It is unlikely that there is at least one person in the world who has not heard of the Virgin Mary. From the first days after her Assumption to this day, the Blessed Virgin Mary has been helping Christians. According to the Holy Scriptures, the Mother of God, appearing to the apostles on the third day after Her Assumption, said to them: "Rejoice, I will be with you all the days."
It is noted that the apparitions of the Mother of God most often coincide with some impending disasters, wars and other large-scale disasters.
Virgin Mary seems to warn people about danger. Most often, She appears in the form of a light, as if woven from a haze of a female silhouette. According to church scriptures, Jesus crucified on the cross entrusted His Mother to His care of John the Theologian, his beloved disciple, and all of humanity to the Most Holy Theotokos.
There is an opinion that the Mother of God does not appear to everyone, but only to those who deeply believe and listen to her advice. Of course, this Divine miracle, like all other miracles, is criticized and disbelieved by skeptics. But be that as it may, there are cases when Divine help contributed to the salvation of people.
SENIOR GUADELUPE
In Latin America, the most revered shrine is the miraculous image of the Virgin Mary of Guadeloupe. She is considered the patroness of both Americas and is called: "Our Lady of Guadeloupe." It all began in December 1531, when the 17-year-old Indian Juan Diego, walking to morning mass by the Tepeyac hill, heard someone singing from above.
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Climbing the hill, the young man saw a young woman who looked more like his fellow tribesmen than a Spanish woman. The woman was as if inside a shining cloud. She introduced herself as the Mother of God. Four days in a row, the Mother of God appeared to Juan Diego, addressing the young man with a request that a church be built on this hill, where everyone could honor her Son - Jesus Christ.
However, the priests decided that the young man was simply fantasizing, because the Indians, as the Spaniards believed then, did not have a soul, which means that the Mother of God could not appear to them.
Then the Virgin Mary told the Indian to pick flowers on a rocky hill. The young man obeyed meekly, although he knew perfectly well that nothing was growing there. And suddenly he saw a rose bush growing right on the stone. “This is My sign,” said the Virgin Mary. “Take these roses, wrap them in your cloak, and take them to the bishop. This time he will believe you."
When Juan Diego unfolded his cloak in front of the bishop, everyone present fell to their knees: the image of the Blessed Virgin was imprinted on the fabric of the cloak. After that, six million Indians converted to Christianity. This is how the baptism of Latin America took place.
I AM THE IMPACT CONCEPT
The small town of Lourdes, located in southwestern France, became widely known in 1858 thanks to a 14-year-old girl, Bernadette Soubirous. It was she who was honored to witness as many as 18 (!) Apparitions of the Virgin Mary. In the cold February of 1858, Bernadette and the other children were gathering branches in the grove for kindling.
To get to the branches, they had to wade across the stream. When Bernadette came to the other side, she heard a noise similar to the sound of the wind, and near the grotto that opened to her eyes she saw a lady in a white dress, at whose feet were scattered yellow roses. Surprisingly, no one else saw anything.
This time, the girl did not dare to talk to the stranger, she decided that it was the ghost of a recently deceased resident of the village. Despite the fear, she was drawn to the grotto, and she came there again and again. Now the girl understood that the Virgin Mary appeared before her, asking her to pray for sinners. In one of her apparitions, the Mother of God gave Bernadette a commission: "Go to the priests and say: I want a chapel to be built here."
But the priests took the stories for empty fiction, and the girl was completely crazy. Only her confessor asked to find out the woman's name. And the Mother of God answered: "I am the Immaculate Conception." When the girl conveyed these words to him, the priest was amazed to the core.
Bernadette could not have known that shortly before the events described, Pope Pius IX proclaimed the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Most Holy Theotokos. Before that, the ministers themselves used the expression "Sinless Conception". And this meant that the girl really communicated with the Virgin Mary.
The Mother of God also showed Bernadette a miraculous source, to which millions of people began to flock later. In the first year alone, this source had five officially certified healings. Bernadette later became a nun under the name Maria Bernarda and died at the age of 35. Already in 1933 she was canonized in the Catholic Church.
Before recognizing her as a saint, representatives of the Catholic Church opened the grave three times. The exhumation was witnessed not only by priests, but also by doctors, as well as other respected members of society. And each time they were all convinced: the body of Bernadette Soubirous was not touched by decay. A temple was built on the site of the appearance of the Virgin, and now Lourdes is visited by about five million pilgrims a year.
FATIM MIRACLE
Perhaps the most significant and famous series of apparitions of the Mother of God began in May 1917 in the Portuguese city of Fatima.
First, the Virgin Mary appeared to three children: Lucia, Jacinte and Francisco, who were playing in a field near their home. She asked if they were ready to become the chosen ones of the Lord in order to atone for the insults and blasphemy inflicted on the Mother of God. They enthusiastically agreed.
As she left, she instructed the children to pray daily for peace and the salvation of sinners and ordered them to come to the meeting place on the thirteenth day of each month. The guys told their parents about everything, and they, in turn, told their neighbors. And already on the 13th day of the next month, about 60 people accompanied the children.
I must say that no one saw the Mother of God, except for these three children, nevertheless, every month there were more and more people on the field.
Pilgrims began to flock to Fatima from all over the world. Two days before October 13, all roads leading to the city were clogged with carts and pedestrians. Waiting for the appearance of the Virgin Mary, people, and there were about 70 thousand of them, slept on the ground, despite the cold October rain, which had been pouring for three days.
Everyone was soaked to the skin. At noon, everyone in attendance knelt down despite the mud and puddles. Lucia, seeing the Mother of God, exclaimed: "Here she is!" And everyone saw how a light white cloud enveloped the children. It went up three times and again fell on the children.
Then eyewitnesses said that the rain suddenly stopped, the sun came out, but its appearance was strange: a disk surrounded by a shining crown, which could be looked at without squinting.
In front of everyone's eyes, the sun first whirled like a huge wheel of fire, scattering colorful bright flashes in all directions, then it seemed to separate from the sky and began to spiral downward, radiating heat. This dance of the sun lasted for at least ten minutes and was visible many kilometers from Fatima.
When it was over, people were surprised to find that their clothes were suddenly dry. This was the last appearance of the Mother of God to children.
The Virgin Mary left them three predictions, the last of which was revealed quite recently. The first and the second were promulgated with the permission of Pope Pius XII in 1942. One spoke of an impending war that would claim millions of lives (apparently, it meant the Second World War). The second prophecy concerned Russia, which must devote her heart to the Virgin Mary so that the chaos in the country will be replaced by peace and tranquility.
But the third message for a long time remained a secret with seven seals. Only in 2000 did Pope John Paul II lift the curtain: it concerned an attempt on his life. Indeed, in 1981, a Turkish terrorist shot at John Paul II.
But that's not all: presumably, the third epistle also contains information about the further tragic fate of the Catholic Church. It seems that church hierarchs prefer to hide it so as not to cause unrest among believers.
ON THE ROADS OF WAR
Immediately after the invasion of Nazi troops into the territory of the USSR, Patriarch Alexander III of Antioch accepted seclusion and retired to a dungeon where the icon of the Mother of God was kept. Without food, water or sleep, he prayed for help for Russia.
Three days later, the Virgin Mary appeared to him and said: “Churches, monasteries, theological academies and seminaries should be opened throughout the country. The priests must be returned from the fronts and released from prisons. They have to start serving. Leningrad cannot be surrendered! Let them take out the miraculous icon of the Kazan Mother of God and carry it around the city with a procession of the cross, then not a single enemy will set foot on its holy land. Before the Kazan icon, a prayer service must be performed in Moscow, then it must arrive in Stalingrad. The Kazan icon must go with troops to the borders of Russia."
Surprisingly, Stalin heeded these words. He promised Metropolitans Alexy and Sergius every assistance. The icon of the Kazan Mother of God was taken out of the Vladimir Cathedral, it was carried in a procession with the cross around Leningrad, and the city survived.
According to some reports, the plane, controlled by Stalin's personal pilot, flew around defended Moscow with the miraculous Kazan image on board. Few people know that the Battle of Stalingrad began with a prayer service. Then the icon stood among our troops on the right bank of the Volga, and the Germans could not cross the river, no matter how hard they tried.
APPEARANCE IN CHERNOBYL
Nikolai Yakushin, the rector of the Church of St. Elias, says: “On a rainy spring evening in the sky over Chernobyl, many townspeople saw a woman's silhouette descending from rain clouds in an extraordinary glow. For a certain time, the rain completely subsided and an extraordinary silence fell. The witnesses of the phenomenon realized with fear that something especially important was happening, concerning the city itself.
From the obscure silhouette, an image similar to the image of the Virgin in the form of Oranta gradually became clearly visible.
The townspeople saw in the hands of the Mother of God a bunch of dry grass, which she dropped, the grass fell and scattered on the wet ground. In May, when everything everywhere begins to turn green, blossom and bloom, dried grass is practically not found.
And here on the ground in large numbers were dry stalks of grass called Chernobyl. At one time, the radiance moved to the St. Elias Church, and the Holy Virgin blessed God's temple with both hands. The vision passed away as suddenly as it appeared."
Then the appearance of the Virgin Mary was interpreted in its own way: supposedly the Mother of God blessed the temple, and the dry grass, most likely, meant a lean year. Only 20 years later, the meaning of the miraculous appearance of the Mother of God became clear. She warned of the impending danger, because a bunch of dry grass, called Chernobyl, or wormwood, was not accidentally dropped by her on the city of the same name.
“The third angel sounded his trumpet, and a large star fell from heaven, burning like a lamp, and fell on a third of the rivers and on the springs of waters. The name of this star is "wormwood", and a third of the waters became wormwood, and many of the people died from the waters, because they became bitter "(Revelation of St. John the Theologian 8: 10-11).
The life of Saint Andrew describes a vision that opened to him: he was shown the beauties of paradise, but not seeing the Mother of God anywhere, he asked his mysterious companion: "Where is she?" In response I heard: "She walks on the ground and collects the tears of those who weep." This is how the Blessed Virgin Mary walks and to this hour and will always walk on the earth, collecting the tears of the suffering.
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One of the soldiers who participated in the assault on Konigsberg in 1944 said: “When the front commander arrived, the priests with the icon of the Mother of God were with him. After serving a prayer, they calmly walked towards the front line. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, the shooting from the German side stopped, and our troops began an assault.
The incredible happened: the Germans died in thousands and surrendered in thousands! The captured Germans unanimously said later: “Before the start of the Russian assault, Madonna appeared in the sky, which was visible to the entire German army. At this time, absolutely all of them had their weapons refused - they could not fire a single shot."
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Everyone remembers the tragedy in Budennovsk in 1995, when Basayev's gang captured the staff and patients of the central city hospital. In those terrible days, the locals several times saw in the sky the image of a grieving woman dressed in dark clothes and standing by a cross formed by clouds.
The apparitions of the Virgin Mary took place both before the terrorist attack itself, and after the militants left the city. Many are still convinced that some of the terrorists were demoralized by her appearance and that this was the decisive moment for the release of the hostages.
Fiction or reality?
There is still no consensus about the apparitions of the Virgin. People have different opinions about these rumors. Those fortunate enough to witness this miracle indignantly reject the assumption of a hoax. Skeptics shrug their shoulders.
I must say that scientists have not yet managed to unravel this mystery. Some of them explain this by reasons more familiar to the modern world. For example, the Franco-American scientist Jacques Vallee is sure that in fact aliens are involved in the Fatima miracle.
“The famous visions at Fatima are a vivid historical example of the religious coloring of UFO encounters. The factual side of the events is quite well known, but I am ready to bet that few know the true essence of what happened in 1917 near this small Portuguese town.
Even fewer people, I believe, know that the series of sightings of the creature, which was mistaken for the Virgin Mary, began two years earlier with a whole series of classical UFO sightings, Vallee wrote in his book Parallel World.
Russian scientist V. Mezentsev explains that the dance of the sun, which on October 13, 1917, together with children, was observed by 70 thousand pilgrims who came to Fatima, was an optical illusion, a play of light. Be that as it may, the Roman Catholic Church officially recognized the Fatima miracle and many other appearances of the Virgin.
Today, when the world continually shudders from catastrophes, tragedies, confrontations, intolerance and wars, perhaps one should not break spears in senseless disputes, but simply heed these warnings and hear the main appeal of the Most Holy Theotokos: "People, stop in your madness!"
And then there will be more good and less sorrow in the world.
Galina BELYSHEVA