![\"Anabelle](\"https://catholicstand.com/wp-content/uploads/Anabelle-Hazard-Told-You-So.png\")
Hell froze over when I chopped off my hair for the official mom’s haircut. (My husband’s smile froze, too.) Then pigs started flying when I left my career to stay home full time and when my husband decided to forego the L.A. Lakers game in order to say the family rosary each night. All these combined earth-shattering events on the twelfth of never inevitably led me to one life-defining moment: Mamas know best.
The approximate time I acceded that my mama knew best was about the time I realized that Holy Mother Church’s dogmatic teachings on faith and morals are infallible. Both were spot on on the importance of Eucharistic devotion, the virtue of chastity and modesty, the sin of contraception, the error of \”gay marriage\”, the atrocity of abortion, the lunacy of euthanasia. “The Church is Mother and talks to the people as a mother talks to her child, with that confidence that the child already knows that everything he is being taught is for his good, because he knows he is loved,” Pope Francis said.
All along, Catholic mother and Catholic Church were right even though I’d been swayed by Hollywood on political opinions, relied on friends and acquaintances for decisions, or mingled with the neither here nor there mass of Cafeteria Catholics. I can almost hear my mom’s sing-song voice inside my head, “I told you so.”
Back when the Chicago Bulls were undefeated, I would have rolled my eyes at my mother’s gloating, but I now hail her proven wisdom in its fullness. Once I made peace with that, it was easy to consecrate my life to Our Lady using the St. Louis De Montforte’s preparation and prayer. It was only natural to trust Our Blessed Mother with my life, my marriage, motherhood, and children. Who better to lead me to Christ than the Blessed Mother herself? “For God, having given her power over his only-begotten and natural Son, also gave her power over his adopted children – not only in what concerns their body – which would be of little account – but also in what concerns their soul,” St. Louis De Montforte said.
If in the past I sought Our Lady’s apparition sites for miraculous answer to prayers (which she granted me by the way in a Church-approved apparition site in Banneaux, Belgium), I spiritually revisited many other apparition sites to study and read her messages: her loving motherhood in Guadalupe; requests for conversion and penance in Betania; urging us to pray the rosary in Fatima; revelation of the abundance of graces through her intercession in Rue Du Bac and even dire warnings in La Salette and Akita. My rueful logic was: If only I had put into practice the advice of holy mothers in the first place, I could have saved myself a lot of heartbreak and mistakes.
The most remarkable and recent of Church approved apparitions lies in Kibeho, Rwanda, Africa. In 1982-83, Our Lady of Kibeho appeared to several children, prophesying a brutal genocide that would eventually murder 800,000 people in 100 days. Though I’d initially intended to gloss over the horror of it, somehow I picked up Imaculee Ilibagiza’s book on Our Lady of Kibeho and listened to her heartbreaking testimony at a recent Diocesan conference.
Imaculee survived the genocide, found the depth her Catholic faith through the rosary while in hiding and forgave the murderers of her entire family. I will not recount Imaculee’s experience (it will be aired on EWTN soon enough and is detailed in her New York Times best-selling book Left to Tell) but I will say what had me sobbing was her narration of how she and her mother said goodbye with their eyes, across a crowd of thousands of villagers, anticipating the murderers’ approach, knowing they were seeing each other for the last time in this life. How often have I said goodbye to my mother through airport security lines, wondering if the next time I see her will be in eternity? How grateful I am that God gave me to her, and that she in turn had me baptized into Holy Mother Church, which unerringly paves my way to eternal life!
If Our Blessed Mother were in the human habit of saying “I told you so,” the events of Kibeho, Rwanda would have been the perfect opportunity to say it. But Our humble, gracious Immaculate Mother instead comes to us where we are, in our brokenness and sin, through our Bibles and rosaries, inviting us with the simplest of her life’s message: Follow the cross of my son Jesus and obey His Church. I only want to make your life a living fiat to God.
© 2013. Anabelle Hazard, Esq. All Rights Reserved.
12 thoughts on “She Told Us So”
*looks at picture*
Ah, THAT is the haircut!
While I go a different direction– don’t cut my hair and just throw it into a pony tail– I must give three cheers for a wonderful and well pointed intro!
Thought you’d be interested. Have you heard of the Marian Apparition in Lipa, Batangas?
Check it out at http://www.marianmessenger.ph
Pingback: 8 Things to Know and Share about Pentecost - Big Pulpit
The wages of sin are death. It may be difficult to swallow for his adherents, but Hitchens, a militant sodomite, died of throat cancer. One can imagine for what was finding it’s way both in and out of that particular cavity.
You read all of Hitchens work, and your lispy idol-worship, and it’s hard to argue that crude, uncultured mammals do NOT, indeed, publish imagined tomes and grievances masquerading as Inerrant Authority..
No doubt.
Heterophobic is no way to lead one’s life. Repent. Take off the figurative dress and be the man, THE WORD that was made flesh, made you to be..
Pax.
Hooray for Traditional Catholic Motherhood, but..
Only THREE of the numerous “visionaries” at Kibeho have Church approval. Imaculee’s story in inspirational, but she gives the same weight to all the seers. She knows better. EWTN knows better. The charismatics at EWTN have never known a “spirit” they didn’t like, unfortunately. The woman also works at the U.N., not exactly a bastion of Christian thought and philosophy, there.
Historically, FALSE apparitions outnumber AUTHENTIC ones by 300-1. That’s why the Church is so careful about validating such claims. UNITY PUBLISHING is a great site for such matters.
SALVE REGINA, MATER DEI, ORA PRO NOBIS!
Mr. JD, it is wonderful that the Church is prudent in authenticating claims. And not to be antagonistic, but I am curious: how and where was this “great chagrin of Heaven” expressed against Medjugorje?
Medjugorge has been condemned by three different bishops there. Each Bishop has requested people NOT come on tours. No Franciscan has had faculties there since 1985! They have refused their superior’s command to return. Medjugorge is a billion dollar industry.
There IS supernatural phenomena there, as in Garbandal, but it’s not from GOD! Sometimes such scams are just money-making schemes, but with no phenomena. Medjugorge, as with Garbandal, has both. At least with Garbandal, the seers recanted. The Medjugorge visionaries are all multi-millionaires. Doesn’t sound like the suffering and crosses we associate with authentic visionaries, does it?
False prophecies, endorsements of other condemned visions, and syncretism are all features of the demonic subterfuge there.
There is only one reason why the Catholic-Establishment Right keeps it alive. The demon of Medjugorge just LOVES the “charismatic renewal”. It goes on and on about it.
This is problematic for outlets like EWTN, diocesan “renewal” offices, and many post v-2 orders. These neo-montanists are attached to a “spirit” whose origin does not come from The Church. Pentecostalism was a late 19th century heresy that poor Catholic college kids turned to in the confusion that followed v-2 in the 1960’s. This was a time when the demonic spirit of v-2 encouraged Catholics to look for salvation outside the Church. “Triumphalism” was the only imagined evil then. (Early Christian Heresy-research “Montanus”)
“Pewitter” is a Catholic News Portal. If you search their site, you’ll find many articles on Benedict about to attach the penalty of sin to anyone promoting Medjugorge. In mid-January, Medjugorge “visionaries” descended on Rome, and told anyone that listened, that if Benedict did as expected, they would divulge “secrets” about Benedict.
Less than a month later, Benedict resigned.
Now follow, Medjugorge is clearly demonic. A little pause would tell you that if Joseph Ratzinger had any skeletons in his closet, infernal minions would know, as they know all of ours.
It is the diocesan ordinary who decides such matters. JP 2 and Francis support these demonic manifestations because if the different “charisms” of v-2 are not legitimate, then there would be no legitimate fruit of a “pastoral” council whose novelties catered to modernism, the world, and the flesh.
JP 2 gave gave the “legionnaires of Christ” (sic) his blessing, kissed a Koran, and gave us annual sanctuary-dancing shamans at Assisi where pagan idols were routinely placed on the Tabernacle.
Bergoglio favored “civil unions” in Argentina, introduced the “charismatic renewal” into same, and he allowed 2 men to marry in his Basilica in Buenos Aries (the transexual man there clearly looked the part of a bride, but was born a man. Bergoglio’s diocese knew, but the families are wealthy, prominent. Similar to how the degenerate “catholic” Kennedy’s (sic) are viewed in America. If you research Bergoglio, you become very afraid.
Please go to UNITY PUBLISHING site for more on Medjugorge. Please search ROMANCATHOLICWORLD for pictures of the aforementioned, infamous Buenos Aries scandal.
The Church has NEVER, EVER been at such a nadir. The Office can change a man, but Francis must be watched and measured carefully. I know this is a lot. Please open your eyes and see the seasons. We have a Pope. We know who he was as Bergoglio.
Pray that God may give him the spirit of repentance, reform, and a deep desire for martyrdom to purify Our Father’s house.
If not, I fear that The Most High will do it with all the promised burning, screaming, and bleeding the mystics have warned us about for some time.
SALVE REGINA, MATER MISERICORDIA, ORA PRO NOBIS!!!
Any man who contradicts Catholic principles cannot be a pope. The ‘Chair of Peter’ does not change the man to become Catholic. Adapting to the infallible spirit of the universal Magisterium is not the personality of Francis I.
http://www.novusordowatch.org/pope-francis.htm
Thanks for the reply but what you’ve cited in not the voice of heaven. Medjugorje is pending investigation. Until the Vatican commission establishes the Church’s official position, human opinion on it is not heaven’s.
Ah Hitchens. When you need a clueless atheist to create a strawman of an argument….
Infallible, really? “The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre, but we are not bound by any of it because it was put together by crude, uncultured human mammals.” ― Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
Pingback: She Told Us So - CATHOLIC FEAST - Sync your Soul