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| Bergoglio blesses another Medjugorje statue! - Sept 2014 |
Francis once again warned against reducing one’s faith to a curiosity for private messages and revelations. On Saturday 6 June he announced that a decision on Medjugorje was imminent. The Conchiglia case and the pseudo-revelations made to Benedict XVI.
The Pope cautions faithful against turning to seers to learn “exactly what message Our Lady will be sending at 4’o’clock this afternoon,” in other words, those who turn their life into a series of messages, private revelations, secrets and predictions about the future.
In the homily he pronounced at yesterday’s mass in St. Martha’s House, Francis spoke about “those who are constantly searching for some “novelty” in their Christian identity,” “forgetting that they were chosen, anointed,” that “they have the seal of the Holy Spirit” and they go in search of seers, asking: 'Where are the seers who can tell us exactly what message Our Lady will be sending at 4’o’clock this afternoon?' And their lives depend on this. This identity is not Christian. God’s final word is “Jesus” and nothing else.”
These words come three days after the announcement of an imminent decision on the Medjugorje case, which Francis mentioned on his return trip from Sarajevo. Many connected the two things, interpreting his homily almost as the anticipation of a negative pronouncement on the phenomenon which began in Herzegovina in 1981 and has not yet reached a conclusion.
This is not the first time Francis has expressed himself in these terms. On 13 November 2013, during a sermon in St. Martha’s House, he criticised the spirit of curiosity, which impels us to want to feel that “the Lord is here or rather there, or leads us to say: “But I know a visionary, who receives letters from Our Lady, messages from Our Lady”. “But, look, Our Lady is the Mother of everyone! And she loves all of us. She is not a postmaster, sending messages every day,” the Pope added. Even then, the words he pronounced at mass were linked to Medjugorje, even though he could also have been referring to other phenomena of this kind and especially to the attitude of those who transform faith into insane curiosity.
The Medjugorje apparitions, initially involved a group of children and continued under the form of private apparitions that still continue today, at specific times and on a daily basis. The Holy See does not want seers to take part in public demonstrations trumpeting the authenticity of the apparitions as a definite, even mentioning the times in advertising campaigns.
Of the six initial seers, three confirm that they still see the Virgin Mary at the same time in the afternoon, wherever they are; one of them witnesses an apparition every 2nd day of the month, while the latter two see one apparition a year.
It is hard to imagine that the Pope intended to anticipate the decision on Medjugorje with his words in the St. Martha House mass. After the exhaustive and balanced work carried out by the commission of experts and theologians, which Benedict XVI decided to set up, appointing Cardinal Camillo Ruini as head, the case passed into the hands of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The Congregation will be discussing it in the coming days. The outcome will then be presented to Francis.
When Ruini’s report was delivered to the Pope in January 2014, the Commission approved the first apparitions witnessed in the summer of 1981 but expressed its doubts over the apparitions which followed and have not yet come to an end, even though no proof was found of trickery or deceit. Similarly, in the case of the Fatima apparitions of 1917, the Church approved these but not those which followed, along with the revelations that Sister Lucia dos Santos has continued to have.
The issue of the healing of millions of pilgrims that go to pray in Medjugorje every year, in the parish chapel, which according to many could become a shrine under the direct tutelage of the Holy See, is completely different and separate from the pronouncement on the supernatural aspect of the event. Pastoral care for faithful is one of the aspects Pope Francis holds closest to his heart, having always valued popular devotion as an archbishop in Argentina.
We must not forget how varied the world of private revelations is, with so-called seers and pseudo-seers and the web has blown up these phenomena. Here is an example that occurred recently: on 9 May, during the course of a meeting that lasted all but a few minutes, at the end of the rosary prayer in the Vatican Gardens, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI was handed a sizable book with a dark red coloured cover and a shell-shaped seal. Neither the Pope Emeritus, not his personal secretary, Archbishop Georg Gänswein knew what it was about. They had no knowledge of the contents, nor did they know the identity of the two envoys sent to represent “seer” Franca Miscio, better known as “Conchiglia”, founder of an international movement whose model figures are Guadalupe and Juan Diego.
The “messages” received from the fake seer are easy to find online. Conchiglia presents herself as a prophetess of our time and fills pages and pages with words that she assures come directly from God, Jesus and Mary. One of the strangest “revelations” she makes is an unshakable belief that aliens exist and that “alien DNA” has mixed with “Terrestrian” DNA so that there are now “alien beings” ruling the world.
The Vatican is described in the “prophesies” as den of all evils: “The Vatican is the centre of the global power that wants to create a single global religion uniting all false religions … it is the den of the seven deadly sins and other kinds of vileness.” In addition, Conchiglia deifies the figure of Mary.
The false seer wrote a great deal about Benedict XVI’s resignation. She claims his resignation resulted from the workings of international masonry and that Ratzinger is apparently still the real and legitimate Pope, while Francis, whom she defines as a “wicked man seated at the Throne of Peter”, is an “imposter”, an anti-Pope, a representative of the Anti-Christ. These comments speak for themselves.
Various figures have recently warned against Conchiglia’s “messages”, including the Bishop of Jesi (Italy), Gerardo Rocconi who met her in person and the Bishop of Senigallia (Italy), Giuseppe Orlandoni, who has repeatedly described the words of the false seer as “objectively heretical and against the doctrine of the Church”.
Conchiglia’s movement has published the images of the meeting with the Pope Emeritus on her website, making them stand out and presenting him almost as a guarantee seal for the messages contained in the book. But Archbishop Georg Gänswein, Prefect of the Papal Household and personal secretary to Benedict XVI clarified what happened in a statement to Vatican Insider.
Answering a series of questions put to him by Vatican Insider: “A certain Mr. Mimmo Rocco who presented himself as chief superintendent of the Italian Carabinieri, had asked some time ago, along with many others, to meet the Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. He was granted a brief meeting after the rosary. There were two of them, him and one other person. They didn’t know each other. During the meeting, they presented Benedict XVI with a book, as shown in a series of photos published on the website. We had no knowledge of the content. The meeting only lasted a few minutes.”
“When I got home,” Gänswein continued, “I looked at the book and so did Benedict XVI later on. We were surprised and shocked because we noticed straight away that the book contained some “private revelations”. It didn’t take long to work out that the whole thing was strange and incredible to say the least. The Pope Emeritus asked me to send the book to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith which is competent in this field, immediately.”
“We didn’t think anything of the meeting,” Mgr. Gänswein concluded. “There are many people around who call themselves “seers”… We had no idea that the book contained those comments. Naturally, there is no support for the “seer” or the contents of the book in any way. Had Benedict XVI known that he was going to be given a collection of messages of this kind, he would never have agreed to the meeting”.
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