Her remarkable story begins in 1976 with Lanni lying on a hospital bed, hemorrhaging profusely after childbirth. Her doctor had given her just two hours to live, and Lanni recalls thinking amid her pain that something just wasn’t fair – where was the Blessed Virgin?
“It wasn’t supposed to be like this. I’d always been told that, if you prayed the rosary and wore the scapular, she would be there at the hour of our death. So, I was thinking: Had everything I’d believed been a lie?”
But she remembered two images from childhood; the first was of accompanying her grandmother on a pilgrimage to the Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation in Ohio.
“My grandmother, who was a tough Sicilian woman, got on her knees from the entryway all the way to the altar,” she recalls.
The second was of her father. “I woke up early one morning to go to the bathroom, and I saw my Dad kneeling before a statue of the Blessed Mother in our yard before going to work. He was a tough man and not outwardly religious, and to think of him outside on his knees and of my grandmother at the shrine gave me the courage and inspiration to start praying,” Lanni says.
“I prayed earnestly from my heart, asking God for healing, and it was just after that that the Blessed Mother appeared next to me, standing next to my bed,” she continues, adding that she implored her, “Blessed Mother, I beg you to go before the throne of God and beg for my life – just so I can raise my children.”
Lanni attributes her survival to her fervent prayers for Mary’s intercession with God. In the 1990s, she felt called by Christ to a ministry of prayer, which eventually resulted in her founding the Servants of Jesus of The Divine Mercy (declared a “private association of the Christian faithful” by Cardinal Adam Maida in 2003).
The working out of the commission she believes she received eventually led to opening the Divine Mercy Center in 2006.
While Lanni’s experiences are astonishing, she sums it up like this: “The bottom line is that God never stops speaking to His people, but we get so caught up in our everyday lives that there is not enough quiet time to be with Jesus.”
The Divine Mercy Center center is located at 16103 Chesterfield Ave. in Eastpointe. For more information, call (586) 777-8591 or visit them online.
