During the past year and a half the Catholic Church in America has been rocked by revelations of widespread clerical sexual misconduct with minors, made worse by various attempted coverups by ecclesiastical authorities. Many instances of abused trust and lost innocence have come to light, resulting in grave harm to the Church’s overall reputation and credibility. Catholics are being forced to confront some painful questions and realities. Victims wonder if they can remain in a Church so slow to hear their cries for justice, while perpetrators hope for forgiveness and a way to atone for their sins; lay persons wonder if they can trust their priests and bishops, while innocent clergy live with a sense of bewilderment and the fear of false accusation. Parishes who’ve had pastors removed due to misconduct struggle with a sense of shock and loss, potential converts to Catholicism experience new doubts and hesitations, and bishops second-guess their handling of some admittedly very painful and difficult situations. This agonizing process of honest reassessment, which is both necessary and overdue, has the potential to make the Church stronger and holier—and because it forces so many of us as Catholics to confront some painful truths, we might say that in a certain sense, it’s a foreshadowing of the Warning.

The Warning, of course, refers to a prophesied worldwide spiritual event, in which every person on earth will simultaneously see the state of his or her soul; this "spiritual x-ray" will tell us whether we are on the path to damnation, or salvation. God will cause this unprecedented event to occur so that vast numbers of sinners will repent. The Warning, or the "Illumination of Conscience," was foretold to St. Catherine Laboure in 1830, to the 19th century stigmatist Marie-Julie Jahenny, to St. Faustina Kowalska in the 1930s, and to the four young seers of Garabandal, to whom Our Lady allegedly appeared a number of times from 1961-1965. Other visionaries have since spoken of the Warning, and there’s general agreement that, as a result of this happening, millions of sinners will repent and be restored to grace; many others, however, will reject this offer of Divine Mercy and become even more hardened in sin—and with the battle lines between good and evil drawn more clearly than ever before, the already-overwhelming pace of events will accelerate as we approach, not the end of the world, but the end of this age.

According to the seers of Garabandal, within a year of the Warning, a great Miracle will occur in the skies over Garabandal, involving something that can be seen, televised, but not touched (perhaps a giant luminous Cross), accompanied by the simultaneous healing of all ill and infirm persons in and near the town. If these two events do not bring about sufficient repentance on the part of humanity, then a great Chastisement or punishment will occur (presumably the Three Days of Darkness foretold by many past and contemporary visionaries); this chastisement will cleanse the world of sin and usher in a promised Era of Peace, in which God’s love and truth will reign in the hearts of everyone still on earth. This most glorious age of human history will be a time of religious unity, prosperity, and perfect harmony, and will last anywhere from twenty-five to a hundred years or more. These events have long been expected, but their timing is unknown. One of the Garabandal visionaries, Mari Loli, is said to know the year of the Warning, and another, Conchita, knows the date of the Miracle (a Thursday in March, April, or May, on or between the 8th and 16th of the month); moreover, Conchita is to announce the Miracle eight days before it occurs (giving time for pilgrims and the ill to gather in Garabandal, and allowing for it to be televised, thereby increasing its impact).

We don’t know when the Warning will occur, but — to those attuned to the "signs of the times" — it seems undeniable that a series of smaller warnings are already happening all around us. The most obvious example, of course, is the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Every climactic event in contemporary history has its defining images: the ruined warships belching black smoke into the sky over Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima in World War II, the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima after the dropping of the atomic bomb, the open-topped limousine in Dallas carrying President and Mrs. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, and so on. Images such as these have a way of searing themselves into our collective memory. This will undoubtedly prove true of one of the horrible pictures taken shortly after the terrorist attacks: the image of the devil’s face in the smoke billowing forth from the World Trade Center. This was surely more than a coincidence, for the events of that day certainly had a satanically-inspired element to them; deliberately causing the deaths of thousands of innocent people, as the terrorists did, is an unspeakably evil act. Heaven grieved with us on that day—but even so, the events of September 11 can, with hindsight, be seen as part of God’s ongoing warning to America.
Attacks Foretold

A number of seers allegedly received forewarnings of the attack, beginning with a 1990 prophecy to an anonymous visionary which stated that within twelve years the pride of New York would be broken, and that within four years an unprecedented new evil would be introduced—with our response to this evil determining the length and severity of the coming chastisements. (It was in 1994, of course, that President Clinton—based on a recommendation by the National Institute of Health—announced that the federal government would allow, but not yet fund, human embryo research). In 1998 the visionary Patricia Mundorf (now deceased) warned the FBI that the World Trade Center and the White House or Pentagon would be attacked, and on September 11, 1999—exactly two years before the attack—the Irish mystic Christina Gallagher, while visiting the United States, gestured toward the Twin Towers and declared, "If Americans don’t turn back to God, all of this will be destroyed!" Maria Esperanza, the visionary associated with the Church-approved apparitions of Our Lady at Betania, Venezuala, stated early in 2001 that something terrible would happen along the Eastern seaboard as a result of human cloning, and on August 25 2001—based on a message she received from St. Peter—she warned, "A great event will be happening in three weeks or three months."

The terrorist attack, of course, happened in the third week after Maria Esperanza’s ominous warning. September 11 also happened to be the 33rd day after President Bush announced the beginning of very limited federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. Even though the President honestly tried to limit the impact of this decision, a fateful line had been crossed: for the first time it was now legal to try to improve some human lives at the expense of other human lives. Several visionaries have said that following this decision, Our Lady’s mantle of protection was withdrawn from our country. On December 6, 2001, an alleged visionary named Judith (known to me personally) received this message from Mary: "Did you not know that in thinking you could create life, you have lost your soul? . . . Your nation, once strong and powerful (because she once trusted in God), has now been warned many, many times—yet she still is wayward. . . . You are a foolish and stubborn people. And by your actions, you have caused your own destruction. You put your foot upon the wrong path and your path has led to perdition. . . . And so I say to you now: Turn to my Son and ask for forgiveness, for there is one small grain of sand left in the hourglass of time. . . . Use this one small grain with wisdom and it will last a long time. Throw this small grain of sand away, and your time is limited. Be careful, my children, how you choose."