The Virgin Mary Returns to the Philippines 1948

Join John Carpenter, Don Hartley, and the Deeper Truth research team as they review another amazing story with supernatural evidence.

Although veneration of Our Lady Mediatrix of all Grace was permitted by Bishop Alfredo Verzosa y Florentin, the Philippine church hierarchy declared on April 11, 1951 that “there was no supernatural intervention in the reported extraordinary happenings including the shower of rose petals in Lipa.” The statement also contained the contentious phrase 'until final decision on the matter will come from the Holy See'. Bishop Rufino Santos, who became apostolic administrator after Bishop Verzosa, ordered that 1) no petals be given to anyone by the Lipa Carmelite community; and 2) the statue of Our Lady of Mediatrix be withdrawn from public view.

While the committee of bishops appeared unanimous in their conclusion that Lipa was fraudulent, several of them allegedly confessed before they died that they too had been coerced, signing the negative "findings" only under duress.

In 1992, Msgr. Mariano Gaviola, archbishop of Lipa, lifted the ban enforced fifty years earlier by the then Lipa Apostolic Administrator Bishop Rufino Santos and granted permission to display again the image of the Mediatrix of all Grace. In 1993, he declared his personal conviction that the Lipa apparitions were worthy of belief.

Most Reverend Ramon C. Arguelles, D.D., archbishop of Lipa, resurrected the devotion with an official kick-off on Sept 12, 2005 with "increased activity and devotion" 

On November 12, 2009, he lifted the 1951 ban on the public veneration of Our Lady, Mediatrix of All Grace

The apparitions were initially approved by the local bishop in 1951 but later condemned by the Vatican in the same year.