Apparitions: he hated Christians, saw the Madonna, became a priest
Alfonso Maria Ratisbonne, born in Strasbourg in 1812, the son of a Jewish banker, doctor of law, of Jewish religion, hated Christians. His brother Teodoro, on the other hand, had become a Catholic priest at the age of 24. On January 20, 1842, the great miracle of his conversion to Catholicism occurred. Ratisbonne urgently sought a confessor and thus narrated, almost out of his mind, to Father Filippo de Villefort: «As I walked through the church of Sant'Andrea delle Fratte in Rome, waiting for my friend the Baron Teodoro, I felt a disturbance, then everything it became dark except for a side chapel of the church, it seemed that all the light was concentrated in it. I raised my eyes to the chapel radiant with so much light and saw on the altar, standing alive and majestic, wrapped in shining light, beautiful and full of mercy, the beautiful Mother of God, the Virgin Mary, which is on the medal that port. I fell to my knees and could not raise my eyes to its splendor. Then I understood the deformity of the sin of the state in which I found myself, the beauty of the Christian religion, in a word I understood everything in a single instant ».
On January 31 Alfonso obtained the sacrament of baptism in the chapel of Sant'Andrea, at nine in the morning, from the hands of Cardinal Patrizi. Ratisbonne entered the Society of Jesus and remained there for about eleven years, from 1842 to 1852, becoming a priest on September 23, 1848. Finally, with the high approval of Pius IX, he passed into the Congregation of religious of Our Lady of Zion, founded for the conversion of the Jews. He founded a seat of this Congregation in Palestine.
He died on May 6, 1884 in Jerusalem, at the age of 70, forty-two years after the apparition, invoking Mary (who perhaps he saw at that moment). «I will tell you my secret. I tell everything to the Holy Virgin, everything that can torment me, give me pain and worry me; and then I'll let you do it. " These are the words that Alfonso Ratisbonne has left us.