Our Lady of Kibeho, Mother of the Word

The place

Kibeho is a village on the hills of southern Rwanda. In 1981 it belonged to the Diocese of Butare under Bishop Jean-Baptiste Gahamanyi. It had a parish and a secondary school for girls, the College of Kibeho, run by the Benebikira Sisters, a Rwandan congregation. Rwanda was a largely Catholic country, and the years ahead would be the hardest in its history.

28 November 1981: Alphonsine

Alphonsine Mumureke, a young student at the College, said she had seen a Lady of incomparable beauty, who presented herself as “Nyina wa Jambo”, Mother of the Word. Alphonsine at once understood this to be the Blessed Virgin Mary. The Bishop later explained that this name means the same as “Mother of God”.

The first reactions were not kind. Bishop Misago's declaration says people took Alphonsine to be mad, or possessed, or a poor student trying to make herself interesting. Some said they would believe if Our Lady showed herself to somebody else. Students tested her during her visions. Others made a novena in December asking for light. Soon before Christmas, a group of students and professors had begun to pray the Rosary with her.

January and March 1982: Nathalie and Marie Claire

Nathalie Mukamazimpaka reported her first vision in January 1982, on the 12th according to several accounts. On 2 March Marie Claire Mukangango followed. Her case impressed people more than any other, since she had been well known in the school as a strong opponent of the apparitions. Witnesses told the commissions that they took the events seriously because of her.

The declaration notes that the number of seers in the College stopped at three, without anyone stepping in from outside. It also notes that the visions came to one person at a time, in turn, with the others watching like everyone else, and that the seers often fell heavily to the ground at the end of an ecstasy. The three said they saw Our Lady sometimes with joined hands and sometimes with outstretched arms.

1982: the crowds and the commissions

Bishop Gahamanyi acted at once. He set up a medical commission on 20 March 1982, and a theological commission on 14 May 1982. From May the news spread, as the declaration says, like a bush fire. Huge crowds gathered on the hills.

On 16 January 1982 Our Lady was reported to ask for a chapel. On 20 March 1982 Alphonsine, and on 30 October 1982 Nathalie, reported a long “mystical journey” with Our Lady through places described in symbolic language, recalling hell, purgatory and heaven. In Lent 1983 Nathalie undertook an extraordinary fast, closely watched by the medical commission, which included some who were not practising Catholics.

15 August 1982

On the feast of the Assumption, with a great crowd present, the seers said they saw the Virgin Mary crying. She was deeply saddened, the declaration says, because of people's unbelief and lack of repentance. The seers also reported frightening visions, described in later accounts as scenes of violence, death and unburied bodies. One reference work dates this to 19 August; the declaration says 15 August.

Twelve years later, Rwanda knew what such scenes were. We come back to this with care below.

When the visions ended

Marie Claire's last public vision was on 15 September 1982, the feast of Our Lady of Sorrows. Nathalie's was on 3 December 1983. Alphonsine's continued, more rarely, until 28 November 1989, exactly eight years after the first. The bishop judged that what came after 1983 added nothing new.

The others who claimed visions

Many others came forward, on the hills and across the country, including some who reported visions of Jesus from July 1982. Writers often name Stephanie Mukamurenzi, Agnes Kamagaju, Vestine Salima and Emmanuel Segatashya, though the declaration names none of them. It also describes itinerant “visionaries” who travelled abroad with so-called messages, without any authority from the Church.

The commissions at first concentrated on the first eight who claimed visions in the first year. In the end the bishop said that they could be taken up only as far as the first three were concerned. See “The status of each seer” below.

Rwanda's tragedy

Civil war began in October 1990. In 1994 came the genocide against the Tutsi, in which a vast number of people were murdered in about a hundred days, among them Hutu who would not join in. Bishop Misago, writing in 2001, calls it “a tragedy beyond comparison”.

Kibeho itself suffered. In his words it was the scene of a double massacre, in April 1994 and April 1995, where helpless civilians were killed because of their ethnic or political affiliation. The parish church was severely damaged in April 1994. Two members of the theological commission lost their lives in 1994. A memorial now stands in Kibeho. People who visit are walking on the ground of the dead, and many of the living carry the memory of it. We will not describe these events further, and no explanation is offered here for what cannot be explained.

After the shrine was ritually purified, pilgrimages began gradually to return from Christmas Eve 1995. Groups of pilgrims kept coming even through the insecure years that followed, many on foot.

The status of each seer

Bishop Misago also asks that the three recognised seers not be treated as saints, or as “chosen ones”, and that people let them live normal lives.

The declaration summarises the message under ten headings. There is no single official text of the visions; these are from the bishop's summary.

The warnings, and the genocide

Popular books often say simply that Our Lady “predicted” the genocide. It needs careful words.

• What the bishop says. He lists “the frightening visions of August 15th, 1982” among the signs of credibility, as proving prophetic in view of what followed. He also writes more cautiously that the great misfortune “might have been, in one way or another, predicted”.
• What it does not mean. The declaration records no date, no names and no plan. Nobody could have read it as a timetable. It was seen as prophetic only afterwards.
• God did not will it. A warning is not a sentence. Our Lady is seen weeping. The guilt of murder belongs to those who planned and did it, never to God, and never to those who were killed. No one may say the victims were being punished. They were innocent, and many were faithful Christians.
• Why, then, did it happen? Bishop Misago asks this directly: how can one speak of fruit in a place of such horror? He answers with the parables of the sower and the weeds (Matthew 13), and with the “mystery of lawlessness” (2 Thessalonians 2:1 to 12). He says the horrors cannot be taken as a sufficient argument against the apparitions. He does not claim to explain them. Neither do we.
• Not for fear today. Kibeho must never be used to frighten anyone about the future. No Catholic may draw from it a date or a further disaster to come. Its word for today is reconciliation.

The Rosary of the Seven Sorrows

This old devotion belongs to the Servite tradition. Before the 1960s it was known in Rwanda only among the Benebikira Sisters, and had then fallen out of use. The commissions found no evidence that Marie Claire knew it before her visions. It is prayed by meditating on Mary's seven sorrows: the prophecy of Simeon, the flight into Egypt, the loss of Jesus in the Temple, meeting Jesus on the way of the Cross, the Crucifixion, receiving his body, and his burial. Each sorrow traditionally has one Our Father and seven Hail Marys. It is meant to deepen love for Christ crucified. The bishop says it does not replace the Holy Rosary, and he forbids other “rosaries” linked with Kibeho without his written permission.

• Conversion in the first years. A survey by the theological commission in 1985 reported real conversions and a growth in vocations, and Bishop Gahamanyi wrote in 1986 of “signs of a new fervour”, while warning against attributing it to Kibeho alone.
• Prayer. The Rosary returned to many homes. The Rosary of the Seven Sorrows spread widely, and perpetual adoration of the Blessed Sacrament began at the shrine after the war.
• A place of reconciliation. The bishop's wish is that Kibeho be a place of “conversions, of the reparation of the sin of the world”, and of reconciliation.
• The shrine. It was consecrated in 2003 (the date reported is 31 May), by Cardinal Crescenzio Sepe, as reported. It has been entrusted to the Pallottine Fathers. Plans for a larger church have been reported in the Rwandan press; whether it is finished could not be confirmed.
• Pilgrims. Rwanda's New Times headlined over 100,000 pilgrims on the Assumption, 15 August 2025. A 2020 report gave 500,000 to 600,000 in a year, and a reference site gave about 100,000 in a year. There are no official counts that we could find. Tens of thousands come on the two great days, 15 August and 28 November.
• Abroad. A shrine of Our Lady of Kibeho was dedicated in Philadelphia on 17 August 2025. A book by the survivor Immaculée Ilibagiza made Kibeho widely known in English.

Kibeho is in Nyaruguru District in the south of Rwanda. From Kigali the road runs about 122 kilometres to Huye, with buses about every half hour, and then about 27 kilometres on a paved road to Kibeho. Reports give about four hours from Kigali. Pilgrims come especially for 15 August, 15 September and 28 November, and many walk.

You will find the apparition square, the Chapel of Our Lady of Sorrows, the parish church, the Way of the Cross, a Rosary garden, and the spring. Please visit the genocide memorial, with silence and respect, and remember that some people around you may have lost their families here. Please do not press anyone to tell their story. Pray.