INTRODUCTION

Mary hold a very important place in the heart of the Catholic Church, giving her the highest

honor among all the saints of God, next to Christ his Son, the divine Savior. From the very

beginning of Christianity, Mary was already in the picture. In the Philippines, the Blessed Mother

of God, has been loved by the Filipinos from the start of their evangelization as baptized Christians.

She is highly revered in the Philippines, manifested through different folk religiosity, popular

devotions and, not to mention the number of liturgical rites dedicated to the Mother of God. The

catholic faithful hold firm that no one is closest to the divine savior than the person who bore him

in the womb, gave birth to him, nursed him and helped him grow to manhood.1 Therefore, from

time immemorial, the Christian faithful especially the Filipinos never cease to invoke Marys

intercession and mediation, trusting and believing that through her closeness to his Son, their

prayers and petitions will be granted and answered.

Lipa Case

It is good to start this paper by calling to mind the alleged apparition of a lady dressed in

white robes in the Philippines. During the post-World War II, a young novice of the Discalced

Carmelite, named Teresita Castillo from the Order of the Discalced Carmelite at Lipa, Philippines

was reported to allegedly had visions of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the monastery garden for

consecutive months, every twelfth day of the month. The Lady who appeared brought the message

of conversion, humility and love. She told her to pray for priests and religious, which she

mentioned, very close to her heart. The Lady, dazzling in white, as the nun described her, instructed

1
See the Prayer to the Virgin Mary, Prayer before Mass, Sacramentary.
her to love each and every member of the community inside Carmel Lipa. On the last day of the

apparition, the Lady named herself to be Mary, Mediatrix of All Grace.

Since then it has been a great commotion in the entire island of the Philippines. People of

every sort and from different status in life came flocking to Carmel to witness miracles, especially

the shower of roses which was reported occurring during the apparition. But it will not last until

the Church itself, represented by several of the hierarchy of bishops of the country, ordered the

veneration and pilgrimages of the alleged apparition of the Blessed Mother at Lipa Carmel, be

stopped, pronouncing that the supernatural phenomenon is a hoax and that there is no supernatural

intervention happened. From then on, no one has ever heard again about the Lady in white who

named herself as Mediatrix of All Grace. For fifty years the whole of the Lipa and the Philippines

were silent about this matter until the year 1992, when the then Archbishop of Lipa, Monsignor

Mariano Graviola, 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.2 The Archbishop Ramon Arguelles resurrected the devotion with an official

kick-off on Sept 12, 2005 with "increased activity and devotion" and made plans to place statues

representing the Virgin of Lipa, as Our Lady Mediatrix of All Grace, in every diocese. On

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

Grace. With the same decree, he formed a new commission to revisit the series of apparitions.3

2
The Miracle Hunter. Our Lady, Mediatrix of All Grace.
http://www.miraclehunter.com/marian_apparitions/unapproved_apparitions/lipa/index.html (accessed
November 20, 2017)
3
Ibid.
From then, the Archbishop declared that the apparition of Mary, Mediatrix of all grace is worthy

of belief.

Last May 31, 2016, there came an announcement from the Congregation for the Doctrine

of Faith, decreeing that the local Diocesan Bishop has no authority over the phenomenon of Lipa

which was ban on 1951, thus declaring Archbishop Arguelles decree as null and void.

The Purpose of the Study

Though the case of Lipa was again banned by the Holy See, the title of the Blessed Mother,

which she named herself upon the young novice of Carmel, Mediatrix of All Grace continued

to be the topic of several discussions with regards to the acceptability of the title of Mary as

Mediator or Intercessor for the Sacred Scripture says that there is only one God and one mediator

to the Father, no other than the man, Christ Jesus (Cf. 1 Timothy 2:5).

For the Christian faithful, Mary has been the vessel of Gods Incarnate Word and through

her, salvation was brought forth into the world. Her role in salvation history did not end by her

being the Mother of the Savior but she shared the merits of her son Jesus as redeemer and

eventually Mediator. This belief was not invented by the hierarchy of the Church and the faithful,

but is based in Scriptures, interpreted by the light of the Sacred Tradition of the Church and is kept

through the Churchs sensus fidelium. Between the fourteenth and fifteenth century, Mary was

already regarded and revered as the Mediatrix of graces. The Church believes that she obtained

this privilege by sharing her sons redemption on the cross.

The purpose of this research paper is neither to solve the problem with doctrines nor defend

the proclamation of a new dogma concerning a title of the Blessed Mother of God. Rather, simply
present Mary in the Catholic tradition and how did she become the Mediatrix of All Grace. This

work will try to answer the following questions:

a) What is the role the Virgin Mary played in the history of salvation?

b) How did she become the Mediatrix of all Grace?

MARY IN THE HISTORY OF SALVATION

Mary has been one of the great concern of the Christian tradition in the history of

Christendom. She is a figure of veneration for the Christian faithful, yet she also is the cause of

great controversies and divisions within and outside the Church. What makes the Virgin Mary as

an overrated figure in the history of the Church and even in the history of the secular world?

It was her role in the work of salvation through Jesus Christ which made her blessed among

all generations. Pope Benedict XIV beautifully describe the Virgin Mary in Gloriosae Dominae:

Indeed, Almighty God enriched the Blessed Virgin with the gifts of His grace more
abundantly than he enriched any other creature. He chose her from all mankind and at the word of
an angel elevated her to the ineffable dignity of the Mother of God. He adorned her with more
radiance of glory than any other work of His hands. Because of all this the Catholic Church, formed
and nourished in the school of the Holy Spirit, has always professed to render humble tribute to her
as the Mother of her Lord and Redeemer, as the Queen of heaven and earth. The Church has
encompassed this most loving of Mothers, entrusted to her by the last words of her dying Spouse,
with expression of filial homage and devotion.4

It was her trusting and wholehearted surrender to the will of God, that she received the

merits of her divine Son Jesus Christ. Through the consent and cooperation of a woman from

Nazareth, Gods eternal salvation merited the whole human race in person of Jesus Christ. God

has been made visible through a vessel of creation. Haffner describes it that, God comes to us in

the realities we know best and can verify most easily, the people and events of our everyday life,

4
Gloriosae Dominae. Apostolic Constitution. September 27, 1748.
in which we understand ourselves. And so, Gods coming into the world is inseparably bound with

the reality of His other Mary. Thus, in Christs coming, we see most particularly and clearly what

God does for humanity, in the marvels He has worked in and for the Blessed Virgin Mary.5

Mary, the Mother of God

The greatest privilege that Mary has greatly merited through God was her role as the

Mother of Jesus Christ, the second person of the Holy Trinity. Her divine motherhood explains

the deepest explanation of her life and of the place she occupies in Gods plan of salvation. Her

divine motherhood is, in effect, the central mystery of our Ladys life, on which are based all the

other mysteries connected with her. Everything in Mary hinges on the person of and mission of

her Son.6

The motherhood of Mary began by her fiat to the words of the Archangel Gabriel in the

Annunciation (cf. Luke ). This wondrous scene as described by the evangelist Luke was Marys

first participation in the redemptive mission of God through Christ Jesus.

Christ, The Sole Mediator to the God the Father

An average Protestant believer would say that Mary should not be regarded and called the

Mediatrix of all Grace for the Scripture did not say anything about the mediation of Mary. The

Bible, specially the letter of Saint Paul to Timothy says, that

5
Paul Haffner. The Mystery of Mary ( ), 1-2.
6
Juan Luis Bastero. Mary, Mother of the Redeemer: A Mariology Textbook, trans. Michael Adams and
Philip Griffin (Portland: Four Courts Press, 2006), 154.