A different kind of love

The Sunday invitation from Joyce Yang, head of the University of San Carlos’ Department of Business Administration for a Monday Lenten recollection with Fr. Jose “Joe” Quilongquilong, SJ came on short notice but I had no second thoughts about accepting it.

The Cebuano Jesuit is president of the Loyola School of Theology (LST) in Quezon city. He is also concurrent rector of the Loyola House of Studies in the Ateneo de Manila Campus.

The LST is a Jesuit and Filipino ecclesiastical faculty involved in the formation of priests who may want to enroll in the Asian institution. It’s an international community noting that students, mostly from the Philippines and other Asian countries, include those from Europe and other parts of the world.

The Medellin native used to be based in Rome, first as full-time student of the Gregorian Pontifical University. After earning his doctorate in Sacred Theology with top honors, he found work in the Jesuit Curia as regional secretary for Asia and the Pacific, working closely with the highest-ranked official of the Jesuit headquarters in Rome.

Such impressive credentials would have changed anyone’s perspective, but Fr. Joe remains, from what I heard from mutual friends, a self-effacing priest who, from my own assessment of his anecdotes which he shared last Monday, delights in being with people.

Fr. Joe was installed as LST president in July last year during which he shared an anecdote that reveals his simple lifestyle. This was not part of his Lenten talk last Monday but I’m writing about it because it says a lot about the Cebuano theologian.

The context of the story is the Vatican’s confirmation of his appointment as president of the ecclesiastical faculty in May 15, 2013. While waiting for the formal rites set less than two months later, he happened to celebrate Sunday mass in barangay San Isidro, a relocation site in Montalban, Rizal province for victims of typhoon Ondoy.

After the mass, the lay minister invited the people to pray for Fr. Joe and for his new mission as LST president. There was a period of silent prayer, wherein according to the priest, he felt “their sensus fidelium (“the intimate sense of spiritual realities that the faithful have”).
At that moment “of deep consolation and communion with our poor, I felt like being installed as president,” Fr. Joe said.

The experience reminded him “that theology must take account of the sensus fidei, the sensus fidelium especially of our poor.”

He cited the document, Theology Today which points out the way for theologians, for them to “depend on the sensus fidelium, because the faith that they explore and explain lives in the people of God.”

Coming from the erstwhile “go-to guy” in Rome, who always had time to help people from the native country each time they came to visit, it helps me understand why he remains grounded or why his Lenten talk was not dull. He spiced it up with funny and moving anecdotes, many of them from his close encounters with people from all walks of life.

Fr. Joe had a tight schedule when he arrived in Cebu Monday morning in the company of Jesuits from Manila. He was supposed to leave the next day but the tight schedule did not discourage Joyce from inviting him to hold a Lenten recollection Monday evening for colleagues in USC, fellow workers in the Ambit Foundation and some friends. To Joyce I’d like to say, “Salamat nga naka-ambit mis Ambit.”

Fr. Joe shared the 2014 Lenten message of Pope Francis, who drew insights from the words of St. Paul, “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich” (2 Cor8:9).

In sum, Christ’s poverty is a different kind of love.

“His way of loving us, his way of being our neighbor, just as the Good Samaritan was neighbor to the man left half-dead by the side of the road (cf. Lk 10:25ff). Christ’s poverty is the greatest treasure of all: Jesus’ wealth is that of his boundless confidence in God the Father, his constant trust, his desire always and only to do the Father’s will and give glory to him,” according to Pope Francis.

“Christians are called to confront the poverty of our brothers and sisters, to touch it, to make it our own and to take practical steps to alleviate it.”

“Lent is a fitting time for self-denial; we would do well to ask ourselves what we can give up in order to help and enrich others by our own poverty. Let us not forget that real poverty hurts: no self-denial is real without this dimension of penance. I distrust a charity that costs nothing and does not hurt.”