Veronica Leuken, the Bayside Prophet.
Stumbled across the writings of Veronica Leuken, the authoress of a series of mad, mildly sadistic and occasionally humorous prophecies revealed to her by the Blessed Virgin and Jesus in – where else? – Bayside, Queens. As with all prophecies – one of the very worst habits of the Biblical tradition – they are a combination of patent certainties (one of the prophecies: “your country [the U.S.] will soon be embroiled in another war”), old-fashioned moralizing (“Do not feel, parents, that you are doing unjustment to your children when you reprimand them for doing wrong.”), and apocalyptic sadist fantasies (“A killer comet hovers – at least a billion people will perish.”). Some of the detailing is worth the price of admission – “unjustment” and “billion” above are quite priceless in their own way, as is the following account of a beatific vision of Mary:
Oh, and Our Lady is coming directly through that star. She’s stepping down as though She was held up on the pedestal there. Our Lady is stepping down and She’s looking all about Her. It’s not still up there; there seems to be a wind because it’s blowing Her skirt back and forth.
Our Lady looks so fragile and so beautiful. And there’s a light emanating from Her. There’s a light shining that makes Her look so beautiful that there are no human words to describe.
Now Our Lady is looking up and smiling. I, I understand She is looking at what just went overhead and making quite a bit of noise [an airplane]. Now Our Lady is smiling, and She’s coming down to almost now – very close to us. And Our Lady touches her finger to her mouth.
The airplane is a Queens touch that really even the greatest artist would fear to put on paper. “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.”
The billion-person-devouring comet she mentioned she gave the interesting name “the Ball of Redemption.”
“You must keep a stern attitude also toward the rearment of your children. Many will die in the great flame of the Ball of Redemption. How many will be saved, the count is only known by the Eternal Father.
“My child and My children, please, I ask – I’m willing to beg you as your Mother to save your children and also in the end, save your own souls.
“My child, you will sit back and wait, because I have a great surprise for you in a short while, but I am now stepping back as I have a conversation with someone, My child, who you know.”
Veronica – Oh, over Our Lady’s side, on Her left side, I see the sky opening up and – oh, it’s Jesus! He’s standing right next to Our Lady on Her left side. And He’s wearing a long, sort of an ecru-colored gown and sandals. I can see His feet from down here. He has on brown sandals. They look like leather; I think they’re leather.
And He has on a cape, an ecru, almost white-colored cape over His gown. It’s quite, it’s quite a bit chilly over here. That is why I would assume that Jesus is wearing His cape.
5 Comments
great post
The church certainly has had its problems with the rearment of children.
“As with all prophecies – one of the very worst habits of the Biblical tradition”
Huh? Isaiah, Amos, Daniel, Paul, Revelation? And post Bible, can’t the entire Commedia be read as a prophecy? And doesn’t that give it part of its urgency?
Scott, my impatience with “Prophecies” in fact does come in part from a recent reading of the Commedia, whose worst, most bombastic, most obscurantist, and most incorrect parts are its “prophecies.” Thank God they mostly stop once Dante gets to Paradiso. First of all, as predictions of the future, religious prophecies are always lame and vague, or flatly incorrect; if God wants a sign of his power, why wouldn’t he send a message like a physics equation or a DNA sequence or tell us how many planets there are or the depth of the Marianas trench – i.e. something falsifiable and which his prophets could hardly have access to on their own – rather than this “therefore shall dragons dwell there with the fig fauns” (Jer.50:39) stuff. I think they’re mostly a remnant or parallel of the ancient oracles, whose gods, conceptually, were frequently hostile to mankind and enjoyed the riddling because it nearly ensured that the drama of predicted catastrophe – in which the gods delighted – would arrive unhindered at its awful end. But I think it is quite verifiable that future-predictive power, in any supernatural sense, is not a quality of prophecy.
The moral seriousness, the passages of real poetry, the at times astonishing link between suffering and divinity found in the Hebrew prophets – these I do not mind. Needless to say the literary rubble in which they are buried means you have to do a lot of mining to get the ore – which is why people don’t so much read them as look up the relevant passages that the Christian authors have already identified as being useful.
The sadism is a problem too, and the book of Revelation is one of the worst offenders. It is really not clear to me that God delights in this kind of thing: “They were trampled in the winepress outside the city, and blood flowed out of the press, rising as high as the horses’ bridles for a distance of 1,600 stadia.” – The precise measure really is an impressively nasty touch.
Listen, these things are in the tradition and they are not all bad. But the Christian stupidity and nastiness they have spawned is proof that writing of this sort is “one of the very worst habits of the Biblical tradition.” I look on it the way Paul looked at genealogies – they’re in the Bible, they’re in the tradition, but there’s a 95% chance you’ll go wrong if you spend much time on this stuff.
Here’s a way of encapsulating that: how many prophecies can be squared with the good news of a loving God? For the most part it’s this “Ball of Redemption – billions perish” style, a kind of diabolical shadow of a Gospel of love.
John, Needless to say (I hope!) I agree with your focus on the need to focus on God’s love. And as Augustine teaches, if we read the Bible in such a way that it does not direct us towards God’s love, we are misreading it. All that said, I’m always afraid of any latent Marcionism in reading the Scriptures, especially the Hebrew prophets. And my favorite prophecy of the Commedia is Cacciaguida’s in Paradiso, where he told Dante of the contingency of all things, and the need to tell the truth, no matter what the cost. But these are important topics. I apologize if my comments made them seem unimportant or if my comments came off a bit flip.
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