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Misyon Online - May-June 2017

From the Editor


The new and the old editor on the latter’s most recent birthday

Your editor took over from the late Fr Niall O’Brien, the founding editor of MISYON, as it then was, a printed magazine, on 1 October 2002. However, the last issue that came out under Father Niall’s editorship was that of January-February 2003. In those days each issue was planned out well in advance and sent to the printers long before the date of publication.

March-April 2008 was the last printed issue of MISYON. Now it is MISYONonline.com and while deadlines still have to be met they are not quite as urgent as they used to be. That is what the current editor says, anyway, as he edits his final issue.

In the Name of the Trinity, I am a Missionary

By Luda L. Egbalic


Luda in Talaandig dress

 The author is from Malaybalay City, Bukidnon, and is the second of the ten children of Mrs Lucresia Luminhay Egbalic of the Talaandig Tribe in that province and of Mr David Fabre Egbalic, a Boholano. She has been in Korea as a Columban Lay Missionary since 2014.

A Messenger of His Love

I am not a writer, but I’m writing this reflection for myself and for others, hoping to be enlightened more about the Trinity’s love and God’s desire for each one of us to become a messenger of His love and the Holy Spirit, the Giver of Life.

I’ve always believed it is the love of the Trinity that brought me to this beautiful country, South Korea, and compelled me to persevere on mission. I also believe that this mission is not mine. It is God’s mission, and He has blessed me to carry it out with Him. God is always at the forefront, and I follow Him. There would be times when I kept my distance from Him because I felt tired and even tempted to stop. But along the way I knew God had sent the Holy Spirit to keep me going.

Through the Eyes of the Child

By  Deacon Erl Dylan J. Tabaco


Newly ordained Deacon Erl Dylan J. Tabaco with Bishop Honesto F. Ongtioco of Cubao

The author became a permanent member of the Missionary Society of St Columban on 29 April and was ordained deacon by Bishop Honesto F. Ongtioco of Cubao the following day in the chapel of the Columban House of Studies, Cubao, Quezon City.  He spent two years, 2014 – 2016, in Peru on his First Mission Assignment (FMA), part of his preparation to be a Columban missionary priest. He is from Holy Rosary Parish, Agusan, Cagayan de Oro City. He is a regular contributor to MISYONonline.com. Here he tells us of his experience in Manuel Duato School for Special Education from March to December 2015.

One of my most memorable experiences in Peru was my ministry in Manuel Duato School for Special Education, which serves young persons with special needs. It was founded on 16 July 1976 by Fr Austin Garvey, an Associate Priest of the Columbans from the Archdiocese of Westminster, England, and Columban Sister Elizabeth Doyle.

Living My Dream

By Febie M. Gonzales

Febie is from Alamada, Cotabato, and graduated with a BS in Accounting and Financial Management from Notre Dame University, Cotabato City. She is currently studying Mandarin Chinese full-time in Hsinchu City, Taiwan, and discerning a placement for ministry to start in July.


Febie with Judy Chu, her Mandarin teacher<

It all started with a dream. I came to Taiwan in June 2016 for my three-year term as a Columban Lay Missionary. This was my first experience of cross-cultural living. I was so excited. At the beginning life was great. Then I began to study Mandarin Chinese. My class was on a one-to-one basis two hours daily. My program of study was divided into four parts: listening, speaking, character reading and writing. As I write, I am in the listening and speaking parts.

Life’s ingrained beauty

By Christian John V. Camorahan


The author

Christian John V. Camorahan is a student at Liceo-de la Salle Senior High School, Bacolod City. The photos are his.

Life is beautiful because everything that we see and experience has some form of innate beauty crafted in the tender hands of God himself.  Life is full of moments of bliss, success, comfort, pleasure, and jubilation, moments also accentuated by grief, sorrow, failure, and adversity.

An Easter Experience: Parable of the loving father and his two sons revisited

By Fr Barry Cairns


The Return of the Prodigal Son, Rembrandt

Christ is risen, He is risen indeed. The Easter season, which ends this year on 4 June, Pentecost Sunday, reminds us that from death comes life. An encounter with the Risen Christ can bring peace, forgiveness and reconciliation out of situations of animosity, division and the inability to forgive. Columban Fr Barry Cairns from New Zealand shares an Easter story of his parish pastoral council reaching out to forgive. He has been a Columban missionary priest in Japan since 1956.

Fifty years ago I was pastor of an 'old Christian' community in Sakita, Shimoshima, the largest of the Amakusa Islands in the far south of Japan. By 'old Christian' I mean that a Jesuit missionary, Fr Luis Almeida, founded the parish 451 years ago in 1566. Then the Tokugawa daimyo government expelled or executed all missionaries. The Amakusa community went into hiding, remaining faithful for 240 years.

To Search is to find
May – June 2017


Confession during a youth pilgrimage, Chile

My aunt in her last moments was asking for the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Since it was Holy Week we weren’t able to get a priest. She died on Holy Thursday and I felt so sorry for her not receiving Holy Communion. Father, will her soul be at peace with the Lord? Were her sins forgiven?

Part of the background to this, I have learned, is that your aunt had just retired and had moved from the island where she had been living for many years to a town on another island and became gravely ill within a number of days. She was taken first to a local hospital for immediate treatment but then taken to a larger city hospital that doesn’t have a Catholic chaplain. And if the Chrism Mass in the cathedral of a diocese takes place on Holy Thursday morning, as I know it did in this case, it makes it difficult for a priest to be available for the sick, since he has to celebrate the Mass of the Lord’s Supper that afternoon in his parish, possibly in two locations.


Moses Smashing the Tablets of the Law, Rembrandt [Web Gallery of Art]

You must not distort justice: you shall not show partiality; you shall not take a bribe, for a bribe blinds the eyes even of the wise and twists the words even of the just. Justice, justice alone shall you pursue, so that you may live and possess the land the Lord, your God, is giving you.

~ Deuteronomy 16:19-20