One thing shared in common by several rejected or partially rejected alleged apparitions of the Virgin Mary: their mention of the Church in any sort of negative light.
Start with Our Lady of LaSalette in 1846, where a prophecy to do with a coming devastating crop failure given to both seers (Melanie Calvat and Maximin Giraud) was officially accepted while a “secret” granted solely to Melanie was alternately (depending on bishop) rejected, accepted, and, finally, rejected again.
The spurned message had said, in part, “The priests, ministers of my Son, the priests, by their wicked lives, by their irreverence and their impiety in the celebration of the holy mysteries, by their love of money, their love of honor and pleasures, the priests have become cesspools of impurity. Yes, the priests are asking vengeance, and vengeance is hanging over their heads. Woe to the priests and those dedicated to God who by their unfaithfulness and their wicked lives are crucifying my Son again!” It wasn’t a message to warm the hearts of clerics.
And it didn’t stop there. “A great number of priests and members of religious orders will break away from the true religion; among these people there will even be bishops.”
Then: “The Holy Father will suffer a great deal” and “the Church will witness a frightful crisis.”
“For,” said Melanie’s secret, “the devil will resort to all his evil tricks to introduce sinners into religious orders” and “many convents are no longer houses of God, but the grazing grounds of Asmodeus [a king of demons] and his like.”
To be sure, there were other reasons the Church didn’t warm up to that part of the apparition: Melanie’s secret had parts that seemed overly apocalyptic and bore what some believed to have suspicious similarity to controversial prophecies by religious seers, particularly in France earlier that century and the previous.
Also, the seer wrote her secret many years after the apparition, while living with nuns who, some said, may have influenced her.
And: would the Blessed Mother speak quite so harshly?
Perhaps not. But there is no doubting the accuracy, even astonishing prescience, of parts of the predictions.
At top-tier apparitions—Lourdes, Fatima, Guadalupe, Miraculous Medal, Medjugorje—was no harshness when it came to the Church. But the image of a Pope suffering in the third Fatima secret could be interpreted various ways (mainly as persecution), and Church problems were mentioned at Our Lady of Good Success in Quito in 1611, where, among other things—in a message that may not have been fully recognized (though, like LaSalette, the apparition itself was), the Virgin reportedly said:
“The Sacred Sacrament of Holy Orders would be ridiculed, oppressed and despised. The demon would labor unceasingly to corrupt the clergy and would succeed with many of them. And these ‘depraved priests,’ who will scandalize the Christian people, will incite the hatred of the bad Christians and the enemies of the Roman, Catholic and Apostolic Church to fall upon all priests. This apparent triumph of Satan will bring enormous sufferings upon the good pastors of the Church.”
About the Sacrament of Matrimony, which symbolizes the union of Christ with His Church, Our Lady of Good Success said, “Masonry, which will then be in power, will enact iniquitous laws with the objective of doing away with this Sacrament, making it easy for everyone to live in sin… The Christian spirit will rapidly decay, extinguishing the precious light of Faith until it reaches the point that there will be an almost total and general corruption of customs. In these unhappy times, there will be unbridled luxury that would conquer innumerable frivolous souls who will be lost. Innocence will almost no longer be found in children, nor modesty in women. In this supreme moment of need of the Church, those who should speak will fall silent.”
In more recent times, a message to the nun Sister Agnes Sasagawa, near Akita, Japan in 1973, “The work of the devil will infiltrate even into the Church in such a way that one will see cardinals opposing cardinals, bishops against bishops. The priests who venerate me will be scorned and opposed by their confreres…churches and altars sacked; the Church will be full of those who accept compromises and the demon will press many priests and consecrated souls to leave the service of the Lord.”
While her local bishop approved the phenomena attached to the nun (a statue that wept real tears on one hundred and one occasions), the entirety of Sister Sasagawa’s experience has not been as welcomed, perhaps due in part to lines like that.
(Compare them to a supposed version of the third Fàtima secret, circulated in 1963 by a German publication called Neues Europa, which claimed to have intercepted it as the secret was conveyed to at least two leaders, John F. Kennedy and Nikita Krushchev:
(“What I have already made known at La Salette through the children Melanie and Maximin, I repeat today before you. Mankind has not developed as God expected. Mankind has gone astray and has trampled underfoot the gifts which were given it. There is no order in anything. Even in the highest positions, it is Satan who governs and decides how affairs are to be conducted. He will even know how to find his way to the highest positions in the Church. He will succeed in sowing confusion in the minds of the great scientists who invent arms, with which half of humanity can be destroyed in a few minutes. If mankind does not refrain from wrongdoing and be converted, I shall be forced to let fall My Son’s arm. If those at the top, in the world and in the Church, do not oppose these ways, it is I who shall do so, and I shall pray God My Father to visit His justice on mankind.
(“There will also come a time of the hardest trials for the Church.
(Cardinals will be against Cardinals and bishops against bishops. Satan will put himself in their midst. In Rome, also, there will be big changes. What is rotten will fall, and what will fall must not be maintained. The Church will be darkened and the world plunged into confusion.”)
Pope John Paul II and Sister Lucia dos Santos, the only living seer from Fàtima, both reportedly denounced the Neues Europa version, though–in some aspects, especially to do with natural disasters–it resembled an “enlightenment” granted to Lucia in 1944.
Had Sister Sasagawa read the Neues Europa report (despite her remoteness, her lack of proficiency in other languages, and the relative obscurity of the German publication)? This much we know: Sister Sasagawa was all but ostracized from her convent, dying (August 15, 2024) in a distant nursing home without a formal funeral. In the convent’s literature, a passage on the phenomena doesn’t use her full name, opting instead to call her “Sister S.”
Fully rejected were dozens of apparitions in Amsterdam to a laywoman named Ide Peerdeman beginning on March 25, 1945, and supposedly lasting until 1959.
Among the alleged visions:
“I see St. Peter’s. The Lady stretches her hand over it and says, ‘That shall and must be protected. The other spirit is penetrating so dreadfully.’ This Church still has its chance, but I will not say more about it. I already spoke about the modern world. Why does Rome not seek for more modern means, and why do they not work more in the modern spirit? They should take advantage of these means to win over the world’s spirit. There are others to care for the body. The Church has to work on forming the spirit. Right now they have such a great opportunity.”
The “apparition” was urging modernism!
But it also seemed to uncannily foresee trends in Germany.
During 1950 Peerdeman, said, “The Pope should send the means and summon the priests; otherwise Germany will perish. There is a great, immense apostasy there. People do not want to give offerings for new churches and buildings. The priests must be spurred on towards this. It is a hard job. I am only warning. The others are very busy drawing the German people away from Rome.”
Rejected also, in the recent slew of Vatican declarations, were alleged apparitions to a Brazilian whose messages included virtually every form of natural and man-made disasters (as well as Church scandal and harsh criticism of the Pope) and one in Trevignano Romano, Italy, associated with Gisella Cardia, which included messages that would likewise be seen as critical of certain aspects of the Catholic Church.
There were also unsettling phenomena (including odd stigmatic marks on her, a statue that bled with blood that was found to genetically match Cardia’s, and the multiplication of food, reportedly including gnocchi and pizza), plus highly questionable aspects of her previous career, including a conviction for fraudulent bankruptcy in Sicily.
We report. You discern.
[resources: The Last Secret]
