Friday, April 3, 2009

Healing Blindness - Mary in Kibeho

If you have not yet read this book,Our Lady of Kibeho, by Immaculée Ilibagiza, then I encourage you to do so! Amazing is all I can say! I have posted on this apparition before, but I think you will find these videos to be informative as well. Have a blessed Holy Week. We have so much to pray about!

Also for more information on these amazing (and approved) apparitions in Rwanda please check out Spirit Daily.


A country in great pain is how one could describe Rwanda.

No where is that hard reality clearer than in Kibeho, a small hill where upon the Virgin Mary appeared to a young girl named Natalie. Since the first apparition in 1981, Kibeho has become a pilgrimage for thousands.

A place of suffering and a place of prayer one might say because on this one hill alone 25,000 people were killed during the 1994 genocide. Purples spots denote holes in the wall where belligerents through in grenades and gasoline. The killings continued for several more years.

No place in Rwanda does the spiritual struggle meet so intently as in Kibeho, a place with no water and electricity, full of the old & demoralized, though it fills regularly with thousands of faithful who walk a hundred miles to get there.

The light on that hill has not been diminished, thanks to the tireless work of one woman. Sister Rafaela Nalecz came to Kibeho to start a school for the blind and she won't leave until she replicates what she's already done in India where hundreds of blind children are being educated in a school she started on her own.

"When the Virgin Mary appeared she insisted upon the way of the cross. You must suffer in order to achieve something," says Pallotine Father Antoine Baligora who like Sister Nalecz is there because he has great compassion for the suffering.



2 comments:

pumpkin said...

I loved this book! I found it to be informative and moving. Before reading it, I had never heard of Our Lady of Kibeho. Does anyone know where I can obtain an image, medal, or statue of Our Lady of Kibeho? I have searched the online Catholic catalogues with no luck.

Michele Bondi Bottesi said...

Very inspiring! Let us pray for our suffering brothers and sisters in Africa. God is at work in each one of us--let us joyfully share His love with one another.