This, after Vatican issued recently a declaration that the alleged Lipa apparitions were not supernatural.
In an interview with Punto, Lipa Archbishop Manuel Arguelles, who was in a private home here to say Mass last Wednesday, said “eventually, the Blessed Mother will have her way.”
“The devil is really working hard to destroy what the Blessed Mother wants,” he lamented.
This, even as Arguelles said that nun Teresing Castillo. who was the visionary of Lipa where roses imprinted with holy images rained on visitors at the Mt. Carmel convent where the apparitions occurred, has become frail of health in a house in Paranaque City. “I think she just might soon embrace the Blessed Mother in heaven,” he said.
Arguelles, like most Filipinos, had worked for spreading devotion to Our Lady of Lipa, also known as Our Lady Mediatrix of Graces, until the recent Vatican declaration.
“But the Blessed Mother will eventually triumph and will crush the head of the serpent as we see in statues of her with the devil underfoot,” the archbishop said.
In 1948, the Blessed Virgin came to manifest her presence to then young postulant Teresing. These heavenly appearances were authenticated with overwhelming and amazing miracles of conversion and physical cures, of visions and humanly unexplainable showers of rose petals inside and outside the Carmelite convent. The apparitions lasted seven months.
Both Bishop Alfredo Verzosa and his auxiliary bishop Alfredo Ma. Obviar were favorable to the apparitions.
However, in 1951, the Philippine hierarchy issued a negative judgment officially declaring the absence of supernatural intervention in the reported extraordinary happenings including the showers of petals.
The apparitions, which were once at the center of attention of the nation, were all but forgotten. The image of Our Lady Mediatrix of All Graces, which earlier had received the prayers of the faithful at Lipa was ordered withdrawn from public veneration.
It would seem, however, that members of the Church committee to investigate the Lipa events were pressured into issuing a negative verdict, done with the least of investigations. All of the priests in the committee admitted this much in their deathbeds.
Still, the messages of Our Lady of Lipa eclipsed into oblivion. An entire generation of Filipinos has grown up unaware of the events of 1948 at Lipa, ignorant of the role of Mary as Mediatrix of All Graces, therefore failing to benefit from the tremendous graces to be secured by recourse to the Blessed Mother under the title by which she identified herself.
In the recent years, the late media personality June Keithly revived interest in the Lipa apparitions with her book and video documentary on the events.
Also, Arguelles, an ardent believer in Lipa, declared the apparitions as worth of belief and promoted devotion to Our Lady Mediatrix of All Graces.
Until the recent intervention of the Vatican that contradicted him.
Arguelles said that believers not only in Lipa but in various parts of the country were disappointed.
But the archbishop has remained positive, saying that the Lipa apparitions, the first Marian apparition in the Far East, will fulfill a prophecy that the Philippines would lead in spreading the faith in the rest of Asia.
“Some say we should be proud for being the only Catholic country in Asia. But we should be ashamed of that because we have done nothing to spread the faith in the region,” he said.
