Salamat Ricardo Cardinal Vidal! Adieu!

Today we take the late Cebu Archbishop Emeritus Ricardo Cardinal Vidal to his grave at the back of the Metropolitan Cathedral where the late Julio Cardinal Rosales is also buried.We expect a huge throng of people whose lives were touched by the late Cardinal Vidal, including the Catholic hierarchy who would be in Cebu to pay their last respects befitting a Prince of the Catholic Church. While we say that he was a Prince of the Church, however to many of us lay people, he received us like an ordinary pastor, after all we looked up to him as our shepherd.

I have written about my days with Cardinal Vidal, especially during the fight against the Reproductive Health Bill where we lost this fight during the term of then president Benigno "PNoy" Aquino III, but thankfully the Supreme Court rendered the RH law as ineffective because of previous laws and rulings about certain drugs, which are abortifacient. Cardinal Vidal led this fight against the RH bill even if he was already retired from his duties in the Cebu Archdiocese.

Perhaps the greatest contribution of Cardinal Vidal was his effort to bring to the Vatican the exploits of San Pedro Calungsod, a Cebuano or Visayan catechist who died for the faith in the shores of Guam. We all went to Rome for the canonization of the second saint for the Philippines. His last acts were to request the Vatican to declare the late Bishop Teofilo Camomot into the roster of saints. Remember the two Filipino saints do not come from the clergy, but are catechists. If the Vatican responds favorably, then we could see Bishop Teofilo Camomot as the first Filipino saint to come from the ranks of the clergy, all thanks to the efforts of Cardinal Vidal.

Finally, I got this piece from my good friend, Fr. Carmelo Diola about what Cardinal Vidal has done for us Cebuanos. Fr. Diola said in his Facebook page, "The late Cardinal Vidal approved the bible translation project from the original biblical languages to Cebuano by giving the official gosignal to the San Pedro Calungsod Bible Translation Commission in 1998.

During the launch of the four gospels – To Euaggelion (Ang Ebanghelyo) – last 2012, or 14 years later, he was there in person at the Cebu Cathedral Museum. He congratulated us but also revealed that he actually had hesitated about giving his approval since he knew the project would be extremely difficult to undertake. Yet, he gave his blessing and prayed for us. Cardinal Vidal can rightly be called the father of the aforementioned modern Cebuano bible translation whose NT should be published by 2021. Cardinal Vidal, i-ampo mo kami!"

No doubt earnest efforts are being made by the Cebu Archdiocese to allow as many people to attend the funeral services for Cardinal Vidal with the less inconvenience. When I learned that they have made Ceres buses available for free to anyone wishing to go to the Cathedral, I found this as a stroke of genius! The only way we can reduce the expected massive traffic jam is for everyone to park their cars elsewhere and take those buses to the Cathedral. But even then, if you go everyone lined up all around the Cathedral, it would be teeming with people shoulder to shoulder. At this point we can only bid Cardinal Vidal goodbye and ask him to pray for us, pray for Cebu and pray for the Philippines.

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In the past two days, October 24 and 25, I joined a Visayas conference dubbed the People's Conversation on Federalism at the Montebello Hotel discussing my favorite topic that we should have embarked 30 years ago when we had the spontaneous EDSA Revolution. Sadly, as my mentor, the late Max Soliven would quip. "It was a revolution that we started and should have ended by working out a better system of governance."

In the end, 30 years later, despite efforts by the Yellow cult that kneels before anyone in the Aquino family have done, no one goes to the EDSA anniversaries anymore simply because we are all disappointed that nothing much has changed and worse, the Aquino cronies, the oligarchs have made it to the top rank richest men in Forbes magazine. So is federalism the answer? I won't say, but keeping our unitary form of government is stupidity!