Archdiocese of San Francisco
Luke the Evangelist tells us that young Mary of Nazareth gave her fiat without reserve when she learned from an angelic messenger that God intended to favor her as the mother of the Messiah. But as she “pondered what sort of greeting this might be,” the angel added some welcome family news: “Elizabeth, your relative, has also conceived a son, in her old age,” he said, “for nothing is impossible with God.”
Ando Perlas was on his knees after Mass at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Parish one Sunday in 1984 when he felt a tap on the shoulder. A stranger asked him if he wanted to join the Daly City parish’s Legion of Mary. “I had gone to Catholic school all my life but had never heard of the Legion of Mary,” said Perlas. When the woman approached him again some months later in the same spot, he was praying for his infant daughter, born with a serious heart defect. Her prognosis was not good. Perlas said he made a silent covenant with the Blessed Mother that day, and with Virgilia “Bebs” de los Santos, the persistent legionary, now deceased.