Sacred vote
By Jason BaguiaCebu commuters have been subjected in the streets to canned political advertisements that speak of the sacredness of the act of voting.
Cebu commuters have been subjected in the streets to canned political advertisements that speak of the sacredness of the act of voting.
I was up early, 5:30 a.m., logged on to the Web the day bombs exploded at the finish line of the Boston Marathon and in the city’s John F. Kennedy library. Soon after reading news blurbs about the violence I checked by e-mail on one of my best friends, a physician from India who lived two blocks from the finish line. He said in reply that he was planning to go there but changed his mind when he heard an explosion.
Then Pope Benedict XVI was right when he said in February that his then impending depature from the papacy was no flight from the Cross. Proof of this is his continuing crucifixion by critics of the Church and pseudo-fans of Pope Francis. The latter extol the simplicity of the new Pope at the cost of tarnishing the character of the old one. They equate the Pope Emeritus with their own poor notion of the Middle Ages—dark, backward and decadent—and speak as if the saintliness of the new Pontiff is an anomaly among the Successors of Saint Peter.
Dried rose petals reposed in a small wooden box on his work desk. The color of blood, sunshine and pearls, they had fallen on the night of Feb. 28, 2013 off stalks that brushed a glass-enclosed reliquary in Cebu’s cathedral. Within rested part of a humerus of Saint Therese of Lisieux.
Whenever he ate with a group, he did not mind taking and eating, say, the last piece of battered and deep fried seafood or vegetables on his plate. This, in spite of the urban legend, taken with a grain of salt and some awkward snickers, that classy diners always left some unfinished morsel on the table while uncouth ones left behind a gutted platter.
His four-day-old fever left four-year-old Richard Nobis at high noon on April 28, 2012.
More than 100 boats joined the Sto. Niño fluvial procession that started after 6 a.m. on Saturday as hundreds of devotees lined the port area from Ouano Wharf in Mandaue City to the Cebu City port.
Red sunsets are not an everyday phenomenon, at least not in Benvolio’s book. He supposes they occur only at certain times in the calendar. For instance, that Saint John’s feast, the 27th of December, the third day of Christmas 2013.
In my last piece, “25 readings for the Year of Faith” (Cebu Daily News/Nov. 11), I presented 25 books that one can read while journeying through this special year for deepening one’s faith in God through Jesus Christ.
Catholic Church officials are seeing a revival of faith in the nationwide tour of the image of St. Pedro Calungsod, saying that up to a million people have gone out into the streets to greet the likeness of the new Filipino saint everywhere it went.
Pope Benedict XVI last Oct. 11 inaugurated at the Vatican the worldwide Catholic Year of Faith in a ceremony witnessed by thousands of the faithful as well as by Patriarch Bartholomew I of the Orthodox Church and Archbishop Rowan Williams of the Anglican Communion.
His latest set of rosary beads looked like marbles save for their chocolate brown color. Their maker had strung together each bead, about a third of an inch in diameter, using a length of black string knotted up like a lasso with a crucifix at the tail end. Bruno, their bachelor owner often kept the beads in his pocket. When he prayed on the move, he fished them out with his right hand, and to punctuate his mental Amens, drew them one by one between thumb and forefinger down the string.
Friday Sept. 7 was a special day for Cebu media practitioners as Archbishop Jose Palma hosted a half day recollection for us at his residence along D. Jakosalem Street.
