By: Rev. Fr. Edgar S. Saguinsin
Pastor, St. John’s Church (Honolulu)

Fr. Edgar Saguinsin was born in Victorias, Negros Occidental in the year 1935. He was ordained in ’63 for the diocese of Bacolod. After being rector of the Seminary and Pastor, he took up justice work for the Sugar Workers. When his life was endangered during Martial Law, he went to work in Hawaii where he eventually became Pastor of St. John’s Church, Honolulu. There he developed the RCIA Approach to evangelization that he explains below.

Techno- Babble
Many years ago, Jack Hynes, a close friend of mine and an Irish Columban missionary priest, jolted me once with a frank critism: “Edgar,” he said, “You are not speaking from your head.”  This was after our group sharing during a spiritual retreat. Jack’s critism made me aware that it was more words and concepts than self and people’s lives that were coming across in my discourses. In the first seven years of my teaching and preaching ministry, it was always a temptation to talk in terms of concepts and technical words, the “techno-babble” of theologians and philosophers. But I soon came to realize that to speak from the heart and to be understood by the ordinary women and men of the street was the real achievement. The first major development in my ministry was a shift away from the “conceptualist” way of preaching and teaching.

Stark Experience
My preaching went through another stage of development when I started associating closely with the sugar workers of the Philippine I Negros Island where I came from. I remember Jose Panganiban, one of our original labor organizers, speaking at a labor seminar in 1971: “When Father comes to the hacienda to celebrate Mass, our amo sends his car to pick him up while we have to walk some distance. After the Mass, Father is invited to go up the amo’s residence for breakfast while we walk home hungry and not sure if we could eat more than a meal that day. Then Father is brought back home with a stipend while our minimum wages are not paid in time.” Jose my trusted friend, was not attacking me. He was just explaining their living conditions and the contrast between our lives!

 National Federation of Sugar Workers
I became convinced during this period that preaching social justice and working for a more just world is an integral part of the Gospel. We organized the National Federation of Sugar Workers (NFSW), and after four years as pastor of La Carlota City where the labor organization was born and grew, I had to work with NFSW full time as one of its officer and organizers. Afterwards I had to leave the Philippines in 1981 for the safety of my life. That as a priest I could work in NFSW as a full time officer and organizer is a tribute to my former bishop, the most Rev. Antonio Y. Fortich. Under increasing pressure and opposition from sugar plantation and mill owners and big business Bishop Fortich now retired, persisted in giving his blessing to such an “unpriestly” work!

Option for the Poor
The content and style of my preaching the gospel changed radically at this point. The Gospels clearly show that our Lord Jesus has a “preferential option for the poor” I joined labor organizations because I strongly felt that the gospel of love must be translated into love and advocacy for  our hungry, exploited, and oppressed people in the land of plenty. Organizing and educating them is the best way of helping them help themselves.

Giving Witness
Our faith demands that we get involved in changing a society where wealth and political power are inequitably distributed between the few very rich and the vast majority of impoverished people. In working to change an unjust and violent society the followers of Jesus have to resist the temptation to adopt violence as an instrument of policy. But we encouraged the laborers and common people to be militant in speaking and working for their rights, and to expose abuses. In this kind of work, however much we tried to be prudent and reasonable, we could not avoid the military repression of the Martial Law government and the angry opposition of former friends, relatives, and benefactors. I always asked: “How else can we give witness to what we preach?”

Shock in Hawaii
A third major development in my preaching took place when I began my ministry in Hawaii in 1983. Here I have been dismayed to observe people and their children, particularly Catholic Filipino immigrants, lose their faith in ways I have never seen in the Philippines. This fact has made me reflect deeply, and has challenged me. Henceforth, I have to focus my ministry and preaching on nurturing faith. If justice, peace and development have become a prominent concern of the Philippines Church, here in the U.S. fostering faith is our crying pastoral need.

Fostering Faith
With fostering faith as a preoccupation, the work of Catholic evangelization has taken center stage in my mind. It’s because faith in our Lord Jesus is what the work of evangelization id trying to bring about. Fostering faith, I have learned, is not the same teaching doctrine. For some teaching doctrine, the proper place is the classroom, and the method is lecture. But for fostering faith, the proper place is the small group, and the method is faith sharing. Doctrine and knowledge can be transferred. But faith, like love and commitment, cannot be transferred but must be personally experienced by each of us. The discovery that small group faith sharing is the most effective way of nurturing one another’s faith is something revolutionary for me. Every time we break up into small groups of four or five at our catechumenate or rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA) session and have bible faith sharing, a miracle takes place! Part of the miracle is the preacher-teacher also learns and gets converted!

Four Elements
Not like before, I have learned that in order to foster faith four elements must always come into play as interconnected parts of a whole. They are: the message, community. prayer and service. The message we preach is Jesus Christ and his call to conversion. Here the bible becomes a necessity. At the same time we promote a sense of fellowship and community among the people we are evangelizing. At every session, a good amount of time is assigned to praying in any form of prayer. Then they are challenged to serve. Sharing one’s faith with others, starting with our family, is a form of service. Working to help make our world a more just and better place for God is another form of service. This kind of Catholic evangelization work has helped me find the focus of my priesthood: the priest’s reason for being is a pastor, to lead in planting and nurturing faith in people.

Will there be major developments in my life that will shape my preaching of the Gospel?