Rwanda's Marian Apparition

Messages of Our Lady of Sorrows in Kibeho, Rwanda

“The Bishop declared: Yes, the Virgin Mary appeared at Kibeho on November 28, 1981, and in the months that followed. There are more reasons to believe in the Apparitions than to deny them... The Apparitions of Kibeho are now officially recognized... The name given to the Marian sanctuary at Kibeho is "Shrine of Our Lady of Sorrows".

“That Kibeho become a place of pilgrimage and of encounter for all who seek Christ and who come there to pray, a fundamental centre of conversion, of reparation for the sins of the world and of reconciliation, a point of meeting for all who were dispersed, as for those who aspire to the values of compassion and fraternity without borders, a fundamental centre that recalls the Gospel of the Cross.

Rwanda in 1980

Vandalism was rampant all over the country from 1980 to 1981. Almost all of the statues of the Virgin Mary that were at the entrance of villages were mutilated, destroyed, or stolen. This was a sad time when Mary was almost forgotten, and barely prayed to. Even several priests did not pray the Rosary any more, influenced by the propaganda of false theologians who would like to make us believe that this devotion is out of date. Catholics are humiliated; the clergy begins to give up.

It is in this time of discouragement that Mary chose to visit Rwanda. From 1981 to 1989, this country heard of the Virgin Mary as never before. Kibeho is located in the south of the country, the poorest area of Rwanda. The presence, in this place, of two dynamic priests made the population fervent.

...The pilgrims in Kibeho witnessed several extraordinary phenomena: the dance of the sun from left to right and up and down, for tens of minutes; the disappearance of the sun, replaced by a greenish moon; a dance of the stars; luminous crosses in the sky.

...One of the key reasons that brought the competent ecclesiastical authorities to recognize the Apparition of Kibeho as authentic was the anticipated vision of the Rwanda genocide that occurred 12 years later, in 1994. On August 19, 1982, the seers saw “a river of blood, people who were killing each other, abandoned corpses with no one to bury them, a tree all in flames, bodies without their heads.” This prophecy seemed at first incredible, but about a decade later, in the spring of 1994, a horrifying civil war erupted in Rwanda, and, in just three months, an estimated 500,000 to one million were killed, many beheaded by machetes and dumped into the Kagea River (“river of blood”).

The Blessed Virgin had warned us at Kibeho that sexual promiscuity would lead to disaster. That was before the world knew about AIDS, but by 1994, Africa has seventy percent of the world's AIDS cases – and entire villages were turned into ghost towns! So far, 25 million Africans have contracted AIDS.

But the warnings of the Blessed Virgin Mary were not just for Africa. "When I tell you this, I am not addressing myself strictly to you, child, but I am making this appeal to the world," the Virgin told the seer Marie-Clare Mukangango – who was later killed in the war. She said the Virgin described the world as in revolt against God, the world “is on the edge of catastrophe.”

Learn why the Mary of Rome is not the Mary of the Bible here.