The archbishop was away from his see on the day of my visit. He was speaker at a conference in Malaysia. But all over Maguindanao and Sultan Kudarat provinces and in the cities of Cotabato and Tacurong were congratulatory messages for his elevation as a cardinal of the Catholic Church. Orlando Beltran Quevedo was archbishop here and it was clear that his people were rejoicing. Even the Moro Islamic Liberation Front had sent a congratulatory letter.
Over lunch at the archbishop’s house near Tamontaka, Msgr. Tony Pueyo, the former vicar general of the Archdiocese of Cotabato, related what had unexpectedly transpired on the day Rome made the announcement of Quevedo’s appointment. It was dinnertime and the archbishop and his priests were having spirited conversation over the day’s last repast in the small dining room. Bishop Jose Colin Bagaforo, the auxiliary bishop of Cotabato who himself is a priest native to this archdiocese, came in with the news that Rome had appointed a new cardinal but that he did not know who it was. That must be Archbishop Palma of Cebu, everyone muttered. His meal over, Quevedo excused himself to go down the ground floor. Managing himself down the stairway, he reached for his mobile phone and there saw that his inbox was flooded with messages. They were all congratulatory messages. The archbishop was nonplussed. Later, the news was confirmed when Manila’s Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle called and relayed the announcement.
The announcement caught the archdiocese in a kind of impasse. Archbishop Quevedo is to retire this June. The archdiocese had prepared a retirement home for the archbishop. There is a small house at the back of the archbishop’s house that was originally intended for retiring bishops. Quevedo was hesitant to move there. He said he did not want to live within the compound for if he did, that would take away the focus from the new archbishop, whoever Rome would appoint. Quevedo had wanted to simply “disappear” from the scene. To live in proximity to the new archbishop would not be fair to the latter, he had thought. What to do, then, with the archbishop’s “retirement home”?
To fix things in their proper perspective, the archdiocese instead shifted its focus on organizing a thanksgiving Mass for the new cardinal on March 11. Guests and friends from all over the country are expected to come. For sure, even his friends in the Bangsamoro are expected to come.
Orlando Quevedo is surely your out-of-the-box cardinal. Affable and humble, he was already a bright star as seminary superior in the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, the congregation he had belonged to. A colleague in my work environment, Arturo Perlas, who was once in the OMI seminary, related an anecdote that probably describes for us why Quevedo was destined to be a church leader in the part of Mindanao that precisely needs the kind of evangelical dialogue his charisma and character had driven him to.
One afternoon, the seminarians were in a basketball game in the seminary compound. The gate to the seminary was open, as it had always been, to allow the neighborhood youngsters to come in and use the basketball court. A game was ongoing among the seminarians and on the court’s fringe was a group of teenage boys from the neighborhood waiting for their turn to use the court. But the game became intense, as we know most basketball games in this country do. It was turning dusk and the neighborhood boys lost their chance to use the court. In anger the boys left, but not before taunting the seminarians with a gesture of defiance. That instantly triggered a knee-jerk reaction from the young Perlas who at that instant started to chase the boys. Quevedo, who was playing, saw the anger immediately, and calling Perlas by his nickname, stopped him from what he sensed was clearly a retaliatory move, “Hey, stop! We are supposed to be preaching about love.” Perlas recalls: “He also said things about forgiveness and understanding.”
Perlas still recalls Quevedo’s counsel very vividly to this day. As a seminarian, that short piece of advice shaped him with the value that he lived by later in life as one of the country’s top mining executives, that kindness was for everyone, including your enemies. “Quevedo, despite his short height, was very versatile at basketball, a really fast player. He was an intense player, but always cheerful.”
The Rome announcement was not only new. The choice was considered nontraditional. For years, lay and clergy had speculated on Mindanao’s first cardinal. The traditional belief was for the Pontiff to choose from among Mindanao’s parent dioceses. Zamboanga was Mindanao’s first diocese, but not its first archdiocese. That honor belongs to Cagayan de Oro, when it was elevated as an archdiocese in 1951 ahead of Zamboanga. Rome had chosen otherwise. Now, knowing Orlando Quevedo and his years of hard work as a friend of Mindanao’s
Moro people, one cannot help but see the hand of God in the appointment.
One thing we can be absolutely certain of, that come Feb. 22 when the bells of St. Peter’s Basilica will ring for the consistory of the new cardinals, Quevedo will be more than capable of heeding the advice of Pope Francis, that a cardinal’s primary work is to love and to be humble. The greatest of the evangelical counsels, says Paul in the epistles, is love. His Eminence, Orlando Cardinal Quevedo, has lived by that. The people of Cotabato have seen that. The MILF has seen that. Now we know why he was chosen.