(LifeSiteNews) — Church history is replete with people who claim to have received visions from heaven. While no apparition indeed can trump the approved dogmatic teaching of the Church, prudence dictates we consider what approved apparitions tell us of warnings about future events and how to avoid them if possible.
My guest today, Ted Flynn, is the author of a new book on the alleged apparitions of Garabandal, Garabandal: The Warning and the Great Miracle: The Divine Reset That Will Correct the Conscience of the World. While the Church has yet to make an official judgment on Our Lady’s supposed appearance at the small Spanish village, three canonized saints of the past century, Padre Pio, Mother Teresa, and John Paul II, all privately held that the visions were authentic.
Flynn begins the show discussing what is meant by the “warning” of Garabandal. He explains that “warning” is a general term translated from the Spanish word “aviso,” but that the event the word attempts to describe can alternatively be called the “judgment in miniature” or the “life review.”
Most, however, know it as the “illumination of conscience,” whereby God shows someone his state of soul as though he were being judged then and there. Flynn claims people have told him that they already experienced this “warning,” explaining that the experience described to him is so “profound” that people will not even speak of it to their spouses.
His “methodology” in the book, Flynn asserts, is simply to lay out what Our Lady is supposed to have told the seers in over 2,000 apparitions between 1961 and 1965, seldom giving his own opinion.
“So my feeling in why I did this, there are certain prophecies now that are coming more into view that weren’t in the past,” he states. “But I feel where, you know from Scripture, where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more.”
Looking to the world economy, Flynn notes that it is so interconnected that there is “no hope for the world” unless God intervenes. Given talk of the Great Reset, he explains, the “warning” will be a “Divine Reset.” People who have read the book, Flynn continues, take from it hope that God has a plan for the world.
“Heaven’s not going to let ‘the remnant’ go to a period of such deterioration and decimation that there’s no hope,” he asserts. “This book is about the hope, trust, love, and mercy.”
When I ask Flynn to discuss the aspects of the alleged messages of Garabandal pertaining to the “warning,” the times we find ourselves in, and our proximity to what I term the “great act of assistance,” Flynn, feels that more and more people are becoming “receptive” to the “warning” specifically.
For him, the supposed message of Garabandal “seems to just answer so many things that you can’t really put your finger on in other places.” Flynn opines that the people most receptive to the apparent message likely make up “the remnant,” and that a “phase two” will entail people noticing an apparent “level of evil that the world hasn’t seen.” The “third phase of openness,” Flynn tells me, takes place when the events allegedly described in the message take place.
Addressing when the “warning” is supposed to take place, Flynn says that the alleged apparition is relatively silent with regard to any specific timing. Looking to what Our Lady is supposed to have told the seers, Flynn notes that the “warning will be like two heavenly bodies colliding” and that it will be “seen and felt.” He also notes that it is supposed to happen after the Church suffers “something like a schism,” and after a chastisement.
Looking to events described by the alleged apparition, Flynn says that the “warning” will also take place after the Pope visits Moscow, as well as after a synod. “As I look at the body of prophecy, I don’t think that we’re there just yet … but it’s obvious they’re clearer to see now than years before,” he tells me.
He relates an alleged message from 18 October 1961, in which Our Lady is supposed to have told the seers that penance must be done and visits to the Blessed Sacrament must be made, and that “we must be good.” Flynn emphasizes the conditional aspect of what follows: “If we do not do this, punishment awaits us,” with Our Lady supposedly saying that a “cup” was “filling.”
Turning his attention to an alleged apparition from June 18, 1965, Flynn says Our Lady is supposed to have said that what was asked of in 1961 was not done, nor was it made known to the world. She is supposed to have continued and said that the “cup” referred to before was now “flowing over,” and that many cardinals, bishops, and priests are “on the road to perdition and are taking many souls with them,” and that there is a diminishing “importance” shown the Eucharist.
Our Lady supposedly concluded the apparition by saying that people should use their own strength to avert God’s wrath, that if they repented they would find pardon, and that she was asking them to amend their lives by St. Michael’s intercession. She is alleged to have further said that people should make more sacrifices and think of Christ’s Passion.
Flynn also discusses two other alleged apparitions, both happening at half past 10:00 at night the week of Corpus Christi in 1962, referred to as the “nights of screams.”
In the first, the seers reported seeing rivers turning red with blood, the Church suffering persecution such that church buildings would no longer exist as they once did, and the difficulty of confessing the faith and receiving the sacraments. While the seers, with tears in their eyes, asked for the vision to stop, they then said that “everyone should confess” and be ready for “it,” that “all is lost” and that the “warning will come.” Shortly after the first night, two of the seers, Jacinta González and Mari Loli Mazón, said that a chastisement will come if people do not repent.
In the second, Flynn states that one of the seers reported they saw rivers change into blood, fire falling from the heavens, and that there would be a “great chastisement of fire” if men returned to their evil ways after a “great miracle.” The seers asked that the events shown them would not happen, and that everyone go to confession before they do. The following day, Corpus Christi, all in Garabandal went to confession.
Returning to the timing of the chastisement Our Lady is supposed to have warned of, Flynn does not give an opinion with regard to timing. He does, however, say that as the described events approach, there would appear to be an “invasion of communism.” The world, he says, would not suddenly find itself communist either just before or after the “warning” or “miracle,” but that what is discussed is a “generational creep.” He also examines the rise of communism and communist sentiment in the United States in light of the alleged apparition.
Flynn also describes what, in his opinion, the chastisement will be like. He observes that the way we currently live in the West is such that we are relatively free compared to elsewhere, such as in Nigeria, where people are being killed for being Catholic. For him, the chastisement is “an ongoing process,” observing that many parts of the world are seeing it already through suffering, corruption, war, deceit, and the “vile behavior of many, many people.”
Towards the end of the show, Flynn and I discuss innuendos in the alleged apparition dealing with abortion. Flynn notes that seer Conchita González asked how someone could kill a child without killing the mother. When asked why she thought of it, González replied that Our Lady told her that such would happen with the “overflowing of the chalice.” González trembled when she explained it, Flynn recounts, adding that she was “unable to visualize what it really implied.”
He also mentions that Our Lady is supposed to have said that the Mass would be “suppressed,” not in the sense of a canonical suppression, but the way one would suppress evidence of a crime or an attitude of “let’s put a little pressure on it.” Flynn recalls looking up the word supposedly used by Our Lady in the dictionary, finding three or so definitions, the last meaning “to decimate.” He also reminds people that the Mass used at the time of the alleged apparitions was the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM).
We close the show discussing the Church’s recognition of the alleged apparition. Flynn notes that since 1961, there have been seven bishops of the diocese in which Garabandal is located. All have taken similar positions, with some more or less favorable to the events that took place there. However, the Church has yet to either condemn the supposed apparition or to approve it, the way it did of Fatima or Guadalupe.
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