of the word—companions in the Lord, strengthening us with their example of joyful faith and generosity.  What Fr. Catalino Arevalo, SJ, has written about San Pedro Calungsod can very well be said of Richie Fernando: “[I]n the face of the corrosion of unbelief” that we face, they are truly “a wonderful gift,” their lives “resounding as a trumpet call in the depths of our hearts, there where our dreams lie, waiting to be reawakened, waiting to come true.”

Truly, two saints for our time.