Picture taken in 1993 of the pope on vacation.
I've had this in my 'to translate' file for a few days, and I am sorry it got 'buried' somehow, and I failed to give it the priority it deserves. On the
other hand, I don't see that the story was ever picked up in the Catholic media and blogosphere. Perhaps, unlike the way it is for me,
nothing here is new to them - they read what he said about Islam in his 1993 apostolic exhortation (even if I do not recall anyone having brought
it up in the past five years of a pope who is doing the exact opposite of what the pope-saint exhorted); and they read his revelation about his
mystical experience everytime he says Mass in his 2003 encyclical (even if I do not recall it having been brought up at all during all the publicity
blitz surrounding his beatification and subsequent canonization). In any case, the narrative told in this article deserves high publicity and wide
dissemination...
St John Paul II’s prophecy in 1993:
Islam will invade Europe
Revelations about the mystical pope
from those who were close to him
by Valerio Pece
Translated from
November 18, 2017
“I see the Church of the third millennium afflicted by a mortal scourge, namely, Islamism. Islam will invade Europe. I see hordes coming – from Morocco, Libya, Egypt and the countries of the East”.
This was the shocking vision St. John Paul II had in 1993, which has never been disclosed till now. Witness to these words is Mons. Mauro Longhi, an Opus Dei priest in Trieste, Italy, who had been in frequent close contact with the Polish pope during his long pontificate.
Longhi spoke of the episode at the hermitage of Santi Pietro e Paoli in Val Camonica, northern Italy, at a conference organized to commemorate the pope-saint last October 22, his liturgical feast day.
Firt, some necessary geographical and temporal parameters are necessary in order to make this story clear, in the light of Karol Wojtyla’s little-reported mystical visions, as reported by a priest who is above suspicion – Mons. Longhi had the esteem of not just John Paul II but also of Benedict XVI who named him to the Congregation for the Clergy in 2007.
From 1985-1995, the then young economist Mauro Longhi (he would be ordained a priest only in 1995) had accompanied and hosted Papa Wojtyla in his legendary skiing and mountainwalking trips. Regularly, 4-5 times a year, during those ten years, Longhi was his guide in these unreported ‘escapades’ from the Vatican, in a place which has since become the summer seat of the Opus Dei’s international seminary.
At the time, it was a simple mountain hut for the use of Opus dei seminarians, particularly those intending to teach theology. The site is at 2600 ft altitude in the province of L’Aquila within the vast national park that comprises the mountainous inland of Abruzzo (the Appenine mountains). Just 50 miles east of Rome, the area has been compared advantageously to winter resorts in the Alps, favored by the fact that the area gets a heavy and lasting snowfall, more than the Alps some years, and that vacations in the Apennines are still quite a bargain, expense-wise. [
Because of its closeness to Rome, the area is also where Mons. Georg Gaenswein, an avid skier, goes to ski whenever he can take time off.]
“The Holy Father would leave Rome in great secrecy in a modest car, accompanied by Mons. Dsiwisz and some Polish friends,” Longhi recalls. “At the tollhouse service facilities along the autostrada, which was the only place where someone might recognize him, he would usually sit with a newspaper in front of his face, seemingly intent on reading".
Thus began Longhi’s series of anecdotes, often accompanied scrupulously, being the pastor he is, by appropriate theological explanations. And it was his stories of Karol Wotyla, the mystic, which kept his audience spellbound – stories that only very few were aware of - the secret mysterious experiences of the saint who had one of the longest pontificates in history.
This is the pope whom, Mons.Longhi says, he would often find at night in the chapel of the mountain cottage, kneeling for hours before the Tabernacle on a plain wooden pew. Whom, at times, he would hear conversing – so it seemed to him - sometimes even animatedly, with the Lord or with his beloved Mother Mary.
To get further glimpses of the mystic Wojtyla (which Antonio Socci did masterfully in his well-documented
I segreti di Karol Wojtyla, published by Rizzoli in 2008), Mons. Longhi recounted what was confided to him by Andrzej Deskur, the Polish cardinal who had been Wojtyla’s friend since they attended the clandestine seminary of Cracow together during the war years.
Deskur, who was president of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications from 1973-1984 (he already held the position 5 years before Wojtyla became pope), is considered by many to have been Wojtyla’s best friend.
He had famously offered his own suffering – he had a major stroke with consequent paralysis - for his friend Lolek’s pontificate in that profound mystery of ‘vicarious substitution’. Indeed, the night Wojtyla was elected pope, he made his first clandestine papal ’escapade’ to visit Deskur at the hospital.
Mons Longhi recalled:
“He had the gift of vision,” Deskur confided to me. And I asked him what he meant. “He speaks with the incarnate God, Jesus; he sees his face and that of his mother”. Since when? “Starting with his first Mass on November 2, 1946, at the Elevation of the Host. He said his first Mass in the crypt of St.LeonarD at the Cathedral of Wawel in Cracow, a feast he offered in the memory of his father.”
Apparently, since then, everytime he elevated the Host and the Chalice at Mass, he would see the eyes of God gazing on him, Deskur told Longhi. Indeed, the pope himself revealed this in his last encyclical
Ecclesia de Eucharistia (Church of the Eucharist) in 2003. [
For some reason, it seems no one in the media made much of this, because I did not even read about it in all the reportage that accompanied his beatification in 2011 and his canonization in 2014.]
In number 59 of the Conclusion, he reveals the mystery that accompanied him all his life:
Today I have the grace of offering the Church this Encyclical on the Eucharist on the Holy Thursday which falls during the twenty-fifth year of my Petrine ministry. As I do so, my heart is filled with gratitude.
For over a half century, every day, beginning on 2 November 1946, when I celebrated my first Mass in the Crypt of Saint Leonard in Wawel Cathedral in Krakow, my eyes have gazed in recollection upon the host and the chalice, where time and space in some way “merge” and the drama of Golgotha is re-presented in a living way, thus revealing its mysterious “contemporaneity”.
Each day my faith has been able to recognize in the consecrated bread and wine the divine Wayfarer who joined the two disciples on the road to Emmaus and opened their eyes to the light and their hearts to new hope (cf. Lk 24:13-35).]
But the episode that most struck Longhi’s audience in Bienno took place during one of the many walks that he took with the pope in the Gran Sasso mountains. Mons. Longhi precedes his account of this episode with a very human introduction, sometimes even hilarious, sharing sandwiches and jokes, especially the pope’s hyperbolic comment on the recent publication of his much-desired Catechism of the Catholic Church. (He said, ‘Don’t wait for the Latin
editione typica – it will contain many errors that will have to be corrected precipitously!”)
On that occasion, the Holy Father and Longhi, walking faster than their companions, had been separated from the group. (Mons. Longhi’s account and the way he leads towards speaking of Wojtyla’s mystical vision deserves to be watched in full on YouTube).
To wait for their companions to catch up, they stopped to eat their sandwiches, leaning on rocks facing each other.
“I had been gazing at him, wondering if he needed something, but he noticed that. His hands were trembling – it was among the first visible symptoms of his Parkinson’s affliction. “My dear Mauro,” he said, “it’s old age!” and I said quickly, “But no, Your Holiness, you are young!” But when you contradicted him in informal conversation, he could be fierce. “That’s not true! I say I am old because I am old!” (In 1993, he was 73.)
Longhi thinks that it was both the pope’s consciousness of the passage of time and the beginnings of an incurable disease that impelled him to say what he said next.
“He then changed both his voice and his tone, and recounting to me one of his nocturnal visions, he said, “Remind those whom you will meet in the Church of the third millennium. I see the Church afflicted by a mortal scourge – more profound, more sorrowful than those we have suffered in the second millennium (referring to Nazism and Communism). It is called Islamism. It will invade Europe. I see the hordes coming – from Morocco, Libya, Egypt and the countries of the East.
They will invade Europe, and Europe will be a cellar of old relics, shadows, cobwebs, memories of family. But you, the Church of the third millennium, must keep out that invasion. Not with weapons – they will not suffice – but by living your faith with integrity”.
This then is the testimony of someone who for 10 years was in close contact with him, and with whom he concelebrated daily Mass many times. It will be noted that
the pope said all that in March 1993 – 24 years ago, when both the social context as well as the number of Muslims in Europe was very different.
It is not by chance that in the now virtually forgotten Apostolic Exhortation of 1993,
Ecclesia in Europa, John Paul II spoke clearly of a ‘proper’ relationship with Islam:
“A proper relationship with Islam [underscored in the original text] is particularly important. As has often become evident in recent years to the Bishops of Europe, this “needs to be conducted prudently, with clear ideas about possibilities and limits, and with confidence in God's saving plan for all his children”. (No. 57).