Welcome to my First Day

Good day to all.

My name is Gener. Family members call me Gene. Those very close to me call me Oz. You can call me a brother.

I started this blog today, May 24th, Ascension Sunday. It is the day when Our Lord Jesus Christ has been taken up into heaven and we believe that He sits at the right of Our God the father.

While I started another blog called Lucky Canary at http://www.luckycanary.blogspot.com/, a while back, I felt a call to write a blog that captures my Catholic faith - its rites, events and practises. Already, my original blog had posts devoted to Philippine Catholic practises.

For starters, let me tell you that I am not a very religious person. As a child, I was first baptized an Aglipayan, in a church in the Philippines. Aglipayan, to those not familiar to it, is a Philippine Christian denomination with very close affinity to the Catholic religion, in its rites and practices.

Now called The Philippine Independent Church, officially the Iglesia Filipina Independiente (IFI) (also known as the Philippine Independent Catholic Church), Aglipayan is a Christian denomination of the Catholic tradition in the form of a national church.

The church was founded by Isabelo de los Reyes in 1902 and made Gregorio Aglipay, a dissilusioned Catholic priest, its head.

Aglipayan grew at an unprecedented growth from that time onwards because the Filipinos resented the Spaniards for its more than 300 years of repressive rule. Then, membership declined. Today, there are about 3 million Aglipayans throughout the Southeast Asian Peninsula of the Philippines, making it the country's second largest Christian church. It has members in the United States and Canada.

My mother's family is Aglipayan, and my father's, Catholic. There was even a topic, hushed mostly by my mother, that my maternal grandfather was a Mason.

But being so intertwined and similar to each other, these two religions and churches were but one to me...to us. While growing up, me and my siblings didn't really consider ourselves Aglipayans nor Catholics. We were foremost, Christians. Thus, even while baptized as Aglipayans, we - me, my siblings, mother and aunts, worshipped freely in both churches.

When I was about to start high school, I was baptized in the Catholic church, and thus now, I am a practising Catholic. All of us in our family are now practising Catholics.

I look forward to posting blogs that will talk about Christian religious practises, events, peoples and places, with a focus on Philippine Catholic practises.

I hope to see you along the way.