A POLITICIAN has a strong devotion to the Sto. Niño. After an election, he won again through cheating and irregularities. Grateful to the Sto. Niño, he asked a priest to say a Thanksgiving Mass!
To have a devotion to the Sto. Niño is good but it doesn’t jibe with the politician’s cheating. According to the Church teaching, this split between devotional faith and immoral conduct is erroneous.
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The most popular devotions among Filipinos are: Jesus the Sto. Niño and the suffering Jesus or the Black Nazarene. This is because Filipinos have an innate love for a helpless infant child and, in the Black Nazarene, they can identify their sufferings with the suffering Jesus.
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Big and mini statues of the Sto. Niño are dressed endearingly in various forms and attires. There’s a Sto. Niño clad as a fireman, doctor, or policeman (hopefully not with a hand receiving a tong!). There is also a Sto. Niño clothed in green, representing the green US dollar bills Filipinos dream of having.
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In the gospel, Jesus teaches: “Unless you become like little children you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven” (Mt. 18, 10).
“Like little children,” what does that mean? What is it about a child that Jesus liked and valued so much?
The emphasis is in being childlike, not childish. “Mag-pakabata,” hindi maging “isip-bata.”
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One endearing quality about the child is its innocence and simplicity. When I was in grade school, I used to play with all kinds of kids in the neighborhood. My parents would warn me not to mingle with “dirty” kids from the depressed areas. But I didn’t see any difference or mind it if they came from a poor or rich families.
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Children are honest and straightforward. “Hindi plastic.” A mother was once entertaining a priest in their house.
He bragged how she instilled on her children the love of reading the Bible. She called her five-year old daughter. “Dear, would you get the book that we all love so much to read?”
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The child ran to the parents’ bedroom and forthwith came bringing a book. “Here it is, Mama,” the young girl said.
When the mother saw it, she turned red with embarrassment. It was the catalogue of fashion wear! The child handed the book “we all love” because it was her mother’s favorite.
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The other quality a child possesses is his spirit of dependence and trust. This is shown, for instance, when a toddler crossing the street puts its hand in the hand of the father and mother.
This dependence is true also with God. It requires true faith and a healthy fear.
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The absence of dependence is shown concretely when a man has no more time for God. Work and pursuit of money take his place or when he believes that he can do and get everything he wants with the power of his wealth and intelligence.
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The feast of the Sto. Niño is very popular among Filipinos. However, let not our devotion remain only on the level of the ritual and external. Let us rather develop a childlike piety and cultivate the virtues of innocence, humility, and filial trust in the Lord.
“Unless you become like little children you cannot enter the Kingdom of heaven.”
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SUPPORT SEMINARIANS. Seminarians are our future priests, missionaries and bishops. We cannot have them if there are no seminarians because all priests and bishops start as seminarians.
So let’s support them.
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Chip in an amount or sponsor a seminarian’s schooling for one year. For inquiries, e-mail me at: [email protected].
Elon Musk stood next to President Donald Trump in the Oval Office on Friday, but the physical proximity belied a growing philosophical divide between two of the world’s most powerful men, resulting in the tech mogul’s abrupt announcement that he is departing Washington — without having achieved his goal of decimating the federal government.
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Trump took a more charitable view of Musk’s tenure during a sprawling news conference in which he also declined to rule out pardoning Sean “Diddy” Combs, who is on trial on charges of sex trafficking and other alleged crimes; said he dislikes “the concept” of former first lady Jill Biden being forced to testify before Congress about her husband’s mental fitness; and predicted again that Iran is on the cusp of making a deal that would suspend its pursuit of nuclear weapons.
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In a battle of plutocrats against populists, Bannon, a longtime advocate for reducing the size and scope of government, found Musk’s methods and policy preferences to be sharply at odds with those of the MAGA movement. So, ultimately, did Musk, who broke with Trump repeatedly on agenda items as narrow as limiting visas for foreign workers and as broad as Trump’s signature “big beautiful” budget bill — which Musk belittled for threatening to add trillions of dollars to the national debt.
“I was, like, disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decrease it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing,” Musk said in an interview with CBS’ “Sunday Morning,” which will air this weekend.
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“I love the gold on the ceiling,” he said.
Musk has argued that inertia throttled his efforts to reduce government spending — a conclusion that raises questions about whether he was naive about the challenge of the mission he undertook.
“The federal bureaucracy situation is much worse than I realized,” he told The Washington Post this week. “I thought there were problems, but it sure is an uphill battle trying to improve things in D.C., to say the least.”
On Friday, he drew an implicit parallel between American government and the Nazi regime that committed a genocide, invoking the “banality of evil” that Hannah Arendt used to describe the atrocities in Germany.
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