Dear Dreamboat,
The Future is a complicated prospect. Yes, at any particular moment there is a projected future which can be seen and prophesized; HOWEVER, there remains a certain mutability. The Apparitions of Our Lady often come prophesizing Doom, but the Doom is typically described as being on a sliding scale -- a Complete Universal Doom if everybody submerges into a general all-encompassing indulgence in Evil, and then a limited and mitigated Doom if a significant portion of the World's Population takes up a Moral Conversion and some certain practices of Atonement.
For instance, there was the 1848 Apparition of La Salette France in which Our Lady appeared to a couple of peasant shepherd children and told them that God was tremendously angry, but that She worked out a compromise -- if the people would only respect the Sabath and refrain from taking the Lord's name in vain then the Wrath would be averted. They could keep all of their other habitual sins, as long as they took a day off work (is that so difficult!?) and watch the content of their swearing and cursing a bit. I wish I could say anybody listened. But they only remembered the children's Prophecy after the fact -- when a general famine swept over Europe causing wheat to turn to dust, and potatoes to rot in the ground. It is best known to us as the Irish Potato Famine, because certain peasants in Ireland were able to escape aboard ships to live to describe it.
We often discount Prophesy that does not come through. A Nuclear Holocaust was predicted for 1986 unless Russia were consecrated to the Blessed Virgin. For years the Vatican negotiated with the Kremlin and the Orthodox Church, but on the very eve of 1986, the Vatican said screw it all and unalaterally held a solemn ceremony and consecrated Russia to the Blessed Virgin whether anybody in Russia liked it or not. Then, when Ronald Reagan stirred up international hatred and paranoia to a fever pitch -- openly fighting Russia in Afganistan -- and the hawks in the Kremlin pushed the "Button"... nothing happened. The launch motors failed to engage. It quite demoralized the Kremlin and they never were able to regather their morale and simply went off on a collective Vodca Binge and got steadily drunker and drunker so as to allow the most extensive Territorial Empire ever known on the face of the earth to slip away into a jurisdictional chaos, which American's still celebrate as a 'victory'. But that result was better than having to live, or die, with the results of a global thermonuclear war.
Of course other disasters have been projected...
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