Magdalena Kade was a 30-year-old peasant woman in the small village of Filipov in northern Bohemia (then in the Austrian Empire). For years she had suffered from a chronic and worsening abdominal condition that had brought her near death; by January 1866 she was bedridden, the physicians had given up, and she had received the last rites.
On the morning of January 13, 1866, at about 4 a.m., the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared at her bedside, surrounded by light. She extended her hand and spoke a single phrase in German: 'Mein Kind, von jetzt heilt's' — 'My child, from now on, it heals.' Magdalena rose instantly from her bed, fully cured. She would live for thirty-nine more years, dying in 1905.
Word spread immediately. The Bishop of Litoměřice opened a formal investigation; medical examinations confirmed the previous condition and the inexplicable cure. Pope Pius IX approved the apparitions on January 13, 1885, the nineteenth anniversary of the event. The Redemptorists built a great basilica on the site of Magdalena's house, completed in 1894. The basilica survived suppression during the Communist period and was reopened in 1989; the small bedroom where Magdalena lay remains preserved as a chapel beneath the high altar.