Message of Mayor Maria Clara L. Lobregat at the Don Pablo Lorenzo Memorial High School’s Don Pablo Lorenzo Day celebration, 1 March 1999

First of all, let me thank the students, teachers, administrators and staff of the Don Pablo Lorenzo Memorial High School for observing this day as Don Pablo Lorenzo Day. It is a beautiful tribute to my late father. If he were alive, I’m sure he would be quite pleased that you have chosen to remember him in such a fond and meaningful way.

This celebration brings to me sweet memories of life with my father. Don Pablo was born before the present century began – in the year 1887. If he were still with us today, he would be 112 years old. He was a person of a different time. It was a time that is so different from our own. It was a time of sincere respect, strong discipline, firm loyalty and unquestionable love. These are values that are not as solid in our society today as they once were. My father lived according to the code of his time and, in my remembrance, that was one of the things that made him a superb father, a perfect gentleman and a respected leader and statesman.

The theme for this celebration speaks of Don Pablo Lorenzo and his concern for education. Let me thus tell you about him in this light. Don Pablo was a self-made man who owed his success to his own efforts. He was a staunch believer in education, but education to him meant more than just lectures and examinations inside the classroom. Like many enlightened people of his time, he believed education starts in the home and it is in the home that learning is best inculcated in the young.

You might ask: What was the kind of education that my father stressed to his children at home? Well, it was an education in dignified living. In was an education in values and manners.

Don Pablo was a disciplinarian with his children. He loved his children very much, but he demanded that they behaved according to the mores or the rules of propriety, decency and dignity. When he married my mother, they both decided that they would bring up their children in a loving, but disciplined way. They agreed that their children would be given strong values to guide them for life. Those values were taught by lecture and by example.

My father believed in the need for the family to be whole and united. All domestic activities – from meals to picnics and attendance at holy mass – were family affairs. No member of the family might be absent from any of these activities unless for a very good reason.

No matter how busy they were, father and mother always had time for their children whom they would engage in daily chats. They would inquire about what each child had done during the day and talk about many other things. These conversations, which showed our parents’ care for their young ones, made the family quite close.

Given my father’s concern for the way the young were brought up, he would be very proud to have a high school bearing his name. Like my father, the Don Pablo Lorenzo Memorial High School is committed to developing children the right way.

I want the teachers and students of this school to visualize Don Pablo Lorenzo the way we, his children, remember him. I urge them to echo his emphasis on values and manners. I would like to ask the teachers to produce not only intelligent and well-informed students, but good citizens and noble persons as well. If you do that, it would be my father’s best legacy to this generation and the ones to come.

Again, thank you for honoring Don Pablo Lorenzo on his special day. I am grateful. The whole family is grateful. And I’m sure my father and mother up there in that big home in the sky are grateful too.