Japan: Sr. Agnes, the nun of the Akita Marian revelations, has died

The nun of the Servants of the Eucharist to whom in 1973 Our Lady entrusted a message calling the world to conversion, penance and prayer passed away on the Feast of the Assumption. In 1984 the local bishop wrote that “the supernatural character could not be denied.” Since 2002, the wooden statue has been kept in the shrine of the Mother of the Redeemer.^

Tokyo (AsiaNews) - On the day of the Solemnity of the Assumption in Japan, Sr. Agnes Sasagawa, the religious who in 1973 experienced the apparitions of Our Lady of Akita, in the town of the same name in the Tohoku region, died. Sr. Agnes passed away at the age of 93 and was a religious of the Order of the Servants of the Eucharist.

Born in 1930 into a Buddhist family, she had encountered Christianity through the witness of a nurse: having received Baptism, she had then chosen to embrace religious life. She was still a novice when she saw rays of light coming from the tabernacle on June 12, 1973; a few days later a cross-shaped wound began to bleed on her hand.

She would receive the explanation for those phenomena on July 6, when she heard a voice speaking to her from the wooden statue of Our Lady venerated in her convent. The Blessed Virgin entrusted her with a message inviting the world to conversion, penance and prayer; Sr. Agnes' wound disappeared to reappear on Mary's hand on the wooden statue, and the nun was also healed of a hearing disorder from which she was suffering.

On August 3 of that year, the statue of Our Lady returned to speak to the nun, entrusting her with a message, “Many men in this world afflict the Lord,” Sr. Agnes reported. “I desire souls to console him in order to soften the wrath of the heavenly Father. I desire, with my Son, souls who repair by their suffering and poverty the sinners and the ungrateful. I desire this also from your community ... that it love poverty, that it sanctify itself and pray in reparation for the ingratitude and outrages of so many men.”

She received a new and final message of this same tenor on October 13, 1973, on the anniversary of the Fatima apparitions: “As I have told you, if men do not repent and improve themselves, the Father will inflict a terrible chastisement on all mankind. It will be a chastisement greater than the Flood, such as has never been seen before. Fire will fall from the sky and sweep away most of humanity, both the good and the bad, sparing neither the priests nor the faithful. The survivors will find themselves so desolate that they will envy the dead. The only weapons left to you will be the Rosary and the Sign left by My Son. Every day recite the prayers of the Rosary. With the Rosary, pray for the Pope, bishops and priests.”

After these manifestations to Sr. Agnes, in January 1975 the wooden statue of Mary in the Akita Convent began to weep. And the phenomenon occurred for more than 100 times until 1981.

In April 1984, Msgr. John Shojiro Ito -- bishop of Niigata, the diocese under whose jurisdiction Akita is located -- wrote in an official letter that “on the basis of the investigations conducted, the supernatural character of a series of unexplained events of the statue of the Virgin honored in Akita cannot be denied. Accordingly, I authorize that the Holy Mother of Akita be venerated throughout the diocese entrusted to me.”

Although without issuing an official document, in 1988, even then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, called the events that took place in Akita reliable. Then in 2002, the shrine of the Mother of the Redeemer was completed, which has housed the statue of the Virgin ever since.

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