Sister Mildred Mary Ephrem was professed as a religious in 1933. In 1938, Sister Ephrem began to have mystical experiences. These messages were published in a book entitled "Our Lady of America." Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary under the title of Our Lady of America enjoys complete canonical approval through the former Archbishop of Cincinatti, Ohio, the late Paul Francis Leibold, who approved the private apparition for public devotion in 1963.
Sister Ephrem writes:
From January 1957 to 1958, Our Lady's warnings came to me again and again. These are her words spoken in January 1957:
"The hour grows late. My Son's patience will not last forever. Help me hold back His anger, which is about to descend on sinful and ungrateful men. Suffering and anguish, such as never before experienced, is about to overtake mankind. It is the darkest hour. But if men will come to me, my Immaculate Heart will make it bright again with the mercy which my Son will rain down through my hands. Help me save those who will not save themselves. Help me bring once again the sunshine of God's peace upon the world."
To my spiritual director I was asked to send this message:
“Hurry, my son, for the time is short but the punishment will be long, and for many, forever.
"Tell the Bishops of the United Stares, my loyal sons, of my desires and how I wish them to be carried out. Through him who is head over you, make known the longings of my Immaculate Heart to establish the reign of my Divine Son in the hearts of men and thus save them from the scourge of heaven, both now and hereafter."
Our Lady, again addressing herself to me, spoke sadly yet hopefully:
"My daughter, will my children in America listen to my pleadings and console my Immaculate Heart? Will my loyal sons carry our my desires and thus help me bring the peace of Christ once again to mankind? 'Pray and do penance, my sweet child, that this may come to pass. Trust me and love me; I so desire it. Do not forger your poor Mother, who weeps over the loss of so many of her children."
The hour grows late. The time is short. These messages are consistent with those of Akita and those given to St. Faustina, Secretary of the Divine Mercy. Do we listen? Or do we scoff saying to ourselves, "Where is the promise of his coming? From the time when our ancestors fell asleep, everything has remained as it was from the beginning of creation." (2 Peter 3: 4). Do we laugh at private revelations or hold them up to ridicule? Do we hear the Apostle Paul urging us: "Do not stifle the Spirit. Do not despise prophecies. Test everything; retain what is good" (1 Thessalonians 5: 19). Or are we too proud? Do we believe that God no longer speaks through His prophets?
Lumen Gentium, No. 12 of the Second Vatican Council teaches us that:
"It is not only through the sacraments and the ministries of the Church that the Holy Spirit sanctifies and leads the people of God and enriches it with virtues, but, "allotting his gifts to everyone according as He wills, He distributes special graces among the faithful of every rank. By these gifts He makes them fit and ready to undertake the various tasks and offices which contribute toward the renewal and building up of the Church, according to the words of the Apostle: "The manifestation of the Spirit is given to everyone for profit". These charisms, whether they be the more outstanding or the more simple and widely diffused, are to be received with thanksgiving and consolation for they are perfectly suited to and useful for the needs of the Church. Extraordinary gifts are not to be sought after, nor are the fruits of apostolic labor to be presumptuously expected from their use; but judgment as to their genuinity and proper use belongs to those who are appointed leaders in the Church, to whose special competence it belongs, not indeed to extinguish the Spirit, but to test all things and hold fast to that which is good."
Once again, devotion to Our Lady of America has canonical approval. And although we are not obligated to accept private revelation (see Catechism of the Catholic Church, No. 67), still, it is always foolish to despise prophecy, especially when the Church - whose "special competence" is to judge "their genuinity" - has granted its approval.
For more on devotion to Our Lady of America, go here.
4 comments:
As the Democrats examine how to lift the ban on embryonic stem-cell research, this nation will have its first-ever Masonic Inaugural Ball for Obama:
http://aftermathnews.wordpress
.com/2009/01/03/first-ever-masonic-inaugural-ball-to-be
-held-for-obama/
I love the devotion to Our Lady of America. On October 7, 1957, Our Lady told Sister Mildred, "My beloved daughter, what I am about to tell you concerns in a particular way my children in America. Unless they do penance by mortifications and self-denial and thus reform their lives, God will visit them with punishments hitherto unknown to them."
We had better take this very seriously. Our whole society is coming unglued. Can't you see it?
Ellen, that is powerful. Why then isn't devotion to Our Lady of America made known? I had never heard of it prior to Paul's post. That's tragic I think.
Read the following article written by film-reviewer Roger Ebert. Then go back to your parish were the priest, Deacon, and Religious (if you've got them) will tell you that the "prophets of doom" are wrong and that our future in this country is just wonderful.
When Rome burned, Nero fiddled.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold
By Roger Ebert on December 28, 2008
It's all coming to pieces, isn't it -- the world we live in, the continuity we thought we could count on, the climate, the economy, the fragile peace. The 20th century was called "the American Century," with some reason. I do not believe the 21st century will belong to anybody, and it may not last for 100 years of human witness. There are nuclear weapons in the Middle East and on the Indian subcontinent, and if one is used, more will follow and who can say when the devastation will end?
The weather is unhinged. It is no longer a question of global warming. It is a question of what in the hell is happening? I do not have to rehearse for you the details of this horrible American autumn, and a winter not yet half over. The tornadoes, the hurricanes, the floods, the blizzards, the wild fires, the heat waves, the water shortages, the power blackouts. The White House declares "a state of emergency" and the federal government sends money. How many states of emergency are we still in? How much more money is there?
The economy is going to get worse. We may have no idea how much worse. The greed and corruption at the economy's core reached a scale unimaginable at the time of the Great Depression. Even responsible banks are threatened, because they cannot borrow and are fearful of lending. The world seeks safe havens for wealth, but the dollar is weaker, the yen is also surrounded by Recession, and if we park our money in China, a risky notion, what will happen with their money, parked here?
Earlier this year, reviewing a bad movie named "Sex Drive," I wrote:
As they motor South, they pass through Amish country. Luckily it's the day of the annual Amish sex orgy, and Ian meets sexy Mary, who falls in love with him, flashes her boobs, etc. The director, Sean Anders, should be ashamed of himself. Lucky the Amish don't go to movies, or he'd be facing a big lawsuit. Better be nice to the Amish. In a year we'll be trading gold bars for their food, haha.
Haha, indeed. The Amish can grow their own food and heat their own homes and feed their own horses, and where does that leave us? Many of my readers right now are living in the middle of vast urban areas, 50 miles from farmland One partner has been laid off, the other fears the same. There are children and mortgage payments. What will they do on the level of survival? I've been reading a memoir by Larry Woiwode, who farms his own land in North Dakota and may not have foreseen disaster but seems prepared to deal with it.
How will my family fare? Yes, we've earned some nice money in our careers. But I have found that nothing cures wealth like illness. Few people in this country can afford to get seriously ill, and many cannot afford to take a single day off from their job--or jobs. Under Bush we doubled our national debt in only eight years. Now the experts say Obama will have no choice but to increase it even further, with "bailouts" of an increasingly leaky ship. That means spending money we do not have--printing it, in the final analysis. That leads to inflation. Inflation leads to legends of fortunes in pre-war Germany reduced to worthless paper, of people trading shopping bags full of banknotes for a loaf of bread. What does money mean when it is backed only by debt?
What if war in the Middle East cuts off oil, even if OPEC wants to sell it? What if the shipping lanes are blocked? What will happen then? Less developed countries may paradoxically be better off. The closer to the land and to subsistence a family lives, the better-equipped it is to survive. The unemployed family in the middle of a city will have savings, unemployment insurance, maybe government and private assistance of various kinds, and may be able to just get by, but how long will that last? Everybody can't move in with the relatives. Some people have to be the relatives.
It does not take any special vision to foresee an immediate future in which the world is hammered by the weather and reeling from an economic meltdown. I hope it is not at war. If the U.S. "steps in" to "police" a war between Pakistan and India, how exactly will that work, when we need both sides as our allies? Their differences are essentially political and territorial, but differences in religion cloud the issues. In this brave modern age, mankind's deep instincts are still tribal, and for some believers religion is the new tribalism.
I dreamed, we all dreamed, for years that the future held vague visions of progress and prosperity, and that our problems would be "solved" by science. How many of us are so sure about that now? I wonder if we are living in the End of Days. I do not mean that in a biblical sense. I mean that we seem to be irrevocably screwing things up. In the case of the global warming problem, we may have already done so. Please, please, don't tell me global warming is Al Gore's fantasy. I am reminded of a great line by Saul Bellow. A dying man tells his brother: "Look for me in the weather reports."
Earthquakes. Tsunamis. Typhoons. Volcanoes. Melting icecaps. Dead zones in the sea. Barack Obama's family and everyone else on Oahu was trapped in a power blackout, after ferocious lightning storms struck the power grid. I googled "power blackout Oahu" and found only 17,000 hits. If you know anything about Google, you know this was a freak weather occurrence. But the sun came up the next morning, and in less than a month Obama will be President.
What a daunting situation he will face. How well can he possibly "succeed" when so many of the problems, starting with the climate, cannot be cured by the actions of man? How can he lead the economy back from a pit of unbridled, unregulated greed--when we learn that CEOs protected their own $100 million bonuses as part of the bailout package we all paid for? How will he bring world peace between peoples who have hated each other for decades?
If you are a member of the U.S. Congress, you should not give a damn if you are a Democrat or a Republican. You should discard ideology and partisanship. You should be searching only for what works, or gives promise of working. You should be listening to the best counsel of the wisest people you can find. This is no time for playing to the crowd. That is all over with. This is the hour to seek what might lead us back from the brink.
William Butler Yeats' poem The Second Coming.
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