“The Lord said”, “The Lord has a message for you”, “The Lord placed this on my heart" or “I am sensing the Lord has a plan…” How often did we hear these crazy statements from the various self appointed prophetesses of the renewal? How dangerous is that!!! For sure, the majority of time there is no more risk involved than getting unsolicited advice from someone. Even so it is a sin to attribute human reasoning to the Holy Spirit. But sometimes these “prophetic” delusions really wrack havoc with people’s lives. There is a woman in our local prayer group who told me the following story. She and her husband joined the renewal in the sixties and were very active in the prayer group. They were told in some prophecy to sell their home to be ready to take off at a moment’s notice to do God’s work. That was thirty years ago and they are still waiting. The money from the sale of the house went a long time ago, they finished raising their family in rental housing, and they got too old to go anywhere. They will never own another home as long as they live.
St. John of the Cross has warned us to flee from seeking out these kinds of manifestations: " I greatly fear what is happening in these times of ours: If any soul whatever after a bit of meditation has in its recollection one of these locutions, it will immediately baptize all as coming from God and with such a supposition say, 'God told me,' 'God answered me.' Yet this is not so, but, as we pointed out, these persons themselves are more often the origin of their locution." (The Ascent of Mount Carmel. Book II Ch. 29)
I made a comment about the prayer group prophet not being a prophet to my parish priest. Once when we waited for a room to clear, I overheard some of her complaints about the prayer group. As soon as we got into the room she received a prophecy. We had a small group and she said "drop to your knees" (we did) and then she proceeded to give us a tongue lashing in the name of the Holy Spirit. But the funniest thing the prophecy was the same stuff she said earlier. So years after the fact my parish priest wanted to discern this. I told him I couldn’t see how this was possible.
Two weeks passed and I got a call from Sister Rita Rose. Well Father’s idea of discernment was to send a fox into the henhouse. You see Sister was up to her eyeballs in the renewal. Sister made me go down to meet her at the cathedral where she gave me a stern lecture that "things were different now", that they "we're running a tight ship", that "the group has evolved" and there was nothing wrong with either the prophet or her prophecies, that I should come back, but warned me I was not qualified to discern – anything. That was the end of it. I came away with the feeling it could have been worse.
