Fr. Roberto C. Layson, OMI

“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” When you meet Father Roberto Layson, an Oblate of Mary Immaculate from the Philippines, it is the blessedness that you remember. Small of stature, smiling, he always seems absorbed in his thoughts – of peace naturally. Today he is 44 years old and the parish priest in Pikit, a remote city with a Muslim majority on Mindanao, in the south of the archipelago. In 2002 he was awarded the prestigious Pax Christi International Prize for Peace. Roberto, born into a poor family that worked on a sugar cane plantation, became an Oblate because since childhood he had wanted to serve the poor and in the Oblates, with whom he had worked as a “Convento-Boy”, he saw a true example of this service.

The first nine years of his priestly ministry he lived in predominantly Muslim surroundings. That was until February 4, 1997, the day on which Bishop Benjamin de Jesus, was killed in Jolo.