Part II: A Most Potent 'Testimony'
There is too much, in this little new booklet, to summarize.
Instead, let's take a look at what it says -- this month of the souls -- of Heaven, hell, and purgatory.
If we accept the revelations -- in My Testimony, by Fabienne Guerrero -- the afterlife isn't just brightness and joy and light: it is very serious business, and transgressions here on earth may be more important than we generally acknowledge.
That's not to say we fear the afterlife. Properly prepared for, it's something to greatly look forward to. We hear that constantly. Death is not to be feared, by those in Jesus.
But, while here in the flesh, exercise prudence?
For certain.
After her conversion, says Fabienne, who spent fifteen months with the Clarissian nuns in a cloistered French monastery (before being "called" to venture forth and evangelize, which she now does around the world), she began to do the Stations of the Cross every day in order to free souls from purgatory. This opened yet additional avenues of perception.
One day at three p.m., for example, Fabienne believes she was told by the Lord: "Implore My Mercy for the souls. Pray To Me through My Passion."
"God asked me to continue this work of mercy and explained that purgatory was His Mercy and hell His Justice," she writes. "So I said to God: 'But it is You Lord Who condemned souls who are in hell?'
The answer was simple: "God predestinates no one to go to hell and He leaves the soul free to love Him or to love Satan! The soul chooses its eternity according to the life that it led on earth. God is love!"
Added the Lord (about the souls): "Never stop praying for them" -- a request that calls to mind the revelations of Fatima, the hundredth anniversary of which we recognize this week.
It was at Fatima that the seers had such a dedication to saving souls after a horrifying vision of hell.
This is all in the booklet, which we are offering for careful yet open discernment. It certainly can have an inner cleansing effect on anyone reading it! It certainly makes one, even a devout Catholic, think twice.
Can we vouch for everything that's said and that may be stated by the author in the future? Of course not.
But standing alone, this booklet is a powerful, purging one.
"God then provided me with another mystical experience!" writes Fabienne, who before her dramatic conversion had spent years immersed in the New Age.
"My soul found itself in a deserted place. I was on a kind of platform and there was a path. I ventured on this path and found myself before a sea of fire in which there were souls. I found a hole with crackling fire inside. There was much flame. The damned were angry and very threatening when I looked at them and they responded: 'We hate you.' Their hatred burned me and their disdain wounded my heart."
Fabienne details many struggles with Satan and the reality of spiritual warfare, especially after her conversion.
One person she "saw" in hell was allegedly a guru who had schooled Fabienne and "opened" her "chakras" (supposed spiritual energy points).
"His soul was lost for eternity, because he had refused Jesus," claims the French woman. "He freely wanted to remain in his spiritual pride. He was a man who was deeply initiated into esotericism. He did not regret his faults. Therefore, God abandoned him to himself. God avoids proud souls. He told me that he loves souls that are little and humble!"
Purgatory?
"My soul found itself with both hands hanging
on a wall. I saw that my soul had the same shape as that of my earthly
body. I was in what seemed to be a huge grotto. Everything was dark.
Suddenly great waves of brilliant light descended into the place where I
was.
"Above me was purgatory, with very high flames. The souls that were in
this state of purification were all united to the Divine Will. Their
greatest suffering is not yet seeing God face to Face. They saw Him, in
their particular judgment, in a light that is not yet that of Heaven and
have therefore kept a great yearning for God, but they do not wish to
appear before Him with their blemishes. They are being purified and they
make amends for that for which they did not make amends on the earth,
and many of them learn how to love. So I pray for them and in turn, they
pray for the wretched one that I am, and together, in the communion of
saints, we help each other to be enlightened so that we can approach God
without fear and without blemish."
At the hour of your death, she says, "when your soul leaves the body.... the material air opens up and above it there is a new world for each of you.
"After having left this world, at the moment itself of that departure, God's judgment is pronounced."
Fabienne had led a life of materialism and loose morals, of deep occultism, of much sinfulness.
Yet: "My Judgment was: 'You have My Mercy.'
"The soul undergoes this judgment as, on the spot, it will see and unravel all its earthly life," she writes. "Also, in that movie, it will see itself as in a mirror, as it never saw itself: all that it did, both good or evil, all the suffering it caused to others, often without noticing it, sometimes with simple words. All of this combination of good and evil determines the level of one's sojourn in purgatory to wash away all that was negative. In order to go before God, before the Lord Our Father, it is imperative that the soul be pure!"
Pure and away from gluttony, from materialism, from lust, from greed, from any addiction or even bad habit.
And humble. This is so critical: humility, and love.
"God showed me my interior and made me see that, before returning to Him, I had refused His mercy. At that time in my life, my heart was hardened and He told me: 'I cannot enter a cold and proud heart.'
"He had me see all my thoughts that were not in His Love, all my participation with evil, all my ill feelings, my criticisms and judgments of others. He told me: 'I know all your thoughts.' 'Beware of judging others.' 'Do not accuse them.' I can assure you that I was an expert in that field!
"These were the wounds that made me bitter toward my brothers and sisters and God made me see that I was not better than Judas! He also told me: 'You have to love.' As I was of a cruel nature, He asked me as well to drop the acts of cruelty. I then grasped the goodness of the Lord Jesus -- and from that instant on, in my soul I felt the infinite kindness and tenderness of God."
[resources: My Testimony]
[Comments from Catholic priests:
"Fabienne's testimony is powerful. It shows the boundless sadness that takes hold of a life lived apart from God. But even more, it reveals the spiritual source of this ill-being that only an experience of Divine Mercy and Love allows us to know. What surge of light and sweetness penetrates one’s soul when it lets itself be touched by mercy and enters the life of the sacraments! We should never forget the sadness of our contemporaries who live far from God. A Christian can think with a certain levity that those who give in to their disordered passions or build their life upon uncertain and obscure beliefs can be happy.
The truth is quite different. They carry within themselves a profound sadness and, in the flow of their life, they are prey to the power of the evil spirits that manipulate their freedom. The joy they display comes from their survival instinct. It is artificial but does not reveal itself as such until light enters their heart. Nothing is more powerful than the testimony of somebody who entered into the light after having known such darkness. A single gaze upon the Sacred Heart (this painting where Jesus points to the wound of His Heart, from which rays burst out) and the life of Fabienne, thirsting for love and chained to her passions, takes a flip.
Jesus leads her to the source of liberation and healing that are the sacraments of Confession and of the Eucharist. Oh, if we could listen to this testimony! We could understand what liberations and illuminations the sacrament of reconciliation brings about. As a priest, I saw hundreds of lives turn from darkness to light in one single Confession. That does not exclude that you need time to progressively consent to not returning to the slavery of sin that reactivates our links to the evil spirits.
Those who share in the ill-being of Fabienne's previous life will discover here the hidden face of many practices that they deemed innocent. It is not necessarily the practices in themselves that are bad but, being deprived of a real relation with God, they are built into a false religion and there are as many gates through which the evil spirits take possession of the soul and thus mistrust progressively ties it up by removing its freedom. We must always have mistrust of practices for which we do not clearly know what is made manifest through them. We rightfully label them as occult practices, in the sense that they serve as a cover.
Behind these, reality there are hiding and working spirits with evil intentions because impersonal forces do not exist. God is a Person, light, sweetness and tenderness. He has a Face. Every face that hides itself is suspected of putting on a suspicious grin. We can only invite people who will read these lines to mistrust any relation with the spirits, bordering on religious practice. What is actually hidden behind the spirits or the dead that speak through the voice of mediums? What mediation do these so called mediums practice?
The testimony of Fabienne expresses that to us. Behind these falsely compelling manifestations of the dead that speak to the living are most often hidden -- but not always -- evil spirits. In the long or short term, these 'consultations' bring about that which Fabienne expressed very well for having lived it out: an evil being which carries with it an unbearable confusion for the soul. These evil spirits weave links that progressively enslave freedom. This testimony reaches each one of us by showing the hidden face not only of our sins but also and most of all of all these troubling practices that invade our society and substitute themselves to the true religion.
They promise the abatement of the ill-being that gnaws at our heart, wounded and thirsting for love, but they immerse us into an indefinable ill-being. The more we seek to free ourselves, the more we feel bound and prey to sadness. When the Mercy of Jesus enters the heart of Fabienne, she, in fact, discovers the flip side of the decor. First of all her own responsibility -- very important and very present in this testimony -- and then the play of the evil spirits that seek to snare her freedom and creep into her soul so as to possess her nearly totally. She becomes conscious of the ignorance in which she found herself and began to taste true freedom, the light that enlightens the heart and especially the infinite tenderness of God.
In the great love of Jesus,
Father Jean Eudes Renault – Doctor of Theology
***
It is with great respect for the experience of the life of Fabienne that I write these few lines. If the Lord allowed her to live a mystical experience that revealed His Sweet Love, it is not for me to cast doubt but rather to review how Our Lord Jesus-Christ led her to the heart of His Church, which leaves me in amazement before the work of God. That is why I would like to repeat the words of Pope Francis who said: 'God always surprises, He breaks the schemes, upsets the projects, and says: trust Me, do not fear, allow yourself to be surprised, come out of yourself and follow Me!' Is that not what Fabienne has lived and her testimony urges us to question ourselves before God.
Pope Francis invites us to this by making an examination of conscience; he proposes the following reflection: 'Do I let myself be surprised by God, as Mary did, or do I seclude myself in my securities, material securities, spiritual securities, ideological securities, security in my projects? Do I really let God enter my life? How do I answer Him?'
In the autobiographical testimony of Fabienne, Jesus calls us to a limitless faithfulness and an unconditional 'yes.'
If God 'surprises us with His love,' He also asks for 'faithfulness in following Him' and not for a passing 'enthusiasm' to then 'throw in the towel,' as soon as we are faced with the first problems.
In the life of faith, we have to say again the initial yes, every day, at the example of Mary who said her yes to God, but this yes was not unique, on the contrary, it was only the first of many yes pronounced in her heart during the joyous and painful moments.
Many 'yes' reach their peak in the one said at the foot of the Cross. Thank you Fabienne for having said 'yes' on following Mary, and today as Blessed Antoine Chevrier tells us, he who follows Jesus carrying the Cross, will follow Him in His Glory. Courage, good continuance and most of all thank you for your commitment and obedience to our Holy Mother the Church.
Father Jean Marie Chami -- Servant of the Community
***
'Give thanks to The Lord for He is good, His love is eternal' (Ps. 118, 1). The Lord marvelously pursues His work of love and of salvation in the midst of the human race. He is the same yesterday, today and to the end of the centuries. He is the one who, having seen and felt deeply the misery of the crowds in the desert, offered them bread and fish in abundance (Mk 6, 35-44); it is He who, having examined the pitiful situation of the man born blind, gave the light to that body plunged into the darkness for many years (Jn. 9); He is the one who, having seen the weakness of human flesh, offered forgiveness to the adulterous woman (Jn. 8, 11); He is the one who, one day in history, met Saul, former persecutor of the Holy Church, and assigned to him the task of the proclamation of the Gospel (Ac. 9, 1-28); He is also the one who chose to show Himself to our sister in Christ, Fabienne GUERRERO, formerly conversant with evil and all kinds of abominations, to show her His Mercy and send her everywhere to proclaim the conversion of sinners and recourse to His Divine Mercy.
'Honour, praise and glory to the Lamb of God!' (Ap. 5, 13) After her personal encounter with Christ in humility, prayer, fasting and sharing, Fabienne accepted to live in the life and the truth, truth that will henceforth make her free and will allow her to give a most edifying testimony. I propose for you to discover the beautiful pages of this story that will help you to recapture yourselves and take more seriously the teaching of Christ contained in the Bible and in the writings of the Magisterium of the Church. Conversion is a question of the present moment and not of the future: 'Now is the favourable moment, now is the day of salvation' (2 Cor. 6,2). We know neither the day nor the hour… Holy reading to you, and may the Blessing of God accompany you all the days of your life. Amen
Father Gilles Vissoukpo, Bishop’s assistant
***
For a Christian, conversion is the discovery of a light: God is not a distant being, but Father, Son and Holy Spirit. God the Father creates a world brimming with goodness and light, but men wound creation through the proud use of their freedom and immerse it in the darkness of a life without God. While it is the men who have sinned, the Son of God Himself made Himself man in order to repair that and offer the sacrifice of the New Covenant by which He pours His blood on the Cross for men to receive the forgiveness of God. The Holy Spirit gives us today the fruits of redemption through the Church and its sacraments, which make of us children of light. Every converted person radiates this light that God made him recover.
Let us benefit of their testimony.
Father Pierre François -- Doctor of Theology
***
Fabienne's life is described throughout this work, without disguise, or embellishments, in its depth. Besides being an autobiographical story, it is mostly a prayer. I thought of the Psalm 130 (129) that I recited this morning at Mass and that begins with these words from the depths. Fabienne certainly had these on her tongue when writing: 'From the depths, I cry to you, Lord. Lord, listen to my call. May your ear be attentive to the cries of my prayer.' Fabienne went through all these declining steps, between Scylla and Charybda (sex, drugs, unbelief, magic...) but like an athlete she wanted to cross the finishing line. And suddenly, this life that was rolling at a hundred an hour, had a snap of the tendon and she fell... She began to cry, seeing victory escaping her.
What squandered her efforts in this competition! Doctors came to her aid, she refused their help. She got up and continued to stumble. It was sad to see her. And then suddenly God the Father upset the protocol and overcame all the obstacles to safety so as to come to the help of his daughter. He held her in His arms and murmured: 'I am your Father... You have nothing to fear. Stop torturing yourself... You have nothing to do, what you are doing...' She answered: ' I must do it.' This race, is the story of this book. Fabienne wanted to finish it no matter what. And I think that she wanted to finish this heroic race and she crossed the finish line. The spectators in the stadium all stood up for an ovation. Thank you Fabienne, thank you for this heroic action. You did not have to do that. But you thought of us, poor sinners who will read you at this time and who need this book, like a life-buoy
Father Patrice Jean AKE -- Doctor of Philosophy
***
If you return to God with your heart and your soul so as to live in the truth, before Him, then He will return to you and will never hide Himself (Tobit 13, 6). This word of Tobit was made flesh in the person of Fabienne GUERRERO, the author of this booklet that you are especially graced to be reading today. It is of a richness beyond measure and of immeasurable depth. If we wish to accompany Christ in His Passion, let us see what God has done for us, let us follow his ways.
It is only in this way that God Himself would humiliate His enemies, that He would raise His hand against our oppressors, would nourish us with the flower of the wheat and would satiate us with the milk from the rock. Lost in the labyrinth of sin, of pernicious and diabolical sects, God, by the Blood of His Son, Our Lord Jesus-Christ, liberates us. It is exactly and with simple words that the author of this work shares with us. Let us seek Yahweh, while He allows Himself to be found, invoke Him while He is near. May the evil one and the criminal person abandon his thoughts. Let us convert to Yahweh who will have mercy on us. (Cf. Is. 55, 6-7)"
Father Gabriel Alain Motsebo -- Diocesan Chaplain of Divine Mercy Devotion]