Let's Adventure to Mindoro!

Phenomenal healing priest Fernando Suarez was amazed. It usually took six years for a new congregation to be set up, but in his case the vital elements of the process took only six days.

“I am in awe!” exclaimed Father Suarez, 44, his voice bringing out his childlike qualities—and his being Filipino.

Suarez has formed a new community named the Missionaries of Mary Mother of the Poor (MMP) under the Diocese of Occidental Mindoro after resigning from the Ottawa-based Companions of the Cross, which ordained him in 2002.

“I never thought that the process of my excardination and incardination would take place only within six days,” he said, noting the speed to be unprecedented. Excardination refers to a priest’s separation and release from a religious group, while incardination refers to his acceptance into another.

Big crowds, donations

Questions have been heard from various quarters on the status of the Batangas-born priest, who now attracts 100,000 to 150,000 people monthly to his healing Masses, apart from drawing substantial donations in cash and in kind from elite families, big corporations and sociocivic groups, not to mention big foreign donors for the projects of the Foundation of Mary Mother of the Poor.

Was he expelled by his Canada group? Had things gone into his head and he could no longer be controlled by his superiors? From Canada, he based himself in Batangas while his group was in Cavite, so why was there word that he would move to Mindoro?

Breaking his silence on these issues, Suarez said: “Overwhelmed by the grace of peace after a pilgrimage to the tomb of Mother Teresa in Calcutta last February, I resigned from the Companions of the Cross on March 25, 2011. Then, on March 31, 2011, I was accepted by the Apostolic Vicariate of San Jose, Occidental Mindoro, under Bishop Antonio Palang.”

On July 16, 2011, Palang decreed the establishment of the MMP as a “Public Association of Christ’s faithful.”

The decree stated: “Aimed at living the demands of evangelical counsels, healing, renewal and ministry to the poor with the intent of becoming a society of apostolic life, the MMP is hereby formally accepted for the service of our pastoral jurisprudence.”

The poor of Elin

To grow the mission, Suarez has been assigned to Elin (pronounced Eling) on the tip of Mindoro, an island three times the size of Boracay and which remains without roads and electricity.

“The place is so poor,” he said. “But that is an answered prayer as I have requested Bishop Palang to locate the mission with the poor.”

“Some have criticized me, saying that I do whatever I want, I go wherever I want to go all over the world. Perhaps if they come with me to Elin, they may say things differently,” the priest said.

“Things are happening fast. MMP now has 10 seminarians. Three will be ordained priests this August,” he added.

The MMP now has five core members, including three incoming priests and cofounder Father Jeff Shannon, also formerly of Companions. Bishop Palang was regarded as canonical founder, Suarez stressed.


Mission foretold

Suarez remembered that on the day he was ordained, a priest came to him and foretold that he was going to receive such tremendous gifts from God that his group would not be able to contain him.

“In Canada, the Companions, to which I am so attached, tried their best to accommodate me and the demands on my healing ministry. But my calling has become so evident,” he recalled.

The young Fernando Suarez was a chemical engineering degree holder from Adamson University who worked for two years with the company CocoChem. He was engaged to be married at 25, but the engagement was called off the same day it was made when his girlfriend of 12 years said, “I think you are meant to be a priest.”

He entered the seminary run by the Society of the Divine Word (SVD).

Suarez recounted that in 1995 the Blessed Mother and St. Joseph appeared to him in a dream where he was told he would go to a “cold and windy place” and would tell the world of God’s love. Three days later, a man came to him and presented him documents for travel to Winnipeg, Canada.

“There really is no barrier to all that God has planned,” the priest said, making a reference to a key message he delivered in his sermon on Saturday, Feast of the Transfiguration.

Obviously in his element at the new site of the Oratory of Our Lady of Montemaria, an MMP Foundation project situated on a breezy hillside expanse in San Alfonso, Cavite, Suarez repeatedly exhorted those present to emerge from the Mass “fully in awe of the power of God.”

“Our Lord heals you all now. He wants you to be in awe, in great amazement of His powers, because He wants you to surrender to Him all your aches, pains and troubles,” he said, drumming up his message in between folksy anecdotes of his healing experiences.

The crowd broke into laughter when he narrated that just the other day, at the Philippine Army headquarters, “napatumba ko ang mga heneral! (I knocked the generals down).”

Prayed over and brought to a state known as being “slain by the Holy Spirit,” the military officers were literally reduced to fallen generals before the power of the Lord, he said.

Suarez’s healing Masses will continue to be held on weekends at Montemaria, with permission from Bishop Palang and Bishop Chito Tagle of Cavite.

The priest glowed with anticipation over the spiritual yield of his new community, one which he said would seek a “new springtime of the Church” through the renewal of priests.

Seeing the healing ministry as a unifier of the Church, Suarez said: “There is healing when there is unity. Hatred breaks. Healing is forgiving and forgiving unites. Unity is healing.”

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This tale is fraught with sharks and treasure, pirates and poachers, strife and solutions. Come, dive with me!

“Apo Reef is the ‘Jewel of Mindoro,’” former Sablayan Mayor Godofreido Mintu told me recently over a seafood dinner. “Perhaps you may come to realize just what its treasure is, but only after you dive.”

Having nursed a lifelong fascination with both pirate lore and bizarre quests, I felt the old man’s words strike home.

And now, surrounded by undersea life 65 feet below the eastern face of Apo Island in Occidental Mindoro, I pray to Poseidon and embark on a treasure hunt—a quest to find the true “jewels” of the deep.

I drift leisurely, propelled alongside a heavily encrusted sea wall by invisible ocean currents. My attention shifts to the wall, where neon-hued fairy basslets frolic amid the swaying tips of crimson gorgonians.

I peer in to inspect their knobby rows of polyps, careful not to touch anything, Leave No Trace principles being of primary importance.

A minute later, an impossibly huge school of yellow-dashed fusiliers (Pterocaesio randalli) appears. I try to estimate their number but they coalesce into a single mass that fills my vision end to end. In a moment they are gone.

This is truly Poseidon’s realm. Consider that 71 percent of the planet is covered in water, and 97 percent of that forms its vast oceans.

Covering just 1 percent of the ocean floor, coral reefs host an incredible variety of life: One in four marine creatures live within these undersea oases, and nowhere are these more beautiful and productive than in the wondrous Pacific archipelago known as the Philippines.



Origin of life and legend

Apo Reef lies at the northern tip of the Coral Triangle, a 5.7-million-square-kilometer region that spans the seas of six countries—the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and Timor-Leste.

A fourth of the world’s islands lie nestled within this exquisite region, distinguished by the presence of at least 500 species of reef-building coral.

The Coral Triangle is so abundant in marine life that it has been hailed by globally renowned coral expert and author Dr. Charlie Veron as “the center of Earth’s marine diversity.” It is home to 605 of the 798 known reef-building corals and 2,228 types of reef fish that include the Sulawesi Coelacanth (Latimeria menadoensis), a living relic of the dinosaur era thought to have been extinct for some 70 million years.

Like the Bermuda Triangle, the Coral Triangle has spawned a variety of folklore. During the Age of Sail, both pirates and privateers swore of surmounting enchanting mermaids, wailing sirens, ship-tearing kraken and all manner of sea monsters.

The region is actually an enormous undersea food factory, whose produce directly benefits half a billion people yearly. A single square kilometer of healthy reef can produce more than 40 metric tons of grouper, oyster, tuna and other forms of seafood year after year.

Obviously, the potential of our seas to sustain life, both human and otherwise, is leviathan.

Troubled Paradise

In Greek mythology, the infant Zeus nursed from a bountiful horn carried by the nymph Amalthea. This so-called Cornucopian Horn came to be associated with wealth and abundance.

Properly protected, the Philippines’ 27,000 square kilometers of coral reefs can turn into a Cornucopian Horn, providing for the needs of millions in a very real bid to stamp out Asian poverty.

But Paradise lies troubled. For more than a century, coastal development, destructive fishing practices, coral mining, sedimentation, overfishing, chemical pollution and the effects of climate change (such as ocean warming, acidification and coral bleaching) have been waging an undersea war against our marine enclaves.

The Philippines, together with Indonesia, hosts the world’s most threatened coral reefs, less than 5 percent of which remain in excellent condition. Faced with this problem, many countries within the Coral Triangle have established Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) to conserve what’s left.

“[MPAs] evolved when people realized that portions of coral reefs needed continual protection to stay productive,” explains Joel Palma, conservation programs vice president of World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). “These areas go by a host of names: MPAs, fish sanctuaries or no-take zones. All of them are loosely defined as inter- or subtidal spots reserved by law for the protection of a given area.”

Undersea enclaves

Today, the Philippines hosts about 10 percent of the world’s MPAs—more than 500, more than any in Southeast Asia. Established largely through local government initiatives and maintained through the blood, sweat and tears of coastal communities, these undersea enclaves provide safe havens for Philippine marine life as well as a growing number of eco-conscious tourists.

But many MPAs are plagued by a lack of funding. Mismanagement is rife: Only a little over 100 are properly administered; the rest are “paper parks”—areas urgently needing funding and professional management.

Hunting incursions are recurring sources of friction between the Philippines and its neighbors.

In September 2007, 126 endangered green sea turtles (Chelonia mydas) and 10,000 turtle eggs were found aboard China’s F/V 01087 in Sulu.

In August 2008, 101 critically endangered hawksbill turtles (Eretmochelys imbricata) were found aboard Vietnam’s F/V Q.ng 91234-TS near El Nido in Palawan.

In April 2009, 14 green sea turtles were found aboard an unmarked Chinese speedboat near Cauayan, also in El Nido.

Since the 1990s, WWF has been working with the private sector, the government and civil society in furthering scientific research, policy reform, protected area and community-based management within the Coral Triangle. Its Philippine office has pioneered the establishment and upkeep of MPAs in some of the country’s best-known and most productive coral reefs.

Two of the best-managed MPAs are Apo Reef off Occidental Mindoro and Tubbataha Reefs off Palawan.

Wonders of ‘payaw’

Much of Apo Reef, the country’s largest (34 square kilometers) and a former world-class dive site, is in an abysmal state after 30 years of destructive fishing.

In October 2007, WWF and the local government of Sablayan in Mindoro spearheaded the total closure of Apo Reef to fishing. Alternative livelihood programs and a robust ecotourism drive were instituted to keep livelihoods afloat while allowing the reef ample time to recover.

Giant fish aggregation devices—locally called payaw—were installed to provide alternate fishing spots for coastal communities.

The crude but effective contraptions feature a buoy, a counterweight and 10 to 20 giant coconut fronds. Algae growths on the decomposing fronds attract herbivores such as surgeonfish and rabbitfish, which then draw larger predators.

Local group leader Elmo Bijona testifies to the effectiveness of the devices: “A single payaw can daily yield maybe 15 kilograms of good fish per boat. You can land tambakol, tulingan, galunggong and even yellowfin tuna on any given night.”

The steady rise in the size and number of fish has been matched by an upsurge of tourists, proving that ecological stewardship goes hand in hand with profit.

There are even more dramatic results in other model sites. From 2004 to 2005, the world-renowned Tubbataha Reefs doubled yearly fish biomass from 166 to 318 metric tons per square kilometer—a yield seven times more productive than a typical reef.

Tubbataha’s fertile reefs also constantly seed adjoining regions such as eastern Palawan and western Visayas with fish and invertebrate spawn.

Through the work of WWF and its allies, Apo Reef may one day be what Tubbataha is now.


Natural investments

Apo Reef differs from all other WWF project sites in that it is kept afloat almost exclusively by donations.

For example, “Bright Skies for Every Juan” enjoins Cebu Pacific passengers to indirectly offset the ecological impacts of their flights by donating to the upkeep of the reef.

The program combines the efforts of WWF, Cebu Pacific, the Department of Environment and Natural Resources and the Sablayan government to boost the region’s resilience to climate change impacts through MPA protection, promotion of responsible ecotourism and introduction of alternative livelihoods.

“Cebu Pacific’s decision to spearhead climate adaptation is a prime example of private-sector leadership,” says WWF-Philippines CEO Jose Ma. Lorenzo Tan.

“Our government alone cannot turn back the tide of climate effects. It is the private sector that has the skills needed to think incisively, move efficiently and manage risk,” he says.

In the face of worsening climate impacts, protecting biodiversity enclaves makes perfect sense. “Our work in Apo Reef and other protected areas focuses on more than just biodiversity conservation: Should we succeed in halting climate change, these pockets of marine resilience will provide the building blocks to restore natural mechanisms that provide food and livelihood for millions of people. This is a natural investment,” Tan says.

White-tipped oracle

Back in Apo Reef, the hunt continues. Over an hour’s exploration has yielded little in the way of jewels or answers.

The dawn rays slice through the water, reflecting off a shadow 30 feet away. Perhaps, I reflect, what’s important in treasure hunting is the journey.

The best hunters have all learned to pick out treasure from trash. So too must we allow the hunt to transform the hunter.

Inexorably, the shadow morphs into a white-tip reef shark (Triaenodon obesus), itself on a hunt, as evidenced by its menacing motions. I tense up, one gloved hand cupping a dive knife used more for show than anything else.

The shark torpedoes onward. Time slows down. Suddenly an enveloping shadow smothers all light!

Puzzled, I gaze upward and realize just what drew the shark in the first place. The fusiliers, thousands upon thousands of them, have returned. The shark pulls up and dives into the mass.

As I watch the fascinating interplay between predator and prey, I notice, as if for the first time, the fusiliers’ gleaming hues of cobalt, ruby and gold, gloriously illuminated by the morning.

Then and there I realize that the shark’s hunt has led me to the end of mine.

As in the grandest treasure tales, the most valuable fortunes really do lie in the depths. As inhabitants of the world’s second-largest archipelago, we must realize that the sea’s greatest treasure is its ability to provide, but that providence can only continue when we learn to protect what we have been gifted with.

At the apex of the Coral Triangle, 65 feet below the Jewel of Mindoro, I finally accomplish my treasure hunt.


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