How to flee a loveless arranged marriage?
I am a 52-year-old male. At 28 I was forced into a marriage arranged by my mother. My wife and I now have three daughters, ages 22, 21 and 10.
I am a 52-year-old male. At 28 I was forced into a marriage arranged by my mother. My wife and I now have three daughters, ages 22, 21 and 10.
Pope Francis may have taken his papal name from the very popular medieval saint who reformed the Church that had gotten cozy with power and materialism by embracing mendicancy. But, of course, the papacy then as now could never take poverty literally.
He’s been gone a week and I miss him already. His Holiness Pope Francis has truly left an imprint in the hearts of all Filipinos.
“There is no answer.” When Pope Francis said this in reply to a child’s question on why God allowed children to suffer, people caught it and hung on to it—the Vicar of Christ professed not to know the answer.
It’s only the first quarter of the year and already Manila’s concert calendar is fast shaping up to be the busiest in recent memory.
Francis was here! But, as luck would have it, both Vergel and I were at the time feeling the painful reality of seniorhood—he had just had a tooth extraction and I was between my first and second root-canal sessions. Actually, we’ve been, for our general sakes, reining in our usual eagerness to be a part of any mass action, no matter how close the cause might be to our hearts.
The past week went by too fast. Preparations were frenzied. Planning took months. Everything needed to be close to perfect. They had dry runs. But we didn’t have to rehearse the outpouring of love and warmth.
Tagalog lessons from an English teacher. Oración. Six p.m., to Catholics before WWII, meant time for the oración or evening prayer. The church announced it to the neighborhood by the well-spaced tolling of one of the bells in the belfry. Every family prayed the oración at home. The prayer began something like this: “The Angel of the Lord came down unto Mary.” “And she conceived of the Holy Ghost” etc.
The day after Pope Francis left I was listening to the car radio and was struck by the comparison made between the Pop’s visit and a Manny Pacquiao fight. It focused on the zero crime rate during both events.
Last year, after saving up for over a year and recovering from illness, I gave myself a long-anticipated 50th birthday gift: a pilgrimage to visit my favorite saints in Europe, and to see Pope Francis in person in Rome.
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