I WAS tasked in January to deliver a pep talk for our agency, as part of our Monday’s
flag-raising ceremony. It was a few days before the pastoral visit of Pope
Francis in the country. So I chose to discuss the virtue of which the People’s
Pope is known. Humility.
Pope
Francis is known to have plenty of humility. Humility to him means spending
time with those people we find hard to live with, those we probably like the
least. He denounced self-importance when he preferred a modest two-room
residence to a grand papal apartment on Vatican’s Apostolic Palace, when he
waited in line with the rest of employees at the Vatican’s canteen, and when he
gave up his chauffeur and started taking the bus to work.
When we
speak of humility according to Pope’s examples, we can’t help but sound
religious, preaching about the teaching of the church. Why not, humility is the
mother of all virtues, the most important lessons Jesus Christ imparted to his
disciples and believers down to all of us present-day Christians. We’ve learned
in the bible that God cannot work on us if we are proud.
Humility
came from the Latin humus meaning “earth,” or literary “on the ground.” And to
St. Thomas Aquinas, humility “consists in keeping oneself within one’s own bounds,
not reaching out to things above one, but submitting to one’s superior.” This
is consistent with the teaching of the Catholic Church that humility “in a
higher and ethical sense is that by which a man has a modest estimate of his
own worth, and submits himself to others.”
