The Priest Who Might Have Been
One late night at the old
Herald
newsroom
Gerry reflected, wistfully, that his contemporaries in the seminary were,
one by one, being ordained. If he had stayed the course, by 1972 or thereabouts
he might have made it to the priesthood.
The order of Melchizedek
never lost its fascination for him; on a similar occasion, he said of his
newsman's job: The typewriter is my altar, the cup of coffee is my
chalice, the cigaret if my sacred host.
In the cold light of day
the comparison sounds mawkish and melodramatic; but when you come down
to it, Gerry was sacerdotal, in a raffish sort of way.
Certainly he observed two
of the three great vows. In this country, you virtually take a vow of poverty
if you hope to be a decent newspaperman or teacher; and Gerry was both.
He was celibate, too; though there was a time at Stanford when I thought
that if he only could bring himself to declare his feelings for a special
lady, she'd have raced him to the nearest bed, or altar.
The vow of obedience was
the hard part. The story goes that within his first month at the seminary,
he found his way into the cellar and got drunk on altar wine. Obedience
would be particularly tough on Gerry - he had too much of an impishness
of humor, too much of an eye for the absurd and the fatuous, to submit
without question to authority.
And lord! how he loved to
skewer officialdom. All newsmen do; one does not join the profession out
of a sense of modesty. But Gerry Gil's editorials could be particularly
irritating because they were devoid of vituperation or scalding rage; their
tone was one of patient, good-humored explanation of the obvious to a prize
idiot.
Gerry's editorials were
inimitable in other respects. They weren't always aimed at the foibles
of the mighty. He had an editorial, would you believe, on the novels
of lsaac Asimov. He was masterful on the subject of educational testing
and statistics - again, hardly your everyday editorial fare. And he had
this habit of scanning the liturgical calendar or the day's gospel, and
spinning it into an editorial on some saint or parable.
This last, of course, is
a standard ploy of a preacher looking for a likely sermon; another indication,
then, of Gerry's ministerial disposition.
It is an odd thing to dwell
on, when there is so much else to write about Gerry - that he was ninong
to heaven knows how many of his friends' children; that he probably
yearned to be better known as a professor of research methods than as a
journalist; that he wrote letters to the editor, reams of them, using different
names and typefaces, sometimes one letter to refute another that he had
written, and thus carrying on a debate with himself; that he was the truest
friend one could ever hope to have.
But it is as priest that
I will remember him; a priest who might have been, and as it turns out,
really was; one who felt he heard the calling, and fashioned an offbeat
lovely, response.
Jimmy Ong
Manila Standard
The Nation
Friday, July 28, 1995