I am deeply honored and privileged to officiate this Mass together with Monsignor Vicente Bauson, the Director of the Campus Ministry of the Archdiocese of Manila, and your beloved Chaplain, Rev. Fr. Bernard O’Neill Martin, MSSC.

When I was elected for the first time as Rector of the University of Santo Tomas way back in the 1990s, it was P. O who taught me how to be an administrator of a big university. And it was P. O. who also suggested to me and to the other presidents of the universities in the U-Belt to establish the U-Belt Consortium.

P. O. has always been a leader, an organizer, chairman, president—perhaps all the titles worthy of him, he already received when he was still with us.

But during P. O. Domingo’s funeral mass, his daughter Joey delivered a very poignant and touching eulogy. And there, I realized that the greatness of a man is not measured by how many titles he had, the wealth, the power, but by—as Joey has shared with us during that day… It is not his fame, his success, his achievements, it is the way he embraced his suffering. I would like to repeat: P. O., from the point of view of his children, was great not because he was allocated with very high positions in government, and in the industry and in the academe, but because of the way he embraced his sufferings.

Perhaps, those of you who knew P. O. would be tempted to ask, quite incredulously, “Si P. O., naghirap?” Si P. O. ba nakita n’yo naghirap? I myself was tempted to ask that because, to be honest, I never saw P. O. suffer. But P. O. suffered. None of us is exempt from suffering. And yet many of us are allergic to it. P. O. has taught his children that suffering, when freely embraced, can transform us. I remember the words of Joey; she said, “It was when my father was so powerless, when he was no longer in control, that we saw him as most lovable.”

Suffering has transformed P. O. from being a person who was always in charge, dominating the events and people in his life, into a person who calmly left everything to God, because he knew that God knows what is best for him. Through suffering, P.O. learned to trust God more than he trusted himself. Indeed, my brothers and sisters, pain and suffering can teach us lessons which prosperity and wealth cannot teach. Pain and suffering can help us acquire the kind of wisdom that Saint Paul describes as not mere cleverness or being worldly wise, but being Christ-like. Suffering has taught P. O. that God is the God of the living, not of the dead. He is our God if we live our life—not tomorrow which is not yet, not yesterday which is no more, but today, he is the God of the present moment. And those of us who are true believers are not beset with tears and worries about the future; nor with regret and guilt about the past. Those who have faith in the living God have full awareness of the value and worth of the present moment. In His Sermon on the Mount, which is called the Beatitudes, Jesus asked his listeners, “Can any of you, by worrying about the future, add an inch to your short life?”

In one rare interview with the press, P. O. once said, “I have always devoured life because I believe every moment of life is precious.” A voracious reader, P. O. must have read what Deepak Chopra once wrote: “Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a dream, today is a gift. That is why it is called the present.”

If we take that as truth, then it is imperative that we should see today as unrepeatable, and recognize everything that we have not as a permanent possession but as a temporary gift to be eventually handed on to others. I am sure we have varied recollections of P. O. but I would like to remember him as a man who never flinched in the face of suffering, who embraced his pain courageously and thereby gave us an example of how it means to be wise and what it takes to live life to the full.

I would like to end by saying: P. O., you are such a good friend. Wherever you are, I hope you will hear me paraphrasing what Joey said in her eulogy: “Our gratitude for having known you is greater than our sorrow for having lost you.”