The miracle of Our Lady of the Rosary in Manila, 1854 (I)

On April 16, 1854, a miracle, confirmed by the parish priest and the archbishop, took place in Barrio San Miguel, Manila, when a great fire burned everything to the ground. Everything except for a visita. The humble little chapel, no more than a nipa hut surrounded by grass, built in 1851, held the portrait of Our Lady of the Rosary carrying the Christ Child.(...)

How the nipa palm visita could have survived a huge fire that consumed every building surrounding it called for an investigation, ordered by the archbishop. He asked the parish priest of San Miguel to investigate the event, “so that it may be consigned to the truth by the competent authority to prevent being distorted with arbitrary and false traditions.”

Six witnesses’ testimonies were taken by the parish priest.

So violently vicious was the fire that firemen had to take a roundabout route to reach it; an assistant to English engineers attested, describing how, all around the hermitage, the structures surrounding it had been consumed by great flames. Also, that the fire was virtually out by the time the bomberos arrived. “Everyone said it was a miracle,” the gobernadorcillo said.

A third witness testified that even as his house burned to the ground, he was “astounded when, as the fire neared the ermita, the fire suddenly was extinguished… Even the grass surrounding the ermita did not lose its freshness.”

A fourth witness, Don Antonio de Ayala, a Spanish peninsular and businessman, said that “the wind went on her (the chapel) with great force with no aid of water pumps that would help to save it,” despite the fact that “the passages on either side of San Miguel and Quiapo were impossible to penetrate.” His impassioned testimony, a testament to faith, like the rest of the witnesses’ accounts, concluded by saying that “I believed that only God, who can do everything, would save the camarin.”

Several witnesses similarly described “a strong wind that came from the east,” but stopped short at the visita, leaving it totally intact. “The day after the fire,” the fifth witness testified, amid great rejoicing by the Lady’s devotees because the visita was saved, some offered candles “and others, alms, and some pulled the grass surrounding the ermita,” saying that “it could be used for medicine.”

Doña Isabel Frias, a Spanish mestiza, said her house was burned, but though it was only eight yards from the side of the ermita, “with the wind blowing hard and flames from my house and others beside the ermita were about to fall on the chapel… the ermita was saved” without any help from other people or firemen.

On the parish priest’s turning over the testimonies bearing witness to the miraculous event, Archbishop Francisco G. Ortiz ordered the original document kept in the archbishop’s archives.

Joan Orendain, April 14, 2019

Adapted from: www.lifestyle.inquirer.net