Alma Mater

CEBU, Philippines - “Alma Mater” is Latin for “Beloved Mother.”

Every human being, including the God-made-man, our Lord Jesus Christ, needs a mother in whose womb to develop until birth, a mother to take care of him until he grows self-sufficient. That woman is literally that person’s “alma mater.”

In a transferred meaning, that Latin phrase is used to refer to the religious congregation to which one belongs. Thus, we call the Roman Catholic Church as our Holy Mother Church, through whose Sacrament of Baptism we were born into the Mystical Body of Christ.

In his last poem “Mi Ultimo Adios,” our national hero Dr. Jose P. Rizal starts with the line, “Adios patria adorada.” “Patria” is Spanish for “fatherland.” In a previous poem, “A la Juventud Filipina,” he calls the youth as the “fair hope of my fatherland.” Perhaps due to women’s lib or gender sensitivity, one’s native country is called his motherland. The Philippines is our third “alma mater.”

Popularly, the term “Alma Mater” is applied to the school or any institution of learning from where one graduates or finishes a course. For example, the other Saturday, August 23, I visited the Seminario Mayor de San Carlos (SMSC) as it celebrated its first Alumni Homecoming. This is where I finished the last two years of my priestly training in 1968. On one of the bulletin boards in the visitors’parlor is a large picture of the late Pres. Sergio Osmeña, Sr., a proof that SMSC is the “Alma Mater” of our country’s former president from Cebu.

On September 9, I will be attending the General Alumni Homecoming of another “Alma Mater” – the University of San Carlos – where I graduated Ph.D., Philosophy in 1985.

Each of the following is my “Alma Mater”: Borbon Central Elementary School,for my elementary education; Christ the King Mission Seminary, Quezon City, for my secondary and tertiary education (A.B. and M.A. Philosophy); Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome, Italy, for A.B. Theology, and the Biblicum (Rome, Italy), for Propaedeutic Greek and Hebrew studies.

For us Roman Catholics, we have a spiritual “Alma Mater” in the person of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of the God-made-man, our Lord Jesus Christ, who while hanging on the cross, entrusted her to our representative, St. John the Apostle, with the words, “Behold your Mother.”

In a plaza in Madrid, Spain, there is a smaller replica of Rizal’s monument at the Luneta. At its pedestal are the words: “La madre cria porvenir dal pais.” The mother creates the future of the country. It means that the mother (that was Spain) creates future of the country, the Philippines.

In like manner, each one of us is the product of our “Beloved Mothers” in life – our biological mother, our religion, our national culture, our schools and all others that positively shape the persons that we are.