But to understand why anyone would take this seriously, we need to go back much further, to a small town in Japan in 1931, to a girl who almost didn’t survive her first year of life.

The baby survived, but she was very fragile from the start.

Her name was Katsuko Sasagawa.

She grew up, went to school, and her teen years passed quickly. Then, at 19, she ended up on an operating table for what should have been a simple surgery: an appendectomy.

But something went wrong.

Nobody ever fully explained what happened that day, but the result was devastating. When she woke up, she could not move.

Paralysis of the central nervous system.

She was told she would spend the next ten years in a hospital bed. She would not walk out until she was nearly 30 years old.

In between were 11 surgeries, each one more painful than the next.

One of the nurses in that hospital was deeply Catholic, and that nurse was assigned to care for Katsuko. At some point, she brought water with her to the hospital. The water was from the spring at Lourdes.

Katsuko drank it, and she started getting better.  Now, the Church never called this a miracle. I need to be honest about that.

But here is what we do know: a woman paralyzed for years, after multiple surgeries, drank that water — and in the days afterward, she began improving, day by day.

She became strong enough to be discharged from the hospital.

She could walk.

And somewhere in those years, lying in that hospital bed, something shifted in her. By 1960, she made a decision that would shock everyone around her. She wanted to become Catholic.

Now, keep in mind, this is Japan, a Buddhist culture. Catholics are less than one percent of the population. So this was a big deal at the time.

A Buddhist priest came personally to talk her out of it. He sat down with her and made his case. She listened and then explained why she believed God was calling her. He left without changing her mind.

But before he walked out, he asked her to pray for him.

She was baptized that year, took the name Agnes, joined the convent in Nagasaki, and for the next several years lived a quiet religious life, praying, serving, and doing the work.