RETIRED Daughters of Saint Paul joined their congregation sisters, other religious people, benefactors, collaborators, relatives and friends from the Philippines and Malaysia at a Mass on June 14 that highlighted the celebration of their centennial.
Some of them wheelchairbound, they lined the front and left sides of the beautiful Queen of the Apostles chapel at their central community in Pasay throughout the Mass that was presided by Cebu Archbishop Jose Palma.
Many years back, some of them helped in building the chapel, lifting construction materials, like gravels and lumbers.
Some are former residents of the congregation’s community across the country.
Today, after fruitful years of missions here and abroad, they are being taken care at the home in Pasay intended for retired sisters. Most went to missions overseas, like Italy, Malaysia, Thailand and Papua New Guinea.
Their ascetic and solemn appearance in light blue habit, which looks beautiful to the eye that loves simplicity and depth, conceal the long years of tests, and perhaps, sorrow that they have undergone through in evangelizing communities here and abroad.
“We are happy,” Gloria V. Felix said. “And even happy in sorrow because the man we chose to follow carried the cross.”
Felix, 79, has been in the military and police ministry since the time of Marcos. But she is not yet retired. She currently conducts formation of the Pasay police.
The Daughters of Saint Paul, otherwise known as Paulines, are usually not retired by age unless their physical condition does.
They are about 25 at the congregation’s home for the elderly at their central community in Pasay, said Evangelina Canag, former Philippine province superior.
One of them is Sis. Maria Imelda Dandoy, 78.
She was superior of the Daughters of Saint Paul’s community in Baguio when a astray bullet from a cop, who was practicing firing, hit and pierced her back about two inches deep while outside the house.
“I heard the gunshot,” Dandoy said. “I thought it was not coming to me. So, I continued sweeping, until I felt something in my back. I felt heavy and I fell.”
She rode a cab to take herself to a hospital. After her recovery, she phoned the police not to practice firing at her anymore. She did not file any charges.
The retired nuns, the likes of Dandoy, continue relishing the joy of religious life. Prayer is a nutrient that sustains them daily, so tasty that it seems to pamper the tastebuds of their soul.
They also serve as testament to the congregation’s fruitful journey, and guardians, through prayer, of their young and active sisters. “They are our treasure,” Canag said. “They are also our prayer warriors.”
Canag herself has also ripened to an age, which usually retires other seniors. She is 74, but still active in apostolate.
Together with other nuns, she evangelizes the living among the dead—the urban homeless who colonized Pasay cemetery.
Paulines are known for their apostolate of evangelization like their patron Saint Paul. The congregation was founded by Blessed James Alberione, an Italian Catholic priest, together with Venerable Mother Tecla Merlo in Italy in 1915.
In the late 1930s, in its first attempts to sow seed in Asia, their earlier nuns had tasted bitter cup in China and India.
They met rejection in both countries, Canag said. Even in the Philippines, the leaders of the Catholic church did not like them at the start.
They settled in Lipa, which is “the cradle of our foundation” in the Philippine province, said Sis. Pinky Barrientos, former CBCP News/CBCP Monitor associate editor.
Today the Daughters of Saint Paul harnesses the advancement in communications technology to carry on evangelization in an era when some of the mainstream media, using Internet platforms, undermine the formative years of the young with all sorts of moral turpitude.
The congregation is currently present and active in 51 countries in all the five continents with a worldwide number of 2, 267 nuns, Barrientos said in an earlier interview.
The Philippine province, which covers the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand and Papua New Guinea, has 18 communities, four of which abroad, she added. Professed sisters in the Philippines are 179.
Image credits: Oliver Samson