This type of hurricane is a very strong tempest, so many and so strong hitting these islands that neither Virgil nor Ovid nor any other poet I have read can describe its destructive power. These occur very often and we suffer so much, that even after experiencing them, it is difficult to believe these can happen.—F. I. Alzina, a Jesuit missionary in Philippines, 1668

IT HAS been our nightmare since our nation emerged. Out of the 192 countries in the world, ours has the dubious distinction of being the nation worst hit by typhoons. I do not refer just to the frequency of typhoons per year, or the destruction wrought by a one typhoon in a particular year.

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Talk about an attack, almost literally, on the Catholic Church.

Just a few weeks ago, police in the Belgian city of Bruges raided the headquarters of the Roman Catholic Church and the residence of the recently retired Cardinal of Belgium to gather evidence to bolster accusations of child sexual abuse committed by the clergy.

The investigations accelerated with the resignation, after admitting to having sexually abused a young boy, of the Bishop of the city of Bruges – a center of Catholicism in Protestant Europe, a pilgrim’s city where stands Michelangelo’s Madonna and Child sculpture and the awesome Church of Our Lady.

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A RECENT TIME MAGAZINE COVER STORY ON the World Cup 2010 games observed: “One reason why football is the world’s most popular game is that it is just so accessible, you can play anywhere.”

That’s not exactly true. Basketball is the more accessible game for one major reason: a basketball court is 10 times smaller than a football pitch, and therefore much easier to find.

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WITH THE WORLD CUP 2010 MADNESS AT ITS height, when European capitals stand still as their national teams compete, you are likely to ask yourself: “Are we so different that we don’t play the game everyone’s playing around the world?”

It’s not a trivial question. Nearly one billion human beings are said to be watching the World Cup 2010 games, and we’re not. We’re very strangely not participants in what an American columnist termed as the “human family at play.” If football, as a historian pointed out, is “the new religion,” then we Filipinos are weirdly the fringe group atheists. And it’s a game we Filipinos can dream of excelling in some day, unlike the tall man’s game, basketball, in which we are genetically handicapped so that we’ll never stand out.

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