Honoring Our Lady of Oslob

As we write this the miraculous icon of the Immaculate Conception of Oslob is being honored in our school with recitations of the Holy Rosary by students and teachers. The icon arrived in the afternoon of November 17 accompanied by a team of "Guardians" headed by Fr. Valention Gemelo, the Oslob parish priest.

Our school is one of the 19 visitation sites of the sacred image, a tour dubbed "Bulawanong Dalit sa Oslob," whose purpose is to raise funds for the reconstruction of Oslob church. As most Cebuanos know, the 150-year old church in that southern municipality was completely gutted down by fire in March last year. Starting at the convent, the fire destroyed everything - even the tile-works on the floor and altar - everything, that is, except the framed wooden image of our Lady of Immaculate Conception, the town's patron saint.

We personally saw the extent of the destruction when we visited Oslob in September this year with former Congressman Jose (Dodong) Gullas and wife Nena along with the members of the UV Chorale. What we saw was an empty shell of a church, with only the belfry and the adobe walls standing. We approached the altar section and saw that the raised pedestal that held the image was still intact, although blackened by the flames and above it was still precariously poised a portion of the roof assembly that fell and formed a canopy above the sacred icon, evidently protecting it from getting scorched. Unscorched too was the notebook of Rosary pledges placed right in front of the image.

That fire last year was said to be second to hit the church. Decades ago, Oslob old timers said, a fire also destroyed the church, but like the present conflagration, the sacred image of Mama Mary was also spared, "Milagroso gayud kining imaje sa among patron," a parishioner exclaimed.

Like the shrine of the Virgin of the Holy Rosary in Lindogon, Sibonga, the Oslob icon is now beginning to attract attention as a miraculous image. So far, however, there has not been much report about miraculous healings and unexplained happenings. But seeing young and old together soulfully praying the Rosary and the hundreds of people lining up to pay homage to our Lady of Oslob, one cannot help but feel that a miraculous event was taking place in the mind and heart of those people.

One thing is that the visit of Our Lady's icon inevitably reminds us of the onset of the spiritual season which is the Nativity. Smothered in the blare and glare of a materialistic world, the soul is almost helpless in its search for peace. The season is supposed to promise respite from anxiety and fear, from the onslaught of hopelessness but in the face of today's reality that promise seems hollow.

Joy to the world - that strain now seems flat and meaningless. For what joy can tickle the mind when many of our brother Filipinos don't have enough for their stomach? What joy when turmoil is rocking the global economy, while in our midst there's an unending skirmish for power and pelf? Truly, we are in a world a poet once described as one that "hath really neither joy nor love nor light, neither happiness nor help from pain."

Against this backdrop of heartaches and disillusionment comes the image of our Lady of the Immaculate Conception. To those who believe, her visit is like a whiff of breeze that refreshes the soul and enlivens faith. For in the last five decades or more, amidst carnage and pestilence, the Virgin Mary through about 300 apparitions has been the consoling Mother to all mankind, pleading for prayers and penance that the hand of God might be stayed from forging another Sodom or Gomorrah. In Lourdes, France, she appealed to Bernadette, the visionary, to "pray to God for the conversion of sinners." And in Fatima, Portugal, almost fifty years later, she brightened humanity's landscape when she said … "in the end my Immaculate Heart will triumph. The Holy Father will consecrate Russia to me which will be granted, and some time of peace will be given to the world." 

In Guadalupe, three centuries earlier, when Juan Diego (the native to which she appeared) felt worried over the health of his uncle, the Virgin Mother of God, consoled him with something like this: "Why are you worried, don't you know I am your mother?"

From salvation of mankind to salvation of individual souls, from supernatural concerns to secular needs, our Lady of the Immaculate Conception has been an unfailing source of help to those who honor her.

Thoughts on the approaching festivity of the Nativity should therefore include always thoughts on Mama Mary. Of course, the Son of God is always the center of it all, but without His loving Mother who is very much our Mother too, something will be missing in that Bethlehem scenario.