Summer Abroad 2026 - The Philippines

Two months, two countries, and three of us: Br. Louis-Marie, Br. Joshua, and myself. What follows is an attempt to gather up a summer I only partly managed to write down while it was happening. I have noticed while writing that I keep returning to mountains — a volcano, a cross at a summit, a mountain of garbage, and a rooftop twelve meters off the ground — so I have let that be the thread. 

We began with a week in South Louisiana, which we nicknamed LouisMarieSiana Week, because it was Br. Louis-Marie's country: where he went to college, where his friends are, where he confirmed his vocation. He planned the whole week and I had no idea what we were going to do or where we would go. I only knew we’d stay with his friends and we’d have fun, culminating in Br. Sam’s vows, before driving to Houston to catch the flight to Asia. 

Drive west out of New Orleans into Acadiana and you are among farm people — fiercely local, anti-elitist, and perhaps the most Catholic place I have seen in our country. The Cajuns descend from colonists expelled from Nova Scotia, and their founding story is an exodus story; their attachment to that land as a promised land is not a metaphor to them. The family who hosted us for the first night had a two-bedroom house and fed us like kings. We were in many different places, but we did not pay for a meal all week. And people kept asking us, in a very pious way, to pray for them. The poorer the people, the more generous they were to us. I wrote that down in my journal thinking it was an observation about Cajuns. It turned out to be the thesis of the summer. 

Then we flew to the other half of Louis-Marie's inheritance. I did not expect that going to the Philippines would teach me so much about a brother I already knew well. Growing up in Colorado and looking different from most people around him, he seems to have had an explanation ready whenever he felt out of place: 

"it's because I'm Filipino." Here that explanation stopped working. People saw a foreigner: are you Mexican? Are you Indonesian? When he explained he was half Pinoy (Filipino), they asked whether he spoke Tagalog, and he doesn't — though he learned an enormous amount in two months. I have watched other second-generation Americans, mostly Latinos, arrive at this same juncture, and it is a hard place to stand: not fully one thing, not fully the other. 

Being present for that, in his mother's country, was a privilege I hadn't asked for. It also made me look at my own life. I have felt something similar since I left Brazil at seventeen — slowly becoming stranger to the people back home while never quite becoming native anywhere I lived, whether Germany, France, or the United States. The difference is that in my case it was my own decision, which takes most of the sting out of it. If anything, it has prepared me for the itinerancy the Order asks of us. Belonging nowhere in particular turns out to be a strange kind of freedom, and it forms a person for solitude. I will come back to that, because I think it is where the question actually gets answered. 

Br. Joshua is from the Central Province, so we did not share a novitiate, and I am glad this summer corrected that. He is the most adaptable friar I know — always in good spirits, always willing to try the strange foods and the unfamiliar schedule, unfailingly positive and supportive. Two months is a long time to be three men doing almost everything together. It taught me things about community I will also come back to at the end. 

Upon our arrival at Santo Domingo in Manila I found an abundance I did not expect in a poor country: vocations in real numbers, lush gardens, the largest church in Metro Manila, and inside the same compound, medical and dental clinics for the poor a few steps from the sanctuary. The doors between the church, the convent, and those clinics are thin. The separation is subtle, almost accidental. I have thought about that architecture ever since. In the United States we tend to live further from the sites of our ministry, which has real advantages — it gives us a place of quiet contemplation to return to — but it also has a cost, and the cost is that the poor are somewhere else. 

I also found that the Order is one in a way I had believed but never felt. The O Sacrum and the De Profundis; a prior reading an assignment letter from the provincial; brothers doing their bellman jobs; a conversation about how you fold a habit; jokes about the Jesuits. None of it needed translating. Br. Louis-Marie said one day that we Dominicans are richer than most billionaires, because we have houses everywhere in the world. True! And I think the deeper wealth is that we walk into those houses already knowing the grammar of the place. 

St. Martin de Porres is everywhere here, and I had forgotten why. A large statue of him stands at the front door of the coristado (studium), welcoming guests, which is exactly right for a saint who kept the door at Lima. There is a shrine to him at Santo Domingo Church, across from Our Lady of La Naval, the motherhouse of the province. The reason the devotion took root in this country is that he is said to have bilocated here — specifically to Colegio de San Juan de Letran in old Manila (intramuros). A brother from Peru, who swept floors and answered the door, somehow arrives in Manila. We were reminded by his statue that we had big shoes to fill. 

The cooperator brothers were indeed one of the great gifts of this trip. Br. Mel at the University of Santo Tomas (UST) holds something like five ministries and carries none of them heavily. Br. Rey spent twenty years at the Curia in Rome and now raises goats. Br. Bai, the cook at Manaoag, drove us to Baguio, and being around him is like stepping into a slower world; he strays, he takes his time, there is no program of simply getting things done. He is contemplative in an entirely practical way. The brother preaches to the friars first — by his prayer, by his visible dependence on priests, by simply being there. He reminds others of the thing we are all trying to forget: that we are vulnerable, and that the standing temptation is to become God without God. Thankfully the province here is seeing a growth in cooperator brother vocations. They have three student brothers, whom I became good friends with; we went out for a meal together and I hope to stay in touch. 

The first mountain was Mount Mayon, and we prayed facing it. In Legazpi the pace slows, the countryside opens up, and the friars there — like every friar we met all summer — were extravagantly hospitable. 

It was also where we met Dominican sisters for the first time. 

The chapel faces the volcano, so for several days my prayers had a mountain in the background, and I started thinking about mountains as an image for preaching. Scripture is full of them and I wanted to go back and study how. A mountain is a hard, demanding, perhaps masculine kind of place: you have to climb it, it costs you something, and what you get at the top is beauty and a certain nearness to God. A volcano complicates that, because it is beautiful and dangerous at once. I did not know then how much of the rest of the summer would arrange itself around high places. 

I have since done some of that reading. It seems that Old Testament scholars have a name for it — the “cosmic mountain.” The argument is that the mountain works as the meeting place of heaven and earth, an axis between the two, and that Israel's two great mountains do different jobs: Sinai is the mountain of the covenant and of Israel's infancy, where God speaks from outside the community's borders; Zion is the mountain of maturity, where He takes up residence inside them. Once you start counting, the list runs the whole length of the Bible — Horeb, Carmel, Zion, the mountain of the Sermon, Tabor, the Mount of Olives, the mountain of the Great Commission. And the pilgrims going up to Jerusalem sang the psalms of ascent. All of this was more or less on my mind as we began to experience the different kinds of mountains in the Philippines. 

The Filipinos are the most hospitable people I have ever met — all of them, everywhere, without much exception and without apparent effort. I have encountered nothing like it anywhere in the world. They do not merely receive a guest; they actively love a guest. Providing food is their love language, and I mean that almost literally: a plate set in front of you is a sentence being spoken. "Have you taken your lunch, brother?" is the equivalent of our "hey, how are you?" I spent part of the summer trying to work out how they do it, and my best answer is that theirs is a culture of availability. They have time. After a long lunch with the Holy Rosary province (the Spanish missionary province from which the Philippine province originates), someone suggested we walk over to the sisters — and we visited not one convent but two, unannounced, and were received with ice cream and hours of conversation. In the United States we are anxious about productivity and our calendars are booked out; we are efficient and unavailable. Here, availability is the ministry. I cannot import the culture but I hope we can import the practice. The story that taught me what this actually costs came later, in Navotas, and I will tell it there. 

Felipe died during our first week in Manila. He was my best friend. We met at school when we were nine and had been friends for almost thirty years — never in the same city after seventeen, but talking a few times a week. When I lived in Germany he came to Munich for a semester, and that is where he converted; he had been baptized and had never practiced, and it happened through our conversations. After that we preached to each other — me mostly with words, and he through his life. I was, in fact if not in name, his spiritual director. He had been sick with cancer for eight years, so it was not a surprise. But I had been hoping to see him and give him one last hug when I got back to Brazil later this summer. 

Earlier on the day he died, driving back from lunch, we came across what looked like a "second line" — a term I had learned only weeks earlier in South Louisiana — in the middle of Manila: a man leading a dozen percussionists, carrying a Brazilian flag, for no occasion anyone could name. Louis-Marie said it was God winking at me. About fifteen minutes later I got the news. I have no tidy theological account of that. I only know that it happened, and that it happened inside a fraternity, with brothers around me and messages arriving from many dear friars back in the States who knew what was going on. I'm very grateful for all the support, as I continued to grieve over the following weeks. 

Of everywhere we went, Manaoag was the most spiritual place. It is three hours north of Manila, and going there feels like going up. Again, psalms of ascent came to mind as we drove through the valley. The Order has cared for this shrine since the apparition happened around 1605, and the image of Our Lady is seventeenth-century ivory. Millions come every year; and the friars bless hundreds of thousands of cars. 

We took part in Masses at the Basic Ecclesial Communities and learned how the BECs work, gave a talk at the school Letran Manaoag, and helped with parish activities — above all we helped with the blessings (of people and devotional objects), which are their own kind of physical labor. In a single session you move through the crowd with holy water, blessing hundreds of people at a time, for a long stretch. At the end of a session our habits were soaked. My favorite detail of this ministry is that students bring their pens and pencils to be blessed before exams. Their faith is very pious. 

I have seen devotion on this scale before, at Aparecida in Brazil, Guadalupe in Mexico, and some holy sites in Europe. But the name here is what stays with me: Our Lady of Manaoag means, roughly, Our Lady who calls. That is precisely what the place feels like — not a destination you choose so much as a summons you answer. As I prayed for our own vocations, I carried a great many people up there with me, especially Felipe and our benefactors. 

In Bataan we climbed Mount Samat (pronounced almost like summit), where the Memorial Cross of the Dambana ng Kagitingan — the Shrine of Valor — stands at the highest point of the mountain, more than half a kilometer up. It was built to commemorate the Filipino and American soldiers who fought and died in the Battle of Bataan against the Japanese, and it is the second-tallest cross in the world. Normally you can ride a lift up inside it and look out from the arms, but currently it's undergoing renovations, so we didn't get to go up. 

Still, I find that arrangement hard to stop thinking about. A nation puts a cross on top of its mountain, not to mark a Marian apparition or an ancient monastery, but to say something about mass suffering and the men who endured it. You climb, as with any mountain, and what you find at the top is the instrument of execution that saved the world, made into a viewing platform over the sea where the killing happened. Mayon taught me that a mountain can be beautiful and dangerous at once. Samat taught me that the summit is where we put our dead, our sufferings. Bataan was also where we spent time with Aeta (indigenous) communities in the rural mountains. They were extraordinarily sweet and hospitable, and what struck me was their bond to the land and to one another — a sense of community we have largely lost in our cities, and whose absence I felt in myself while I was standing there. We visited their school, which is supported by volunteer students from the University of Santo Tomas. They work to keep their own language alive alongside Tagalog, which meant we were two languages away from each other. And yet one of the little girls, who looked like my niece, was named Melanie. The American cultural influence is shallow but it is everywhere. With the help of UST students, they also made their own videos for teaching, which I did not expect: an extremely poor and rural, somewhat primitive place — and yet their teachers make use of the newest technologies, blending old and new pedagogical tools. 

Five days at San Lorenzo Ruiz and Companion Martyrs Parish. Each of us lived with two host families, two days each. I'm sure this is the part of the summer that will stay with us for the rest of our lives. I was blessed to stay with Maria, who had hosted Br. Joshua for the two nights before me. She is one of the most special people we met all summer, and the word I keep reaching for is motherly — she is indeed like Mary. Her family made us lunch, and it was abundant, which is a whole statement in a place like that. Her house has a rooftop, and from up there you can see the entire slum: other people's roofs, laundry being hung out to dry, small activities of ordinary life going on at that height because there is no room for them below. Maria grows beautiful plants up there — mostly herbs and fruits. 

Thinking back on that humble rooftop, I find myself thinking again of Mount Mayon. Instead of lava, Maria grows food. And her three-story house, with her neighbors' houses, rises above the slum as its own kind of mountain — the smallest summit of the summer and the one I would be most excited to climb again. 

Poverty in Navotas reaches every sense. Tiny homes, rats, roaches, almost nothing in the way of material goods; heat day and night; smell of fish, trash, ship oil; bad taste in the water; and above all noise, LOTS of noise. There is no silence in Navotas — honestly, there is not much silence anywhere in the Philippines. I had never before considered that silence is something a person can be deprived of. Poverty hurts, and it hurts through the 

body first. 

In Navotas, we also visited Smokey Mountain, which used to be the city's dump and is now a neighborhood. People live on a mountain of garbage. That sentence is not a figure of speech. Here is the fifth mountain of the summer: not a volcano, not a shrine, but an accumulation of what a city decided it no longer wanted, including human beings who make their homes on top of it. 

And then Market 3, where my categories broke. I had spent days believing I was seeing extreme poverty in the host families' homes — and yet those same families, and the parishioners with similar income, speak of Market 3 as “the poor.” It is the poorest place I have ever seen. They are indeed the poorest of the poor. The dwellings are not much more than boxes set among sewage and trash; people sleep on the floor, which is just dirt. We wore rubber boots, and at least once I caught myself thinking I should be in a hazmat suit. Louis-Marie called it Dante's Inferno, and I did not have a better word. To reach it we had to climb a wall — a wall built probably to hide the poorest from view — and go down the stairs on the other side. I do not need to explain what that wall is. It is the most honest image of structural sin I'm bringing home. 

There is one more mountain in the tradition, and it did not occur to me until I was back and writing this. Golgotha is barely a hill, and it is not a shrine. A big part of its meaning is that it is outside — outside the wall, past the gate, in the place where the city put the people and the things it had finished with. Every other mountain in Scripture is a climb toward God. That one is God arriving in the exact place we built a wall to avoid seeing Him. We built one too, in Navotas, and then we climbed it. I hope to continue climbing over those walls. 

Later that day, or perhaps the next, the tail of a typhoon reached Manila. It rained hard, it flooded a bit, and our plans were cancelled. Fr. Allan had heard that Br. Louis-Marie wanted to see the Galeón Museum, so he took us. The museum is inside a mall, the largest mall in the Philippines. We went in a single day from one of the poorest places in Asia to one of its nicest malls. Filipinos love malls. There are Catholic chapels in all of them, and I am told their Sunday Masses are always full. What we learned at the museum was worth the whiplash and provided some needed rest and comfort.

Filipinos have always been maritime peoples, sailing west as far as Madagascar, and under the Spanish, east all the way to Acapulco. Standing in that huge room I understood in a new way how much connects Manila to Acapulco, Manaoag to Guadalupe, Compostela to Navotas. 

We did prison ministry in Navotas as well, our second time after Calamba, and by then I was less overwhelmed and more able to think. After Mass we were each asked to lead a group conversation. I had planned mostly to listen, but of course the men asked a great many questions. Talking to men who have been waiting for a decade just to go to trial, I quickly noticed I didn't have the right words, the right vocabulary and theological depth that they deserved. Since that experience, I've been asking myself and the Lord how to best preach to people who are suffering the most. At Market 3 we were feeding them and smiling — and that was enough — but here they wanted words of comfort, which I didn't really have. Of course, we can and should point to the rewards of the next life, but those men need hope now. I later asked a friend for reading recommendations, and his answer was better than I expected: that art — novels, films, etc — probably teaches us this better than prose does, because it makes us see rather than talk; that the key is compassion in the literal sense, to suffer with; that on the cross Christ did not simply suffer, he suffered with us; and that his own hospice patients were suffering with Christ even when they could not have reasoned their way to saying so. That is the theology I think I need. 

In my memories I also keep going back to the first jail, in Calamba. Towards the beginning of the Mass we were all singing a Tagalog hymn I had learned the week before, and I closed my eyes. I did not know most of the words. But with my eyes shut I could hear every voice in that room resolving into one voice — friars and inmates, Americans and Filipinos, men in habits and men in prison uniforms, across languages and cultures and states of life. Our words became one in the Word of God, one single Body, and none of the differences were erased by it; they were simply not what mattered most. The men participated in that Mass as though it belonged to them, which of course it does. They have a choir and a band. One man was being released that day and the Mass became his thanksgiving. Here too, many of them have waited years just to learn when their trial will begin, some of them innocent, and yet they smiled and shook our hands. Often we did not need to say anything at all 

— they wanted to be heard. Which is why I keep returning to the language: we were told that the proper term for inmates in the Philippines is “PDL" (for "persons deprived of liberty"). But I think acronyms like "PDL” are actually less human and less true than what Jesus called them. Prisoners yes, but above all children of God. 

The Quiet Sacrifice of Hospitality 

I said I would come back to hospitality, and Navotas is where I finally understood it. Almost everything we did there happened outside the convent. We ministered to people in the parish and lived in their houses, which was hard but wonderful. What we did not know was what the friars were doing for us in the meantime. They had set up a room with mattresses and air conditioning so we could rest during our free hours — they had worked out, without being told, that we would not be sleeping well at night under the conditions in the slum. Oh, those siestas were powerful! 

On our last day, one of the friars asked if he could come in and take one of the mattresses back. We helped him carry it to his room, and that is when we realized what had happened: he had been sleeping for several nights on the bare wooden doorframe. Much like St. Dominic, I guess. Three friars had given up their beds and slept on hard wood (or the floor?) so that three visiting student brothers could nap. They never mentioned it. We only found out because a mattress had to go back. 

My academic background is in political economy, and I came into this summer with a long-settled view about the positive impact of free markets. I still think market exchange is good, and that when people trade freely both parties are better off — the buyer and the seller, the worker and the boss, the rich and the poor. 

Yet what Navotas did was put pressure on a word I had been using lightly. When people trade freely, then and only then are they better off. Standing in the port of Navotas, where so much human trafficking and prostitution takes place, it is very hard to call what is happening to those families free exchange in any sense I would defend. Their conditions force them to accept terms no one should have to accept, and the freedom in the transaction is either absent or almost entirely one-sided. I do not think this refutes anything I believed; I think it 

specifies it. It is one thing to hold that free trade creates wealth. It is another to notice how much of the world's actual trading is done by people with no meaningful alternative, and to see that as a moral fact rather than a footnote. That is the nearest I have come to understanding structural sin, and I got there by walking, not by reading. 

Gutiérrez writes that poverty renders a person insignificant — a nonperson, invisible, someone whose full humanity goes unrecognized. Standing on top of that wall at Market 3, I saw invisible as a piece of engineering rather than just a metaphor. Someone built that wall. Someone approved it — probably from an air-conditioned office somewhere. 

He also says, quoting a woman from a slum, that the opposite of joy is not suffering but sadness. But here is the special thing about the Philippines: these families suffer and yet do not express sadness. Someone there said they feel that they have a future because they believe God loves them. He looks with favor on his lowly servants. Even in the poorest places, the Pinoys smiled at us. Hospitality is everywhere in the Philippines. 

Which brings me to the comparison I did not expect to make. Compared to Navotas, Brazil looks like the United States: rich but rather sad. I grew up seeing homeless children and families on the street and thought I knew what poverty was, but materially this was another order of magnitude. And the traffic runs both ways. In our countries we have no time. We work, and we are efficient, and we are unavailable to each other, and people feel lost — anxious, depressed, isolated, and in numbers we have stopped finding shocking. Too many of them take their own lives. We have solved material poverty far better than the Philippines has but we have produced a poverty of our own: of community, of communion, of the Word of God, of ordinary human availability. I do not say this to relativize what I saw in the slums, which was inhumane and should not exist. I say it because the poor in Navotas have something we do not, and any honest account of the summer has to include the fact that I came home admiring them. 

The first is Maria's house — the rooftop with its plants, the abundant lunch, being fed by someone who does not have much. As I mentioned, in this country food is how love is said out loud, and we were told we were loved every single day. 

The second is a child at a feeding program at Market 3, and it isn't even my story: Br. Joshua experienced it. A very young boy, maybe four years old, very frail, was standing by him. All the other children were pushing and reaching for the food and the candy, and this one kid simply stood there with his hand out. He was the only one not shoving. Joshua moved in to protect him from the crowd, and then realized that the boy did not actually want to be pulled out of it. What he wanted, more than food, was to be there, among the others, with his friends. He wanted to be loved. I'm still thinking of that scene. 

The third is the experience of communion while singing with the men in the jail of Calamba. Iloilo, and being proud of the Order 

We finished our summer in Iloilo, which had the best food of the whole trip and comparatively little poverty. The friars have turned a struggling school around, and it is now thriving under a principal who is in his early thirties and was ordained only six months ago. That tells you what this province is willing to entrust to the young, and I found it bracing. 

But the larger thing Iloilo crystallized had been building all summer. Everywhere we went, we found institutions the Order built and still runs — universities, colleges, schools, hospitals, clinics, retreat houses, shrines — and they are unmistakably, unembarrassedly Catholic in a world that seems to be going the other way. The University of Santo Tomas in Manila has been at it since 1611 and has grown enormously without losing its Catholic identity. I arrived in May already with a strong appreciation for the Order. And yet I leave even prouder — much prouder — of it than I have ever been, and considerably more hopeful about what is possible in the US and the rest of the world. 

Two months of doing everything with the same two people, in the middle of the hardest loss of my adult life, taught me something I would not have chosen to learn. I had expected the fraternity around me to 

meet me exactly where I was, and there were stretches when I felt alone anyway. 

What I came away with is this. I cannot expect to be loved perfectly by every brother all the time, and it is not fair of me to ask it. What I can do is trust that the brothers will be there when I truly need them, because this is the life God has called me to and He is always there. Somewhere in those weeks I started embracing solitude, and I am a happier friar on the other side of that. My vocation was not shaken this summer. It was confirmed — by a harder road than I expected to walk. 

And this, I think, is where Louis-Marie's question and mine finally meet. The conflict he was living out in his mother's country — too foreign here, too foreign there — is not really a problem about passports or languages or skin tone, and it does not get solved by locating the correct hyphen. Neither does mine. Sooner or later everyone arrives at that same solitude, immigrant or not, because it is not produced by emigration; emigration only makes it obvious sooner. It is simply the place where you stand before God without any of the usual descriptions attached to you, and there is no nationality that can furnish it. What we found waiting there is that our truest identity was never Filipino or American or Brazilian, and not in the first instance even Dominican. It is that we are in Christ. Baptism gives a name that does not depend on where you were born, or on how well you speak your mother's language. 

I don't think this makes the ache disappear. Louis-Marie will keep being asked whether he speaks Tagalog (which he might answer in the affirmative soon), and I will keep being a little foreign in Brazil and a little foreign in the States. But it puts the ache where it belongs, which is well below the level at which a person's identity is actually decided. 

Every mountain this summer was also, eventually, something to walk back down from. The question I am left with is not what we saw but how to carry it down into ordinary life. This was not a safari; we did not come to look at the poor and go home. I refuse to romanticize what we saw, because it is inhumane and very sad. But I equally refuse to file it away quietly, because it is real, and the people in it are real, and I think that wall was 

built precisely so that people like us would not have to keep looking. Finding language that neither prettifies nor erases is the work in front of me, and I expect it to take years. 

Three concrete things. 

● First, availability. I seek to be interruptible — always available to the brothers. That is a scheduling decision before it is a spiritual one, and three friars sleeping on a doorframe have set the bar for what it can cost. 

● Second, language. I want to preach and write in a way that refuses to turn people into acronyms and categories or abstractions. Our faith is palpable, it's incarnate. We shouldn't forget that. 
● Third, intentional intercessory prayer with names in it — Maria and her family, the men at the prison, the small boy with his hand out. 

Almost nothing about the hospitality, which was extraordinary, or about the brothers I traveled with, who were good company through a very hard summer. 

What I would change is my own discipline in journaling and prayer. I journaled for the first half of the summer and then stopped when things got really busy, and I feel that loss now — Navotas especially, and the long conversation with Fr. Allan on our last day there, which I wish I had recorded. Prayer was also hard when the communities did not pray together and we were very busy, and there weren’t many quiet spaces. 

Whatever else this summer taught me, it taught me that experience without articulation evaporates. I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to write this reflection, though it only scratches the surface — not every mountain gets climbed in a single summer, and I expect to be on this one for a while.