More than 70 years ago, Bruno Cornacchiola was an Adventist who wrote an article against Marian dogmas and wanted to assassinate Pope Pius XII. However, an apparition of the Virgin Mary was the beginning of the path that led him to embrace the Catholic faith.
The event occurred on April 12, 1947. On that day, Bruno took his three children, Isola, ten years old, Carlo, seven years old, and Gianfranco, four years old, to the park. While the children were playing, he wrote an article against Marian dogmas for his Adventist community.
On their website, the Missionaries of Divine Revelation reported that Bruno, 34, a streetcar service worker, sought “a quiet place to prepare the speech he was to deliver the next day on the topic: ‘Mary was not always Virgin and Immaculate.”
However, noticing that the children did not return, he went to look for them and found them in front of the entrance of a grotto, with their hands clasped and their faces pale, repeating the words: “Beautiful Lady, Beautiful Lady.”
Cornacchiola saw a woman dressed in white, with a green cloak and a pink sash, holding the Scriptures. “I am the Virgin of Revelation. You persecute me. Now enough. Return to the holy fold (the Catholic Church),” the Virgin Mary told Bruno.
The experience changed the Adventist, who soon converted to Catholicism and, a short time later, decided to go before Pius XII to tell him about the apparition he had witnessed and to ask his forgiveness because before he converted, he had intended to kill him.
“Here is the dagger with the engraving ‘Death to the Pope,’ with which I planned to kill you! I have come to ask your forgiveness,” Cornacchiola indicated to the Pope.
Seeing his repentance, Pius XII replied to Bruno that by killing him, “you would only have given a new martyr to the Church, and Christ a victory of love.” “My son, the best forgiveness is repentance,” the Holy Father told him.
Cornacchiola witnessed other apparitions of Our Lady, which ended on February 23, 1982, when the Mother of God asked Bruno to build a shrine in her honor.
Pope Pius XII allowed a chapel to be built at the apparition site, in the vicinity of the Trappist abbey of Tre Fontane in Rome, near the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls.
In 1997, St. John Paul II approved the naming of the site “Saint Mary of the Third Millennium at the Three Fountains.” Today, a congregation of sisters, the Missionaries of Divine Revelation, are affiliated with the shrine.
