Floy Quintos reflects on Lipa ‘miracle’ in new play
The story goes that sometime in September 1948, a 21-year-old Batangueña named Teresita, daughter of an ex-governor, began having encounters with the devil at night, who would pinch and molest her. It was then followed by 15 days of encounters with the Blessed Virgin Mary where Teresita was given a series of messages.
At first, Teresita only heard the Holy Mother’s voice, but it wouldn’t be long before Mother Mary started appearing in all her heavenly glory. In her last apparition, she identified herself as Mary, Mediatrix of All Grace. Soon rose petals started falling from the sky.
This all happened at the Carmelite monastery in the city of Lipa in Batangas where Sister Teresita was a postulant. Word quickly spread throughout the Philippines and even beyond. People started referring to the extraordinary events as the “Lipa Miracle.”
Three years later, in 1951, the Vatican declared the events weren’t supernatural. There was no miracle.
End of story? Not so fast.
The story returned to the public sphere in the 1990s after another series of extraordinary events occurred, including more petal showers from the sky. And again in the 2000s, when then Lipa Archbishop Ramon Arguelles resurrected the devotion to Mary Mediatrix, after declaring his personal belief that the 1948 events are worthy of belief.
And now, the story is in the limelight again with the release some weeks ago, for the first time since 1951, of the Vatican document officially dismissing the “Lipa Miracle.”
Serendipitously, the document was revealed just a few days after the start of the promotional blitz for “Grace,” an upcoming stage play that will be the first time the story will be dramatized anywhere.
Theme of secrecy
The show’s entire team, which includes veteran playwright Floy Quintos, certainly did not see the coincidence coming. According to the seven-time Palanca winner, he has been developing the “Grace” material since 2016 after he read “Lipa,” a book about the Marian apparitions written by renowned Filipino broadcast journalist June Keithley.
Quintos has been in possession of the book since 2008, when he discovered it while going through his mother’s things after she passed away.
“Lipa” contains the original account of the events at Lipa Carmel in 1948 by Mother Mary Cecilia, the monastery’s prioress at the time. The testimony maintained the authenticity of the apparitions and the petal showers.
But no, “Grace” is not out to convince everyone to take Mother Cecilia and Sister Teresita’s side. Neither will it aim to say the Church is right.
“The play really just wants to tell the story again,” Quintos says.
There’s a lot about it that many people probably don’t know or may have already forgotten, not the least of which is the Blessed Mother’s alleged message to “Pray for China because they want to take over your country.” At the time, China was a poor country in turmoil, several worlds away from the superpower it has become and one now embroiled in an aggressive territorial dispute with much of Asia, particularly the Philippines.
“Tumindig talaga ang balahibo ko (I really got goosebumps) when I read it in June Keithley’s book,” Quintos says.
“Grace” also covers the key events that followed in the wake of the Vatican decree: Mother Cecilia’s removal as prioress from the Lipa monastery and banishment to Iloilo where she was demoted to kitchen maid; the removal from Lipa of Bishop Alfredo Verzosa, who was one of the nuns’ champions; and Sister Teresita’s forced exit from the congregation, when the Church higher-ups asked her to leave.
“That really hurt her very much because she left her family in secret and had wanted nothing else but to be a nun,” says Quintos.
The theme of secrecy runs through the story. After 1951, there was a moratorium from Rufino Cardinal Santos. Speaking for the six bishops involved in the investigation into the events, he ordered everything related to the “Lipa Miracle” to be burned—the petals, the leaflets, the records. The image of the Blessed Virgin that had been sculpted and erected in the Carmelite monastery garden upon Her specific orders in one of Her messages was painted over with blue paint.
“Talagang full erasure,” Quintos notes. “Forget history. It never happened.“
Floy.
Fictionalized narrative
Keithley’s “Lipa,” published in 1992, and the documentary she produced earlier that year titled “The Woman Clothed with the Sun,” on which the book was based, certainly helped remind people of this part of Philippine history.
At the time, Sister Teresita was ready to break her silence. “I think I’ve been quiet long enough,” Quintos quotes her telling Keithley when the broadcast journalist reached out to her when she was about to work on the documentary.
That’s three decades of silence.
It’s this concept that Quintos finds most fascinating about the story. “Even the bishops who have said at some point they were coerced to sign the Church declaration—why didn’t they speak up?” he asks, before offering his own answer.
“It’s the culture of the church. Obedience. That’s why I wanted to write the play because that’s so alien to us. The play asks questions about faith, obedience, and silence. ‘Right now, it’s ‘Ay hindi (Oh no.) I’m right and I will put it on social media. I will fight for it. It’s a cause.”
Quintos continues his reflection: “They lived at a time that was so repressive and that’s what fascinated me. It’s such a different life, a different way of looking at things. It’s such a different discipline, which we don’t know in this world anymore.”
In 2008, the former Sister Teresita wrote her own memoir, “I Am Mary, Mediatrix of All Grace.” In it she stands by the truth of her story about the Marian apparitions.
How does the just-released official Vatican document debunking her story affect “Grace”?
It doesn’t, Quintos says.
“The play is a fictionalized narrative. It’s an artistic expression of what happened in Lipa, and it ends with Sister Teresita’s death.”
More than 75 years after the events in Lipa, the story lives on and is unlikely to die anytime soon. – CONTRIBUTED
