Stefano Gobbi: true or false?
by Michael H. Brown
@copyright spiridaily.com
I get the question everywhere I go: what do you think of Father Gobbi? Do you think he's legitimate? Do you his prophecies will really occur?
Now ailing with serious arterial disease, Stefano Gobbi, 70, is a priest from Milan who began to receive what he says are messages from the Virgin Mary in 1972 while praying in the Chapel of the Apparitions at Fatima, Portugal. The spread of his locutions (whereby a voice is heard, as opposed to a full-scale apparition) took the world by storm in the 1980s and 1990s and predicted apocalyptical times when an era of evil would culminate in the glorious return of Jesus.
Only time will tell if such a dramatic prophecy holds true. The Church has not ruled on this matter. While the messages often bear a bishop's imprimatur, Church officials asked his organization, the Marian Movement of Priests, to change the title of his book from Our Lady Speaks to Her Beloved Sons to To the Priests, Our Lady's Beloved Sons -- a less direct inference of the supernatural. Indeed, on the copyright page it's stated that "the messages contained in this book must be understood not as words spoken directly by Our Lady, but received, in the form of interior locutions, by Don Stefano Gobbi." They are not messages that the Church takes as literally as those dispensed at major sites of corporeal apparition such as Lourdes, Fatima, and Guadalupe. As I cautioned years ago, when I first wrote about Father Gobbi, any locutionist is subject to the insertion of his or her own thoughts or other forms of deception or dilution.
But locutions can be legitimate and in the case of Gobbi the prophecies have been unusually potent. There are "hits" and "misses." Let me start with his "hits":
On August 31, 1988, while conducting a prayer cenacle with priests in Vienna, Austria, Gobbi received a message from Mary that amounted to a startling pronouncement: "With Austria and Germany, from here I bless the surrounding countries which are still under the yoke of a great slavery and today announce that the moment of their liberation is close."
It was a stunning prognostication because it was clearly saying that the "surrounding countries" of Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Romania, and Poland -- at the time under Communism -- would soon be free. Back then few expected they would ever live to see Communism fall in Poland and no one expected to see Communism fall in the other countries.
But within a year precisely this happened: Communism fell in Poland in 1989 and in a miraculous fashion across Eastern Europe -- and then, in what can only be termed a miracle, in the Soviet Union itself. The Berlin Wall came down. When Polish freedom fighter Lech Walesa proclaimed victory, he was photographed with a statue of the Fatima Virgin -- the same statue that's in the Chapel of Apparitions -- smiling behind him!
That was a huge Gobbi hit but there were others. The priest quoted Mary as requesting that everyone "entrust" themselves to her in 1985 -- 15 years before the precise same language of "entrustment" was used in an official Vatican ceremony (last October). Gobbi also quoted Mary as using the expression "splendor of its truth" in 1985 -- eight years before Pope John Paul II penned an encyclical called Veritatis Splendor (which means the "splendor of the truth"). The same year he also received a locution with the phrase "new times" -- an expression that was used in the precise same way in the most recent message from the famous apparition site of Medjugorje.
Nothing was more startling, however, than the fact that Gobbi seemed privy to the third secret of Fatima. On May 13, 1991 -- nine years before the secret was revealed to the public -- Gobbi quoted Mary as saying that "today I confirm for you that this is the Pope of my secret, the Pope about whom I spoke to the children during the apparitions, the Pope of my love and my sorrow. With great courage and with superhuman strength, he goes about every part of the world, heedless of the fatigue and the many dangers, in order to confirm all in the faith and thus he carries out his apostolic ministry as successor of Peter, Vicar of Christ, universal pastor of the holy Catholic Church."
Remarkably, on the same day -- May 13 -- in 1995, Gobbi next quoted Mary as saying, "Pray for the Pope. This Pope is the greatest gift which my Immaculate Heart has given you, for the time of the purification and the great tribulation. An important part of my message and my secret, that I revealed to the three children to whom I appeared, refers precisely to the person and the mission of Pope John Paul II."
Five years later, when the Vatican released the third secret -- on May 13, 2000 -- it contained a vision of a "bishop in white" falling at the hands of gunmen -- in a way reminiscent of how the Pope, officially "bishop of Rome," had been shot back in 1981 (on May 13!).
The world learned that the most secret prophecy in the history of the Catholic Church indeed contained an image of the stricken Pope.
Nor is that all. In 1985, Gobbi also mentioned a major event or series of events that seemed to threaten mankind. He quoted the Virgin as saying that the "mystery of inequity" was about to be completed in the world and said she was asking for prayers in order to blunt it.
"Then you will be helping me to keep in suspension the chastisement, which this human race has even now drawn upon itself," Gobbi quoted Mary as saying.
That seemed connected to nuclear war. In the third secret was also the image of an angel ready to torch the world with a flaming sword, but drowned out by a light coming from Mary. According to Fatima seer Lucia dos Santos, the Consecration of the world to the Immaculate Heart in 1984 indeed caused a light to shine from Mary and prevent a nuclear war that Sister Lucia herself claims would otherwise have occurred in 1985 -- the year Gobbi had his locution about suspension of a serious "chastisement."
Has Gobbi "missed"? Here we get into a hot controversy. An argument could be made that he made an error on July 3, 1987, when he quoted the Virgin as saying, "Already during this Marian year, certain great events will take place, concerning what I predicted at Fatima and have told, under secrecy, to the children to whom I am appearing at Medjugorje."
I'm not sure everything that this implied, but obviously the secrets of Medjugorje have not yet occurred.
Others cite Gobbi's contention that the Consecration requested at Fatima has not been fully done. They point out that Sister Lucia, in a way that may contradict Gobbi, herself has stated that the Consecration was acceptable. This is a complicated issue we don't have time to discuss here (Gobbi may have been referring to a lack of participation by bishops), or they cite a Gobbi locution in 1988 that said the following decade -- "a period of ten years" -- would see the final period of the Second Advent, which would lead to the triumph of Mary's Immaculate Heart.
The "triumph" did indeed arrive the following year with the collapse of Communism (according to Sister Lucia). But in the same message Gobbi also said that a purification would culminate and that the world would see "completion" of "the great tribulation" -- that "the secrets which I have revealed to some of my children will come to pass and all the events which have been foretold to you by me will take place." Gobbi quoted the Virgin as saying that the period of ten years would see completion of the fullness of time pointed out from LaSalette "all the way to my most recent and present apparitions."
One could argue that a great tribulation has taken place with the marked rise of personal suffering and evil, and that the triumph is in fact now complete with the recent entrustment of the world to the Immaculate Heart -- but the kind of cataclysmic events many felt were implied in the prophecy have not yet transpired, nor has the total secret of LaSalette, where the Virgin appeared to two children in 1846 and dispensed predictions that were apocalyptic and controversial.
The bottom line?
There may be some imperfections, but they have been among the most amazing locutions of our time. And they have caused hundreds if not thousands of priests to come back to the fold -- priests who may otherwise have followed other priests and left their ministry. There are 4,000 priests in Gobbi's American movement alone, and worldwide estimates go as high as 100,000.
"Many priests have written to me and some have come back to the ministry -- those who are not married -- and those who are married told me that if only they would have had this message before, they would never have been where they were at that time," says Father Albert G. Roux, director of the Marian Movement of Priests in the U.S.
That "fruit" is undeniable and so is Gobbi's warning of great events. He has compared what is coming to the times of Noah.
We can only hope that these prophecies are also imperfect, but we already see signs of certain events that may be approaching as purification. These may end up being in the secrets of Medjugorje. It's Roux's impression that "the tribulation is not so much a worldwide thing happening at one time, but happening in little pockets here and there. Very very often they're happening but not according to our understanding. And that has caused much confusion among people." He cautions not to be overly apocalyptical. While many have said they interpret Gobbi's messages as referring to the end times -- and as implying that this would occur by the end of 2000 -- Father Roux believes that events, while "close," are evolving in a more gradual fashion. The deadline of 2000 was a spiritual preparation. "It seems there is still an awful lot to happen before Jesus returns, " says Father Roux, warning that the "man of inequity," who must precede a return of Jesus, may be waiting for the death of John Paul II.