Garabandal
13 April 1999 11:35
Fr. «X» ended his article titled «Three and a Half Years of the Antichrist», which was forwarded to this list in February, with the following words:
«… the destruction of Satan’s kingdom cannot be far away. In short, Vassula’s writings confirm the hope and the promise raised by Our Blessed Virgin in the writings of Fr. Gobbi that the era of peace is truly at our doorstep.»
These words encourage me to forward the following to this list.
Readers may be surprised to hear that the apparitions of Garabandal are mentioned in no less than 32 separate messages given to Vassula. I myself had never heard of Garabandal before reading True Life in God. The apparitions in Garabandal, which occurred in the early 1960s, are important in many ways but it is the prophecies of the Warning and the Great Miracle to which I refer here. Garabandal prophesies a great miracle which will occur in Garabandal itself. It also prophesies a Warning to mankind which will occur prior to the miracle.
Conchita, one of the Garabandal visionaries, has stated the following regarding when the Great Miracle will occur:
‘It will occur between the 8th and 16th March, April or May, on a Thursday at 8.30pm (year unspecified). It will be on the feast of a young martyr of the Eucharist and will coincide with a great ecclesiastical event in the Church.’
Speculation as to who this martyr of the Eucharist might be has continued ever since the apparitions ended, in the hope of discovering when the miracle might occur. To my knowledge, no ‘suitable’ candidate has ever been proposed who ‘fitted’ Conchita’s ‘requirements’. But now the name of a young girl who was born in 1322 has been put forward and the following information strikes me as being, at the very least, worthy of mention.
The girl’s name is Blessed Imelda Lambertini. From a very early age she showed great piety. When only nine years old she asked to enter a Dominican convent and was allowed to do so, following the sisters schedule as far as possible. Imelda showed great devotion to the Eucharistic presence of Our Lord at Mass and in the tabernacle. Although her consuming desire was to receive Our Lord in Holy Communion, she was not able to do so as the earliest age, at that time, for a child to receive Communion was 12.
Then, on May 12, 1333, after the vigil Mass of the Ascension, while Imelda remained in prayer, a Host appeared suspended above her head. The priest was called and he took the Host, put it on a platen and then gave it to the child. After the disturbance all this caused had died down, Imelda remained kneeling in Church. Later the prioress was called to her but she found her still kneeling, a smile on her lips, but Imelda was dead. This story has echoes of the death of Fr. Andreu who died during the apparitions in Garabandal, immediately after having been shown the Great Miracle.
Imelda was beatified in 1826. Her feast day is the thirteenth of May. While she is not a martyr in the obvious sense of the word, in a deeper sense she is truly a ‘martyr of the Eucharist’. It is also worthy of mention that Jesus refers to Imelda, by name, in Maria Valtorta’s Poem of the Man God. The following additional points strike me as significant:
May 13th, this year, marks 666 years since Imelda’s death.
May 13th is the anniversary of the first apparitions of Our Lady in Fatima and is the day the Pope was shot in Rome.
May 13th this year is Ascension Thursday.
I hope that by forwarding this information to the list I am not encouraging ‘date watching’, but some of the ‘coincidences’ involved strike me as worthy of note.
David Armitage
