Eight Apparitions, One Priest, and the Endless Miracle of the Sisters of Mary

On the Feast of the Assumption next week, 383 members of the Sisters of Mary across the globe will celebrate sixty years of one of the greatest rescue movements for the poor, orphaned, and humiliated in the history of the world. Since August 15, 1964, countless thousands of children have been saved since the sisters began to enter the loneliest places in South Korea’s war-scorched southern peninsula.

Although American missionary priest Venerable Aloysius Schwartz founded the Sisters of Mary religious community that day, he said the Sisters’ true birth — the Sisters’ supernatural birth — came in 1933, when Mary visited a tiny and brokenhearted Belgian village that had abandoned the Catholic faith. Even those with intimate knowledge of the Sisters of Mary’s founding find the history of their narrative of a different order, comparable to a Tolkien novel that ripples through the imagination of a sleepy-eyed child.

This story, though, is true. To begin: Who are the Sisters of Mary?

The religious community “spiritually mother” more than 20,000 teenagers today at fifteen Catholic Boystown and Girlstown Catholic boarding schools on four continents. For 60 years, they’ve entered the most dangerous places in the world — by boat, motorcycle, bus, and foot — to rescue children submerged in the violence of poverty. Shoulder-to-shoulder, they’ve walked thousands of paths — always two-by-two — that split the seams of mountains and villages bathed in traffickers, gang members, murderers, witch doctors, and drug runners. Sisters have been kidnapped, held up at gunpoint, accosted, verbally threatened and abused in their search for orphans and poor and abused children.

Venerable Schwartz — “Fr. Al” — told the religious community: “The way we serve is to wear a constant crown of thorns.” The Sisters of Mary are one of the lone religious orders to take five vows, one of which includes praying three hours each day. Their founder knew prayer and the Eucharist would sustain them in their work.

Students attend five years of schooling, where they pray nightly Rosaries with the sisters. They attend frequent weekday Masses, heal from wounds before the monstrance at adoration, confess their sins, and are mothered by the sisters, who raise their spiritual children to evangelize and convert drifting or lost college-aged souls. The sisters spend their days catechizing, nourishing, counseling, jogging with, playing sports with, and praying with their spiritual sons and daughters. Their care begins before dawn and ends after nightfall; it is their aim to become mothers for the children.

Dozens of U.S. bishops, priests, evangelists, writers, and visitors have become wonderstruck by what they’ve seen in the Boystown and Girlstown communities.

“I can honestly tell you that I have never seen anything like it in my life,” Catholic author and evangelist Jason Evert said of his stay in Girlstown in Chalco, Mexico. “It took my breath away. I want everyone to see what I saw. … I’ve gone into many American high school classrooms and given talks to freshmen and sophomore girls who looked like 23- and 24-year-olds. But what I saw in that gymnasium in Girlstown was a thousand or so 17- and 18-year-old teenage girls who looked like they were 9 or 10 or 11 years old.

“The reason why it was so breathtaking is because I know so many had been exposed to horrible and abusive things—physical and sexual things. And to see them look into my eyes as the most innocent and pure children brought tears to my eyes. The only other place I’ve ever seen this type of piercing joy has been in cloistered convents.”

Bishop Joseph Strickland spent five days with the Sisters of Mary and their 3,000-plus girls in Chalco earlier this year. He became overwhelmed by what he saw as “sacred work.”

“These girls come here broken, and the Sisters of Mary pray and work hard to heal their trauma,” he said. “The wounded become healed here by women who want no fanfare. It is the work of God. … I began to see the Sisters of Mary’s work as woven into the priest’s call—my own call—to suffer and offer sacrifice with no fanfare.”

More than 170,000 of once-poor graduates have gone on to run companies. They’ve become lawyers, teachers, nurses, architects, construction workers, artists, professional athletes, and auto mechanics. They run family farms, join orchestras, and work to bring order to hardscrabble neighborhoods as police officers and soldiers. Many have become priests and nuns, and have entered cloisters. Others have moved into parishes and begun to volunteer as catechists, lectors, and to lead bible studies. Tens of thousands of the graduates would be dead, trafficked, homeless, or trapped in lives of poverty if it wasn’t for the Sisters of Mary’s redoubtable instinct to save them, remove their wounds, and begin the work of building bonfires of renewed hope and joy in beaten-down souls.

The Miracle of Banneux 

Fr. Al said none of the saving work for poor children would have happened had a 14-year-old named Mariette Beco failed to notice a glow in the front yard of her family’s home on Sunday, January 15, 1933. It was a moonless, frigid evening in the poor town of Banneux, Belgium, when Mariette noticed a “bright ball” moving slowly across the horizon. She knelt on a wooden bench in the home’s parlor and pressed her nose against a frosty windowpane as she watched an orb “like the moon” pass through pine trees and move toward the Beco home. Gradually, she saw the image take on the silhouette of an exceedingly beautiful woman, a little over five feet in height, who began to hover a few feet above the ground just outside the window. The image looked directly at Mariette. She was smiling. No one else in the home was the wiser as to what was unfolding.

The woman appeared as a vision of radiant light, clothed in a white garment above a blanket of snow, where an onion patch would bloom in the springtime. She stood in a posture of motherly love, her head slightly inclined to the left. After gawking at the luminosity of the image for several minutes, Mariette thought to place an oil lamp into another room, imagining a reflected play of light was being cast. But the image of the beautiful woman remained, even brighter. When she bolted for the door to greet the woman, explaining to those she passed what she had seen, her mother told her to remain inside because of the darkness and cold. Superstitions were widespread in the Belgian countryside towns of those days, and her mother lazily attributed the glow to that of a witch. Thereafter, the light from the front yard became extinguished.

Mariette went to her room later that night and began to pray the Rosary. It would mark her return to the practice of the faith. She began to attend weekday Mass, seek catechism instruction, and practice habits of virtue and piety.

It was on this night, 3,924 miles away in Washington D.C., that Al said his tiny ears began to burn. Over the course of his thirty-five years as a priest, he often told the Sisters of Mary that as Our Lady beckoned Mariette that night, she was simultaneously calling him to Banneux. At the time, Al was a three-year-old boy growing up on the wrong side of the Benning Road trolley tracks in the teeth of the Great Depression. His father, Louis, was forced to raise his growing family with only a sixth-grade education.

The apparition marked the first of eight in Banneux, when Mary introduced herself to Mariette as the Virgin of the Poor — the first time in history Mary had identified herself with the poverty-stricken. In the weeks that followed, Mary told Mariette she had come to alleviate the sufferings of the poor and broken-spirited, while emphasizing the need for unceasing prayer, mortifications, and sacrifices. By the time of her final apparition to Mariette that winter, the entire village had returned to the practice of the faith.

Banneux was not unlike other country villages throughout Europe in the 1930s, a time when indifference to the Catholic faith spread along with the push for industrialization in cities. Banneux had a population of three hundred, most of whom had fallen away from the sacraments. It was the unspoken mental stain of the townsfolk; they knew where they were supposed to be on Sunday, but they just didn’t seem to care. The situation was especially egregious in light of the town’s then-recent history. In 1914, the villagers made a collective vow to consecrate Banneux to Our Lady if she would spread her mantle over their town when German soldiers began their Belgian routes during World War I. Banneux townsfolk never heard a single rifle shot.

Though the apparitions in Banneux have been approved by the Church, they are barely known—even though what unfolded there spurred one of the greatest accounts in Church history of Our Lady’s intermediary work through a single man—the lonely seminarian who changed the course of the world by making a promise to the Virgin of the Poor.

In the 1950s, in the midst of battling prolonged illnesses, a language barrier, persistently miserable weather, and a concentration camp-scarred seminary rector, Al Schwartz—the lone American seminarian with the Société des Auxiliaires des Mission (the Samists)—often traveled southeast by train through Belgium’s green-blanketed farming communities to reach tiny Banneux. Because of his devotion to Mary and his fascination with the apparitions, the town drew Al, in the manner a sunflower bends to the sun’s rays. By the time he was in his third year at the Catholic University of Louvain, Banneux had become a part of his soul. He desired union with Mary, who rose in him there like a small flame of consolation during hard seminary days.

During the early years of his priesthood, Fr. Al spent unmeasured hours in contemplation of Mary’s 89 words spoken to Mariette. As he turned the messages from Mary’s apparitions over in his head, he began to piece together a holy system of care that would bestow incomprehensible inheritances on generations of the poverty-stricken, societally rejected, orphaned, and abandoned.

In effect, Mary’s words to the young girl acted for the American missionary priest as the raw material to build the perhaps the broadest non-governmentally funded service for poor children and orphans in the history of the world. Everything mentioned to Mariette, in a sense, was stolen, contemplated, mentally engineered, and effectuated by Fr. Al. As Mary appeared to an impoverished, humble, and poorly educated youngster in Banneux, he knew the lonely teenager would serve as the mirror image of the children the Sisters would serve each day. And as Our Lady mothered Jesus tirelessly during His Hidden Years, the Sisters of Mary would work day and night to mother wounded children. In essence, the religious community would pour themselves out each day to mother as white martyrs, where they would offer their lives for love-starved children.

It could be argued, with great success, that the language of Heaven that Mary brought to the peasant Mariette was designed not for her, but for the seminarian, Al, who is now on the path to canonization. Fr. Al died in 1992 after suffering three years with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) . In time, under the banner of his spiritual muse, Fr. Al fashioned an integrated system of authentically Catholic temporal and spiritual care for countless poor children, who were provided an education, housing, meals, medical care, catechesis, the sacraments, vocational job training, sports teams, orchestras, and other extracurricular activities for a five-year time span.

“People say that St. Vincent de Paul was the great apostle of charity and that Fr. Al Schwartz based his entire missionary life on his,” said Monsignor James Golasinski, who served with Fr. Al for 10 years in South Korea. “But I’ve told people that Msgr. Aloysius Schwartz accomplished more than St. Vincent de Paul. What Fr. Al managed to do was beyond the pale. I was there, and I saw what happened.”

Before Al returned to Washington D.C. to become ordained in the summer of 1957, he caught a train to Banneux one last time where he gave Mary his life—at the same spot where she appeared to Mariette twenty-four years earlier. He vowed to Mary that everything he did in the days that followed would be as her slave. After pledging his priesthood to Mary—and surrendering to her all of its future merits—he left Banneux forever, uncomprehending of all the Mother of God would do through him.

Days before he died, he wrote:

Mary of Banneux chose me at an early age just as she erupted in the night in the life of Mariette Beco. She suddenly appeared in my life without any preparation. She brought me to Belgium where I discovered her. I never heard of Banneux before then. So my priesthood in a special way belongs to Our Lady of Banneux. My apostolate is hers and I would like to be buried at her feet and say, that, all praise, glory, and honor for anything good accomplished in my life goes to her and her alone.

How to help: The Sisters of Mary World Villages for Children is a nonprofit organization that financially supports the Sisters of Mary as they help children break free from a life of poverty and lead them to Christ and the Catholic faith. The Sisters provide food, shelter, clothing, medical expenses, Catholic education, and vocational training to more than 20,000 children in Boystowns and Girlstowns in six different countries around the world. To donate, please go to the World Villages for Children site.