Fr. Picx Picardal’s book launched on his first death anniversary

DAVAO CITY (MindaNews / 27 May) – A book written by Fr. Amado “Picx” Picardal, will be launched at the Redemptorists in Cebu City on Thursday, May 29, on his first death anniversary. 

“The Beloved: Journals, Diaries and Letters of a Priest,” will be launched at 3 p.m. at the Holy Redeemer Provincial Center of the Redemptorists in Cebu, after the inauguration of the hermitage made of stone-cordwood-bottle that Picardal was building on a promontory across the religious congregation’s retreat center in Busay, Cebu City. 

Picardal, a Redemptorist priest, had just come down from working on the hermitage around noon when he collapsed near a row of pink and white periwinkles on the side of the retreat center. He died of cardiac arrest. He was 69. 

His death anniversary will be marked by a morning visit to the cemetery in downtown Cebu and from there to Busay for mass and the blessing of his hermitage, and in the afternoon, the launch of the book, “The Beloved,” after his name, Amado. 

Picardal had earlier explained the design and materials of the structure he said he would name as “St. Anthony’s Hermitage,” apparently after St. Anthony the Great who is also referred to as Anthony the Hermit, the Father of All Monks. The reinforced version of the hermitage is now named “Capella del Amado” or Amado’s chapel. 

The cordwood he used were from trees felled by super typhoon Odette in the retreat center’s compound; the stones, too. The empty wine bottles, he said, had accumulated across the years from Irish confreres who would go to the mountain retreat every Monday.  

The book is an abridged version of a thick manuscript that Picardal submitted for publication in January 2018, the year he was supposed to go full-time hermit.
But his supposed full-time eremitical life was interrupted by August 2018 when he was targeted for assassination and was forced to leave the country until the end of the Duterte administration. He was back in Busay six days after Duterte stepped down as President on June 30, 2022. 

Picardal was a staunch critic of former President and long-time mayor Rodrigo Duterte, particularly on the issue of extrajudicial killings (EJKs). He was the spokesperson of the Coalition Against Summary Executions (CASE) which documented the killings in Davao City attributed to the Davao Death Squad (DDS) during Duterte’s war on drugs as mayor. 

Picardal is credited for having helped the Commission on Human Rights, international human rights bodies and the International Criminal Court (ICC) during their investigations on the summary executions in the city while Duterte was mayor, and as President. 

In mid-April 2016, just a few weeks before the Presidential elections, Picardal posted a consolidated report of the CASE on the Davao killings, warning this could happen nationwide under a Duterte presidency. When Duterte was elected President, Picardal, then assigned at the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) office in Manila, continued his campaign against EJKs and helped set up a network of  groups monitoring EJKs. 

In his Prologue to the book, Picardal asked: “Who would be interested to read the life-story of an ordinary, unknown priest?” 

It is not clear exactly when he wrote the prologue but asking who would be interested to read his book was “always the question as my manuscript was rejected by three publishers at the turn of the millennium.”

“The impression I got was only the autobiographies of those who have achieved success – power, wealth and fame will sell and are worth publishing. So, I gave up looking for publishers and continued keeping a diary and posting on my blogs in the internet for the next seventeen years,” he wrote. 

Picardal had initially prepared the manuscript for publication in the late 1990s. He kept adding more pages as the years passed. The final manuscript that he submitted for publication in January 2018 was 779 pages. The book is an abridged version.

Picardal said the previous rejection of his manuscript “was a blessing in disguise because nine more chapters were added – full of drama and adventure.”

The manuscript ends with entries in 2017, as he was going full-time hermit by 2018. “As another chapter of my life has ended, I again make another attempt to share the story of my life thus far. I told myself that if I will still get rejection slips, I will continue keeping diaries and journals until my twilight years. Hopefully, someone will discover it, appreciate its value and have it published when I am gone. This book will then serve as a testimony of how I have lived my life as a decent human being and a good and faithful priest with all my faults and limitations.” 

But he added that he would have wanted to have “the satisfaction of seeing this book published at this period of my life. So I haven’t given up hope that a publisher will find value in this book now.”

After his death, the Redemptorist Province of Cebu decided to publish the book in partnership with the Institute of Spirituality in Asia (ISA). 

Choosing what would be included in the abridged version fell on Picardal’s friend, Redemptorist Brother Karl Gaspar, the book’s editor. 

Picardal’s book is an autobiography in the form of diary and journal entries, and letters since he left Iligan City for the Redemptorists in Cebu in 1968, when he was barely 13. It is his personal history and the history of the nation a well, spanning decades.

Picardal wrote: “So what I have really done is write an autobiographical theology. In the noontime and later years of my life I gathered the scattered texts that have emerged along the way- the diaries, letters and memoirs. In trying to be in touch with my unfolding story and my life-journey I came to discover the presence of Someone whom I have been searching and longing for.  God is part of my story. My story is about who I am in relation to God, a story of discovering God in the experience of suffering, doubts, love and joy. It is a living testimony, a proclamation of God’s love. Above all it is a story about the process of coming to believe what my name suggests: I am God’s beloved – Amado.”

He wrote several poems, too, but the poems are to be published separately. 

But the book features Picardal’s last poem – about his dog Bruno — which he posted on his social media account just a few hours before he passed on. Excerpts from tributes written about Picardal have also been included in the book. 

Gaspar said Picardal’s documentation of his life included “his formation years, his ordination, his life as a missionary in the far-flung villages in the peripheries of Mindanao, then his theological studies in USC Berkeley and Rome, then his stint as Dean of the St. Alphonsus Theologate in Davao, then as Executive Secretary of the BEC Commission under the CBCP, then his transfer to Rome where he served as staff of the Major Religious Superiors to deal with social and ecological concerns, his return to Cebu to build his hermitage until his death a year ago.”

Picardal wrote about his many advocacies and how he drew attention to them.  “He climbed Mt. Apo a few times, hiked in many places, walked from Davao to Cagayan de Oro, biked from Mindanao up to Luzon and got involved in marathons. He also walked as a pilgrim to the  Camino de Santiago in Portugal, one time for 30 days,” Gaspar said. 

He also wrote about his active opposition to  Duterte’s war on drugs, specifically the EJKs.  

“As Dean of SAT (St. Alphonsus Theologate), even as he acted like a lone wolf (as he got very little support from the clergy and religious in Davao City), when he got very upset with the EJKS, he began to document the cases even as he comforted the relatives of the victims. He even spoke about this in his sermon at the pulpit of the Redemptorist church. Eventually this reached the ears of Duterte and his henchmen, and not too long after, he received death threats. When he was with the BEC Commission and was based in Manila, he continued his advocacy against the EJKs openly when Duterte was already President. The death threats persisted. Eventually it was no longer safe for him to remain in the country so he got transferred to Rome,” Gaspar said. 

When Duterte was arrested on March 11 and brought to The Hague in the Netherlands to face charges of crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court, Picardal’s friends remembered how he longed to see the day Duterte would face the ICC. 

Gaspar said Picardal’s manuscript would have taken three volumes. “In this country, very few readers would have the patience to buy and read through all three volumes. So we decided to cut it down to one book.”

The Redemptorists and ISA shared the costs of publishing the book.  

The book will also be launched in Picardal’s home city of Iligan. It will also be launched in Davao City in July. (Carolyn O. Arguillas / MindaNews)