"Will you please listen?"

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We have been blessed by our Blessed Mother, whom Christ gave to us as St. John’s mother and our mother, spiritually speaking as well, while on the cross at Calvary (John 19:26-27)!

Over the centuries she has appeared to numerous saints in Church approved private revelations filled with her wonderful love for us but also having great concern for fallen humanity as well. She sees how easily, readily and indeed frequently we commit mortal sins that lead so many souls to fall into Hell, especially from sins of impurity!

Sadly, she herself has been an object not of veneration but rather indifference and even scorn from many non-Catholic Christians over the past few centuries who think of her as an interloper rather than a powerful intercessor for us with her Divine Son.

So many of them mistakenly think we Catholics give Mary the worship we give to God rather than honoring our Blessed Mother in our prayers, such as in the Rosary.

Yet we see Mary in several striking Church approved apparitions pleading for sinners to listen to her Divine Son, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and to stop offending Him so much and so deeply.

We even have verified accounts of Mary weeping in several situations over the gravity of our sins, and the hostility or indifference in which we treat the idea of obedience to God.

We see this in the stories of Our Lady of LaSalette in France in 1846 as well as that of our Lady of Akita in Japan from 1973-1981, in which both blood and tears emanated from a wooden statue of Our Lady on numerous occasions.

In a well-documented book covering various Marian apparitions from the past century entitled, appropriately enough The World of Marian Apparitions, author Adam Blai notes in the introduction that while there have only been 26 officially Church approved apparitions in total, 10 by local bishops and 16 by Rome, there have been hundreds more accounts of these over the centuries!

In many of these messages we see Mary asking, even pleading, with us to serve her Divine Son in loving obedience in prayer (especially the Rosary), penance for our sins, and in praying for the conversion of sinners when all this has been found to be so strikingly lacking!

Going back to the tears at La Salette and Akita, and somber warnings given then and at Fatima in 1917, among other places, it’s as if our Blessed Mother is saying to all of us: "Will you please listen to me? Mankind has to stop offending God or there will be a terrible chastisement for humanity, and everyone, both the good and the bad, will experience tremendous suffering."

Yet do we listen? After all, we know better than our Creator, right? How, when lifted from the shackles of having to obey His commandments we can find true freedom, authenticity and happiness, right? Yeah, right! (And while we’re asking questions, how’s atheism and assorted notions of the superiority of man over God working out for everybody these days?)

Most significantly, our Blessed Mother specifically warned the three visionaries at Fatima in 1917 that if mankind did not stop offending our Lord with so many sins, that a worse war (which became World War II) than the one that would end soon (in 1917, that is, World War I) would break out under the reign of Pius XI, which indeed happened.

And at Akita, on October 13, 1973, Mary warned of a great apostasy within the Church, along with a somber chilling warning, that if man didn’t cease offending God so egregiously that He would inflict a Divine Chastisement on the world so grave, including fire falling from the sky, that the living would envy the dead.

So, on that note, let us imagine for a moment, considering these apparitions, what Mary must be thinking as she sees humanity in such a debauched, divided state these days, as we proceed further into what might well be called the Terrible Twenties.

As she surveys the wreckage and great peril of these times, even though she, like her Divine Son, has seen this coming for centuries, might she not say to us as she exhorts us to doing penances and praying for the conversion of sinners in loving obedience to God, along with praying many Rosaries:

"Will you please listen to me? Stop offending God!
And pray!"

She sees us being led by elites drunk on their own power and alleged omnipotence who fashion themselves as Gods knowing good and evil.

They ominously obsess on population and carbon reduction thinking planet Earth is more important than its people. In their arrogance they have chloroformed their consciences rendering them virtually comatose. For these elites, right and wrong is whatever they say it is!

Some of them even arrogantly seek immortality through new technologies. These are souls devoid of any real sense of empathy or remorse seeking only more and more power for themselves! Seeing this, Mary might well say:

"Will you please listen to me? Stop offending God!
And pray!"

Paradoxically enough, any notion that we should embrace the Social Kingdom of Christ has been shunted aside as these elites worldwide give us empty promises of a New Technocratic society in which humans merge with machines for a whole new utopia in which we shall be as Gods, knowing good and evil.

The fact that similar attempts from the likes of Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, to name a few of these despots, to make heaven on earth without God have given us Hell instead, means nothing to those in charge who crave more and more control over all of us!

While so many in the communications and entertainment media, along with far too many college students, embrace Marxist solutions that proved so disastrous last century (as "Russia would spread her errors” as our Lady warned us she would at Fatima), Mary may well ask:

"Will you please listen to me? Stop offending God!
And pray!"

Her somber warning to the Fatima visionaries about so many souls falling into Hell over sins of impurity are almost completely ignored in our hyper-sexualized society in which even young children are being exposed to pornographic material in their classrooms!

And many of our young people are being encouraged into undergoing so-called Gender affirming reassignment surgeries in which Johnny is encouraged to become Janey and vice-versa, without being given adequate information about the physical and emotional side effects of such procedures.

And suddenly as well, it seems that God’s having made two genders, male and female, has become offensive to some people in a society that proclaims there are many more than that of course. There were almost 100 genders listed in a San Francisco application for a Guaranteed Income Program published in the Fall of 2022.  Seeing all this Mary may well ask:

"Will you please listen to me? Stop offending God.
And pray!"

Speaking of things offensive, our Blessed Mother looks at a society filled with people proclaiming how offended and oppressed they are from traditional American culture and values, on College campuses filled with Marxist-leaning students majoring in what could be called Resentment Studies.

An America in which the Latin Mass is the subject of FBI scrutiny and the words “Christian Nationalist” have become an epithet in elite, Marxist, and other far-left leaning circles. And yet one where few people care whether or not God is offended by all this! And again Mary may well say:

"Will you please listen to me? Stop offending God. And pray!"

While she warned us at Fatima about the danger of the annihilation of various nations, we see what was once unthinkable, World War III, a shooting war between nuclear armed Russia and NATO, is starting to look like more and more of a possibility over Ukraine; or perhaps with China over Taiwan, or from some erupting flashpoint in the Middle East.

And if that’s not enough, we see a world teetering on the edge of Economic Collapse from an avalanche of debt falling down on all of us. As if to underscore the lateness of the hour, and the perilous condition in which humanity might well be facing a truly Biblical Divine chastisement started from our own hands, Mary may well cry out:

"Will you please listen to me? Stop offending God! And pray!"

While the hour is indeed late, it is never too late as long as we’re alive, to turn our faces, not our backs, to God (Jeremiah 32:33), and implore His mercy and His grace to truly reform ourselves or just to stay on the righteous path as "citizens-in-training" for heaven, leading prayerful and sacramental lives.

And for each and every one of us to strive to love God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength, and our neighbor as ourselves (Mark 12:28-31).

So let us take heed of our Blessed Mother’s counsel from her various apparitions and pray many Rosaries and do penances for sinners to mitigate the chastisement that lies straight ahead for sinful humanity as a whole. And to seek God’s mercy and grace like there’s no tomorrow.

For one of these days indeed, maybe sooner than we think, there might not be a tomorrow, at least not in this life, for many of us! Lord, have mercy! Christ, have mercy! Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us, Our Lady of Akita, pray for us!