A FORMER regent of the College of Information and Computing Sciences (CICS) and faculty member of the Ecclesiastical Faculty of Philosophy, Fr. Hermel Pama, O.P., was appointed head of Biara Santo Tomas Aquino, the Dominican priory in Surabaya, East Java, Indonesia.
He was installed as the first prior of the St. Thomas Aquinas convent in December 2025, following the elevation of the Surabaya house into a priory.
The Thomasian priest is now part of the Order of Preachers’ leadership in the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation.
For Pama, the appointment did not feel like a beginning. It felt like the culmination of five years spent slowly building a community that once existed only online.
In November 2020, former Dominican prior provincial, now Alaminos Bishop Napoleon Sipalay, O.P., appointed Pama as superior of the Surabaya mission house while he was still in Manila.
Due to the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown, Indonesia’s borders were closed and the friars could not meet in person.
It was only in February 2022 when he arrived in Surabaya to serve the remaining time of his three-year term.
The early years of the mission were mostly administrative work. The Dominican Province of the Philippines signed a memorandum of agreement with the Diocese of Surabaya, in November 2023.
In his second term as superior, Pama and his community developed a plan to guide Dominican religious life within Indonesia’s cultural context, implemented in 2024.
Anthropological
Pama approached the assignment as both a priest and an anthropologist.
Pama, who has a doctorate in anthropology, said he travels around Indonesia when there is an opportunity for him to get “a feel of the local vibes.”
“I was challenged to take even more seriously the study engagements of Dominican life at the heart of this multicultural and multireligious social context,” Pama said, reflecting on his research on people’s migratory movements between the Philippines and Indonesia.
However, Pama said his background in anthropology was peripheral to his position as prior and that he treated it only as a “happenstance.”
To him, study serves preaching. “The Dominican pillar of life, or one may say a preferential commitment to lifelong learning in view of preaching, allows for a difficult, but not impossible, conviviality between science and faith, study and work, religion and culture,” the Dominican priest said.
‘UST is home’
Pama traces his leadership approach to his years at the University. The lessons, he said, came less from classrooms and more from daily encounters with Thomasians.
He said UST remains home to him not only because of the priests, administrators, and faculty, but also because of the non-teaching personnel who continue to help him even from afar.
He recalled a CICS staff member recovering files from an administrator’s damaged laptop and ecclesiastical office personnel covering the cost of a failed online book purchase. He also thanked the Santísimo Rosario Parish staff for renewing his marriage solemnization license.
Although these actions might seem ordinary, he said “governance and decision-making consider how people respond to us and how, in turn, we respond to people.”
“I take it as a dialectical process… Thus, there-always-already in front of one’s considerations are the life-contexts that we need to care about, and which I care about in work or ministry,” Pama added.
He emphasized the Thomasian’s enduring passion for both teaching and study, viewing learning as an experience that extends beyond the traditional confines of libraries and classrooms. For him, knowledge comes from people and communities, which he calls “living libraries.”
This commitment to continuous learning, he said, formed both his ministry and his leadership.
“I look forward to the time after Surabaya—not because I do not like it here, but that the real test is appropriation and continuing improvisation, by the succeeding Dominicans, of the mission we also just continued,” Pama said.
Convent life
The Dominican Province of the Philippines is constructing a formation house, expected to be completed this year, that will provide the friars with a permanent base and legal footing. But Pama believes the real work is cultural rather than structural.
Dominican life revolves around prayer, study, community life, and preaching. In Surabaya, these “pillars” must be lived within an Indonesian context where Catholics are a minority, Pama said.
“The priority is to be at home in the world: Dominicans are at home in Surabaya, as Surabaya is at home with Dominicans. In [theology], it is realizing synodality in the Church,” Pama said.
The community is also coordinating with Dominican friars in Pontianak, West Kalimantan, toward a long-term plan of an Indonesian vicariate that could lead to greater autonomy.
