President Benigno Aquino III, Vice President Jejomar Binay and Interior Secretary Mar Roxas on Friday led other government officials and more than a million devotees in a National Thanksgiving Mass for the canonization of St. Pedro Calungsod.
On Sunday the eyes of the Filipinos are turned toward Rome. A Filipino youth in the 17th century becomes just the second saint from this country that has been a Christian nation for almost half a millennium.
What a wonderful gift to the youth of our land, at a time when our faith seeks to affirm the realities it believes in, in the face of the corrosion of unbelief which the spirit of the times (and its control of so much of media) surrounds us with, … what a wonderful gift to place before our eyes the figure of the 18-year-old Visayan youth, martyr of the faith! Pedro Calungsod lives: he inspires us not only as a hero from the past, but as one who stands before God to pray for our Filipino young people today. He speaks to today’s young people, who must face other times and other struggles, but who will find, like him, the final meanings of their lives in the faith they have been born to, and must now make truly their own, in obedience and love.
1654. Pedro Calungsod is born in the Visayas. Very little is known about Calungsod, but based on documents, these Philippine towns claim to be his probable birthplace: Ginatilan and Tuburan in Cebu; Loboc in Bohol, and Leon in Iloilo.
Some accounts of Blessed Pedro Calungsod’s origins point to his Visayan lineage. But historians have difficulty confirming which part of the Visayas he truly came from in the absence of material proof.
