Padre Roque (Homily, Funeral Mass of Fr. Roque Ferriols, SJ)

Fr. Nemesio S. Que, SJ
August 24, 2021

“Laudatio, a eulogy whose task it is to praise the man rather than his work. . . .
The sole consideration is the greatness and dignity of the individuals concerned.
In other words, a eulogy concerns the dignity that pertains to a man
insofar as he is more than everything he does or creates.

Hannah Arendt. “Men in Dark Times.” Apple Books.

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We thank God for you, Fr. Roque Ferriols, for gifting us with 96 years of your life.

We thank you for enriching us with your presence, blessing us with your wisdom, guiding us in our search for truth.

And when we too have concluded our earthly sojourn, may we meet again in the glory of the One, True, and Good, together with Mary, our Mother, and all the saints in heaven.

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A man is greater than his life condensed in a list of events and happenings. Indeed, a man is greater than everything he does or creates.

So how better to talk about Fr. Roque than through stories – stories that have been passed from one to another like oral tradition, stories that have proliferated a day after his passing on to new life.

Stories have a way of keeping one’s presence present. Would the life of Jesus been memorialized in dissertations and disputations, I doubt if he would be as present to us the way someone is who is conversing and laughing with us, the way a beloved occupies one’s heart and mind all the time, the way someone is on hand to help us in our needs, who forgives our faults with his tender mercies.

The Evangelists knew that through stories, they were not only immortalizing the wonderful stories about a Man who is Savior of all, but also making Him eternally present to the memories and minds of the people He saved.

So where do I begin?

When I went through the CV attached to the invitation to give this homily (a laudatio disguised as a homily), there emerged the shadow of a slippered Jesuit, head bowed by the weight of his thoughts, bespectacled eyes trained no farther than the ground upon which his feet walked ever so slowly but with determination and purpose. Getting into a jeepney at the corner of Katipunan and Aurora boulevard, this Jesuit commenced his trip home after a tiring day of classes in Ateneo. At Stop and Shop in Sta. Mesa, he would switch rides for the second half of his trip. Home was La Ignaciana, first along Taft Avenue, then in Sta. Ana. Fr. Roque enjoyed these rides because he was able to engage in his favorite pastime: thinking and talking to fellow passengers. He always considered himself one of them. His being a professor, priest and Jesuit were not clothes he wore, badges of entitlement, when he was among these people.

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In a very vivid way, FR. ROQUE FERRIOLS – opens his world to us thus, –

“… According to reliable hearsay, I saw first light on floor 12, PGH. Later I saw more and more light in Sampaloc. Not the storied Sampaloc of San Antonio and Bustillos, an area steeped in centuries of lore and legend, but North Sampaloc around P. Leoncio and Maria Clara, as little known then as now. Ricefields, houses here and there, feet running on pilapils, carabaos, dragon flies. When the rains came, water snakes. Then you rafted or slogged through the flood. Men feeling through mud for dalag or catching hito and martiniko with their nets in the clean flowing water. A row of long-skirted fisherwomen on a pilapil, bamboo rods aslant, left hands holding rattan-lipped cloth bags for their catch. Near sundown a veiled one joins them. She is a leper. Her family is hiding her from that sanidad. They want her with them. They do not want her exiled to Culion.

In the 16 years I grew there,” Fr. Roque continues, “the earth became less province, more and more city. The farmers moved elsewhere or became carpenters, plumbers, masons, sculptors of saints’ images, barbers, photographers. And people from elsewhere became more and more. We were among the first of these.

“At home the grownups talked to each other in Ilocano or Spanish. To the children they talked – condescendingly, I felt – something they called Tagalog. In the grassy roadways children of former farmers and of comers from elsewhere played together and talked to each other in something we called Tagalog.

Then it was time to go to go to school. Trying to make friends in the playground, I talked to my peers in something I thought was Tagalog and was laughed at. In North Sampaloc nobody felt superior to you if you spoke a different accent or mixed Ilocanisms with your Tagalog. Not three kilometers away, the little sons and daughters of the Tagalese were enforcing elitist norms. Slowly I came to know that my language is not Tagalog but North Sampalokese.

…. (Many) years (after), one comes to know that for human thinking North Sampalokese is better than Plato’s Greek…

…. Might one also come to know that, without his knowing it, another language had all along been his heart’s blood? Could it happen that he awoke to the old sounds and spoke them new and found his lost soul new in a new and always growing world? But that is another story.” (Ferriols, Pagdiriwang sa Meron, 221-222)

My apologies for such a long quote. But who could talk, ‘Amorsolo-like,’ about his childhood better than Fr. Roque himself? Besides, we begin to see here the shadow of his love for his native tongue emerging from the day-to-day interactions with people he grew up and played with. In his philosophical meanderings later in his life, Fr. Roque will exhibit the same passion for his native tongue, at times, with the intensity of a knight defending his Lady.

This love for his native tongue spilt over into his philosophizing. A response to a question about this matter is classic Roque in its sarcasm and bite. When asked how he can translate philosophical terms, he replied:

“That is really no problem. Most English philosophical terms are really Latin terms (subjectivum, objectivum, intuitio, praedicatum) somewhat mispronounced and misspelled (subjective, objective, intuition, predicate). Or Greek words similarly distorted (metaphysics). The Germans sometimes use Latin and Greek or create their own terms (Mitzumachung) or do both at the same time (Objekt, Gegenstand). We followed the German model.

But this question was usually asked not as a request for suggestions on how to proceed or for information on how we proceeded. Usually, it was asked rhetorically, as a way of saying: you cannot do this. Sometimes so bitterly as to mean: You cannot do this to me. Often the question was a cover for a presupposition that what English and Spanish are allowed to do cannot be allowed in Tagalog or any Filipino language. So intuition is “derived from” the Latin. Coffee and alcohol are “derived from” the Arabic. But sumbalilong  is a “corruption of” the Spanish, istrok “corrupted from” the English.

Another form this question took was: How do you say “being” in Filipino? Asked with a facial aha-you-cannot-do-philosophy-in-Filipino expression. There are many ways of answering this question. One answer is: “as inadequately as in English. The English language word “being” does not really express the central deed of metaphysics….”

“… More than the others,” Fr. Roque continues, “[this question] is surrounded with an aroma of something rotten in the state of Denmark. The question proceeds from the hidden conviction of the asker that nothing profound has happened in any Filipino language…. Can there be any depth, he asks, in a Filipino center? The Lord save him from his own superciliousness. He himself cannot.” (Ferriols, Pagdiriwang, 220-221)

If this were not Roque talking, it would have sounded like pure swagger. But in truth, the Philippine languages he spoke (Ilocano, Cebuano, Tagalog, among others) are the language of his soul, just as his philosophy in Pilipino is the language where ‘meron’ abides. Dr. Agustin Rodriguez, in his introduction to Pagdiriwang sa Meron, a festival of thought celebrating Fr. Roque, articulates this passion for the native language best:

“Roque Ferriols discovered…that…thinking thought was rooted in language, for language is living thought fixing itself in word in order to open itself more deeply and to transmit its deepest discoveries. Thus, language bears the deepest insights of our ancestors who had thought life. It allows us to encounter the world and speak the truth of this encounter. Language allows us to expand thought with the deepening experience of the real, and it allows us to deepen experience as we meet what is with language that opens us to the expanse of the real. If one were to teach living thought to students, they need to be made to speak in their living language. That is to say not the formal language of memorized formulas and petrified discourse, but the language with which they experience their world and live their reality. Thus, the necessity to allow philosophy to speak in Filipino.” (Gus Rodriguez, Pagdiriwang sa Meron, vi-vii)

And when Fr. Roque was asked if he was trying to create a Filipino philosophy, the citation in the 1989 Tanglaw ng Lahi awarded to him by the Ateneo de Manila University would have been the only proper response:

“Hindi nagsusumikap si P. Ferriols na gumawa ng isang pilosopiyang Pilipino. Sinisikap lamang niyang tumingin at makinig sa talaga at bigkasin ito nang buong katapatan. Sa ganitong paraan, tunay siyang pilosopo – at pilosopong Pilipino…. Sa pagtuturo niya ng Pilosopiya sa wikang Filipino, pinayayaman ni P. Ferriols ang laman ng kaisipang Pilipino sa ibayo ng mga hangganan nito.”

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Father Roque went to Ateneo de Manila High School at Padre Faura from San Beda Grade School. In high school, he was known as a prodigious reader; legend has it that he had read most of Charles Dickens, Walter Scott, GK Chesterton and others before finishing high school.

On a rainy afternoon in May 1941, Father Roque entered the Jesuit Novitiate in Novaliches with Frs. Catalino Arevalo, Jesus Diaz, Santiago Gaa, among others. What was he like when he entered? Father Roque claims to have said many years later that  they were very much what they were at the beginning, “only more so…”

In Juniorate, Fr. Roque was also legendary for his memory. He excelled in Greek, which gave him access to the fragmented thoughts of the Pre-socratics. It was also told that if “he merely read a page of Homer or Demosthenes, he would have eo ipso committed it to memory….”

For his Regency, Fr. Roque taught at San Jose Minor Seminary and then at Ateneo de Manila high school. He did his theology at Saint Mary’s College (Kansas) and at Woodstock (Maryland).

On June 19, 1954, Feast of Corpus Christi, he was ordained a priest by Cardinal Francis Spellman at the Fordham University Church in New York. It was also here in Fordham, in what is called The Blue Chapel, officially consecrated as the Chapel of Most Holy Mary, Mother of Sorrows, where he said his first mass. (CG Arevalo, Pagdiriwang sa Meron, 3 ff.)

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“The very humanity of man loses its vitality to the extent that he abstains from thinking
and puts his confidence into old verities or even new truths,
throwing them down as if they were coins with which to balance all experiences.”

Hannah Arendt. “Men in Dark Times.” Apple Books.

 

It was here in Fordham where he pursued his doctorate in philosophy after tertianship in Auriesville in upstate New York. I am not sure if this was where he really wanted to pursue his graduate studies. I remember him telling me that I was foolish not to go to Paris for mine when I could, and opted instead to go to Fordham. In Ferriols style, nose and a pout raised upwards, he said, “I wanted to go to Europe, but they didn’t think I was good enough!” So he wrote a dissertation on Sri Aurobindo, about whom he know more than his mentor Fr Norris Clark (as once Fr Clark told me). Fr. Clarke only had great admiration for Fr. Roque. “What a mind!” – he would say with a smile.

When I had Fr. Clarke as professor in metaphysics, I began to appreciate what I learned from Fr. Roque so much more, especially the idea that what is real and true is more meaningfully and profoundly expressed by my native tongue – “meron”! “meron talaga!” And when Clarke (pardon this intrusion of metaphysics here) explained to us how incorrect the usual way the analogy of being expressed in English is, I recalled Fr. Roque and what he kept repeating in class about analogia – “May pagkakapareho at pagkakaiba sa mismong pagkakapareho.” I nodded understandingly. Ang lahat ay sa meron naka-ugat at umiikot. Kasama na dito ang ating pagakakapareho at pagkakaiba. I’ve tried explaining this property of the idea of being to my metaphysics students in English, but my tongue would get all twisted, my mind frustrated – nabubulol! So, I end up saying it in Pilipino instead. Not only did it sound correct, but it also sounded profound!

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“Thinking calls not only for intelligence and profundity but above all for courage.”
Hannah Arendt. “Men in Dark Times.”

We all know that Fr. Roque eventually found his way to the Philosophy Department of Ateneo de Manila. For many years, countless students got a taste of being in his classes, some bitterly if they incurred his legendary rage, others in a most liberating way if they tried hard to think with the master. It was also here in the same department where Fr. Roque left a tradition of philosophizing that to this day is carried on by teachers who were also his students.

And here too he met Dr. Leo Garcia, his dear friend, the son he would have been proud to have. In a recent column of Danton Remoto in Philippine Star, he recounts what Leo remembered about his dear Jesuit friend:

“Just after my graduation, my parents and I were returning to Tuguegarao. Fr. Ferriols and Fr. Jose A. Cruz, then teaching philosophy, offered to drive us to the Rural Transit bus terminal near the Bonifacio Monument in Caloocan. To reserve seats for us in the bus, which was on a first come-first served basis, Fr. Ferriols tucked the lower part of his sutana and ran alongside the arriving bus and clambered up the window, head first, legs dangling out. Later, we saw Fr. Ferriols and Fr. Cruz (in their sutana) standing on the roof of the bus, arranging and tying our luggage. I will forever remember the two figures silhouetted against the afternoon sky.” (Danton Remoto, Philippine Star, 8/21/21)

Fr. Roque had a “love-hate” relationship with his superiors. Who doesn’t? But he was as good a son of Ignatius as any Jesuit. He never refused when he was approached for confession or for spiritual conversation, no matter how tired he was. He was a channel of God’s mercy and compassion to others who were looking for consolation in their desolate condition.

In a very poignant picture of Fr. Roque as a Jesuit, Fr. Danny Huang, who was once his provincial, writes in a shared post:

“What I treasure most about Fr. Roque is his profound witness to the mercy of God. The mercy of God was something he spoke of often, and is the reason he loved Therese.  He knew from experience of what he spoke. Having undergone a serious breakdown, having known the indignity of being taken away in a straightjacket and confined in a psychiatric ward, having gradually rebuilt himself doing parish work in Mindanao, he knew from experience the pain of facing one’s demons and the consolation of God’s goodness, which heals and makes new beginnings possible. I often asked him to write his memoirs of those years, to help us who struggle and fail to realize that, in God’s mercy, there are second chances, even in Jesuit life. I hope that perhaps he will have left something in his papers.”

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This complete freedom from cares and worries was his form of humility;
what set him free was that he could say without any reservation, mental or emotional:
“Thy will be done.”

Hannah Arendt. “Men in Dark Times.” Apple Books.

Perhaps Fr. Roque has left something written about God’s tender mercies as he experienced them. If nothing was ever written, he has surely left something about God’s mercy in our hearts’ memories.

So please don’t stop telling stories about Fr. Roque. Speak his name. Tell stories of how his life met yours. Tell the ways in which he touched your life and made a difference. Never stop telling the stories, because those stories are not just words. Those words create and call forth presence. Those stories are not just mere recollections of past events. Spoken from the heart, they are the never-ending story of Fr. Roque’s life. From those stories will emerge again and again the presence of a slippered Jesuit, head bowed by the weight of his thoughts, bespectacled eyes trained no farther than the ground upon which his feet walked ever so slowly, but with determination and purpose.

Life has indeed changed, not ended. Our brother now rests in our Lord’s embrace who bids him –

“Come to me, you who labor and are burdened,
     and I will give you rest.

Take my yoke upon you and learn from me,
     for I am meek and humble of heart;
     and you will find rest for yourselves

For my yoke is easy, and my burden light.”

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Apo Roque, agyamankam unay kenka Apo. Ikarkararag mo kami a kanayon.