The Filipov Apparition and the Healing of Magdalena Kade

Philippsdorf lay in the Šluknov hook of northern Bohemia, on the Saxon border opposite Neugersdorf. Today it is Filipov, part of the town of Jiříkov in the Czech Republic. Magdalena Kade was a German-speaking home weaver there.

At 19 she fell ill, and doctors spoke of pneumonia, pleurisy and meningitis, with seizures and fainting. In early 1865 festering blisters spread into ulcers, and in November 1865 Dr Görlich and Dr Ulbrich declared her incurable. In December her brother Josef took her back to house no. 63, close to death. On 21 December Chaplain Franz Storch gave her the Anointing of the Sick. A picture of the Virgin hung on the wall facing her bed.

The night of 12 to 13 January 1866. At about 2 a.m. Magdalena was too weak to speak. Veronika Kindermann was keeping watch. At about 4 a.m. the room suddenly became bright.

Under oath, Magdalena later testified that the room was filled with a bright light and the Mother of God stepped out of it and spoke to her. "Look at that shine! Look at that beauty," she cried. She saw a lady dressed in white with a golden tiara in her hair, close to the bed. The Virgin moved her lips softly.

"Mein Kind, von jetzt an heilt's." My child, from now on it heals. Then she disappeared, and Magdalena rose. She called loudly for her relatives, took off her bandages and started on the housework. Veronika Kindermann, in the same room, had seen and heard nothing.

Within a week, Vienna newspapers reported the healing. Bishop Augustin Pavel Wahala of Litoměřice set up a commission. From 7 to 14 March 1866 it sat for eight days under Canon Dr Jan Nepomuk Řehák, joined by the mayor of Jiříkov and six town councillors. It received a medical report on the recovery, took Magdalena's sworn testimony and visited the house. It found no rational explanation, but no formal verdict is recorded, and pilgrimages were neither banned nor restricted.

During the First Vatican Council, Wahala briefed Pope Pius IX in person. In 1926 Pius XI made the church a basilica minor. Some sources say the apparition itself was recognised that year. Today the Church calls it an event, not a miracle.

Her own doctor stayed doubtful, wavering between hysteria and a histrionic personality. A Protestant newspaper across the Saxon border mocked the cult as superstition. In 2008 Kerstin Schneider's book Maries Akte drew parallels between Kade's illness and that of her great-niece, Lina Marie Schöbel, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia. The Church rejects that reading.

In 1991 anthropologists Emanuel Vlček and Vítězslav Kuželka examined part of her remains. They concluded her festering illness was pemphigus. That names the disease. It says nothing about the cure. And the light and the figure rest on a single testimony.

Within a year, thousands came, and by the 1930s some 85,000 to 100,000 pilgrims arrived each year at the Lourdes of North Bohemia. In her later years Magdalena Kade cared for the sick and for pilgrims at the almshouse in Jiříkov. She died on 10 December 1905, and her remains lie at the Chapel of Grace, built where the family's house once stood. After 1948 the church was closed and the site lay in a guarded border zone, yet, as Markéta Jindrová put it, "the chain of Masses on the anniversary of the apparition was never interrupted." Every 13 January, a Mass still begins at 4 a.m.