conflagration and was found miraculously intact after the fire. The church, despite the hardships the people of Orani endured, was rebuilt in a short time thanks to the people's devotion to their patroness. During World War II, according to the accounts of Luling Casimiro, one of the seamstresses of the image, a Japanese soldier arrogantly aimed his gun at the statue, but scampered away in fright after the magazine of his gun melted and bent right before his very eyes. When most of Luzon's seawaters were hit by red tide in the 1990s, Orani's fishermen prayed to the Virgen Milagrosa for help, and Orani's fishing waters were mysteriously spared. To the surprise of the image's caretakers, the hemline of the Virgen's dress was found wet and muddied as though she had gone out to the coast to banish away the red tide. After the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo, citizens of Porac, Pampanga, came to Orani during the town fiesta to give thanks, claiming that the Sto. Rosario of Orani had appeared to them in their dreams telling them to flee to higher grounds to escape the onslaught of lahar. At about the time the lahar had flowed, caretakers of the image found that the Virgen's saya was wet and soiled with lahar as if the Virgin had travelled to Pampanga to come to the aid of her devotees. Veneration In recognition of the widespread devotion to the Virgen Milagrosa of Orani, Pope Pius XII approved on October 7, 1958, the canonical coronation of the image. The actual coronation would take place on April 18, 1959, in a solemn ceremony led by the Archbishop of San Fernando, Emilio Cinense, and the Papal Nuncio to the Philippines, Salvatore Sino. In 1965, six years after the canonical coronation of the Virgen Milagrosa, Joaquin Mayoralgo, a native of Orani, approached the then parish priest, Msgr. Emiliano Santos, claiming that he had the "original" image of the Virgen (i.e., the one that was brought by the Spaniards to Bataan) in his possession. When asked by Santos how the image came into his possession, Mayoralgo claimed that he bought the image in an antique shop in Manila that had allegedly acquired it from an American G.I. who, in turn, supposedly found it floating in a river in Cavite in the 1940s. According to the claim, the G.I. was returning to the United States, so he