Rhoda Wise featured in Beacon Journal

More than six decades after her death, Rhoda Wise is still an inspiration, Beacon Journal religion writer Colette M. Jenkins writes in an artilcle on page B1,the front of the Community Section, in today’s newspaper.

Wise, who said she received regular visits from Jesus and St. Therese at her modest northeast Canton home, has been associated with many miraculous healings (including her own and that of Eternal Word Television Network's Mother Angelica).

Witnesses say that on the first Friday of every month, she bled from her palms and forehead, wounds resembling those Christ received on the cross, called stigmata. The bleeding would happen between noon and 3 p.m., the hours that Jesus is believed to have been on the cross. She died July 7, 1948,

Today, the house at 2337 25th St. N.E., which is owned by Our Lady of the Angels Monastery in Alabama, is still open to visitors. Daily tours are offered, and visitors are welcome to pray in the altar room (Wise's former bedroom). Inside the altar room is a kitchen chair Anna Mae Wise painted gold. It is the chair Rhoda Wise said Jesus sat in when he came to visit her for the first time on May 28, 1939.

Next to the house is a small grotto dedicated to the Sacred Heart and Little Flower. Visitors are welcome to pray there from 8 a.m. to dusk daily.

As a child, the Roman Catholic nun and founder of EWTN suffered from severe abdominal and stomach cramps. Doctors found internal abnormalities they didn't know how to treat. In 1943, her mother, Mae Rizzo, took her to see Wise, who gave her a devotional prayer to recite and orders to offer a novena (nine days of prayer). After the nine days of prayer, Mother Angelica says her pain was gone and has never returned.

The Roman Catholic Church has investigated the claims associated with Wise and has treated them as private experiences of faith, according to Msgr. Robert Siffrin, vicar general of the Catholic Diocese of Youngstown.

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