Mary's Far Out Messages at Garabandal: The Time for Buy-in Is Now

A closer look into the Blessed Virgin's apparitions at Garabandal reveals more of the same: Powerful men behaving like men, mansplaining to little girls. Should we follow suit?

Whoever has ears ought to hear what the Spirit says to the churches.

Revelations 3:6

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Given her legacy, when the Blessed Virgin appears to communicate a message, ears prick up.

This Tower of Ivory, whose great Fiat secured our salvation, continues to lavish us with graces as we muck our way through this valley of death, decision and tears. From her seat of wisdom in the heavenly court, she consistently tips us off to erroneous ideologies and foreboding movements, with pith and incision second to none.

In 1858, she appeared in Lourdes, France, where decades earlier, revolutionaries burned crucifixes, murdered priests and genuflected to the Goddess of Reason. Her dogma shattered this illusion when she announced “I am the Immaculate Conception” to a perplexed 14-year-old Bernadette Subirous. She crushed rationalism underfoot when she told Bernadette to dig a hole in the dirt, where a miraculous spring began to flow that heals and restores pilgrims to this day.

In 1917, she appeared to three small children in Fatima, Portugal, into a world mired in the trenches of WWI. She again countered materialism, warning of a fomenting revolution in Russia that boded terror for the entire world. “War is a punishment for sins,” she told Lucia, Francisco and Jacinta. If the world ignored her heed to repent, pray and fast, it would fall into another, far bloodier, war.

“In every Marian apparition, the message Our Lady gives, or God gives through her, is to help the Church in a very specific way in the historical moment it's going through,” says Father Jose Luis Saavedra in the documentary Garabandal: Unstoppable Waterfall.¹

Although these children squeal with delight at affections from their tender mother, the BVM doesn't limit her visits to pleasantries and idle chatter. In largely one-sided discussions, she relays substantive, portentous messages the visionaries can barely make sense of, with the urgent request they be propagated far and wide.

Her messages are for us all, her council for the hour in which she provides it. She speaks to us personally and, with the tone of a devoted mother counseling a wayward child, pleads for us to accept them.

She continues to grace us with good counsel right into present history, and addresses the very moment we face today. In the 1960s, at the dawn of an epoch wrought by centuries of iconoclasts, she appears to four girls in Garabandal, Spain. Her apparitions coincide with the Vatican II Council, where Pope John XXIII sought aggiornamento, or to bring the Church up to speed with modern sensibilities.

Here, she again relays messages seeped in political and social commentary, these more profound, explicit and devastating than at either Lourdes or Fatima.

“You are now receiving the last warnings,” she says. “You should turn the wrath of God away from yourselves by your efforts.”

Appearing under the title of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, she calls us to make more sacrifices, lead good lives, meditate on the Passion of her Son, and increase our devotion to the Eucharist.

“The cup is overflowing. Many cardinals, many bishops, and many priests are on the road to perdition and are taking many souls with them.”

She also foresees:

• A communist takeover in much of the world, and the subsequent disappearance of the Church,

• A great chastisement to befall us if her heed for conversion goes ignored and

• A mystical world-wide Warning from God, meant to spur our conversion.

In its study of the Garabandal apparitions and their authenticity, the Church makes no official assertion one way or the other. In 1992, Cardinal Ratzinger, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, showed interest in the apparitions, but declared them non constant (uncertain) and open to the faithful's own sensibilities.²

A comprehensive evaluation affirms the authenticity of the messages and apparitions. This prescient council, if heeded, encloses us within the mantle of our Morning Star, and permits her to escort us through this rugged and narrow precipice we find ourselves on today.

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Contents:

• Four Little Lambs: The Apparitions and the Messages

• Sly Foxes: The Investigations into Garabandal

• Wise Owls: A Hard Look at It All

• Eager Beavers: The Acceptable Time Is Now

• Conclusion

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Four Little Lambs: The Apparitions and the Messages

When choosing her platform and her messengers, the BVM doesn't seek out the erudite and the well-connected living in metropolitan epicenters. Rather, she invites herself into the presence of children with simple lives in out-of-the-way places.

In the 1960s, the counterculture raged throughout the West, propagating alternative lifestyles, and escape from the trappings of religious edicts and sexual mores. But the town of Garabandal, in the diocese of Santander in Northern Spain, did not receive the memo. Its primitive streets, swathed with protruding rocks and deep potholes, sequestered it from the latest goings-on. Children baled hay and herded livestock most days, fitting in schoolwork as time permitted. In the evenings, families gathered at a kitchen table lit with a single bulb to pray the rosary.

The Blessed Virgin consistently appears in remote places. Livestock was the principal livlihood of the residents of Garabandal, Spain in the 1960s. Cars couldn’t access the village, and cows, horses and sheep roamed freely in the streets.

One cloudless afternoon in June of 1961, four girls picking apples from their neighbor's tree jumped at a loud clap of thunder. Diverted, they looked to the sky. One girl fell to her knees and the others quickly followed, as each entered into a trance where an angel appeared before them. He spoke nothing and departed.

Stunned, the girls told their teacher, then the priest, who questioned the girls separately and found their stories consistent. News spread, and within days hundreds of Spaniards began arriving in Garabandal to see what the chatter amounted to.

The Blessed Virgin appeared two weeks later. Gapers looked on as the girls' knees crashed to the ground, their necks thrust back and their gaze fixed above them. Afterwards, one of the girls, Conchita, remarked that it felt like talking to your mother who'd just returned from a long trip.³ Mary made many subsequent visits, drawing the girls into ecstasies that lasted for hours. Thousands travelled to witness the phenomenon, trekking on foot into a village with no amenities or public restrooms and little electricity. During their ecstasies, people poked and prodded the girls, but they didn't feel a thing.

The four girls, Mari Loli, Jacinta, Mari Cruz and Conchita, prayed the rosary, then became rigid as they were drawn into ecstasies where they conversed with Our Lady. Their bodies became leaden and grown men could not lift them.

Miraculous and fascinating incidents accompanied the apparitions. When the crowds handed tangles of rosaries to the girls for Mary to bless, they mysteriously untangled with ease, and the girls returned each to its rightful owner. One time, the Eucharist appeared on the tongue of Conchita, placed there by the angel.

Numerous doctors examined and studied the girls during the apparitions, finding no natural explanation for the curiosities the girls experienced.⁴

The apparition followed the same sequence as Fatima: first a clap of thunder, then the appearance of an angel, then the appearance of the BVM. Lourdes also began with thunder, but Bernadette didn't mention seeing an angel.

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The Blessed Virgin asked the girls to disseminate several messages to the gathered crowds; messages that increased in severity and mystery. Although the crowds sensationalized the marvels surrounding the apparitions, the girls say the messages are its pièce de résistance.

The First Message, October 18 1961

The Blessed Virgin wished for the parish priest to deliver this message from the Church; however, some investigating priests pressured the girls to read it to the crowds, which numbered in the thousands.

We must make many sacrifices and do much penance and visit the Blessed Sacrament frequently. But first, we must lead good lives. If we do not, a chastisement will befall us.

The cup is already filling up and if we do not change, a very great chastisement will come upon us.⁵

The choice of first person is noteworthy. Of course the BVM won't be included in the chastisement; by including herself she softens the delivery.

Messages of a Communist Regime, a Church Disappeared, a Warning and a Miracle, 1962-64

The Blessed Virgin delivered many more messages about upcoming tribulations and supernatural occurrences, sharing more details with some girls than with others. In interviews from the 70s and 80s⁶, Mari Loli, Conchita and Jacinta summarize what the BVM told them about these events.

• The Warning

The Warning is a great supernatural event where everyone sees the state of their soul at the same moment, and each understands all the ways they've offended God in their lives. Outside of the Incarnation, it's the single greatest act of mercy in the history of humanity.

Conchita: Everyone in the whole world will see a sign...they will find themselves all alone in the world no matter where they are at the time, alone with their conscience right before God. They will then see all their sins and what their sins have caused.

Jacinta: The Warning is something that is first seen in the air everywhere in the world and immediately is transmitted into the interior of our souls. It will last for a very little time, but it will seem a very long time because of its effect within us.

Mari Loli: It will look as if the world has come to a standstill, however, no one will be aware of that as they will be totally absorbed in their own experience...God will help us to see clearly the harm we are causing Him and the evil things we do. He will help us to sense this interior pain because often when we do something wrong we just ask the Lord's forgiveness with our lips.

• Communist Rule and a Disappeared Church

Jacinta: There was an invasion...something that was a great evil in which communism played a great part....The difficult events will take place before the Warning because the Warning itself will occur when the situation is at its worst.

Mari Loli: It would look like the Communists have taken over the whole world and it would be very difficult to practice religion, for priests to say Mass or for the people to open the doors of the Churches.

Conchita: When communism comes again everything will happen.

(As this message was delivered in the 60s, this seems to indicate a period after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the USSR.)

• Miracle

The BVM said that a miracle is to occur at Garabandal, something in the vein of the miracle of the sun in Fatima, but greater. Its purpose is to make the whole world believe that the Warning comes from God, which many will try to deny and write off as an illusion. The Miracle will make Garabandal a place of pilgrimage.

Conchita: God was going to perform a great Miracle and there would be no doubt about the fact that it was a miracle. It will come directly from God with no human intervention...it will take place within a year after the Warning...you would be able to take pictures and televise it. From that moment there would be a permanent sign at the pines that everyone will be able to see and touch.

Conchita: Everyone who would be in Garabandal on that day would see it. The sick who are there will be cured, no matter what their disease or religion....After the miracle there may come the punishment.

Although some of the girls claim to know the dates to these events, they haven't revealed them. Conchita plans to propagate the Miracle eight days before it is said to occur.

The Final Message, June 18, 1965

After thousands of apparitions and numerous messages, the BVM announced a final message to be delivered to Conchita alone. According to eyewitness David Toribio,⁷ Conchita cried as she shared this message with the crowd, which numbered between twelve and fifteen thousand. She'd been raised to revere priests, and it felt like a sacrilege.

As my message of October 18th has not been fulfilled and made known to the world, I tell you this is my last message: Before, the cup was filling up; now it is overflowing. Many cardinals, many bishops, and many priests are on the road to perdition and are taking many souls with them. Less and less importance has been given to the Eucharist. You should turn the wrath of God away from yourselves by your efforts. If you ask for his forgiveness with sincere hearts, he will forgive you.

I, you mother, through the intercession of St. Michael the Archangel, ask you to amend your lives. You are now receiving the last warnings. I love you very much and do not want your condemnation. Pray to us with sincerity and we will grant your requests. You should make more sacrifices. Meditate on the passion of Jesus.⁸

Conchita received this message just months before Pope Paul VI closed the Vatican II; its tone is far more authoritative than the first message.

With the conclusion of the apparitions, the window opened for the Church to investigate and possibly propagate the messages.

Sly Foxes: The Investigations into Garabandal

It's easy to write off Garabandal on the grounds that two commissions have investigated it, yet the Church hasn't granted it pro nunc nihil obstare (for now, nothing stands in the way) approval, which permits a public manifestation of a cult or devotion.⁹

This assessment, first of all, ignores common sense. An effort to propagate a message that execrates the clergy by way of the clergy is doomed from the start. Additionally, a closer look into both commissions reveals entirely slipshod affairs. Significantly, the Bishops of Santander found nothing objectionable in the messages themselves, one saying that they “simply repeat common doctrine of the Church.”¹⁰

The dynamics of Garabandal incite repudiation of the messages by clergy. Here you have unschooled girls who bale hay, milk cows and herd cattle most days, castigating Cardinals and Bishops before thousands, in messages disseminated far and wide by the press. It's a no-brainer that educated, statured men would squelch a humiliation of this magnitude and nature. Add to this an increasingly secular society that detested the melodramatic peasant piety Garabandal stirred up.

All this led to clergy generally dismissing the apparitions, and more than one instance where clergymen gaslit and coerced the girls to deny them. In her diary, Conchita wrote how a Franciscan, Father Justo, visited Bishop Aldazabal of Santander following the Eucharist miracle and told him it was a fake. Soon after, he sent other Franciscans to Garabandal to apologize to the visionaries; he had no idea why he did that, he said. He was just upset. Not surprisingly, the succeeding Bishop, Vincente Puchol, wrote off the apparitions as “a simple child's prank....All the events have a natural explanation.” After the apparitions ceased, Conchita entered a convent in Burgos, Spain. At confession one day, the priest realized she was a Garabandal visionary. He immediately rounded up two more priests and two bishops and the five of them interrogated her in a room for six hours, pressuring her to deny the apparitions.¹¹

Shortly after the apparitions began, the local Bishop appointed two doctors and three priests to study them. This “First Episcopal Commission” halfheartedly accepted the assignment, traveling to the village only a few times to study the girls; one doctor only once.¹²

On one occasion, the members of the commission convinced Conchita to join them in Santander. As recounted by her Aunt and Godmother Maximina Gonzalez, these doctors and priests built sandcastles with Conchita at the Mediterranean seashore, treated her to cotton candy at the fair, and told her that if she didn't deny the apparitions, they'd take her to a mental asylum and put her parents in jail.¹³ The following day, they dropped Conchita back in Garabandal, but kept the written denial of the apparitions they had secured from her. This they shared with the bishop and with the press, and used as the foundation for the commission's conclusion that nothing supernatural had occurred at Garabandal.

Nearly three decades later, long after the apparitions had ceased, Bishop Juan Antonio del val set up a second commission to study them.

Javier Vildosola, a doctor of social anthropology who formed part of the commission, recounts that it was a bizarre affair. On its visit to Garabandal, the commission failed to define a field of study or follow any other research method and techniques. He received only a vague explanation as to the purpose of the endeavor at all.

The second commission, which I supposedly formed a part, of didn't exist...No one told us 'this is a commission.'¹⁴

He quit when the other doctors presented conclusions without having performed any research. They asserted that the apparitions were fake and simply a tactic for urban development.

Given this testimony, it's little wonder that Cardinal Ratzinger studied the second commission and declared the apparitions non constant (uncertain), and open to the faithful's own sensibilities. This assessment means that although the messages present no objections, the supernatural origins are uncertain.

And significantly, two Santander bishops found the messages theologically accurate. Bishop Juan Antonio del Val stated that "the message of Garabandal was important and theologically correct."¹⁵ On July 8, 1965, Bishop Eugenio Beitia of Santander wrote this of the apparitions:

We have not found anything deserving of ecclesiastical censorship or condemnation either in the doctrine or in the spiritual recommendations that have been publicized as having been addressed to the faithful, for these...contain an exhortation to prayer and sacrifice, to Eucharistic devotion, to veneration of Our Lady in traditional praiseworthy ways, and to holy fear of God offended by our sins. They simply repeat the common doctrine of the Church in these matters.¹⁶

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In the nearly 60 years since they took place, Garabandal has not received a formal straightforward investigation. If anything, the obstructions; the implicit skepticism, the abuse of Conchita, the flagrant falsification of evidence; underscores the authenticity of its messages about a corrupt Church and society.

An openness to the messages, then, is a minimal response. And a broad evaluation may provide complete justification for buy-in.

Wise Owls: A Hard Look at It All

The Blessed Virgin's messages aren't fixed prophecies; she hopes to play the role of Jonah and stay or prevent a chastisement. In order to embody this role, she needs wholesale buy-in; the council must be heeded now.

And so she doesn't appear for that person standing at a distance with his arms folded, looking askance at everything she has to say. She seeks the docile and the fervent; those who willingly accept her council with gusto. And she hopes to find this person en masse.

Be that as it may, appropriately digesting her messages requires a holy caution. They are cryptic; a proper interpretation eludes most. We see through a glass darkly; they're given by someone who knows fully. How many in 1917, for example, recognized that the Russian Revolution spelled terror to the rest of the world?

Although at some level, then, accepting and acting on the messages requires an act of faith, a more holistic and integrated response is both possible and necessary. Evaluating the messages in the context of their historical moment teases out their meaning and confirms their authenticity.

• A Church in Decay

Centrally, Mary warned of canker within the Church that threatened to poison the laity as well. In some instances, the Church had already explicitly acknowledged this rot, even within its greatest liturgy.

Five years before delivering her third message, a newly ordained Joseph Raztinger lectured that “the modern Church has become the Church of pagans, and is constantly becoming even more so.”¹⁷

Six decades earlier, Pope Leo VIII wrote:

Most cunning enemies have filled with bitterness and drenched with gall the Church, the Spouse of the Lamb without spot, and have lifted impious hands against all that is most sacred in it.¹⁸

In order to impede the machinations of Lucifer within the Church, in 1886 he incorporated his St. Michael the Archangel prayer into the liturgy of the Low Mass.

And now, with the benefit of hindsight, it takes no stretch of the imagination to believe that a message of a corrupt Church comes from a concerned mother, urging her beloved children to take heed.

In 1968, Pope Paul VI issued Humanae Vitae, the encyclical where he emphatically renounced all forms of artificial contraception, instead advocating natural methods of birth regulation. Church leaders immediately rebelled against this teaching, given under the Church's Magisterial authority, declaring contraception a matter of personal choice between couples.¹⁹ Many, many lay Catholics followed this defiant council, in clear violation of natural law. As many as 98% of Catholics may use artificial contraception today!²⁰

The recent exposure of sex abuse scandals in the Church; by the Boston Globe, by the movie Spotlight and by the culture at large; fully reveals a Church drenched in gall.

And the Church continues to provide gravely misguided counsel right up to this very day. In 2021, when doctors and nurses began injecting the masses with experimental mRNA technology, the Vatican's doctrinal office declared the vaccines morally acceptable,²¹ in flagrant opposition to Church teaching on human experimentation.²²

• A Communist Seizure

A second message at Garabandal has to do with a communist takeover of sorts, a massive persecution and the disappearance of the Church. These messages, too, have come to seem entirely plausible in light of recent events; their fuller meaning is laid bare.

The covid pandemic stunned the world with its display of worldwide, top-down control. Uncompromising authoritarians closed businesses and Churches and mandated mask-wearing in public places. World leaders speak and write openly about ushering in a “great reset” that eviscerates individual rights in favor of the collective, and propels a 4th Industrial Revolution which aims to monitor and control everyone with biotechnology.²³ At the G20 Bali summit a few weeks ago, leaders of the world's 20 largest economies agreed to develop a vaccine passport system, which would force all the people of these countries; 2/3 of the world's population; to receive a vaccine in order to travel.²⁴

The global landscape smacks of communism; it's right in our faces. And we already know the fallout of a communist state. In Russia's Anti-religious campaign in the 1930s, the number of Orthodox Churches fell from above 29,000 to fewer than 500; a 98% drop off; in only 14 years.²⁵

It's entirely plausible that the Church will disappear under this black cloud of quasi-communism that portends to surround and envelop us.

• An Illumination of Conscience

The Warning, perhaps the most fantastic message from Garabandal, is repeated in many prophecies, both prominent and obscure.

In the 1500s, St. Edmund Campion writes that he foresaw "a great day wherein the terrible Judge should reveal all men's consciences and try every man of each kind of religion.”²⁶

In 1997, Queenship published the book Do Whatever Love Requires, a series of locutions from two Arizona women, Carol Ameche and Harriet Hammons. The book is intended for “those preparing for, or hearing about, or having just experienced the Warning or Illumination” and it describes the Warning just as the girls at Garabandal do.

This list is truncated in the interest of moving on, but even a superficial search unearths a litany of similar prophecies, including those from Father Gobbi of the Marian Movement of Priests and St. Faustina Kowalska.

The consistency of the prophecies, given at various times and coming from a variety of locations, suggest that the Warning isn't a creation of the girls' imagination, but rather a message they received.

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This context cuts away uncertainty. Though the messages of Garabandal are “muy fuerte,” they are not at all opaque. Many of them play out before us, writ large. And so it would well behoove us to heed Mary's council, in order to stay the dread that is already upon us. This naturally leads to pondering what buy-in entails.

Eager Beavers: The Acceptable Time Is Now

It's easy to spin out over the messages at Garabandal; over prophecies about calamities, chastisements, persecution, social upheaval, great supernatural events and wicked men leading the innocent over a cliff.

But this certainly is not what BVM intends. First and foremost, she wants to calm our fears and quell our anxieties. “Listen and hear well in your hearts: what frightens and troubles you is nothing. Am I not here, your mother?” she tells Juan Diego at her apparition in Mexico City in 1531.

When pondering on the messages within the context of this moment, and forming a response from a place of trust, hope and love, a few clarities emerge.

At Garabandal, the Blessed Virgin brings us bizarre and troubling messages that may leave our heads spinning. How do we steady ourselves and identify a path forward?

• First Message: Return to the Basics

The central message at Garabandal is also the most lucid. In order to stay or prevent the wrath of God, she tells us to return to Catholicism 101: visit the Eucharist, go to confession, meditate on the Passion, do acts of penance.

She's advising us to deepen our devotional lives, essentially. As the Bishops of Santander said, she isn't reinventing the wheel here. And it echoes the same advice she gave the children at Fatima and Lourdes.

• Third Message: Take Caution!

In light of the first message, responding to the substance of her third message presents more of a challenge. After advising us to make the Church our lifeblood, now she stands before the entrance of the Church with blinking yellow lights.

Clearly, if many church leaders are on a path to perdition, it's a call to pray for them and for the healing of the Church. Beyond this, there's a lot to parse out.

Her council doesn't call us to disassociate from these leaders, as they can still distribute the Sacraments. Besides, she never specifies which leaders to look out for. Here's how it is, she says: you're to be in the milieu of a group of leaders, some of whom are so drunk with delusion that should you fall in line behind them, they will lead you off a cliff and into an abyss of fire.

It's a tricky predicament.

Perhaps, as a model for how to respond, we can look to Paul who recounts in his letter to the Galatians how in Antioch he opposed Peter to his face “because he clearly was wrong.” (At a social gathering, Peter fell in line with other Jewish Christians and refused to dine with gentile Christians.)

The emulation isn't of Paul's actions, but of his knowing, his inner conviction.

Paul demonstrates that he doesn't mingle at Christian gatherings with an Ophelian flimsy, bending and catering to the men running the show. Rather, he disposes himself within the Church with a detachment that enables him to perceive when its leaders model wayward behavior.

The BVM calls us to strive for the depth and stability of Paul, a maturity he came into after many solitary years in Arabia. The prayer she calls us to, then, isn't a rote daily recitation of the rosary, but rather an ascension beyond the first, second and third mansions to the realm of the mature Christian. It's a call to build an internal foundation so as not be “swept along by every wind of teaching arising from human trickery.”²⁷

Further, it's a call to educate ourselves. Just as the early Jewish Christians had to discern whether or not to eat pork and intermingle with gentiles, we too wrestle with moral choices in our everyday lives; we choose whether or not to use contraception within our marriages, whether or not to have sex outside of marriage, whether or not to marry outside the Church, whether or not to receive a vaccine; consequential choices which, just like St. Peter in Antioch, Church leaders today provide murky guidance at best. The onus is on us, then, to pray, to dig, to learn and to discern a right course of action, as we will have to accept the eternal consequences of our choices on these weighty matters.

• The Illumination: Prepare to Meet Your God

The biggest challenge to the Blessed Virgin's message about the Illumination is simply believing it's going to happen. The Warning sounds utterly fantastic. A simultaneous judgement, granted to all the living--in the entire history of humanity nothing like this has ever happened before. So coming to this conviction is half the battle. And it requires much prayer, again, much spiritual maturity, and a big leap of faith.

When this faith is secured, the haze and fog clear away, and a preparatory path emerges.

The Warning, of course, is a great mystery, one we'll understand much better in hindsight. But according to all that's been prophesied, it has about three distinct stages, with a logical course of action at each.

Stage 1: Leading up to the Warning

Leading up to the Warning, the principal objective is to prepare ourselves, so as to mitigate its blow and put us in a position to help others.

“We must always be prepared with our souls in peace and not tied down so much to the things of this world. Instead, we must think very often that we are here to go to heaven and to be saints,” Conchita said in 1968.²⁸

In preparation, many have advised making a general confession. In his Spiritual Exercises, St. Ignatius provides an excellent preparation for one, with steps to identify the transgressions of one's life, to mull on them, and then to ask for pardon.²⁹

Stage 2: Immediately After the Warning

The warning is going to hit most of humanity like a 2x4 across the head. Within the space of a few moments, a society that caged and muzzled God centuries ago will encounter this roaring lion unleashed. And He will impart intimate self-knowledge to each; many will wretch and writhe in pain at the Scrooge-like smallness they see within themselves.

In the immediate aftermath, the world will be in a state of chaos and bewilderment. Many will spin out in despair. As Revelations says: the kings and princes of the earth will hide in caves and under rocks, asking the mountains to shield them from the wrath of God.³⁰

And so the role of a Catholic in this period is to ease the pain and unravel the confusion; to provide counsel and guidance, to encourage people to accept this immense grace and so secure their salvation.

Although an individual's charisms would inform how they specifically go about doing this, for every Catholic it entails honing up on the Church's teachings and developing some counseling and spiritual direction skills as well.

Stage 3: Six Weeks Following the Warning

According to prophecies, Lucifer will be bound in hell for about six weeks after the Warning, unable to tempt or derail us. It's a window of clarity God wishes to grant, to allow us to adjust to this change in a world view, and, if we choose, to redirect the course of our lives. Once released, however, Lucifer will return to middle earth with a vengeance and use every trick in the book to convince people to just forget about the Warning to resume their lives like it never happened.

And so we are to prepare for this as well; to put on the full armor of God, to establish cords of three, to pray and fast; so we're able to withstand all of satan's deception and attacks.

• The Reign of Communism

It's clear we are in the midst of the upheaval and chastisements the BVM forewarned at Garabandal. But with world leaders gunning for more, it's probable that we'll descend into greater tyranny and chaos. What we've seen so far; broken supply chains and empty shelves at grocery stores, de facto mandates for a dangerous experimental vaccine, dissident voices silenced; provides some clarity for a course of action.

Establishing parallel communities makes a lot of sense at this point. Investing in cryptocurrencies, gold, silver, local currencies, having a three-month supply of food on hand, building strong ties with people with a range of skills, will allow us to retain the semblance of a life amidst great persecution and social upheaval.

And certainly, the Church Militant must stand at the front lines of the resistance and prevail against the hell as it descends around us.

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The Blessed Virgin certainly provides us with much to mull with her messages at Garabandal. The specific course of action varies from individual to individual, and so a daily listening, a docile disposition and an openness to blow where the Holy Spirit wishes, lie at the crux of the response.

Conclusion

As we can see, our sweet mother has come through for us once again. With her council at Garabandal, she's illuminated a path through the rocky terrain of this present age.

But Garabandal, Spain feels different from Lourdes, France and Fatima, Portugal. Its streets aren't lined with five star hotels, modest motels, bed and breakfasts and hostels, with kiosks bulging with rosaries, plastic statues and holy water bottles. Airports don't bustle with pilgrims coming to pray for healing and forgiveness at Masses, rosaries and hours of reparation. Priests don't offer confession around the clock.

The Chair of Peter hasn't visited Garabandal to offer prayers of homage and gratitude to the Arc of the Covenant, the cause of our joy. A lonely breeze blows through the pines where she made most of her visits to the girls.

Will Garabandal one day be a throng for pilgrims like Lourdes and Fatima? The Blessed Virgin assured the girls it would be so.

It really is dismal to end with a round of woulda, coulda, shoulda, but until now the elephant in the room has been sidelined, and at this point his stomping will not be ignored.

Had Mary's messages been propagated and heeded en masse, the Church could have mitigated or even stayed the chastisements we're now living through.

With the announcement of her third message, the Church leaders, like the wise King of Nineveh, should have repented in sackcloth and ashes, and so purified the Spouse of the Lamb without spot.

Had the Church embraced the prophecy of the Warning, it would have leveraged its organizational capacity; in preparation, priests at every parish within every diocese would have instructed and prompted the laity to make a general confession; in its aftermath, programs would have been set up to counsel, guide, and advise the confused and distressed.

Instead, at the arrival of the single greatest act of mercy since the Incarnation, much of the Church will be as helpless and bewildered as the worst of them.

This failure of the Church to disseminate these time sensitive messages, to bring her council to us, right now, at this desperate hour for which they were intended, reflects a cluelessness on par with the Jewish elders of first century Palestine, who pored over Scriptures studying the arrival of the Messiah, but who failed to recognize His birth in cave in Palestine.

But like the three Wise men who did listen and who came to do Him homage, a few do listen today. Despite the Church's obstructions, and in no small part because of them, for many of her children, the BVM's messages at Garabandal are coming through loud and clear.

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What is your take on Garabandal, and the messages the Mary gave us there? What is your favorite Marian apparition and Shrine?

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1. Garabandal: Unstoppable Waterfall, Minutes 4-5. www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUYuO7M4k_s

2. “A Third Declaration” https://www.garabandal.it/en/documentation/going-deeper/972-a-third-declaration

Garabandal: Unstoppable Waterfall, Minutes 75-77.

3. “The Message of Garabandal” www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoXsD7CBCug&t=8s

4. "The Last Apparation” www.garabandal.us/the-story-of-garabandal-page-4/

5. https://www.garabandal.us/themessage/english.htm

6. “The Warning and the Miracle”: https://www.garabandal.us/pdfs/The-Warning-and-the-Miracle.pdf

“Cervantes: Communism coming back to sweep the world” https://www.sunstar.com.ph/article/1883446/pampanga/opinion/cervantes-communism-coming-back-to-sweep-the-world

7. Garabandal: Unstoppable Waterfall, minute 52.

8. https://www.garabandal.us/themessage/english.htm

9. Norms Regarding the Manner of Proceeding in the Discernment of Presumed Apparations or Revelations: https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19780225_norme-apparizioni_en.html

10. "Garabandal Apparatiaons”https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garabandal_apparitions#Position_of_the_Catholic_Church

11. Garabandal: Unstoppable Waterfall: Minutes 40-42 (Franciscan Priest), 59-60 (Bishop Puchtol), 56 (Mother Garcia, RCM of Burgos)

12. Garabandal: Unstoppable Waterfall, Minute 25-30.

13. Garabandal: Unstoppable Waterfall, Minutes 27-30.

14. Garabandal: Unstoppable Waterfall, Minutes 70-75.

15. Statements from the Bishops of Santander: https://www.garabandal.it/en/documentation/statements-from-the-bishops-of-santander

16. Garabandal Apparations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garabandal_apparitions#Position_of_the_Catholic_Church

17. The New Pagans and the Church, A 1958 Lecture by Joseph Ratzinger https://www.hprweb.com/2017/01/the-new-pagans-and-the-church/

18. St. Michael, His Prayer, And The Version You’ve Never Seen: https://www.goodcatholic.com/st-michael-his-prayer-and-the-version-youve-never-seen/

19. CATHOLIC EXPERTS IN STRONG DISSENT ON EDICT BY POPE; 87 Theologians, Mostly of Clergy, Say Birth-Control Ban Is Not Binding: https://www.nytimes.com/1968/07/31/archives/catholic-experts-in-strong-dissent-on-edict-by-pope-87-theologians.html

20. Catholics for Choice: https://www.catholicsforchoice.org/issues/contraception/

21. Catholic Moral Teaching and Tradition on COVID-19 Vaccines: https://www.cacatholic.org/CCC-vaccine-moral-acceptability

22. Catechism of the Catholic Church. Doubleday Publishers, April 1995 Article 2295:

“Experimentation on human beings is not morally legitimate if it exposes the subject's life or physical and pyschological integrity to disproportionate or avoidable risks. Experimentation on human beings does not conform to the dignity of the person if it takes place without the informed consent of the subject or those who legitimately speak for him.”

23. Covid-19, The Great Reset by Klaus Schwab. World Economic Forum, 2020.

24. G20 Leaders Agree to Global Vaccination Passport System: 'Where Will It End?': https://cmsedit.cbn.com/cbnnews/world/2022/november/g20-leaders-agree-to-global-vaccination-passport-to-limit-rights-of-travelers-where-will-it-end

25. Persecution of Christians in the Soviet Union: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Christians_in_the_Soviet_Union

26. The Warning or the Illumination of Conscience: https://www.michaeljournal.org/articles/roman-catholic-church/item/the-warning-or-the-illumination-of-conscience

27. Ephesians 4:14

28. The Warning and the Miracle: https://www.garabandal.us/pdfs/The-Warning-and-the-Miracle.pdf

29. The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. Translated by Louis J. Puhl, S. J. Loyola Press, 1951: Pages 23-34

30. cf Rev 6:15-6