Wednesday, August 15, 2007
REVIEWING VASSULA
Fr. Mitch Pacwa reviewed the writings of Vassula Ryden for "Touchstone" magazine. The review is online here.
He found much in her books that is authentically Catholic, but he also found problems in her theology, including a "Christological Confusion" of the three Persons of the Trinity into one Person, a sin that he labels the heresy of Patripassianism and one that was promoted by Sabellius during the Arian heresy.
Also, Pacwa says she bases her call for unity on her "heretical teachings on Jesus Christ and the Blessed Trinity", and on a kind of "indifferentism about the various denominations".
He found material that was inappropriately sexual in her books.
Lastly he believes the "most telling statement of all: "Let Me edit what I wrote. It is I, Jesus." "In fact, the notebooks are indeed edited. Words are changed and pages are blanked out, removing embarrassing, wrong doctrines. Comparing later editions with the first edition proves this."
Pacwa describes the source of Vassula's prophecy this way:
she claims that Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and angels literally write through her hand.
Vassula’s experiences began in November 1985, when she felt a “kind of supernatural vibration that was flowing through my hands . . . the pencil was too strong for me to control.” The writer identified himself as her guardian angel, Daniel, preparing her for conversion. In February 1986 “Jesus” began to write through her hand. Eventually, the “Blessed Virgin Mary” and “St. Michael” wrote through her, too.
That is a nice description of the occult practice called automatic writing, and it is certainly not limited to an Orthodox seer who claims to be receiving messages from God. Aleister Crowley engaged in it:
Crowley was asked by his wife, Rose, to perform an esoteric ritual as an experiment. During the ceremony, she entered a trance-like state and became the medium for the words of a communicator. “They are waiting for you,” she said to Crowley. “They,” she said, being Horus, the god of war and the son of Osiris, according to the beliefs of ancient Egypt. The communicator told Crowley to be at his desk in his hotel room between noon and one o’clock on three specific days. He agreed and in these periods he wrote, via automatic writing, a document called The Book of the Law. This tome spoke of a race of supermen and condemned the traditional Judeo-Christian religions, pacifism, democracy, compassion and humanitarianism.
That passage is taken from a website describing Satanism.
