Posted on 06/24/2002 8:36:27 AM PDT by Siobhan
It is nothing you will read in the diocesan newspaper. It is nothing you will see on network TV, or in The Boston Globe. It was certainly not an issue under discussion at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in Dallas. But here is a fact: the bishops of the United States were granted prescient warnings of the coming Church crisis by the Blessed Mother in apparitions to an Ohio nun named Sister Mildred Mary Ephrem Neuzil, and had the bishops listened to what the Virgin requested, they would have staved off or at least greatly lessened the recent damage.
The Blessed Mother's request to Sister Neuzil was straightforward, as reported here many times, and as sent to all the bishops: make the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington a place of special pilgrimage, dedicated to "purity" (as well as to our youth) and place a statue there representing Our Lady of America.
It did not seem like an outlandish request. It would not have taken much. It was a call to goodness (the Virgin fretted to Sister Neuzil about humility in the priesthood), and it was issued in an apparition that had the strong support of Archbishop Paul F. Leibold of Cincinnati, who promised Sister Neuzil he would work at installing the statue and who had a medal of Our Lady of America struck, along with a large plaque that hung in the chancery.
That's first-stage ecclesiastic approval -- and while there are several older cases whereby chapels were build in association with a vision or miracle, it was the first time an apparition had reached that level in the United States.
But Archbishop Leibold died before completing this mission, and the apparition has since been set aside or ignored by a Church hierarchy that, at least in the U.S., has grown cold toward apparitions. "Tell the Bishops of the United States, my loyal sons, of my desires and how I wish them to be carried out," the Blessed Mother had pleaded as long ago as 1957 to Sister Neuzil -- who then set forth a relentless campaign trying to dedicate a statue of youth and purity right up to her death in 2000.
Sister Neuzil herself became a victim of the rampant psychology, liberalism, and modernism that all but stripped the Catholic Church in America of its supernatural nature. In the end a move by her order toward secularism and away from "old-fashioned" traditions -- including cloister living -- sent her and several other nuns into a tailspin that ended with her death in a lonely house-turned-tiny-cloister in Fostoria, Ohio.
Such is obvious in Sister Neuzil's personal letters, starting in the late 1970s. It was during this time that the order to which Sister Neuzil belonged headed in a direction that put nuns in apartments, replaced habits with modern dress, and began to make life difficult for Sister Neuzil and six others who were living in a cloister within the order.
Suddenly, that cloister, home to the American apparitions, faced extinction.
"For the past 21 years we, the Contemplative Sisters, have attempted to live our monastic, contemplative way of life within the Congregation of the Sisters of the Precious Blood," said a letter signed by the seven cloister nuns, led by Sister M. Florecita. "Through the years it has become progressively more difficult for us to live out our way of life from within the framework of policies and norms intended for the entire Congregation. The difficulties we have encountered along the way have brought us to question whether or not we are trying to do an impossible thing: namely, to live one way of life from within another way of life."
Tensions between the cloister and the "active" community burst forth in the late-1970s to the point where the cloister was forced to leave a monastery they had spent years renovating and move into the lonely, spare quarters in Fostoria, Ohio, where Sister Neuzil lived until her death on January 10, 2000. "There is no way we can recover the monastery, as it has been sold to a lay person," lamented Sister Neuzil in a letter dated March 3, 1982, describing the situation in a previous letter as "the darkness of my exile."
It was all in the atmosphere of changes that swept the entire Church -- and that is now coming into special focus amid Church scandals. The underlying disease, indicated the Blessed Mother, was pride, a pride that in many cases caused priests to resist her grace. This the Virgin had warned about as far back as 1959. Years later, in 1981, Our Lady of America, speaking to the now-isolated Sister Neuzil, warned that a "web of evil" had therefore ensnared the priesthood.
Had the requested dedication taken place, the Blessed Mother, in all likelihood, would have empowered (as she often is empowered by consecration) to prevent many abuse situations that have specifically targeted our youth as well as priestly purity. Instead, the request has been set aside and there is no representation of the Virgin of America in our own national shrine, which does have altars dedicated to apparitions that occurred in far-off places like Croatia and India -- leaving the U.S. as the only major country in the West with no fully recognized apparition of Mary.
We believe this lack of devotion has severely hurt the Church in the U.S. A dedication to the Virgin's purity -- to her immaculate nature -- would have afforded a shield of protection. We also believe that had such a discussion taken place in Dallas, had the bishops finally installed her under the requested title, had they consecrated the nation to her purity, they would have transcended the crisis and sent the Church's enemies into a tailspin.
This may well become our fate if the situation in this country is not turned around, soon. There is still much talk of holding Vatican III, where the liberals can finish the plan they set in motion at Vatican II.
Keep the faith!
I keep reminding myself of St. Padre Pio saying "Pray, hope, and don't worry." It is a discipline I have been trying to practice, though 'worry' does get the best of me sometimes. God bless.
Any thoughts?
I believe it started in the 60s .. have you ever hear Dr. William Coulson speak? I had the priveledge of meeting Dr. Coulson and I think you will find what he says re the effect on the Church enlightening. Dr. Bill Coulson
"Dr. William Coulson was a disciple of the influential American psychologist Carl Rogers and for many years a co-practitioner of Roger's humanistic "non-directive" therapy. In 1964, Coulson was chief-of-staff at Rogers' Western Behavioral Sciences Institute in La Jolla, California. One of the popular methods of psychotherapy in the 60's and 70's was the "encounter group." The participants in such groups, under the direction of a facilitator, were encouraged to unmask their real feelings as they interacted with the other group participants. The practice has widely entered the church in various forms. As an initial experiment, Rogers and Coulson introduced the "encounter group" dynamic into the Order of the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in southern California. The results were devastating."
Most of our bishops don't seem to need too much outside help to discredit them, thank you very much! They're doing splendidly on their own.
It would seem though that "lesbianism" and other mental health problems don't materialize out of nowhere. Must have been something wrong with such people before they even entered religious life. Although that hardly excuses the unconventional touchy-feely psychobabble corrupting religious life. Delicate subject. Spotting people with problems early on in the formation stage requires cautious but charitable intervention. Breaking the news that someone is not mentally fit for a religious vocation must not be an easy job. Quite obviously this was neglected during the last 30 to 40 years.
Gee, did I say that? I remember when George Weigel and James Hitchcock were assessing the damage that "Third Force" and Transpersonal Psychology had played in disrupting religious life during the counter-cultural period. Hitchcock devoted some treatment of the impact of modern psychology in his book The Pope and the Jesuits as Mitch Pacwa did in his book on the same period. One would suppose that a variety of personality types might be vulnerable to the power of suggestion in such mind manipulation systems. There's no doubt that bad, wrong-headed psychology explains a certain amount of disorder in post-conciliar religious life. There are things which make some people more vulnerable to this. The Psych Department at the Jesuit university which previously employed me certainly had a few loony lib types. There really ought to be a scientific body which issues citations for such pseudo-intellectual neo-gnosticism.
hihil is nihil with a chuckle. Perhaps you have stumbled on an appropriate term.
Good Grief.
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