OUR Lady of Mount Carmel Shrine Parish was declared a national shrine during a solemn ceremony highlighted by a Eucharistic celebration on December 14.
Led by Lingayen-Dagupan Arch. Socrates Villegas, DD, who is also the president of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP), the ceremony was attended by six bishops, 54 Carmelite and diocesan priests, Carmelite nuns, secular Carmelites and members of the laity at the shrine on Broadway Avenue in Quezon City.
The Mass was preceded by the reading of a message by Diocese of Cubao Bishop Honesto Ongtioco, DD, under which the church belongs, and the reading of the document by Villegas declaring the parish as a national shrine.
“Today marks an important milestone in the life of the community of this church as it will now become a national shrine,” Ongtioco said.
As such, he said the national shrine “will now minister not only to the local community but to all Filipinos and to all the faithful who wants to become closer to God and to Our Lady of Mount Carmel.”
He added: “May this shrine help people deepen their faith in God, lift up their faith and show mercy and compassion to those seeking. May our Christian community foster greater love and devotion to our blessed mother, the patron of Mount Carmel.”
Fr. Danilo Lim, OCD, former parish priest of the Carmel church, read Villegas’s declaration of the national shrine.
“By virtue of powers vested in me as president of CBCP, I hereby decree with joy that the Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in New Manila, Quezon City, in the diocese of Cubao, is henceforth be called the National Chrine of Our Lady of Mount Carmel,” the message of Villegas said. The CBCP unanimously voted in favor of granting the title “National Shrine” to Our Lady of Mount Carmel Shrine Parish during its meeting on July 11.
“We invoke the blessings of the almighty God upon all the faithful who visit the national shrine,” Villegas added.
He said the sacraments, “most especially the Eucharist, must be celebrated with utmost devotion according to the liturgical law of the Church…. The sacrament of reconciliation must be made available daily to the Catholic faithful. The poor and the needy must always receive the best pastoral care…so that every day God will be glorified.”
The shrine was established as parish on February 17, 1975, by Archbishop of Manila Jaime Sin.
In his homily, Villegas said the national shrine “stands as a reminder that everything that our eyes can see is temporary. When the world has disappeared, and this world as we know it has come to an end, the pilgrimage will be ended, no longer in the church building but in the heart of God himself. And we are not afraid, in fact, we look forward to that.”
He said, “We come to pray [at the shrine], experience God in contemplation, in silence, in a mystical encounter,” where the faithful “encounter God in the poor, in the downtrodden, in the confused. Here, we come and be reminded, that even if this church collapses, we will not be afraid because the church of Christ…is vested for eternity.”
He said the Carmel church was declared a national shrine not by virtue of a competition or a popularity contest because “we are all convinced that this church fulfilled the primary mission of all churches. What is that? Prayer.”
“The National Shrine of Our Lady of Mount Carmel is first and foremost a place for prayer…. Because our most important contribution for the transformation of society is prayer, and not only prayer, but contemplative prayer. And not only a contemplatives experience, but a mystical experience.”
Villegas said the world will be saved, not by activists, but by mystics. “If we have problems in the church today, it is because we are lacking in mystics. There is a poverty of contemplation. There is a poverty of mysticism in the church.” The national shrine, he said, is a reminder for us, that the people who will change the world are the mystics. And what do they teach us? It is true mystical experience to carry us on to many lifetimes.”
At the national shrine, “we will celebrate the Eucharist, we will celebrate the sacraments, but first and foremost, we come here to just keep quiet, to just allow God to speak to us, and to just allow God to speak in silence.” At Carmel national shrine, he said, “We declare that silence is the language of God, and those who know silence, even if they are ignorant of Latin or English, will be able to experience the love of God.”
At the same time, Villegas said the national shrine is not just a place for prayer, “it is a place for presence, it is a place for encounter.” He said it is the culture of encounter that Pope Francis loves to talk about. “We can be present to one another, sit beside one another and yet treat one another with disdain and suspicion.”
He said the Mass should not only bring us closer to the Lord. “The Mass, the prayer, should bring us closer to one another, and the call of prayer will bring us closer as brothers and sisters, present to one another’s faith and joy, present to one another in life, present to one another in darkness and in light. That is the duty of the church, where we can encounter God, where we can say God is here. God dwells in us his people.”
Villegas said in the traffic, noise and pollution of Metro Manila “we can come here like an oasis…. And be assured God is here. And be assured that every person you will meet in this church is a friend, is a brother, is a sister.”
He said in declaring Carmel church as a national shrine, “we also declare to the other people in other dioceses that this church is a pilgrimage church, that they can come here in pilgrimage.”
It means, he said, that “we are only transient. That we are only walking through, that we are temporary residents, that we are not permanent…on Earth.
“To be people in pilgrimage, we recognize that someday this building will fall, that the National Shrine of Our Lady of Mount Carmel will collapse, [due to] a bomb, an earthquake, a typhoon. Quezon City will disappear from the map of the Philippines, and the Philippines will disappear from the map of the world. And the Earth will explode in the solar system. And, yet, we are not afraid because we are people in pilgrimage and our destiny is life everlasting.”
Image credits: Nonoy Lacza