I always had Mary’s chain in my hands

In 1948, in the "Wooden Bridge," a suburb of Tokyo, Japan, a thousand old men and homeless people lived in old military barracks.

One night, around 2 am, a phone rang: an old woman about to die was asking for a priest. When she was a young girl, she had attended a Catholic school. There, a nun taught her for three years, and she became a Catholic at the age of 17. "I received the Holy Water and the Bread of God," she told me. But then she obeyed the family’s choice of a husband, and married a Buddhist monk who owned a temple, far in the mountains. She moved there and her duties involved maintaining the temple.

Her husband would have allowed her to go to church, but there was none. She had eight children. After 70 years, she had lost her husband and all her children, including five sons who had died during the war. Another Buddhist priest arrived, so she had to leave the temple.

I asked her if, during all those years, she had thought of God. She looked at me with astonishment and pulled out her right hand from under the blanket. She was holding a rosary and I heard this answer: "During all those years, every day and several times a day, without ever missing a single one, I prayed while doing my work. I always had the chain of Mary in my hands or in my pocket and I asked her every day that before I die, I could once again find a Catholic priest who might give me the Bread of God.”

Father Gereon Goldmann in "The Ragpicker of Tokyo"

Story told by Father Albert Pfleger, Marist, in Collection of Marian Stories (1986)