Une Minute avec Marie
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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.(...)
The miracle so impressed the governor general that he ordered a stone chapel built on the site to replace the nipa palm hut visita.
These accounts were translated in 1904 from the book La Virgen Maria Venerada: en sus Imagines Filipinas.
A story handed down through the ages tells of a Spanish high government official who sat in a tub of warm water in his bathroom to relieve stomach troubles, as his physician had advised. Suddenly, from out of nowhere, a lovely lady holding an infant appeared to him. What he needed, she said, was grass growing around a particular nipa hut which, when boiled and drank, would help him recover. With that, the lady disappeared.
The official ran to ask whether the guard had seen a lady come through the gate, but the guard said he had not. The Spanish official then sent for the grass, followed the mysterious lady’s instructions, and recovered. He himself then went to the visita, the nipa hut, where he found the same lovely lady and child at the altar. It was Our Lady of the Rosary.
Is it any wonder that after the fire in 1854, people collected blades of grass for medicinal purposes, as the original story of the miracle had told?
Our Lady of the Rosary’s two feast days are on April 16, the miracle of the fire, and the Sunday after Easter Sunday, April 28.