October 30, 1947prev home next
Yesterday one of my seven witnesses informed me that a Dominican had written to him, saying, “I know from a soul that communicates with Our Lady that ‘we will be saved through Mary.’ I cannot tell you anything else. Remember this statement, and in two or three years you’ll be able to say something more to me.”
This witness of mine does not know about the communications I have received on the need to resort to Mary: the only final salvation for us. Except for Father Berti, no one knows about them. And Father Berti himself does net know about the next-to-last one on October 23 (about a Holy Year with a Marian character). This concomitance of voices on Mary’s power to save us gave me one of those sudden starts I always experience when from other sources - unknown to me, as I am to them - I hear things being repeated which I have been told.
The same witness informed me that Father Pietro Pennoni, in his recent visit to Camaiore (September 1947), had told Mrs. Favilla (one of the many fanatic women to whom, in an imprudent and disobedient way, the notebooks from 1943 to 1945 had been given by Fathers Migliorini, Pennoni, De Santis, and others) that Father Migliorini was continuing to write and copy the communications of the “spokesman” and that some notebooks had been presented to the Holy Father and the Holy Roman Rota (?) in order to be examined. Doesn’t this obstinacy in being tactless, imprudent, and so forth ever yield? May God forgive them and make provision....
This news pained and disturbed me throughout the evening, night, and morning. My thoughts then turned away from this bitterness to consider an event I would term... domestic.
Yesterday I was saying to my lodger, good, but not practicing, and soon to become a mother, “I don’t like to be a preacher. I leave everyone free to believe or not, to practice or not. I limit myself to showing my faith openly. And if my example is attractive, all the better. If not..., I let God act. I’ll tell you, though - since you’re afraid of a surgical birth - that you would be well advised to start setting your conscience in order. If you are in God’s grace, He and his Saints - especially Our Lady and St. Anne - will be benevolent towards you. I don’t like those who wait to cry out, ‘Lord, Lord’ when they are drowning, but don’t think about providing themselves with a lifejacket in time and then complain about the Lord’s not helping them....” She replied, “I’ll do what I ought to around Christmas,” and the conversation ended there.
This morning I reflected, “Alright. She’ll unload her conscience of all the Sunday Masses she did not attend and all the rest at Christmas. But the child will be born at the end of January.... She’ll thus have at least four Sundays without Mass on her conscience.... And so? If a disaster were to take place, what would happen to her poor soul?” And I turned to Jesus, saying, “Lord, she’s an ignorant woman, religiously illiterate. So apply your prayer of forgiveness to her because she ‘does not know what she is doing.’ ”
And Jesus unexpectedly replied, “And I’ll do so. And I indeed do so, precisely because she is a savage in religion. She is not far above those who have an instinctive stimulus towards God without knowing who the true God is. But she not to blame. There are so many like her! They have Baptism, Confirmation, the Eucharist, and other Sacraments because... it is the custom for them to be administered to children or to receive them.... And these Sacraments are like extraordinary encounters with Me.... They then lose sight of Me and no longer remember to come to Me, who am awaiting all the pilgrims of the earth. Their relatives don’t think about it; they don’t think about it. They are Catholics because they are baptized. But they are not united to Me because they do not live. They are animal-men and not Men united to God through Grace. They are indigent. And they should be pitied and helped to be saved. But you, on the other hand, will be judged severely because you have received perfect religious instruction directly from the Word of God: the Most Perfect One.”
I felt properly judged and worthy of hell. I already felt as if I were being enveloped by the infernal flames. I was tremendously frightened by these words.
But, after a pause in which He let me meditate - and I can assure everyone that I had never conducted such a severe and minute and contrite examination of conscience as I did this morning and had never annihilated myself so much on seeing myself as “mire, impurity, and unworthiness” as I did this morning - Jesus added, “I truly tell you that if you did not join a total love, like the love you have for Me, to your insufficiency, in comparison to the religious instruction I have given you, your stay in Purgatory would be very long, for you will be judged even for the slightest nuances, according to Justice. But Love will forgive you because of your love and according to my word. For I said, ‘Those who have loved greatly will be forgiven for many sins.’ And I say to you, ‘You will be forgiven for your veniality and insufficiency because you love Me with your whole capacity for loving.’ Go in peace, Maria. You are a victim of Justice, but it is Love that judges you. Do you understand? Love. The love of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. We: Love.”
And I thus got over my fright....