PAN DE LA SEMANA

SOLEMNITY OF STS. PETER & PAUL June 29, 2014 COMPETING WELL, FINISHING, & KEEPING THE FAITH We live in times where multi-tasking seems to be the run of the day. We attend meetings left and right, but even as we try our best to follow all the proceedings, our smartphones are busy beeping, chirping, chiming or burping, as the case may be, calling our attention to a thousand-and-one concerns that are all collectively called “notifications.” We turn on the coffee-maker first thing in the morning, even as we boot our laptops, or pick up our tablets to look for the MMDA app that tells us what we already know – that traffic is bad like any other day, and that so-called alternate routes are simply make-believe alternate routes, for everyone has exactly the same idea! We begin so many tasks. We start so many campaigns. We call for so many rallies and sign up to so many petitions. We begin so many faddish diets and we enroll ourselves in ever...

Catholic Homily/Sunday Reflection Solemnity of Sts. Peter & Paul June 29, 2008 The first reading, by all counts, should be rather depressing. King Herod was hell-bent on doing harm to the Church and its incipient leaders … James was ordered killed … and Peter, too, the head of the emerging “band of brothers,” presumably becoming, as days went by, some kind of a pain in the neck for ambitious Herod, was arrested … and imprisoned. Luke finds it significant enough to record that no less than “four squads of four soldiers each” had to be commissioned to guard him as he languished in prison. He was fettered with “double chains” and had to sleep “between two soldiers,” while more guards “kept watch outside the door.” The second reading is no less saddening, in a way. Paul, too, was in prison kept under humiliating conditions. As if to say good-bye, he speaks of his impending “departure” very clearly referring to his death. Paul was writing his own version of a valedictory address ...