priest

SPIRITUALITY OF THE “CRUMBS” Homily of Archbishop Gaudencio B. Rosales Launching of Pondo ng Pinoy Community Foundation, Inc. Folk Arts Theater, Roxas Boulebard, Pasay City 11 June 2004 9:00 a.m. WHAT IS PONDO ng PINOY? The Situation Today Manila has more than half of its population as poor (52% to be exact). The Makati, Mandaluyong and Ortigas skylines and the many condominium complexes around may not have the intention to deceive, but they certainly conceal the true state of life for more than one-half of the country’s people. The GDPs and GNPs do not tell the true picture and stories of our less fortunate brothers and sisters. These economic indicators always speak of averages. The poor cannot eat economic product “averages” no matter how well they are prepared. All told the unassailable story of the Philippine economy is revealed daily at the meal plates (if they still use plates) of families in the slums, shacks, cardboard homes and makeshift sheds you see in Metro Manila (a...

Subscribe to RSS headline updates from: Powered by FeedBurner Blogs commenting Fr. Jessie's post

“Five Loaves & Two Fish, Bridging the Gap Between Dives and Lazarus” (Theology of the Crumbs, Part Two) Fr. Ambo S. David “Between us and you is a wide gap that prevents anyone from crossing who might wish to go from our side to yours or from your side to ours.” (Lk 16:26) It doesn’t take much to imagine the wide gap that father Abraham speaks about. We just need to look at the great divide between the rich few and the poor majority in this country. The gap remains unbridgeable, so how can we even hope to gather the scraps that fall from the rich man’s table? I hate to say this, but it is becoming clearer and clearer to me that the scraps from the rich man’s table are not the kind we would wish to gather for pondong pinoy. These are scraps from unbroken bread, which the rich man in the story never intended to share in the first place. Perhaps he was really saving them as bait for the hungry fishes that will also end up in the rich man’s table. This narrative is every bit an...

THE THEOLOGY OF THE CRUMBS By. Bishop Luis Antonio G. Tagle Launching of Pondo ng Pinoy Community Foundation, Inc. 11 June 2004 Folk Arts Theatre Roxas Boulevard, Pasay City (Editor’s Note: This article is a transcript of the talk of Bishop Chito Tagle during the launching of Pondo ng Pinoy. Due to some garbled parts of the recording towards the end of his talk, a faithful summary is herein encoded.) The story of The Rich Man and Lazarus (Lk 16:19-31) provides the biblical basis for “The Theology of the Crumbs”. There was a rich man who feasted on good food and lived in great luxury everyday, while Lazarus, a poor beggar whose wounds were licked by dogs, lay by the door waiting for crumbs. When Lazarus died, he went to heaven and was received at the bosom of Abraham. When the rich man died, he went to hell. The rich man asked Abraham in vain to send Lazarus to warn his brothers so that they would not come to the same place of pain: “If they will not listen to Moses and the pro...