When Pope Francis visits the Philippines Jan. 15-19 Mary Lou and D.J. Jael from St. Eulalia Parish in Maywood will be there to see him.

“My sister-in-law, she is 86 years old. We’re bringing her with us,” Jael told the Catholic New World. “She doesn’t want to see him in the Vatican or wherever in Europe. She wants to see him in Manila.”
She said people in the Philipines are excited for the visit.
“I know when Pope John Paul was there it was also a holiday. But the excitement this time is different because it seems that they feel that here is a pope for the people,” Jael said.
Jack Martinez of Our Lady of Mercy Parish, 4432 N. Troy St., was in the Philippines when Pope John Paul II visited and was part of the welcoming committee. He said Filipinos are very eager to hear the message of Pope Francis.
“Filipinos are very hospitable people and they will welcome him with open arms,” he said.

Visits to typhoon victims
Manila Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle announced details of the pope’s Jan. 15-19 itinerary in November. Pope Francis will arrive in the Philippines late Jan. 15, after just over two days in Sri Lanka.
On Jan. 16, his first full day there, Pope Francis will spend time with families from all 86 dioceses of the Philippines. On that morning, he will take care of state visit obligations with a courtesy call to President Benigno Aquino and meetings with the diplomatic corps. He also will celebrate Mass for the priests and women and men religious at the Manila cathedral.
The following day, the pope will visit Tacloban and Palo, two central Philippine cities battered in November 2013 by Typhoon Haiyan, or Yolanda as it was known locally.
Archbishop John Du of Palo said in a statement read by a church official, “The decision of Pope Francis to come to the Philippines and especially to visit the Archdiocese of Palo, to show solidarity with the victims of the Yolanda catastrophe, was very unexpected but is also very much welcome.”
Most of the 7,300 dead or missing from the typhoon came from Tacloban and surrounding towns, including Palo.
The pope will celebrate Mass on the Tacloban Airport grounds, then travel just south to Palo, where he will have lunch at the archbishop’s house with survivors of the typhoon and bless the Pope Francis Center for the Poor. He will celebrate Mass for priests, women and men religious as well as seminarians at Palo’s Cathedral of the Transfiguration of Our Lord, whose roof was reduced to a mangled mess of metal during the storm.
Archbishop Du’s message also included the reminder that he expected hundreds of thousands to converge on the small town of Palo, while Manila would see the millions expected to turn out for the pope’s open air Mass at Rizal Park Jan. 18.

In 1995, people in this overwhelmingly Catholic country lined Manila’s streets, making them virtually impassable to cars during Pope John Paul’s visit.
Marciano Paynor, former Philippine ambassador to Israel and Cyprus, represents the government on the planning committee. He said that in 1995, “we could not keep (the pope’s) schedule because the roads were blocked.”

Great devotion to church
The Archdiocese of Chicago has a significant Filipino population, which can be seen in the annual Simbang Gabi celebrations. This year more than 70 parishes participated in the Filipino Christmas novena.
The Filipino people, 86 percent of who are Catholic, traditionally have a great devotion to the church, said Teresita Nuval, director of the Archdiocese of Chicago’s Office for Asian Catholics.
The roots of the Filipino devotion to the church can be found in more than 400 years of colonization and evangelization under Spanish rule, followed by further occupation by American and Japanese rulers, Nuval said.
“One of the things is one’s relationship to poverty, poverty expressed in homelessness and hunger and malnutrition, and one’s experience of political corruption,” she said. “Being colonized by these foreign powers made people feel they were second-class. The Spanish called Filipinos ‘indios,’ meaning lazy people. But the Filipino is resilient, and the Filipino looks at the church as the liberator from poverty, from control, from torture and violence.”
Filipinos developed a deep identification with the church as described in the New Testament, especially by Paul, a persecuted church that shares in the shame of the cross for promise of salvation. Filipino culture emphasizes community over individualism, she said, with personal identity embedded in the group and each person loyal to the group, a concept called “sakop.” No one person — or no one part of the Body of Christ — stands alone; all are a necessary part of the whole.
“This kind of dependence on the whole resonates with how we think of church,” she said.

Faith is second nature
Faith is second nature “to most, if not all Filipinos,” especially those who were raised in the Philippines and grew up in a Catholic home, said Faye Arellano.
“When we immigrate to Canada or elsewhere, faith is the one important thing that we bring with us, because we believe that it is the one constant realization of the things that we hope for,” she told the Catholic Register, Canada’s national Catholic newspaper.
“Even if the road may be difficult at times, we can be assured that with faith there is nothing that we cannot overcome. The suffering takes on a whole new meaning, and by faith we believe that the journey with God is always good for us. As I always tell my friends, ‘Faith is great,’” she said.
Arellano, a Toronto legal assistant, was among a number of Catholic Filipinos in Canada and elsewhere who spoke about their strong faith, deep devotion to Mary and a focus on fami-ly as well as the highly anticipated pastoral visit of Pope Francis to their homeland.
Many also are looking beyond the papal trip to the International Eucharistic Congress to be held in the Philippines in 2016.
“The pope will be like a healing balm to a long-suffering people need-ing just that,” said Arellano, former head of the Live-in Caregiver’s Min-istry at Our Lady of the Assumption Church in Toronto.
“The pope’s visit is dubbed as a ‘mercy and compassion visit,’ because he is primarily lending support and solidarity with those in the southern region of the Philippines,” said Arellano.
Officials also said the government was taking great precautions with the pope’s security during his visit. They did announce in December that Pope Francis will travel in an open vehicle.
The pope’s speeches are all expected to be delivered in English. But Bishop Mylo Vergara of Pasig, a member of the bishops’ commission on social communications, said Pope Francis could spontaneously switch to another language, including Italian or Spanish.

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Contributing to this story was Michelle Martin and Joyce Duriga, Catholic New World; Evan Baudreau, CNS.