Commemoration of the Passions of the Lord

Palm Sunday on our parishes

More than a year ago, a young man, Jeffrey Marmol, was dying of an unknown disease in a village in Quezon province. Having no money even for diagnostics, the relatives could only watch him fading away, and mentally they had already said goodbye to him. As a last hope, they took the offer of the priests of the Russian Orthodox Church to baptize him. They baptized Jeffrey and his family right in the ocean. The newly baptized was given the name Athanasius (Immortal in Greek). And he lived up to his name: immediately after his baptism, Athanasius went on the mend and a month later he was able to come to Tagaytay himself to thank the Lord in the temple. Today he is in good health and works to provide for his family.

The Philippine-Vietnamese Diocese of the Patriarchal Exarchate of Southeast Asia of the Russian Orthodox Church, with the blessing of Metropolitan Pavel of Manila and Hanoi, has published the first prayer book in the Cebuano language.The collection includes morning and evening prayers, the rule for Holy Communion, prayers for every need, the Hours of Holy Easter. This is more than a year’s work of the initiative group of the educational and missionary center of St Matrona of Moscow in Davao City, under the leadership of the Secretary of the Filipino-Vietnamese Diocese, Hieromonk Korniliy (Molev), nun Maria (Buniel) and Elijah Ang Aleria, who edited the final text. Dimitri Cahilig, a student of the St. Petersburg Theological Seminary, also took part in the work on the translation. The approval of the translation was carried out by diocesan Filipino priests.A prayer book in the Cebuano language will be in demand for local residents, since several hundred Filipinos have converted to Orthodoxy recently, having passed the appropriate catechesis. And the number of such people continues to increase.The prayer book in the Cebuano language was published with the support of the literary foundation “The Road of Life” and personally by D.A.Mizgulin.Cebuano is one of the most widely spoken languages of the Philippines, spoken by about 15.8 million people.