PRAY THE ROSARY FOR PEACE

We can only stand by and watch with tremendous sadness and disbelief at the inaction of our political leaders, while murder and mayhem continues to unfold and be suffered by people living in the Middle East. The coffins of young soldiers have begun arriving in the USA.

So many people are afraid that this pointless war might soon escalate to global scale.

In a recent conversation with my sister, we were discussing whether we were approaching not the end of the world but the end of this era. I reminded her about the plea for prayer for peace by Our Lady of Fatima....... The Lady said this would be accomplished through a strong devotion to the Rosary: “Pray the Rosary every day to obtain peace for the world and the end of the war.”

This morning I was reminded of a booklet, that I treasured as a teenager, which shared how we could live the devotion to her Immaculate Heart and told the story of how a group of people who lived her message came out of Hiroshima unscathed after the atomic bomb.

In Hiroshima in 1945, there was a small community of German Jesuit Fathers, who lived in the parish house of the Church of Our Lady of the Assumption, only eight blocks from the epicentre of the nuclear blast.

One of these Jesuits, Father Hubert Schiffer (1915–1982), recounts that Mass had just been celebrated and they had gone to breakfast when the bomb fell:

“Suddenly, a terrific explosion filled the air with one bursting thunderstroke. An invisible force lifted me from the chair, hurled me through the air, shook me, battered me, whirled me ‘round and ‘round like a leaf in a gust of autumn wind.”

For a whole day, the four Jesuits were enveloped in an inferno of fire, smoke and toxic clouds, but none of them was contaminated by the radiation, and their parish buildings remained standing, while all the other houses around were destroyed and no one survived.

When the religious were rescued, the doctors noted with amazement that their bodies seemed immune to radiation and any other harmful effects of the explosion.

Father Schiffer lived another 37 years in good health, and attended the Eucharistic Congress held in Philadelphia in 1976. At that time all the members of the Hiroshima community were still alive.

From the day the bombs fell, the surviving Jesuits were examined more than 200 times by scientists, without any conclusion being reached, except that their survival of the explosion was an event inexplicable for human science.

The Jesuits attributed their deliverance to Our Lady of Fatima, whom they venerated by reciting the Rosary every day. “As missionaries,” Fr Schiffer attested, “we wanted to live the message of Our Lady of Fatima in our country, and so we prayed the Rosary every day,”

"Seek first God's kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own".

Matt 6:33-34