A few weeks ago, I wrote that New Yorker Joey Lomangino, a promoter of the Garabandal, Spain Marian apparitions that happened in the early 1960s, was worth keeping tabs on.
The Blessed Mother had, after all, said that when her prophesied “miracle” happens, Joey would see it with new eyes. (Joey, by the way, was rendered totally blind after a tire he was infl ating blew up on his face when he was still a teenager in New York.
The accident was so serious as also to deprive him totally of the sense of smell, but this sense was fully restored years later by Padre Pio.)
Because the miracle would be followed by a great chastisement – believed to be much more severe than Noah’s flood – Joey had been perceived as a timeline yardstick, as followers had presumed he would be alive on earth during the miracle and that since he turned an old 83 on Oct. 5 last year, mankind was not far off from the chastisement.
And then last June 18, he died – without anyone alive in the world having seen the miracle. Does that smash to smithereens the credibility of the Garabandal apparitions?
On December 6, 1962,Garabandal visionary Conchita Gonzalez experienced one of over 2,000 apparitions of the Blessed Mother and after that, revealed yet another prophecy: that before the miracle, something would happen that would make people lose confidence in the authenticity of the Garabandal events and that this would not have anything to do with the delays in the occurrence of the prophecies.
Now, many believe this happening was the death of Joey, a devoted apostle of Garabandal, because he died and the prophecy about his seeing with new eyes the miracle never happened.
So did the “premature” death of Joey shatter Garabandal? Should Garabandal no longer be credible on the basis of a failed prophecy? I and other followers don’t think so. The problem was not in his death, but in how earthfocused we have been.
When the Blessed Mother said Joey would see the miracle with new eyes, our minds conjured up a pair of eyeballs, complete with corneas and irises, outlined with eyelashes. It never occurred to us, until now, that Joey would see the miracle with the new eyes of a disembodied saint.
Padre Pio was also supposed to have seen the prophesied Garabandal miracle. The good padre, now a saint, died even much earlier on Sept. 23, 1968. But in his case, there was another monk who later declared that Padre Pio had, indeed, experienced the miracle even before his death. After all, God, author of all miracles, is eternal, unfettered by time.
This would seem to open another possibility: did Joey also see the miracle before he passed on last June 18?
Probably not, since he never was said to have received new eyes. The premise that we had been too earth-focused stays in his case. Joey would see, but with new eyes in Heaven.
Yet Joey’s death is coupled with a coincidence that’s comforting for Garabandal believers. Last June 18 when he went on to eternity was exactly 53 years to that day when St. Michael the Archangel appeared to the visionaries of Garabandal to announce to them the apparitions of the Blessed Mother that was to repeat itself hundreds of times up to 1965.
In their lifetimes, not only Padre Pio, but also Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta, confirmed the authenticity of the Garabandal apparitions. Can more be asked to establish Garabandal?
