Anecdotes about the Virgin Mary

«Takashi Nagai: el rosario en las ruinas de Nagasaki»

Urakami, Nagasaki (Japanese)

Ahmad Nagai (1908-1951) was a Japanese radiologist who converted to Catholicism in 1934 and was baptized under the name of Pablo. He knew the faith for his wife, Midori Moriyamafrom a family of former Christians hidden from the Catholic Urakamiin Nagasaki. In his writings he tells how prayer in the family, and especially the rosaryIt was the center of his house's life. This is documented in their own memoirs and in biographies based on Japanese sources.

El 9 August 1945the atomic bomb exploded almost over the Christian neighborhood of Urakami and destroyed its great cathedral, dedicated to the Immaculate Conceptionwhile many Catholics prayed around her. Nagai survived, but lost Midori and much of his parish community; among the ashes of his house he found the rosary His wife's fused, even in what her hands had been. He himself, already sick of leukemia because of the radiation he had received in his work, spent his last years in a little post-war hermitage, _ ("the hermitage of loving one's neighbor as one's own"), given to prayer and writing, among them Las campranas de Nagasaki.

It is documented that Nagai, prostrate and dying, continued to pray the rosary every day and encouraged others to pray, presenting it as a spiritual weapon for peace and reconciliation. In the Nyokodō, today turned into a place of memory, its rosary is preserved as a sign of its inner life, and every anniversary of the bombing in Urakami is still the rosary and the bells are touched.

The truth should be distinguished from the beautiful. Local tradition - collected mainly in oral testimonies - says Nagai offered every mystery of the rosary for peace and for the victims of the two bombsand that many unbelieving visitors were moved to the tears by praying with him and hearing him speak of forgiveness. It is entirely credible and converts into many testimonies, but it does not always consist of textual quotation in its diaries and letters; by rigour we point it out as a devotional tradition. There is also no physical miracle attributed to his rosary, nor a process of fully advanced beatification, despite his great fame of holiness.

The Midori rosary, cast and embraced by the hands of those who died praying, says better than any speech that this story teaches: that the Mother accompanies her people in the darkest, and that putting the Rosary's accounts in the hands - alive or dead - is already asking for peace for the whole world.