Chapter
Nine
The Era of Peace
"If people do as I ask, there will be peace." These words of hope spoken by Our Lady of Fatima preceded a long litany of misfortunes that she predicted would come upon the world if her requests were not taken seriously. It is imperative to realize that her assertion still holds: there definitely will be peace, if people do as she asks. If, even now, during the "last warnings," we respond with repentance, letting our hearts be cleansed of sin by God's forgiving grace, there will indeed be peace: peace first in each person's heart, then throughout the whole world in society, initiating an Era of Peace, which she prophesied would inevitably arrive.
Had we listened at the beginning, or at any time over the years she was remonstrating with us, we could have averted "wars, famine, persecution of the Church and of the Holy Father." Many good people would have been spared martyrdom, hunger would not have ravaged nations, Russia would have already been converted, and never would she have been able to "spread her errors throughout the world," The Second World War would never have happened.
But these afflictions did take place. Has peace been lost forever? Will the human race obliterate itself with global nuclear war? Is peace a dream, an illusion?
"In the end, My Immaculate Heart will triumph . . .and an Era of Peace will be given to the world." This promise is unconditional. Peace is coming. It will be the peace that Jesus gives, not that which is given by "the world." People will finally do as she asks, and there will be peace. Peace, and era of peace, is surely on its way. It is not an illusion to believe this. The Mother of God has predicted it. Despite human considerations and doubts, failures and sins, wars or punishment, her prophecy will come true "in the end."
The Era of Peace awaits The Triumph. Measuring the time that remains before peace arrives is not possible, since the coming of peace depends on The Triumph happening in us beforehand. We must first hold in our hearts the sinlessness of the Immaculate Heart before peace can come. Repentance must route sin before any peace can be ours. Love must override every other consideration, reconciling us all in gentleness, before we can see peace come. Families and neighborhoods, towns and cities, countries and nations must be reconciled before there can be peace. Above all, Christians must be brought together again in one Body which is the Church, before peace can descend on us from heaven. And the peace must be from heaven. Our Lady referred to this by assuring us that peace will "be given" to the world. It will come from God.
Thus the Era of Peace must wait until The Triumph is complete. Already it has begun in those who have heard the message of Our lady and have changed their lives, striving daily to become holy and pleasing to God, seeking to imitate the Immaculate Heart of Mary with their own hearts. The Warning has already torn untold millions from their sins; in them especially, The Triumph is gaining a foothold. The Miracle will confirm their decision for them and convert many more to follow Jesus. The grace of repentance flowing from these events may well so advance The Triumph that The Punishment will never happen. But the Era of Peace will not arrive until the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart is so complete that the hearts of all of us will have already been converted to peace.
Peace is a gift for the heart, and if a heart is at peace, it can give away peace. Peace in me can make the world around me a more peaceful place for others. By my peace, I am ready to be in friendly relationship with everyone I meet. Peaceful nations are made up of peaceful persons who have chosen peace as a way of life for themselves. There can be no war between nations full of peaceful men and women. A heart transformed by one's own inner peace can give to the world the peace that the world cannot give itself. It is those who share, through repentance and conversion, the peace of Jesus, who will inaugurate the Era of Peace promised to us all.
For these reasons, we must wait, we know not how long, for the Era of Peace. It can be hastened by people of peace, delayed by people who reject peace and embrace sin. We only know that it will certainly come, this mysterious "peace." The Immaculate Heart has promised it.
The Era of Peace can arrive very soon. We can hope for a short interval between The Miracle and The Era of Peace, and that The Punishment will not intervene. Should the world be rapidly converted by the marvelous events we have begun to experience in The Warning, it is possible for the Era of Peace to come quickly. After all, "nothing is impossible with God." Perhaps the great wave of intercessory prayer that will well up in the faithful for the conversion of the world will be so effective that The Era of Peace will come without delay. But we have to admit that a longer, even a much longer interval is also possible, and perhaps more likely (given our record of poor response to the messages), and that it may take many hard years before The Triumph is complete and The Era of Peace begins. We simply have no knowledge of how long it will be, after The Miracle, for The Era of Peace to be given to us. Peace may in fact appear only after The Punishment, which God surely will not be eager to see us suffer. We can hope The Era of Peace will come soon, so that through repentance, no punishment will be necessary to bring peace. May the peace of the Lord be with us all by the intercession of Mary, Mother of God. "Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now," in our times, that we may know world-wide peace again, in the Heart of Jesus and your Immaculate Heart.
THE
NEW
TIMES
Chapter
Ten
"All Will Love Our Hearts"
The whole world will be converted. To the mind that does not literally believe that "nothing is impossible with God", the previous sentence would seem utterly absurd. Yet, this is what Our Lord assured Conchita would happen when she asked Him the purpose of The Miracle at Garabandal. It would be, He revealed to her, not only for the conversion of Russia that The Miracle would be worked by the Lord, but for the conversion of the whole world. Then, to indicate that this conversion would actually be brought about by The Miracle, He stated further, "Thus, all will love Our Hearts." Jesus told Conchita that by The Great Miracle at Garabandal the entire world---"todos" (everybody)---will be converted. Evangelization, the task Jesus handed over to the Church when He ascended, will at last be universally accomplished. The whole world will become The Church.
World-conversion has happened before in history. Twice before, a "whole world" (as its inhabitants thought it to be) has been converted. The Mediterranean world in the early centuries of the Church's mission was completely turned around by the preaching of the Gospel. Another world, the New World of Central and South America, was evangelized with extreme rapidity when Our Lady "of Guadalupe" appeared to Juan Diego, a humble Indian newly converted. His testimony about his encounter with the Mother of God, together with the miraculous image she imprinted of herself on his cloak, led all God's people in that pagan country into the Church. The conversion of Mexico took only seven years thereafter, as eight million were converted. The whole of South America followed the same course, so that today almost half the baptized Catholics in the world live in that "New World."
A third World-Evangelization is about to break in on us. But this time it will not be just a segment of the globe's population, thinking of itself as a separate world, that will turn to Him and be saved. Every nation and each person on earth has been opened to the Gospel by The Warning. The Miracle will draw them toward the Church. These apocalyptic events will make it unquestionable that Jesus is truly Lord and that we must enter into Him and His Church to be saved.
The Church is being prepared. The Lord has been readying His Church for the greatest of its missionary efforts, the evangelization of the modern world. Vatican Council II irrevocably altered the direction of the Catholic Church, summoning us back to our primitive fervor and biblical roots, charting for us a new course which has for its destination the conversion of the entire world. The Council Fathers speak not only to the Church itself gathered around the successor of Saint Peter, the Pope, but to our "separated brethren" of the other Christian Churches, and also to the world that is neither Catholic nor Christian. The bishops break the barriers to dialogue by addressing in the Council even those who have never heard the Word of Christ. Their attitude restimulates in us the belief that God's Word still has all the power and life it needs to redeem the masses of humanity. The Bishops of the Council assumed the responsibility, issuing from Christ's command, to preach the Gospel to all the nations on the face of the earth. For centuries there have been insuperable obstacles, political, economic, cultural, and otherwise, to this enterprise. But today, many of the forces once antithetical to evangelizing are crumbling. Because of modern technological advances, improvements in communications, political cooperation among many nations, multi-national resources, and other developments, we are fast moving toward geopolitical unity. A similar unity was characteristic of the Roman world in the time of Christ and the apostolic Church. For some three hundred years the Mediterranean Sea was considered a "Roman Lake" across which missionaries like Saint Paul had free access to all the civilized world they knew, and to all its population centers. The "Pax Romana," or Roman Peace, reigned under the Caesars. Not without difficulty, but blessed by the world-situation, the people of the Roman Empire, slave and free, rich or poor, commoner, nobleman, emperor, eventually all entered the Church through the preaching of the apostles of the time. God had made ready the world, in the fullness of time, for the mystery and power of the "Good News" of Jesus Christ. With the indomitable strength and guidance of the Holy Spirit, the spread of the Gospel and the Church met with total success.
Today the Catholic Church looks toward her future with a new awareness of her call to evangelize. Not only did a recent Synod of Bishops (1974) state their commitment to it, but from the grassroots, among Catholics particularly, a new zeal to proclaim the Gospel throughout the whole world is becoming evident. God is preparing His Church for the great age of evangelization that is about to appear.
The whole world will be evangelized. The Marian apparitions, especially those at Fatima and Garabandal, invite the human race to repentance and salvation. Our Lady of Fatima declared that an Era of Peace would be "given to the world." At Garabandal, Our Lord promised "the conversion of thewhole world." The Era of Peace, The Triumph of the Immaculate Heart, and the Conversion of the Whole World were all predicted as an unconditional and definite future. All three imply the evangelization of the globe. An Age of Evangelization will begin soon, and to us who are His Church, He still commands, "Go into the whole world and preach the Gospel to every creature" (Mark 16:15). We must prepare ourselves for this, the greatest of God's works in history. The Father is going to send us, his little ones, to the four corners of the earth to bring the good news to everyone.
The Warning prepares the Church. It is the most compelling preparation the Lord could have given us for the coming Age of Evangelization. By The Warning, God demands that we face our sinfulness, always the major obstacle to the spread of the Gospel, and repent. We must be purified. The Warning also reveals to us that our times are unique, unlike any other times, and that a new age is dawning for which we must be ready. There have been "wars and rumors of wars," and we have been tempted to panic, as if the end were at hand. But Jesus tells us, "that is not yet the end" (Matthew 24:6). "This good news of the kingdom will be proclaimed to all the nations. Only after that will the end come" (Matthew 24:16). Could it be that he was referring to the Age of Evangelization we have been describing? To a priest with whom she was discussing the prophecies of Garabandal, Conchita stated, "When you see The Warning, you will know that we have opened up the end of time." This assertion is offered as her own opinion; she is not directly quoting Our Lady. But on other occasions she has insisted that we are near "the end of the times." The least we may infer from these declarations is that if they are accurate in their assessment of our moment of history, a great and final epoch is about to begin: The Era of Peace and the Age of Evangelization. The Warning is the "sign of the times" which announces to us the "New Times," the period of history when God will act in greater power than ever before to bring the Gospel, through His Church, to every creature. All will come to love the Hearts of Jesus and Mary, and love will reign in the world. The Warning was the first of these acts of power. It is preparing us all for the age of glory that is approaching.
The Church will be reunited. Time and again the Bishops attending the Synod on Evangelization in 1974 voiced their conviction in speeches to that august body that unless the Church again becomes one, it is futile to expect the evangelization of the world to develop. Our disunity is an evident scandal and a contradiction to the demands of the Gospel. The Holy Catholic Church must become one again in order to be recognizable to the nations as the Church that Jesus established. Unity is its distinguishing characteristic. But our common sinfulness has led us astray; history records break after break in the threads that weave together the seamless robe of Christ. Unity, true and full unity, must be attained once more before the evangelization of the world can even be considered likely.
Such unity has to be a gift from the Lord. Pope John Paul II has made assertions along this vein a number of times when referring to the divided condition of today's churches. His conviction that unity must come from God as grace and favor was expressed in his invitation to the leaders of the Christian world to journey to Rome for Pentecost Sunday in 1981 (June 7th) to first pray together to the Holy Spirit for unity, rather than immediately "discuss our differences" (his words).
God is determined to reunite His Church. The most excruciating pain the members of all the Christian churches felt on the day of The Warning was to see the harm we have all done to one another by not remaining one in heart and mind. By now the whole world would have become Christian, and many saved from perdition in centuries gone by, if we had continued to be faithful to one another. The Warning has made us aware of the enormity of this corporate sin of which all of us are to some degree guilty. We require a deep renewal of heart in order to reverse this division, and to embrace the full Catholic unity to which the Lord now directs us. Not only so-called "non-Catholics," but Catholics too, the Lord presses to lay down their cherished prejudices. Our hardness must be melted away for all hearts to flow together into one compact unity.
The conversion of Russia will be the turning point for the reunion of all Christians. It is required by the Lord, according to the Fatima messages, that the Consecration of that country to the Immaculate Heart be enacted by the Pope in union with all the Bishops of the world. The promise that Russia will be converted by this action will leave no doubt, after conversion follows swiftly, that it happened 1) by the intercession of the Immaculate Heart, and 2) by the authority of the Pope and the Bishops; it will establish before all eyes the traditional teaching of the Catholic Church concerning the Pope and Mary. It will be disconcerting to many that the Pope, the authority of the Church to bind and to loose (through him and the other Bishops), and Mary's power as channel of intercession and grace will be shown to be not the problem impeding Christian unity, but rather the solution to the problem. God will set our presuppositions on their heads. Unity will come because God wills it, because He has set out the way it shall be achieved, and because He, not we, is the giver of Unity.
The new Church will be humble. We will come together again in mutual forgiveness. Whatever gifts of the Spirit a particular church has received or rediscovered, it will share gladly with the others. The whole Church will be enriched by us all being together again in one Body. A fully empowered Church will become, in each member, evangelizer, apostle, preacher, servant. There will not only be chosen apostles who will go out into the highways and byways to compel them to come in; everyone will realize and carry out the mission given to us all: "Preach the Gospel everywhere!" It will be an age of conversion unlike any other. The entire Church, gathered together again by its own conversion into unity, will turn outward to bring in the harvest, lying in wait, ripe for reaping.
The Church reunited will be the Sign of Evangelization. Even though The Warning, The Miracle, and The Punishment (if it comes) will be signs for the whole world, they are given to focus our attention on the Great Sign of the Church itself, reunited by the Spirit, from which salvation must come. It is because we have stifled her witness by our sins that The Warning and The Miracle have become necessary. Prodigies and wonders alert us to where the mystery of the Church can be discovered. To point us toward the Church, God has determined that The Miracle will coincide with an important ecclesiastical event. The Miracle will take place on a Thursday evening at 8:30, to remind us that we find unity at the supper-table of the Church, for the Holy Eucharist was founded on that day and time of evening. The Miracle will happen on the Feast-day of a Martyr of the Church, again emphasizing that it was in unity with the Church that this martyr-saint gave his or her life in such love. The visible head of the Church, the Pope, and the Bishops, heads of the Church in their dioceses and eparchies, are, personally, sacramental signs of the unity of the Church who are called by their ministry to protect our oneness. The Miracle is to bring about the conversion of Russia and of the whole world; it will somehow be linked with the collegial consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart. The connection of this action of the Catholic Bishops united with the Pope will convince those of us who doubt it that God's power is with the Church united to that body, and this again will lead us toward a true Catholic unity with them. God wants us to again accept the Church as a credible witness to His truth, and to this end He will work these wonders to persuade us to seek Him with, through, and in His One True Church. It is His way of redeeming us, the "incarnational" way, whereby He gives us to one another so that we will find Him with, through, and in one another. We must allow ourselves to be taken into that Church and led by it. His Body is the Church, with all the gifts of the Holy Spirit as her patrimony, not excluding the Pope, Church authority and teaching, the Bishops and Priests, Mary, the Holy Eucharist and the other Sacraments, including Confession and indissoluble Matrimony. Reunited in the fullness of her gifts, the Church will shine like the sun before the nations. They will see that she alone offers and can give salvation, and they will stream into that heavenly city from all the corners of the earth.
The Church lives in time, and it will take time for the conversion of the world to take place and for evangelization to be completed. God can pierce time as He did during The Warning, but the spread of the message depends ordinally, even after such a prodigy as The Warning, on the ministry of the Churchin time. There has to be, therefore, an Era of Peace, to allow evangelization to unfold. The world will not be brought into the Church overnight, nor without struggle, persecution, hardship and pain. Not everyone has been so renovated by The Warning that all will immediately embrace the Christian faith. Local churches will need opportunity to become fully united and mature, strong enough to engage in the work of evangelizing. The process that began in Jerusalem and Antioch over nineteen centuries ago will have to be repeated, this time on a world-wide basis. A well-developed system of instruction, catechesis, pastoral care and mutual support must first blossom, to render recognizable the Church where all can find salvation. The Church must be properly organized to evangelize the world, and the world may be hesitant to surrender at once to the demands of living the full implications of the mystery of Church. The complete conversion of the world by the Church newly reunited will require much time. We will need the Era of Peace.
What will the Church of the Era of Peace be like? The prophecy given at Garabandal creating the greatest curiosity concerns the present Pope. Conchita tells us Our Lady revealed that "There will be only two more Popes after Paul VI, but that does not mean the end of the world." This difficult prediction implies that during the last years of history remaining before the Second Coming of Christ, the Church will have no Pope. Will it also be the Era of Peace? Or will the Era of Peace be so short that this present Pope, John Paul II, who according to the prophecy is the last one, will live to the end of it, when persecution begins again and only a short time is left before the world ends? Or can it signify that a form of Church unity will be embraced where the Petrine office will be exercised by more than one person or by a college of Patriarchs, somewhat after the manner of the Orthodox Church? The meaning of Mary's words is obscure, but she does link this prophecy about the last Pope with the "end of the times."
Perhaps the purpose the Blessed Virgin has in unveiling this unusual prediction is to prepare us for unprecedented organizational shifts in the structure of the Church of the future. Reunion and world-evangelization will require enormous alteration of attitudes and methods to accomplish the tasks at hand. The Church, it appears, will be vastly different from the one we are used to now, and light years away from the Church as it was before the Second Vatican Council.
Conclusion
This book has been written to prepare minds for the events to come. For over twenty years, the revelations of Garabandal have been held in doubt and confusion, through circumstances beyond the control of any of us. This situation was in the plan of God, and was predicted by Our Lady herself at Garabandal. But now The Warning has confirmed all those events, and dispelled the fog hanging over the apparitions that occurred there. Her words and lessons in that little mountain village also reaffirm and authenticate the Marian apparitions of the past, and link them all in a remarkable tapestry of prophecy that singles out the years we are passing through as the most important in history. She has given us the "Last Warnings," and we know we are seeing the "End of the Times." We are on the threshold of a new age, an Era of Peace, a time of evangelization without comparison. God is doing everything to prepare us. This book has attempted to bring to center-focus the elements of the basic message the Mother of God has been bringing to the world for over one hundred and fifty years.
God Himself has begun, by The Warning, to dramatically make clear to us that what Mary has proclaimed has been true all along. We can all see for ourselves what God is doing, because He is making His works apparent. No one can sincerely maintain, from now on, that there is no God or that He has no power. We are experiencing His judgement upon our world, which has drifted so far from Him. In His mercy, He now gives us the opportunity to turn back to Him before it is too late.
We must now wait for The Miracle, which will surely ensue within a year of the date of The Warning. It will eventually convert the whole world. A new world is being born. There are wars and rumors of wars, but we are not to panic, for "the end is not yet." There is an Era of Peace stretching out before us. We must reach out for it, grasp it, and give it to one another. We cannot delay any longer. The time is now.
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