Faces of the News: Fr. Fernando Suarez

The most well-known healing priest in the country succumbed to a massive heart attack on Feb. 4, while playing his third singles set at the tennis tournament that he would organize yearly for fellow priests at the Alabang Country Club.

Fr. Fernando Suarez’s unexpected demise came less than a month after the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines’ appeals tribunal notified him of the Vatican’s “not guilty” finding on the sexual misconduct charge against him by two former altar boys from Mindoro Occidental in 2014.

Suarez described the decree as a “vindication” and a “triumph of the Catholic Church.”

The healing priest was in the process of rebooting the Missionaries of Mary Mother of the Poor, the foundation he had set up when he arrived from Canada in 2008, when he died.

Said a longtime friend of the timing of the priest’s death: “God works in mysterious ways and took him after his name was restored.”

His death gave him “the peace he so richly deserved,” said another.