HOLIER THAN THOU

Amid today's chaos and corruption, a glimpse of peace seems downright necessary.

- LISA GUERRERO NAKPIL

On Feb. 22, my phone was flooded with texts from my more devout friends that a certain Bishop Cesar Ma. Guerrero had been accepted by the Vatican as a "Servant of God." It was the first step in a very long stairway to canonization.

All my friends (and even more of my frenemies) wanted to know if, by some accident of the universe, we were somehow related. When I replied that we were-he being the "Lolo Obispo" of the family, the older brother of my grandfather - I could feel a wave of dozens of eyeballs rolling upwards.

The Guerreros can be divided into two types of people: the scientists and the artists; the hardened newspapermen and the poets; and, yes, the pious and the provocateurs.

Still, the good bishop must have been a completely different creature and fallen into a separate category all his own. His father was Leon Ma.

Guerrero, the pharmacist and botanist, the country's first believer in the power of herbs. He extracted phosphorus from forest plants to make gunpowder when bullets were scarce, lacing them with poison to make them more lethal even if they just nicked the mark. He was also a social activist, concocting healing powders for the community and giving them away for free during the cholera outbreaks that frequently ravaged the city. This made him popular, and he rose to become a member of the Aguinaldo cabinet as secretary of Trade and Industry, as well as the rector of the first republic's all-Filipino university.

Leon Maria was a member of the Malolos Congress and would take his two sons - Cesar and my grandfather Alfredo with him on the train from Tutuban to Malolos and later to Tarlac, the Republic's first and last capitals. Perhaps those adventurous trips were enough to cure Cesar of any taste for revolution.