Shrine of Our Lady of Kibeho

Image: Wikimedia Commons

On November 28, 1981, at a girls' school in the green hills of southern Rwanda, sixteen-year-old Alphonsine Mumureke saw a Lady of incomparable beauty who called herself Nyina wa Jambo, Mother of the Word. The visions passed also to Nathalie Mukamazimpaka and to Marie Claire Mukangango, who had once mocked Alphonsine, and the Lady's messages were of prayer, repentance and the chaplet of the Seven Sorrows, with tears and terrible visions of rivers of blood that Rwanda would understand only in the genocide of 1994, in which Marie Claire herself was killed. In 2001 the local bishop approved the apparitions, the first and only Church-approved apparitions of Mary in Africa, and the sanctuary of Our Lady of Sorrows now rises where the schoolgirls once stood. On today's feast of Our Lady of Sorrows, the Mother of the Word weeps and consoles at Kibeho still, drawing pilgrims from across Africa and the world to a place of unthinkable grief turned into prayer.