By Gina Christian Maria Wiering
OSV News
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.
Sister 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 Aug. 15, the solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, at age 93.
A convert to Catholicism from Buddhism, Sister Sasagawa experienced several apparently miraculous events centering 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.”
An Aug. 15 post on X on the account @seitai_hoshikai — the religious order’s Japanese name and linked to the religious order’s website — stated in Japanese that Sister Agnes “had been undergoing medical treatment for some time” and had “passed away … due to old age.”
In July 1973, Sister Sasagawa 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, though its reported apparitions were not. The statue was alleged to have spoken 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.
Sister Sasagawa also experienced visions of her guardian angel and the stigmata, the wounds of Jesus Christ, in her left hand. She, her fellow sisters and hundreds of visitors would witness the 3-foot-tall statue sweating as well as shedding tears, a phenomenon that continued sporadically, 101 times in total, until 1981.