Still Running Off at the Keyboard

NEW JERUSALEM UPDATE

Dr. Miguel Leatham of Texas A & M made a presentation at an October (year ?) convention of The Society for the Scientific Study of Religion in St. Louis, on New Jerusalem, Mexico. Some of the material he presented is online here. Scroll down to the subheading "Mary in Modern Mexico."

Here we are told Gabina Romero had a vision of the "Virgin of the Rosary" in 1973 and chose a local priest, Fr. Nabor Cardenas, as her prophet. Fr. Cardenas gathered together the words of the Virgin into what he called "the latter-day 'Gospel of the Virgin'" in which he condemned the changes of Vatican II.

Gabina died in 1981. Her replacement died in 1989.

Since then, Fr. Nabor has taken center stage, receiving messages from various souls in Heaven and Purgatory. The group believes before the year 2,000 the world will come to a cataclysmic end. The group believes that they will be protected by being taken into the air (a "Marian Rapture") and that they then will live on in an earthly paradise.

A few American members of the community have come there from Bayside, New York (the condemned prophecy of Veronica Leuken). The report also claims that members of the New Jerusalem community "were not conventionally religious before their association with the group." In Mexico "conventionally religious" would be Catholic, so apparently the members of the group were not convetionally Catholic before joining the community. What would that mean?

Another article in Spanish can be found in Google translation here. Three bits of information can be gleaned from this article:

1. The town is guided by "voices beyond the grave".

2. The seer Don Agapito was seen in February 1998 "acting as a conduit of a spirit named Oscar"

3. The Mexican filmmaker Arturo Ripstein was inspired by New Jerusalem to make the film "The Gospel of Wonders" in 1998.

Since these peasants were not members of a conventional religion prior to forming the town, could they have been followers of Rodney Collin, the devotee of Gurdjieff apologist P. D. Ouspensky, who went to Mexico following Ouspensky's death and founded a community? Collin converted to Catholicism a year before his death. Among Collin's followers was a woman named Mema Dickins. The closest thing to a biography of Collin currently in print is the book by Joyce Collin-Smith CALL NO MAN MASTER. She says of Memma Dickins:

Mema had taken complete charge of Rodney's few people now, and Janet [Collin's wife who followed Mema after his death in 1956] was her obedient disciple. The Chamber of the Sun and the Chamber of the Moon had been converted, at Mema's command, into two chapels, the one to the Christ, the other to the Madonna. (p. 107)

Mema allowed Collin's library at his compound outside Mexico City to fall into ruin.

Mema had vetoed much of the collection as being unsuitable reading for Roman Catholics. The first editions, and the priceless volumes on magic, alchemy and so on had been deliberately destroyed. The other works would just disappear quietly. Nothing could apparently be done about it. Janet who had inherited everything, had a perfect right to destroy them if she wished.

Mema now had a group of young trainee Catholic priests from an ecclesiastical college around her. Her 'voices' were conveying Christian messages to them. In addition, she had developed the stigmata. Her bleeding palms were shown every Friday. I never saw them, of course. I know many people were deeply impressed by the manifestation. But someone who had seen it had said to me: "I saw how it was induced"... (p. 107)

Is it only coincidental that Don Agapito channeled a spirit named "Oscar" which is the first name of Oscar Ichazo, the man who put the Enneagram on the Catholic map with the help of dissident priest Fr. Richard Rohr?

Moving on...

Arturo Ripstein has not only made a movie inspired by New Jerusalem. He has also made a movie about Mexican Jewish artist Jacqueline Ripstein, who has been involved with the circle surrounding Barbara Marx Hubbard, and also with the circle surrounding the disobedient Franciscan Fr. Jozo Zovko from Medjugorje. Ripstein works with ex-Franciscan James Twyman, whose community uses the Enneagram, and who saw a vision of a woman on apparitions hill at Medjugorje and took a picture which was subsequently the inspiration for Jacqueline Ripstein's painting of Our Lady of the Universe.

Arturo's film of Ripstein's artwork can be found on his website. It's titled "The Mirror of Your Soul". If you watch it, you will discover how much Masonic symbolism it contains.