A LITTLE over a month before resigning as head of the Filipino Dominicans over supposed violations of Church law in the UST Hospital spinoff, Fr. Edmund Nantes, O.P., called upon his fellow prior provincials to be patient on their wayward brothers as well as themselves.
In his homily during the Order of Preachers’ General Chapter in Bogota, Colombia last July 28, Fr. Nantes described how the Dominican community is a mixed lot— composed of good and bad brothers symbolically represented as “wheat” and the “weeds” in the bible parable.
He reminded his fellow Chapter friars that there are many “positive concerns” provincials need to address and that they must not spend “all their energies dealing with problematic brothers and filing canonical cases here and there.”
Citing the parable in which the landowner commanded his servants to patiently allow both weeds and wheat to grow until harvest time, Father Nantes said a Dominican cannot be presumptuous that he can be a weed or a wheat at all times. “This kind of mutation is more specifically our human condition. People change. I hope we do not plant wheat in initial formation only to be dismayed at the end that they have become weeds,” Father Nantes said.
“All the Dominican community needs is patience and tolerance for each other’s behaviors and beliefs,” Father Nantes said.
The resignations of Father Nantes, who was the UST vice-chancellor, UST Rector Fr. Ernesto Arceo, O.P., and UST Vice-Rector Fr. Juan Ponce, O.P. last September 8 were the product of an intra-order dispute surrounding the spinoff of the UST Hospital into a separate corporation and a P3-billion loan for its expansion.
