DAVAO CITY (MindaNews / 28 July) – A book written by the late Fr. Amado “Picx” Picardal titled “The Beloved: Journals, Diaries and Letters of a Priest,” will be launched here on Friday, August 1.

The book will be launched at 2:30 p.m. at the Fr. Joel E. Tabora, SJ. Audio visual room of the St. Alphonsus Theological and Mission Institute (SATMI) within the Redemptorist Compound along Bajada  

The book was first launched in Cebu City afternoon of May 29, the first death anniversary since Picardal passed on. Earlier that day was the inauguration of the hermitage made of stone-cordwood-bottle that Picardal was building on a promontory across the religious congregation’s retreat center in Busay, Cebu City. 

Picardal had just come down from working on the hermitage around noon when he collapsed near a row of pink and white periwinkles on the side of the retreat center. He died of cardiac arrest. He was 69. 

The Redemptorists and the family of Picardal finished the structure and the reinforced version of the hermitage is now named “Capella del Amado” or Amado’s chapel. 

Picardal’s book is an abridged version of a thick manuscript that Picardal submitted for publication in January 2018, the year he was supposed to go full-time hermit.

But his supposed full-time eremitical life was interrupted by August 2018 when he was targeted for assassination and was forced to leave the country until the end of the Duterte administration. He was back in Busay six days after Duterte stepped down as President on June 30, 2022. 

Picardal was a staunch critic of former President and long-time mayor Rodrigo Duterte, particularly on the issue of extrajudicial killings (EJKs). He was the spokesperson of the Coalition Against Summary Executions (CASE) which documented the killings in Davao City attributed to the Davao Death Squad (DDS) during Duterte’s war on drugs as mayor. 

Picardal’s book is an autobiography in the form of diary and journal entries, and letters since he left Iligan City for the Redemptorists in Cebu in 1968, when he was barely 13. It is his personal history and the history of the nation a well, spanning decades. 

He wrote several poems, too, but the poems are to be published separately. 

But  Picardal’s last poem is included in the book. The poem is about his dog Bruno, which he posted on his social media account just a few hours before he passed on.  (MindaNews)

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