A Japanese woman religious and Marian visionary has died some five decades after witnessing the miraculous weeping of a statue of Mary and receiving urgent messages to pray in reparation for humanity’s sins. Source: Global Sisters Report.
Sr Agnes Sasagawa, a member of the Institute of the Handmaids of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in the Holy Eucharist in Akita, Japan, was reported to have passed away on August 15, the solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, at age 93.
A convert to Catholicism from Buddhism, Sr Agnes experienced several apparently miraculous events centred on a statue of Mary from 1973 to 1981.
The phenomena were witnessed by several others, including the local bishop at the time, Bishop John Shojiro Ito of Niigata, who in 1984 approved their supernatural character and encouraged the veneration of “the Holy Mother of Akita”.
Current Bishop Paul Daisuke Narui of Niigata confirmed that he had been informed of the nun’s death, saying that he had “no plan to publish a statement in relation to her passing” and adding, “I thank you very much for praying for her”.
In July 1973, Sr Agnes – then a 42-year-old novice – claimed to have witnessed a light surrounding the convent’s wooden statue of Our Lady of All Nations, a Marian image from postwar Amsterdam that, along with its title and accompanying prayers, was approved, although its reported apparitions were not.
The statue in the Akita convent was alleged to have spoken to Sr Agnes on that occasion and in August and October of that year as well, asking her to pray in reparation of the sins of humanity and to be obedient to her superior.
Sr Agnes also experienced visions of her guardian angel and the stigmata, the wounds of Jesus Christ, as a wound in her left hand.
She, her fellow sisters and hundreds of visitors to the religious order also would witness the metre-tall statue sweating as well as shedding tears, a phenomenon that continued sporadically, 101 times in total, until 1981.
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Marian visionary dies at 93 on feast of Assumption (By Gina Christian, OSV News via Global Sisters Report)
