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Health & Fitness

Looking Into the Future: Our Lady of Good Success – Part 1

In the early 17th century in the first days of the Catholic Church in Ecuador, a nun by the name of Mariana de Jesus Torres was praying in a convent in Quito, when The Blessed Mother appeared to her with some very prophetic predictions. The events and advice foretold in these apparitions are very relevant in our present day, and the central message is one of great importance for the future of our society.

 

It is important to note that these apparitions, referred to as Our Lady of Good Success, received the approval of the Roman Catholic Church. The messages centered upon the corruption of the religious orders, the eventual decline in numbers of those committed to religious vocations, the importance of prayer, and the attack on the Sacrament of Matrimony.

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The visionary in these apparitions, Mariana, was one of five nuns who travelled from Spain to Ecuador in 1577 to establish the first convent there, with the hope of evangelizing the people to Roman Catholicism. Her aunt was the Mother of the Order, housed in the Convent of the Immaculate Conception, at the time of the first appearance of the Blessed Mother.

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The backdrop to both the arrival of the Catholic religious orders and the subsequent apparition of the Virgin Mary occurred during a time period marked by idol worship and distrust of the Church by the natives in Ecuador. These historical events would prove to significantly impact and shape the reaction of the Catholic Church in this part of the world.

 

Struggle over a Statue

 

One of the early messages communicated by Our Lady during her appearances to Mariana was the request to build a statue and place it in the choir loft of the convent in Quito. The statue had specific requirements in order to be made in the exact likeness of the Blessed Mother with the Infant Jesus in one arm and the keys to the convent in the other.

 

The statue would bear the inscription of “Our Lady of Good Success”, but the timing had to be right. The Blessed Mother instructed Mariana to wait several years before gaining permission to create the statue. When Mariana asked about the long waiting period, the rationale Our Lady provided was that if the statue was unveiled too soon after the convent first started there, the people would not believe Mariana. The risk of alienating the native people was too great, it would result in the downfall of the entire mission of the Church in Ecuador.

 

Mariana struggled with the decision over the correct timing on moving forward with the sculpting of the statue. Eventually, in 1610, she asked permission from the bishop to create the statue. That permission was promptly granted and a sculptor named Francisco del Castillo was chosen for the project. He was reported to be a faithful devotee to the Virgin Mary.

 

The process of completing the statue had many obstacles and Mariana and the other nuns were concerned about the native people confusing the statue as an idol. They were afraid that the people would worship it rather than worship God. The worship of a variety of idols and false gods was quite prevalent in Central America and South America at that point in time, and the Catholic Church and other western religions struggled against those popular forces in the goal of converting new members.

 

An Overnight Miracle

 

After months of dedicated work by Mr. del Castillo, the statue was beginning to take shape. The sculptor worked late into the night on many occasions. Then one night, numerous reports state that he and his co-workers left after another late night of work with many areas of the statue still a long way from being finished.  

 

The next morning when they arrived to work on the statue they found it had been completed overnight, and with exquisite detail down to the exact parameters provided by Our Lady in the message to Mariana. The completion of the statue in this manner, in that short amount of time, is considered a miracle with the work being attributed to the angels.

 

Furthermore, in accordance with the instructions given in the apparition, the completed statue was placed in the Abbess chair in the upper choir loft area of the convent based on the instructions provided in the message. This signified the Blessed Mother taking Her place as the Abbess of their order from that point until the end of time. The nuns and the people of Ecuador embraced the statue and still maintain a devotion and respect for this holy relic now over three centuries in duration.

 

In fact the statue is one of the most celebrated and protected holy objects in Ecuador and it was all as a result of this apparition, which is a relatively unknown event to most of the Western world and to the general public in North America.

 

Messages to Mariana

 

Mariana de Jesus Torres eventually became known as Mother Mariana, when she ascended into the role of Mother Superior of the Immaculate Conception convent in Quito. She guided the order through some tumultuous times during the adaptation of Roman Catholicism in the New World. She remained in that position until her death in 1635.

 

Throughout her life, she received many messages from both the Blessed Mother and Our Lord regarding the future of Ecuador as well as the rest of the world. Some of those messages and prophecies are profound when they are viewed in the context of the current state of the Catholic Church.

 

An early prophecy was that by the end of the 19th century and into the 20th century, Satan would reign due to the actions of unfaithful members of the religious orders. This is an especially relevant message in light of the abuse scandal that has damaged the Church.

 

Our Lady also predicted that the Sacrament of Matrimony will be attacked which will lead to more people living in sin and bearing illegitimate children. This prediction is particularly timely with the ongoing debate regarding the definition of marriage in this country and throughout the world. The definition of marriage is one of the seminal debates in our national discourse here in the United States for the past several years, it is a polarizing issue which has divided the American public.

 

The Holy Mother provided Mariana with the message that the Sacrament of Holy Orders would be attacked by Satan resulting in the corruption of many in the religious vocation. The message continued by stating that the Roman Catholic Church will be criticized for this behavior and that good priests will suffer tremendous anguish due to the actions of the corrupt priests.

 

The Blessed Virgin Mary also predicted times of “unbridled luxury” in our future which will snare people into a life of sin, stating that innocence in children would be lost, and that women would lack any modesty. The Church will be silent on these matters even though it is a time where it is needed badly to take action. This type of activity has been front-and-center in the national conversation about the gap in the American class system, wealth consolidation, and flat wage increases for the majority of the American labor force.

 

 This activity coupled with the reports of several high ranking Bishops and American and European clergy in the Catholic Church spending money opulently on retirement homes with indoor pools and luxury cars proves the apparition to be very prophetic.

 

Some other messages from Our Lady during this apparition include:

·        A warning on the lack of convents and monasteries – they are the solution for all the physical and moral corruptions of our society. According to Our Lady the salvation of souls, conversions, the end of pestilence and war, as well as global peace all stems from prayers made in religious houses. This is exceedingly relevant today with the focus on the decreasing numbers of religious vocations in the Roman Catholic Church.

·        Humans would conduct themselves much differently if they knew what Heaven was truly like. We should live with virtue, dedicated to charity toward others, and be like children when praying to the Lord.

·        Sacrament of Penance – Our Lady of Good Success stressed the importance of this sacrament as the “only sure means of salvation”. The troublesome trend of priests misunderstanding the true value of the sacrament was also addressed in the messages to Mariana.

·        The prediction that a truly Catholic President would come to power in Ecuador and consecrate the country to the Sacred Heart of Jesus only to be killed in the square adjacent to the convent. This all came true when Gabriel Garcia Moreno became President and consecrated Ecuador to the Sacred Heart in 1873. He was assassinated in 1875.

 

 

In the second part of this series on the apparition of Our Lady of Good Success, the messages from Our Lord will be detailed, a key prediction will be revealed, and the implications of this apparition on our modern world will be explained.

 

 

 

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