Visions of Jesus and Mary - Predictions

Predictions

Some of the reported visions of Jesus simply fade away by virtue of predictions that fail to materialize. On the other hand, some predictions based on visions continue to gather interest decades after they were made.

Messages from Jesus reported by John Leary in Rochester New York in 1999 had predicted that Pope John Paul II would be forced out of Rome and sent into exile amid chaos. Bishop Mathew Clark of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Rochester disallowed these messages at the time, but with the election of Pope Benedict XVI the debate about the validity of these messages seems to have simply ended.

The visions of Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich, written by Clemens Brentano in 1852, led a French priest Abbé Julien Gouyet to discover a house near Ephesus in Turkey in 1881. This house is assumed by some Catholics and some Muslims to be the House of the Virgin Mary. Since Emmerich had never been to Ephesus, some people view this discovery as a prediction. The Holy See has taken no official position on the authenticity of the discovery yet, but in 1896 Pope Leo XIII visited it and in 1951 Pope Pius XII initially declared the house a Holy Place. Pope John XXIII later made the declaration permanent. Pope Paul VI in 1967, Pope John Paul II in 1979 and Pope Benedict XVI in 2006 visited the house and treated it as a shrine.

On August 19, 1982, some teenagers in Kibeho, Rwanda reported visions of the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ, as Our Lady of Kibeho. The teenagers reported truly gruesome sights such as rivers of blood and the visions were accompanied by intense reactions: crying, tremors, and comas. Some today regard the visions as an ominous prediction of the Rwandan Genocide of 1994, and particularly in that specific location in 1995 in which some of the teenagers died a decade after their vision. The apparitions were accepted by the local Roman Catholic bishop (accused by many of complicity in the genocide himself), but have not been given final approval by the Holy Office.

On September 11, 1991, ten years to the day before the September 11 attacks, alleged visionary Vassula Ryden claims to have written in her notebook a message that she attributed to Jesus: "the earth will shiver and shake - and every evil built into Towers will collapse into a heap of rubble and be buried in the dust of sin! above, the Heavens will shake and the foundations of the earth will rock!" Some of Vassula's followers view this sentence as a prediction. Her notebooks were published as a series of books “True Life in God” in the 1990s and have a strong following worldwide.