You and I have seen the most heart rending photos of immigrant families walking miles to safety, children and old folks, carrying either nothing or just a few bags to the most uncertain destinations. Christmas is likely to catch up with them that way.
In one of her apparitions, the Blessed Mother said that wars are the result of mankind’s sins, of its departing from God’s graces. Many times, she warned against continuing transgression of God’s do’s and dont’s, so such aberrations as climate change, widespread bird and fish deaths, trumpets blowing in the skies, preponderance of UFO’s, etc. are happening and could possibly, nay, probably, climax to, well, the Apocalypse. She didn’t mince words on this in her message in Akita, Japan in 1972 when she warned of “Fire falling from the sky” and “the living envying the dead.”
I am sad to dwell on these on Christmas, but we are faced with a New Year and next years where the warnings could unfold to a terrible denouement unless we comply with the requests of the Blessed Mother for prayers, sacrifices and change of lives. And I feel the atmosphere of Christmas can afford us a more heartfelt contemplation on these and, better, a turn to lives finally responding to the calls from Heaven.
My apocalyptic sentiments are not mine alone. The internet is awash with the end times (as against the end of the world which is not yet).
In the United States in 1976, then Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, who was later Pope John Paul II and now saint, said: “We are now standing in the face of the greatest historical confrontation humanity has ever experienced. I do not think the wide circle of the American Society, or the wide circle of the Christian Community realize this fully. We are now facing the final confrontation between the Church and the antichurch, between the Gospel and the antigospel, between Christ and the antichrist. This confrontation lies within the plans of Divine Providence. It is, therefore, in God’s Plan, and it must be a trial which the Church must take up, and face courageously.” Pope Pius IX also said something apocalyptic when asked to comment on the message of the Blessed Mother in her apparition in La Salette in the French Alps. To recall La Salette: on September 19, 1846, the Blessed Mother appeared to children Melanie Calvat and Maximin Giraud, about many sins of mankind.
Pope Pius IX who was visibly moved on reading the messages, but finally consigned these messages to the archives of the Vatican.
Questioned one day by Father Giraud, Superior General of the Missionaries of La Salette, about the content of these secrets, Pius IX replied: “You wish to know the secrets of La Salette? Well, it is this: ‘If you do not do penance, you will all perish!’
” Thank God Filipinos are not in fl ight like the families of Allepo in Syria, but regardless of what food will be laid on the noche buena table, Christmas noche buena is time to contemplate on the warnings from the Blessed Mother and the confirming declarations of popes and other holy people. There’s a future ahead, 2017 onwards.
