Homage to Fr. Arsenio C. Jesena
The Jesuit community has lost one of its stoutest champions of the oppressed and to the legions whom he had helped, a benefactor.
He was big enough to be a sumo wrestler, and swarthy, too. He truly looked formidable but he was softspoken, a smile always on his rotund face. His easygoing manner belied a strength that wasn’t just muscle, but solid steel within. When Fr. J.J. or Junie, as he was affectionately called by colleagues and friends died last month, the Jesuit community lost one of its stoutest champions of the oppressed and to the legions whom he had helped, a benefactor.
In the 1960s, upon my return to Manila after a two-year stint in Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) as information officer of the Colombo Plan Bureau, I set up Solidaridad — a bookshop cum publishing house on Padre Faura, Ermita. Next door was the Jesuit-run Institute of Social Order (ISO), whose members included Jose Blanco, Fritz Araneta, Hector Mauri, Denis Murphy, John Carroll and Walter Hogan. They often dropped by the bookshop and I developed a warm friendship with them primarily because they were all working on social problems — how to assist the very poor.
It was also a time that I was conducting a one-man campaign against the sugar oligarchy, which was then the single best organized economic bloc, powerful enough to influence national politics. The Jesuit most active in working for the benefit of sugar workers in Negros was the Italian Hector Mauri. It was he who mentioned Arsenio Jesena to me. I sought him out, and he told me of his experiences as an incognito migrant worker in the sugar plantations in Negros. He described in detail the miserable lives of the sacadas, their exploitation, and how hard they worked for so little pay.
His long essay on the sacadas was the most important article in the special issue on the sugar industry of my journal,
Solidarity. I sent 50 copies of the journal to Washington as told to me by then senior aide, Tom Dines, of Senator Frank Church. A former Peace Corps volunteer in Negros, Tom became my ally too, in my confrontation with the sugar lobby. That special issue made an impact in Washington; in the Appropriation Act of that year, Congress prohibited the grant of the sugar quota to any favored country that does not pay the minimum wage.
I have not kept myself up to date with developments in the sugar industry. All I know and am sure of is that the efforts of Jesuits like Father Jesena were not in vain.
For four years after 1972, when Marcos declared martial law, I was not allowed to travel. I was harassed by the thugs of Marcos. Then in 1976, I finally got my passport back after faking the reasons that I was going to attend a non-existent agrarian reform conference during which I will sing paeans to the dictatorship.
I went instead to Paris to attend a cultural conference but before leaving, I decided to write the fifth and concluding novel — Mass — of the Rosales saga. I have a priest in the novel, a major character who influences the young revolutionary Pepe Samson. His name is Fr. Jess — and who else did I pattern him but my Jesuit friend, Arsenio Jesena.
The fictional Fr. Jess sets up a church in a slum area in Tondo and immerses himself in its life, helping out of school youth and finding jobs for them. Among those he takes under his wing is the mother of Victor and Luis in the novel,
My Brother, My Executioner, an orphan from the Hospicio de San Jose named Toto who is a student activist, and Pepe Samson, the illegitimate son of Antonio Samson in The Pretenders. Samson works as sacristan in the church, and engages Fr. Jess in many discussions and in one of them, Fr. Jess explains that his ramshackle church is just another church for the real church is in the heart. This is what Fr. Jesena articulated not just with ritual but with his life.
I am not going to add anymore to this information other than tell my readers that what Fr. Jess says in the novel are what Fr. Jesena could have uttered himself.
Through the decades after the tumultuous Sixties, we kept in touch and whenever possible, I visited him where he was stationed, in Davao, in his native Negros, always involved as he was with agrarian problems and the unending rural poverty.
I recall at one time, he was almost killed by a hit and run driver. He recovered and resumed his work.
The last time I saw Fr. Jesena was early this year. I had gone to Diliman to see Fr. John Schumacher, the historian, and Fr. Jaime Bulatao, another old friend. Both were very ill. Fr. Jesena was already walking around with crutches but there was nothing infirm about his spirit. We exchanged notes on what we were doing; he had written a couple of books about his experiences; both being humble, they did not tell much about what he had done.
My wife and I were in Japan when he had a stroke and died. He was buried together with his Jesuit brethren at the Novitiate in Novaliches. My loss is very personal for Fr. Jesena was not just a friend. He was a staunch and loyal ally in causes — some of them already lost — we both believed in.