By Deedee M. Siytangco
ANGEL THOUGHTS
I have closed the door on doubt. I will go by what light I can find. And hold up my hands and reach them out. —Irene Pettit McKeehan
Welcome July… only five months to go before 2021! We are all alive, and while many are suffering among us, let us be grateful for being alive! Let us try to help more people!
It was the birthday of Teresing Lat Castillo, Lipa’s late visionary, on July 4. It should have been our First Saturday mass and fellowship but, alas, the Carmel church is still closed, so we heard mass on TV instead, and offered our prayers for her and in thanksgiving to Our Lady, Mary Mediatrix of All Grace.
We plan to return to Lipa and resume our First Saturday mass as soon as the community quarantine is lifted. In the meantime, let us hear from her confessor and staunch defender of the authenticity of apparitions, Fr. Pio C. Acion. By the way, if you want to hear masses officiated by Fr. Pio, you can
catch them every midnight on Facebook.
“What those against the Mediatrix do not know is that all that is happening is traceable to a certain fact—Mary truly appeared at Lipa Carmel in 1948. All the testimonies coming out, especially the journal of Fr. Angel de Blas, OP, shapes the picture of the event in such a way that we begin to reflect on things about the apparition we have not thought of before. The Blessed Mother tried to get our attention. Mediatrix enemies will be surprised even those things said against the devotion are brought into their faces, scrutinized and probed unexpectedly,” Fr. Pio told us. “They came to a false conclusion because they went further than God intended.
Our Lord knows the details. He knows everything. The way He intervened proves it. We just have to remember that God deals with us a step at a time, knowing the details perfectly. As a rule of thumb (but there are exceptions to this) the way of God is seldom recognized as that, at first. It is usually realized later as we look back. Nothing is hidden from God. How God determines the end from the beginning is absolutely secret. We can try to get behind God and speculate why our devotion has to pass this difficult way and even try to find out what makes Him ‘tick.’ Please know that when it comes to the way, God knows the future—and how He knows it, that is hidden. To all the Mediatrix devotees, I tell you, no matter how much we try to hasten everything, there is one thing that God cannot do and that is to make things happen any sooner as we wish because He chose to be bound by time, with the result that He himself waits for some things to happen.”
Fr. Pio admits that defending and propagating the Marian devotion to the Mediatrix makes him very happy even if he is still persecuted for his beliefs. He suffers but he offers it all for Mary.
“Perhaps God has chosen us all devotees to do something that would be recognized later and would give much glory to Him! We are people who have been given a witness by Mary, the Mediatrix of All Grace, years before she will use us as her servants to fight the ancient Enemy of humanity, the devil,” Fr. Pio said.