Journey of Faith

All the money in the world was not helping Filipino-Canadian property tycoon Geronimo de los Reyes save his daughters life.
Prayer did. That’s how the millionaire sees it and last week, 17 years after his daughter, Saralou returned from the brink of death, her miracle was celebrated with consecration of a church in his native Philippines. Dedicated to Our Lady of Guadalupe, the church General Trias, Cavite is patterned after the awesome Basilica de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe in Guadalupe. The church, including a convent on the property, has been donated to the diocese of Cavite. In an interview with The Philippine Inquirer, Reyes said he realized one night in March 1991 that for all his wealth he could do nothing to ensure that his 6-month-old daughter Saralou would live. Saralou was born Aug. 5, 1990 in Vancouver, Canada, with a hole in her heart, the size of an American quarter. The condition was called VSDPDA or ventricular septal defect patent ductus arteriosus. This is a congenital heart defect which occurs when the heart or blood vessels near the heart don’t develop normally before birth, causing an inadequate oxygenation of the blood. This gives infants with the condition a deathly pale color. Saralou needed an operation, but the Canadian doctors said she could undergo surgery only when
she turned four or six. “Nobody in Canada was brave enough to do it right away. Nobody wanted to put a 6-month-old under the knife,” said De los Reyes.

De los Reyes and wife, Lulu, with the baby, traveled from Vancouver to Manila and back to Vancouver, trying to find a doctor who could help them. Four years would have been a harrowing wait for the couple. They could not bear to look at their daughter without weeping. Saralou’s heartbeat was “hitting the wall of her skin,” they said. Her lips had turned blue. And she was always gasping for breath. Against the advice of a Filipino doctor who warned that frequent air travel might be harmful to the baby, the couple flew to California where doctors at the University of California in San Francisco performed a very risky open heart surgery on Saralou. According to De los Reyes, they were told to pray because the operation was a great gamble and that only God could tell whether the baby would make it through the night. While Saralou was fighting for her life, De los Reyes found himself walking into the Our Lady of Guadalupe chapel at the St. Mary of the Assumption Cathedral on Gough Street in San Francisco. He knelt before the 10-ft high mosaic of Our Lady of Guadalupe and prayed for a miracle. “If there should be a life to be taken, it should be mine,” he recalled telling the Blessed Mother. He asked for “as much courage as when the Virgin Mother herself lost her own son.” It was probably the first and only time in his life that he prayed so fervently, said De los Reyes, 72, the businessman and art collector who developed the Pacific Plaza building
in Makati and the Gateway Industrial Park in Cavite. He prayed long and hard and promised that he would fulfill a childhood dream to build a church
in honor of the Virgin Mary’s miracles, a dream he said he had from when he was a little boy hanging out at the bell tower of the Sta. Ursula Church in Binangonan, Rizal, during the Japanese Occupation.

Saralou survived the surgery. “Our Lady interceded for Saralou that she tolerated the surgery extremely well,” Lulu said. And as promised, De los Reyes has erected a church in honor of Our Lady of Guadalupe. It is patterned after the awesome Basilica de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe at the base of a hill known as Tepeyac, now called Guadalupe, in Mexico. This is the site where the Virgin Mary appeared before a humble Indian laborer, Juan Diego, four times in December 1531 and performed a number of miracles. Juan Diego was proclaimed a saint in rites presided over by Pope John Paul II in July 2002. The original basilica in Mexico has nine chapels and can seat 10,000. Including standing space, it can accommodate 40,000 people at any given time. Though a lot smaller than the original, the Cavite church is just as imposing, with its circular structure patterned after the Mexican basilica. It stands on a 5,745-sq.m. property in Barangay Javalera, General Trias town. It cost “a huge fortune” to build, said architect Jesus Miguel Benedicto. He said it took two years to design and build it, beginning in 2005, because most of the materials, including lamps and the sound system, were imported and that De los Reyes had kept on changing some design details “until things became perfect.” De los Reyes said he wanted to make sure the Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe would be the best tribute to the Mother of God. Flanking the main altar are two tablets of the Apostle’s Creed and the Magnificat. Two huge statues of Our Lady of Guadalupe and Christ the Redeemer dominate the left and right sides of the altar.
On the wall to the right, Mary’s life and times are captured in a collection of large oil paintings by Vladimir Cuevas, a Mexican artist. Cuevas also
painted the scenes showing the apparitions of Our Lady of Guadalupe hanging on this wall. On the left wall is a mural depicting various biblical scenes by Fr. Armand Tangi, the Filipino artist priest from the Society of St. Paul, who painted the famous images of a laughing, friendly and joyful Christ. Tangi’s laughing, down-to-earth images of Christ were said to have inspired a famous rendering of the Last Supper showing Jesus Christ in the company of street kids by painter Joey Velasco. Tangi and Velasco are friends. There are two sets of representations of the Stations of the Cross. One, a set of relief sculptures carved from molave by Filipino artisans, is on the exterior semicircle wall of the church. The other set painted on ceramic baked tiles by Spanish artisans from Toledo, Spain, hangs on the interior walls. A large Crucified Christ is on the left of the church, while a small wooden cross hangs above the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe behind the main altar. Outside the church is a carillon consisting of 18 computer-operated bells from The Netherlands. It plays the hymn of Our Lady of the Guadalupe, among other songs. The church, including a convent on the property, has been donated to the diocese of Cavite. De los Reyes and Lulu attended a Mass at the church to celebrate the feast of the Our Lady of Guadalupe last Dec. 12. With them was Saralou, now grown into a tall and beautiful 18-year-old who bears no traces at all of her near-death  experience as an infant. She is a junior student at De La Salle University. On her 18th birthday, Saralou told her parents she did not want a lavish
celebration and to instead donate what they would have spent for it to charity. They readily agreed. “For all our trials, we have so many things to
thank God and Mary for.” De los Reyes said.