In the past fifty years, there have been five deaths in my immediate family—my father, my mother, and three brothers, two of whom were priests. I have never been present for any of these family funerals, and have often wondered what it would be like to preside or preach at one of them. Today I am finally experiencing that feeling, for Cisco was not only a very close friend, but very truly a cherished brother to me.

We first met fifty seven years ago, in 1953, when I arrived in Cebu, at the tender age of 22, to begin my philosophical studies. Cisco, then 24, was one year ahead of me. We became good friends during the next two years together, and shared that friendship in a special way during our two-week community vacation at Philips, Del Monte. At that time we went out in pairs to visit the various mission parishes in Bukidnon. Cisco and I went together to the parish of Fr. Ferruccio Leoni in Valencia, where he lived in a little ramshackle house, and was planning a new church to replace the small chapel that then served the parish. From that brief but inspiring experience of the Jesuit missionary work in Mindanao, I developed a very strong desire to be a parish priest in Bukidnon, and relayed that to my Superiors. “No way,” they said. “You are going to special studies and prepare to teach in the seminary.”  As you all know so well, we Jesuits are very obedient, so that’s the way it happened.

From Cebu, Cisco went for regency in Davao, and I was sent to Ateneo de Cagayan. After regency he went to Woodstock College in Maryland for theology, while I was sent to Weston College near Boston. Cisco returned to Bukidnon in the mid-60’s to do research for his studies in cultural anthropology at the University of Colorado, while I went to the Gregorian University in Rome, preparing to teach moral theology and canon law at Loyola School of Theology—this very place where we are now gathered. When I came here in 1968, Cisco was back in Colorado finishing his doctoral dissertation.

In June of 1969, as I began the second year of what I presumed would be my life-long career, Cisco was living in a small community with several other Jesuits studying at Colorado. They used to take turns cooking. One evening, when it was his turn, he carried the food to the supper table where the others were seated and said: “Did you hear the news?” When they asked what it was, he announced: “Your cook has been made a bishop!”
 

When he returned to the Philippines for his Episcopal ordination, he invited me to be his assistant priest, and also asked if I would be willing to go with him to begin setting up the new Prelature of Malaybalay. “Are you kidding? Am I willing to go to Bukidnon?” He wasn’t, and I was. So he asked the Provincial, Fr. Horacio De la Costa at the time, if I could be assigned with him, and consistent with the decision of the previous provincial, he said, “No way!” Since bishops are no longer subject to Jesuit obedience, Cisco turned on all his persuasive powers with Horacio, and convinced him that there was, in fact, a way, and the provincial yielded to the bishop. So I obediently left this house and accompanied Cisco to Malaybalay. Little did we think on our first visit to Valencia that we would return to Bukidnon together fifteen years later, Cisco as the Bishop of Malaybalay, and me tagging along as his Vicar General, Chancellor, and Secretary for the next eleven years.

There is no need to narrate his many great accomplishments, summarize his superb and influential writings, or itemize his many notable contributions to the Philippine Church and the local churches where he served, most recently in his home town at Bontoc-Lagawe. These are already well known to everyone here today. I would rather like to focus on some of his more personal traits that may shed some further light on what this very public figure was like “up close” in private.

Cisco was a man of great vision, with a sharp eye for what is true and correct. And I mean that very literally. One time he hired a bull dozer to level a piece of land that was to be used to build the novitiate for our local community of sisters—the Missionary Congregation of Mary. When the job was finished and the driver came for his pay, Cisco told him that it was not level, pointing out that one end was a good meter higher than the other. The man argued his case, so they got a level measuring tool, and sure enough, one end was one meter higher than the other.

Another time we were driving through Atugan Canyon. They had just repaired the bridge and built a stone retaining wall underneath the end the bridge. As we drove across the bridge, and he got a good look at the new wall, he said, “That won’t last. It will come down with the next strong rain.” We drove across again after the next strong rain, and it had come down.

Having grown up in Bontoc in the shadow of the rice terraces, he not only could recognize a strong wall, but he knew how to build one as well. When he was studying theology at Woodstock, he got his exercise by building stone walls. He did the same wherever he lived, and they are still standing. The one at Woodstock is a retaining wall for the parking area in front of the garages. I’m sure if the anthropologists dig there some time in the future, they will be in total wonderment about how this Igorot-style wall came to be built in Maryland.

After his Episcopal ordination in Baguio, I accompanied him home to Bontoc, where there was great jubilation among his own people in celebrating with the first Igorot Bishop. After this festive occasion, we returned to Baguio, and flew back to Manila. Cisco was really quite shy, and had difficulty getting attuned to many of the protocols and procedures that were accorded to him in his newly acquired episcopal dignity. So upon arrival at the Manila airport, he was rather dismayed to see the Provincial, Fr. De la Costa, waiting to meet him. He turned to me and said, “This has to stop!”

In many places, the normal way of addressing a bishop is “My Lord.” The first time he was called “Monsignor,” he felt embarrassed, for he said “That means my lord. I don’t feel right in being called that.” However, he was quite often responsible for initiating, or at least occasioning,  that title from others. When we moved to Malaybalay, we took up residence in an old rat-infested wooden building that was falling apart at the seams. One of the first things he did was dig a garbage pit in the back yard, and line it with a stone wall. One afternoon while he was working there, one of the preeminent personages in town came looking for him. She came into the yard, looked down at the sweat and grime covered man in the garbage pit and demanded: “Asa ang Obispo?” He looked up and said: “Ako ang Obispo.” Shocked and startled, she replied: “Oh, my Lord! Please forgive me.”

This man of great vision and innovative ingenuity exercised these characteristics not only in building stone walls, but he did so in an extraordinary way in his commitment to build the Kingdom of God here on earth,  particularly in envisioning what a “local” church is, and how to go about constructing it in a meaningful and effective way.

When Cisco assumed office as Bishop of Malaybalay, there were only two diocesan priests, while all the others were Jesuits. He saw all too clearly that a church that is served almost exclusively by missionary priests is not truly a local church, the meaning of which he develops in a most superlative way in his book, providentially completed and published only in 2008, Making of a Local Church. Surely his reflections will serve as an excellent guide for others on their assuming their new responsibilities as bishops, based on his very engaging account of his own thirty five years of active “episcopating ministry,” to use his own term. It will also certainly receive recognition as a truly classic dissertation not only on the meaning of Basic Ecclesial Communities, but how to build them in a creative and innovative way, in direct communication with and full participation of the people of God who are the local church.

 

Early on in his “episcopating ministry,” assessing the current situation, identifying the prevailing problems, and defining the primary goals, he decided that one of his first priorities would be opening a college seminary. He bought and renovated an old abandoned, ramshackle wooden house in town, renovated it, and made some additions to it. The first group of eleven seminarians would study at San Isidro College, but who was available to run the Seminary? He resolved that problem by inviting a retired public high school principal who was very active in the Catholic Women’s League. He approached her and asked: “Mrs. Manuel, would you be willing to undertake a project for me?” Always ready and willing, she replied, “Of course, Monsignor. What is it?” He said, “I would like you to be the Director of our new Seminary.” Quite as startled as the woman at the garbage pit she said, “Oh my Lord! I don’t know anything about running a seminary.” He closed the matter by saying, “That’s all right. Neither do I!” She accepted, so she and her husband, “Ma and Pa Manuel” to the seminarians, did a magnificent job of it for many years. When the first of their seminarians was ordained a priest, they gave their testimony to his worthiness by saying: “We, the mother and father of the seminarians….” This seminary BEC had already taken on the characteristics of the Church as the family of God.

When Cisco took over in Malaybalay he had not yet finished his doctoral dissertation, and had to return to Colorado for some months. At that time, of course, we had no e-mail service, and in fact we did not even have long distance telephone service in Bukidnon. You had to go down to Cagayan to make a phone call. So we had voluminous correspondence by what is now called snail mail, interlaced with rather frequent telegrams. One time upon returning home, he went over the letters I had written during his absence. Reading one he said, “I could have written this.” When I replied that I was just trying to save him time, he said, “No, that’s not what I meant. This looks like it was written by me.” That was, I think, one of the highest tributes ever paid to my writing style. 

Another time, during Martial Law, I was “invited” to either leave the country voluntarily or be deported. I managed to get a personal appointment with the Commissioner of Immigration and Deportation. While standing in the waiting line in his office, he looked over and said to me: “Where are you coming from?” When I told him I was from Malaybalay he got very excited and said, “Come over here! Maybe you are the one writing all those letters that are critical of the government!” I answered in a very firm tone that I hoped he could not hear, saying, “I wish I were!!”

Many of the extraordinary qualities of Bishop Claver were shown in much clearer detail and sometimes with astonishing courage during Martial Law. He was away from Malaybalay when Martial Law was declared. On the very first day, Fr. Vic Cullen, who had been very deeply involved with the Federation of Free Farmers and other programs of social action, was taken into custody in the bishop’s house by a band of heavily armed soldiers, marched down the main street in view of a shocked and disbelieving public, and locked in the stockade. When Cisco came home he immediately went to visit Vic in the stockade, which was in the interior part of the Constabulary Headquarters. Since he indicated that he had driven right up to the stockade, I remarked that he had driven past the sign that said No Civilian Vehicles Beyond This Point. This man of such remarkable vision said he had not seen any such sign. The next day I went to the stockade with him. I pointed and said, “That’s the sign.” He replied “What sign?” and drove right past it. No one stopped him. No one dared.

When our radio station was closed and our weekly newsletter shut down Cisco demanded to know why Fr. Stoffel, the station director,  and I, his Vicar General, were charged before the Military Tribunal for inciting to sedition and he was not, for as bishop he was the one ultimately responsible for everything that was done there. Communication with the people was always one of his very highest priorities. Since our radio station was closed down, our weekly newsletter, Ang Bandilyo, suppressed, and all the facilities and equipment of these two entities either sealed or confiscated, he began the very next week to write and distribute to the old Bandilyo recipients a weekly Pastoral Letter, rolled out from a hidden-away mimeograph machine. The military was no more willing to take the chance of suppressing a bishop’s pastoral letter than they were to stop the bishop’s car going past the sign on the road to the stockade.

Cisco was, I believe, not only the one who formulated the term “critical collaboration” during the Martial Law years, but he was most prominent in envisioning in fine perspective and articulating in clear definition the extremely difficult and demanding challenges of those terrible times. Beyond that, he also gave effective direction and designed energetic means in our striving together to achieve the goals of justice and peace, so direly lacking and so urgently desired. 

In recent months, it was very distressing to see this tremendously strong man barely able to make his way across the room. At times his speech was quite slurred, and it was perhaps even more painful, as well as embarrassing for him, to hear this man of such enormous eloquence keep asking, “Can you understand what I am saying?” In one of the earliest statements after his death, Archbishop Quevedo paid beautiful homage to him: “Filipino prophet without peer, truest priest, innovative humble shepherd, a very dear friend. He is with Jesus whom he proclaimed with eloquent word, spoken and written, in all arenas of life. Who can take his place?”

That is a very challenging question. I have another equally challenging question which has been seriously troubling me these past few days. Who can sum him up? I have been feeling seriously inadequate to this task requested of me. I have something of a similar sense of how John must have felt in trying to bring his gospel to a close. In respectful paraphrase, may I put it this way: “There is much more that Cisco did. If it were all to be recorded or even summarized, this whole day and many more hours beyond could not provide the time that would be required.” You have patiently endured me this long, so I shall not test your patience further.

I don’t recall Cisco ever taking a real vacation, and he was not very good even at really relaxing. Now he is most certainly with the Lord, and most assuredly enjoying perfect peace and eternal rest. We are most grateful to God for giving us such an outstanding person, and to Cisco as well for all that he did with and for all of us, and for all that he was to each and every one of us. I never would have dared say this to him directly, but feel I can now: We love you, Cisco. With Archbishop Quevedo, our tears flow. Thank you, and may you rest in eternal peace in that mansion in the Kingdom of God prepared for you from the foundation of the world. Amen.

  Homily at the Funeral Mass of Bishop Francisco F. Claver, SJ

  7 July  2010

  Oratory of St. Ignatius, Loyola House of Studies