THERE is no doubt that the Blessed Mother dares shock, nay, terrify us if only for the purpose of conversion in our earthly path towards non-ending bliss, Heaven. She did so when she allowed the three children of Fatima to see hell on July 13, 1917.
Before the vision of hell, our Blessed Mother first told the children: “Make sacrifices for sinners, and say often, especially while making a sacrifice: O Jesus, this is for love of Thee, for the conversion of sinners and for reparation for offenses committed against the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
Then let us recall the words of visionary Sr. Lucia dos Santos on the terrifying vision:
“As Our Lady spoke these last words, she opened her hands once more, as she had done during the two previous months. The rays of light seemed to penetrate the earth, and we saw as it were a sea of fire. Plunged in this fire were demons and souls in human form, like transparent burning embers, all blackened or burnished bronze, floating about in the conflagration, now raised into the air by the flames that issued from within themselves together with great clouds of smoke now falling back on every side like sparks in huge fires, without weight or equilibrium, amid shrieks and groans of pain and despair, which horrified us and made us tremble with fear. (It must have been this sight which caused me to cry out, as people say they heard me). The demons could be distinguished by their terrifying and repellent likeness to frightful and unknown animals, black and transparent like burning coals.
“Terrified and as if to plead for succour, we looked up at Our Lady, who said to us, so kindly and so sadly: You have seen hell where the souls of poor sinners go. To save them, God wishes to establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart. If what I say to you is done, many souls will be saved and there will be peace.”
I FELT THE NEED to cite this anew because of a few people who take offense at dire prophecies for our times. But it should be noted thatbut such prophecies have been in the Bible thru generations, although more details are being provided by mystics of our days.
How should we react to the prophesied Warning, Miracle, and Chastisement, these that seem to await us in our present generation? Are we to abandon all we have to do each day in wait for nothing but doomsday? Are we to build underground sanctuaries to protect ourselves and families from the dire things to come?
On this I rely on words of wisdom from those who know better, limited as I am to being merely one conveyance of the messages being supernaturally relayed to credible mystics.
Let me cite the late Fr Slavko Barbaric OFM, one of the priests who were closest to the visionaries of Medjugorje, as he commented on the secrets, possibly including terrifying prophecies, relayed by the Blessed Mother to the seers,
“With regards to the secrets it is definitely better not to want to guess, because it would all be in vain. It would be better to recite another Rosary rather than talk about the secrets. Impatiently waiting for the secrets to be revealed removes our concentration from what is important. There are catastrophes, floods, earthquakes and wars every day, but unless I am personally involved, they are not catastrophic for me. To wait for something to happen is similar to a student who continually asks himself when the exam will be, when his turn will be and whether the professor will be well disposed or not. It’s the same as a student not studying or preparing himself for the exam even though the exam is upon him, but concentrates instead only on the ‘secrets,’ on what is unknown to him. So, you see, we must do what we can do, and the secrets will no longer be a problem for us.”
In 1998, Medjugorje visionary Mirjana Soldo also commented to how we should face dire prophecies, pointing out that the Blessed Mother, more than anything else, wanted conversion and surrender more than fear. She said:
“I want to tell you that I have heard about lots of different apparitions, some here in America, where reportedly Our Lady is talking about some horrible times to come where there is going to be floods and all kinds of disasters. And I always say, with a full heart, that that’s not truly Our Lady speaking because Our Lady is our mother and she loves her children, and it is not her desire that people love her because they fear. That is not true faith. She changes us with her smile and with love. And so, we don’t need to fear anything, but we need to place our lives in her hands and we must not think about what will happen tomorrow. Our Lady desires that we think about what is going to happen now, in this moment, because who amongst us here can say in ten minutes we will still be alive. Our Lady desires that every second of our lives we’re prepared to return to God.”
I SUPPOSE THAT when she said the Blessed Mother was not really speaking about horrible times, she meant that the intent was not primarily to terrify or shock, but to save us from eternal perdition.