Seers in Africa foresaw plague

       The recent devastation in Africa from AIDS was foreseen in 1981 by visionaries at Kibeho, Rwanda, who said that during apparitions of the Virgin Mary they were shown entire villages abandoned.

       Last week at an international AIDS conference in South Africa it was announced that for the first time since the Black Plague of the 14th century, the population of some African countries is expected to drop as AIDS continues to sweep through rural and urban communities alike. And in regions hardest hit by the fatal scourge, says MSNBC , life expectancy will plummet to age 30 by the end of the decade — the lowest level in 100 years.

       Entire towns have been vacated by fearful residents and there is now a dire shortage of coffins in some African nations. This matches a vision reported on August 18, 1983, during which the seers at Kibeho were told that people must "cleanse" themselves and in vision were shown villages that had been turned to ghost towns.

       During the apparition, partially approved by the local bishop, the Virgin said that it was important that women "should not use their bodies as an instrument of pleasure. They are using all means to love and be loved and they forget that true love comes from God. Instead of being at the service of God, they are at the service of money. They must make of their bodies instruments destined to the glory of God and not an object of pleasure at the service of men."

       This statement was remarkable because it was in this region of Africa that AIDS is thought to have jumped from chimpanzees to humans in the 1930s and then spread by way of prostitutes lining the Kinshasa Highway to the rest of the world.

       We note that the dictionary definition of virus starts out with "venom, as from a snake" and ends with "that which corrupts or poisons the mind or character; evil or harmful influence." A virus is a physical precipitation, in some ways, then, of evil.

       The majority of AIDS in Africa is spread heterosexually. According to reports, in Botswana most people will be expected to die by age 29; before AIDS, estimates had been 71. Swaziland’s average life expectancy will drop to 30; Namibia’s and Zimbabwe’s, to 33.

       About 25 million Africans are already infected with HIV; most of them will die within eight years. One in three people in Botswana, the world’s hardest-hit country, carry the virus. In Zimbabwe an amazing 47 percent of women tested in prenatal clinics carry the HIV virus!

       In some places it has also spread through tribal practices such as the ritual drinking of blood.

       The apparitions of Mary were accompanied by inexplicable movements of the sun and during them Mary urged devotion to her Seven Sorrows. "You are distracted by the goods of the world," she said, warning that the world "is on the edge of catastrophe."

       So let us pray.