With over a million followers across all social media, if Father Jerry Orbos would be classified as a celebrity, he would be on the A1 list. Last Sunday, he gave a talk at the first Marian Conference that Jean Lim-Rizalde and the Oasis of Love Manila and hundreds attended. 

Although Father is already in his sixties with a massive following from the baby boomers and the Gen X generation like me, many millennials and Gen Z including my Gen Z daughter follow him on social media because his sermons are made in a light and sometimes even in a funny way, easily digestible which makes him the Priest for all Generations or PAG. 

Everyone started to clap when he announced that he had now been cancer-free for six years and thanked Mama Mary and St. Ezequiel Moreno, patron saint of cancer patients, for interceding his prayers to our Lord Jesus Christ, “I was diagnosed with lung cancer in February 2018. During my college days, I was a secret smoker, but I only smoked “moderately” and stopped eventually. In 2017, I experienced weight loss, coughing and quickly got tired. My cancer was discovered by accident. I visited a doctor to undergo a CT scan of my abdomen initially. I don’t know why I told the doctor also to check my lungs, and there he found a white spot. Right away, he said, ‘Father, the tumor is malignant.’ For months, I underwent “chemono (kimono) therapy”-sessions of chemotherapy and immunotherapy.” and everybody in the audience laughed. “Ayan naka-smile na kayo. Part of my healing, I attribute it to copying the virtues of Mama Mary. She had a joyful outlook. If you are joyful, the healing is faster. You have to hope; you have to trust. That’s why my advocacy is focused on ‘humor, not on the tumor,” and everyone laughed again. 

The PAG (priest for all generations) added, “It was my nanay that introduced me to the devotion of Mama Mary so that I would pray the rosary every day.Then I met St. Ezequiel Moreno. During my treatments, somebody gave me a three-foot statue of St. Ezequiel, popularly invoked as the patron of cancer patients. I didn’t know him. I never heard about him. I experienced St. Ezequiel’s presence and healing through his statue, which constantly shed perspiration and tears during my bout with cancer. After my last chemotherapy in November 2018, it no longer shed tears nor perspired, as if telling me that my cancer was gone.

On Jan. 15, 2019, I was declared cancer-free. And as of today, I am now six years free of cancer. During my prayers, I had a discernment from God, "You are now completely healed. You will now help people be healed as well.” 

The no-longer crying St. Ezequiel Moreno remains in the smaller chapel of the Christ the King Seminary on E. Rodriguez Quezon City so that people can come to pray and ask for his loving intercession.