Woman Who Was Healed By Vision Says Virgin Spoke About Crisis In The Church

By Michael H. Brown

Last year after September 11 we brought you news of a woman, Sandy Mazzitelli, 45, who was suffering from severe cancer when she allegedly began experiencing apparitions of St. Therese of Lisieux and the Blessed Mother. She told us that St. Therese came as a clear, distinct, and full-bodied apparition on the night of September 4 -- the beginning of five consecutive nights of apparitions during which the saint urged recitation of the Rosary and warned that "bad and terrible things" were about to happen. Mrs. Mazzitelli says the saint appeared in her classic garb of a brown habit with roses and on one occasion, the second night, September 5, was accompanied by a long appearance of  the Blessed Virgin Mary.  She also says the appearances greatly relieved and may even have healed an untreatable cancer she had been suffering. She said lumps in her body began to disappear during or soon after the events.

As always, we submit this for your discernment. We ran the article because she was under the guidance of a holy priest. We're not going to get into too many specifics, because when we ran the article last time, too many flocked to her house.  Sandy hasn't been receiving apparitions since then, but allegedly has received locutions, most of them with personal messages, but at least one of which pertain to us all. "Because of the Church scandal, [the Blessed Mother] now wants me to add when I tell my story that my whole healing was started by the prayers of a very holy priest, so people realize that there are good priests out there. So now I add that at the end. 

"The Blessed Mother did tell me that bad things were going to happen, and I see them happening, and I feel it's going to get worse before it gets better. That's why you have to pray the Rosary. But the Church is always going to be there. And she's calling it a 'cleansing' of the Church; the Church is going to come back even stronger. It really saddens me, everything that's going on, and she's helping me through it. I ask her over and over again, why is this happening, and she explains that it's a cleansing and we have to go through it. She says, 'Pray, pray, pray.' 

"We have to pray for the priests, for the Church, for the Pope. She says we have to know we're going to have to go through these bad times. She said this isn't the end of it. It's going to go on for a while. And we should help the Church through it. I was sad about it, but the Virgin said it's a good thing, that the Church is going to come out of it better. She said this is one of the reasons she wanted everyone to say the Rosary."

Sandy adds that she was asked by St. Therese to erect a statue of the Little Flower in front of her local church, and she is currently working at this. It is meant to give people a place to pray even when the church is closed for the night. She expects it to be done by June.

Significant is the fact that Mrs. Mazzitelli saw the saint not as a vision in her mind but with her eyes open, as what mystical theologians know as a "corporeal apparition." At first Sandy, a weekly Mass attendee, but not overly devout, didn't know it was Therese. 

"It was late at night and everybody was in bed and I was getting ready to doze off," recounts Mrs. Mazzitelli. "I was just sitting on the couch and all of a sudden I smelled this pretty-like rose smell, and then I looked up a little bit and I could see her, and she was kind of glimmering, but then when I looked at her more, the more I looked at her, the more solid she became. At the beginning I was actually a bit frightened and amazed at the same time. I didn't ask her anything. She said she was here and she came to heal me."

The next night at around the same time Therese allegedly came again. This time Sandy knew who it was. She had looked at Mass cards and Therese had been one of the pictures. That night -- September 5, a Wednesday -- she told St. Therese she knew who she was. "And she told me that Jesus had a special purpose for me, that was the reason she was healing me, that I had special work," says Sandy. "She was like full-sized, but I could only see down to her ankles. She was telling me that bad things were going to happen. She stayed a while and was talking to me, that bad and terrible things were going to happen, and that for people to get through them they had to pray the Rosary more, that no matter what people tried to do, nothing was going to work unless everyone went back to the Rosary."