The accounts of folks protected by sacramentals, and more direct interventions by Christ and His mother, are countless and amazing. They are not stories. They are facts.
Fact:
There was the young woman at a sorority house at Florida State University who serial killer Ted Bundy was ready to brutally murder — entering her room, at night, with a club, after slaying others — but mysteriously stopped when he saw that this college girl was holding rosary beads her grandmother had given her. Bundy told the story to a priest before he was executed at a state prison in Florida.
Fact: The spectacular instance, near Green Bay, whereby the seer Adele Brise who experienced the Blessed Mother in a Church-approved apparition at Champion escaped almost certain death by a wildfire that totally ravaged that vicinity by praying, with a small group, at a little now 12-acre (then five-acre) shrine dedicated to the apparition — an oasis of emerald in what was otherwise, for the most part, a 1.2-million acre wasteland of ash.
Fact: the homes that made it through storms like “Katrina” or, in the South and Midwest, F-5 tornadoes through this type of sacramental protection — in some cases, lifted up, carried off, but harmlessly set down. (Let us hope the name “Corpus Christi” — the Body of Christ — holds sway over a storm this weekend.)
In his very interesting, seminal book on spiritual warfare, Healing You and Your Family Tree (highly recommended), Father Christopher Ngozi Onuoha of Omaha (formerly Nigeria), relates his own example.
“A well-known Scapular miracle story occurred in May of 1957,” writes Father Onuoha. “A Carmelite priest in Germany published the unusual story of how the Scapular saved a home from fire.
“An entire row of homes had caught fire in Westboden, Germany. The pious inhabitants of a two-family home, seeing the fire, immediately fastened a Scapular to the main door of the house.
“Sparks flew over it and around it, but the house remained unharmed.
“Within five hours, twenty-two homes had been reduced to ashes.
“The one structure that stood undamaged amidst the destruction was that which had the Scapular attached to its door.”
It was so unusual, so undeniable, relates the priest, that hundreds came by to see this place Our Lady had saved — to serve as eyewitnesses to the power of the Scapular. Fact.
It doesn’t matter the disaster. It doesn’t matter, the onslaught.
Heaven, when we beseech its aid, can save us from anything in our lives, including ourselves.
[resources Healing You and Your Family Tree and The God of Miracles]
[Scapular]
[see also: Signs on the earth]