And so the Month of Mary neatly morphed into June, the Month of the Sacred Heart.
When it comes to the Blessed Mother, we didn’t realize the Lourdes Grotto in the Vatican Gardens [above] so closely resembles the real thing in southern France. (The Pope prayed a Rosary there last week.)
During last month, a few details pertaining to the Virgin Mary’s miracles in Akita, Japan, to a deaf nun (Sister Agnes Sasagawa, who soon was cured), came to our attention.
Born in 1931, Sister Sasagawa (then named Katsuko ), at 19, on an operating table for what should have been a simple appendectomy, woke up and could not move. Something had gone terribly wrong. Paralysis of the central nervous system.
She was told she would spend the next ten years in a hospital bed—not walk out until she was nearly thirty years old! In between were eleven surgeries, each plenty painful.
But according to one account, a nurse in that hospital who was deeply Catholic brought water with her to the hospital from the spring at Lourdes.
Katsuko drank it, we’re informed, and started getting better. The Church never called this a miracle. But what we need to know is that a woman paralyzed or partly immobilized for years, after those multiple surgeries, drank that water and day by day improved, strong enough to be discharged from the hospital.
She could walk.
And somewhere in those years, lying in that hospital bed, she made a decision that would shock everyone around her. She wanted to become Catholic. And a nun to boot. (This was Buddha’s territory!) That was around 1960. She would became famous after a series of events in 1973 when, at her convent in Akita (northern Japan) a Church-verified weeping statue of Mary began giving her messages. Our Lady warned that if humanity does not repent and improve, the Heavenly Father will inflict a terrible punishment. The quote: “Many men in this world afflict the Lord. I wish souls to comfort Him to soften the anger of the Heavenly Father.” Some add an apocryphal addendum not in the formal messages, “If you could see the sins of one day, you would be overwhelmed with horror.” For your reckoning.
We stayed a bit distant from these alleged revelations, not feeling at total comfort, but since the bishop thus far has cited no problems, some messages, to a seer named Christiana Agbo, from there:
October 1992 – One morning at 9 a.m. Christiana went to her room to meditate, when suddenly Our Lady appeared with tears in her eyes. When Christiana asked why she was crying, Our Lady said: “I am crying, because more souls are going to hell, pray.”
April 1995 – “While saying the Rosary you should hold the beads with your two hands so that your eyes will be on them and it will make you concentrate.”
June 1996 – “Jesus is merciful, He will pardon you if you beg for pardon. Will you beg for pardon?”
November 1999 – “You should say the Rosary with much concentration like someone who has been told that they would die in the next minute and is preparing for this. If only you knew the importance of the Holy Rosary.”
