In the early 1980s, in a rural village in South India, a Dalit woman miscarried. She hovered on the edge of death-until the Virgin Mary led her to a chapel and possessed her. For years, hundreds of ailing Catholics and Hindus came to this woman for healing, and Mary made them well.

Two decades later, in the metropolis of Chennai a boy named Alex lay in his hospital bed sick with fever when the Virgin Mary appeared to him and told him to walk. He did-and at home, he felt Mary enter his body. Soon, his older cousin Rosalind also showed signs of Marian possession. Mary told them that her...