Can you tell us about your spiritual life growing up in the Philippines?
I was born and raised in a Catholic family. We prayed the rosary together, and I found myself naturally saying the rosary in a way that enabled me to settle down and find spiritual grounding.
In my mid-teens, I began to ask big questions. I started learning about suffering and poverty. Go to Manila and you’ll immediately be confronted with people—children—sleeping in the streets. My question was how could a loving and merciful God, who’s supposed to be almighty, allow such suffering?
When I was in school, I was interested in physics and wanted to be a physicist when I grew up. I learned that if you flash a beam of light
