Rare it is that something splashed so constantly across the news or legislated in Congress serves as a prelude to an event of true prophetic significance. What is so loud is usually not prophetic. But prophecy can be real, coming, normally, in a way that's  not expected. At the very end of 1990 was an alleged prediction that among other things said, "New York City is under an evil cloud and will be for 12 years. Do not go there. The pride there will be broken." Just short of eleven years later came September 11 and the collapse of the World Trade Center, two monumental skyscrapers described by many on the news that day as the "pride of New York." Of late, a further "word" in seeming regard to modern technology and its errors (especially in the way it is disrupting Creation) has been added, saying that "a serious effect has occurred and must be reconciled." Something we are doing or have done has caused upset at some profound level. Fukushima? Genetic engineering? We are out of accordance with what God fashioned. When the cloud is seen in the north, perhaps in conjunction with a huge light, perhaps with a great smoke, if we read previous alleged prophecies correctly, and the winds have come, do we look for the turn of an era. In accordance with the reputed prediction, there already are reports of what perhaps it had so long ago foreseen as "strange loud rumblings" (or at least we hear the precursors to them).

As the Pope has pointed out, we must be on the watch for false religiosity -- any set of religious perspectives, even from "private revelations," that are not centered on Jesus. If "revelations" send us into an isolated mindset of obsessive devotion that strays from or overshadows Him, it is in error, as a number of false apparitions and so many New Age beliefs are, based on little more than the unusual.

But authentic private Catholic revelations there are, as we know from officially sanctioned places like Guadalupe and Lourdes and Knock and Miraculous Medal and Kibeho and Betania and Fatima, which will be invoked in a special way during a consecration next month in Rome by Francis, who during his journey to Brazil for Youth Day took a special side trip to honor a miraculous statue of the Blessed Mother -- who points to Jesus. We know there have been authentic predictions by those prognostications -- and there are not so many -- that have come true. No seer, no mystic, is a hundred percent accurate. Scripture itself says this. All prophecy, it says, in 1 Corinthians 14:9 is "imperfect." Prayer also can change events, as perhaps with Syria. The only perfect prophecy was from Jesus. But interesting it is how on December 9, 1992, the mystic Maria Esperanza of Betania, currently up for sainthood, told a group of visiting Americans that she saw "two huge towers with black smoke all around them." She had said they were in New York and asked the pilgrims to pray about it. Something was going to happen in America, she said -- and indeed a couple months later, on February 26, 1993, there was the first terrorist bombing at the World Trade Center. She told me her vision had been of the towers falling down. Seven years later, in December of 2000, the headline on this website was: "World-known mystic Maria Esperanza warns U.S. of foreign danger, sees world 'saddened' in a short while, is concerned with the Mid-East, the Pope, and two [foreign powers; one large, one very small]." Several months later she told us she was certain a "big thing" was about to happen,warning that enemies were on our own soil. Esperanza said what would come ("in a little more time, not too much time, but a little more") would "shake the world." And a few months later, in August of 2001, she had her people fax this website that the event she had been referring to was about to occur. When it (9/11) did, Maria happened to be in Manhattan, and when asked two days after the attack who was behind it, told me, "a roaring lion" (the name "Osama" means lion).

What signs now might come? What storms? At left, a Cross reportedly spotted above Medjugorje in Bosnia-Hercegovina and photographed here more than a hundred miles away along the Croatian coast, for our discernment, for our future contemplation. We have not authenticated the precise location. Is it a precursor, or just contrails? Our greatest focus should be on our own lives; for we know without doubt there are daily signs in our lives through events and trials (and blessings) and that for each of us, the world will one day end and nothing is more important than preparing for it -- no squabbles, no politics, no world happenings. The beauty of Jesus is reflected in His mother, who conceived without original sin emerges from any darkness. In Aparecida -- where that miraculous Brazilian statue is -- God’s message was one of restoring what is broken, reuniting what has been divided. With urgency, we must realize that the newscasters more often than not don't have their fingers on what is truly important and germane to the future in the next two decades and that one of the things seldom mentioned but of critical importance is how we must reconcile ourselves and what we have built with the Creation of our dear Lord.

-- Michael H. Brown

[resources: Fear of Fire]

[Retreats: Louisiana and Indiana]

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