A Most Potent 'Testimony'
It is as fascinating as it is powerful -- as potent a booklet as we've seen in quite a while -- this memoir, My Testimony, by Fabienne Guerrero of France.
Tough?
Strong medicine indeed. Are there controversies? No doubt. There are alleged mystical insights into life and the afterlife -- many of them, in the case of this New Age-occultist-turned-devout Catholic who experienced a radical conversion a quarter century ago.
Tough stuff but words, memories, and accounts that tend to clarify, to clean the soul -- making crystal clear the need to wipe things from our lives like anger and lust and jealousy, as well as any smidgeon of occultism.
It is thus purgative, this booklet, just under a hundred pages in length, which ironically, in its intensity, reminds one of the classic, An Unpublished Manuscript On Purgatory.
We are offering it for discernment because while acknowledging the controversies it may provoke (we can not vouch for everything said during, for example, personal appearances), it has the potential for a transformative deepening of faith, leading, perhaps, to more powerful and fruitful experiences with Mass and the sacraments.
It also plain hard to put down.
This is a woman who clearly is very, very serious about her Catholicism -- and in a nation that has all but lost its faith.
"In researching the New Age that does not come from God, I practiced magnetism, telepathy, pendulum, all kinds of magic, hypnosis, the effects of New Age, reading auras, all forms of healing through energies, crystals, music and colors, meditations on New Age music, Reiki -- against which the bishops of the United States warn us," she explains.
"And then, I felt in my body that Satan had placed his energy in me and with his power and I began to tremble.
"Later on I studied Christian reflections on the New Age, 'Jesus Christ the Bearer of the Water of Life,' by the Vatican's Pontifical Council on Inter-Religious Dialogue. These writings proved to me that my studies were disastrous for my soul."
And yoga.
"In the [deeply occult, Masonic-like] Rosicrucian Order, I met a gentleman who was single for many years as his wife had left him for another man. A few months later, we decided to have a civil marriage. We could not get married in the Catholic Church because he had previously received the sacrament of marriage.
"And then I was struck by a bolt of Grace! Looking at a poster of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, I heard a Voice telling me: 'My Holy Wounds will save you'! The wounds of His sorrowful Passion."
Upon returning to France from a pilgrimage, during which the Blessed Mother allegedly spoke to her, "God gave me a first supernatural experience during which He asked me to do penance," she writes. "He showed me how my soul was enclosed in the Beast that had a lion's head as described in the Book of Revelation (13: 2)
"I saw the demons that surrounded me and that were ready to take me with them to the place of darkness. These demons were tied to each of my sins."
She was also taken on a descent into hell.
And shown exactly how we suffer for both sins and imperfections.
She also was shown, it seems, how to greatly lessen her purgatory -- a deep purgatory, at that point, and why she has now dedicated her life to evangelization: to save others from what she saw and also as penance. She now speaks around the world as a mission which she says was entrusted to her as a way of gaining a better afterlife.
One thing rings clear: in the experience of Fabienne Guerrero, sin is much more damaging than what the vast majority of people -- even many practicing Catholics -- perceive.
And so we have this booklet here.
"I was a worldly woman, seducer, always wooed and domineering," admits Fabienne. "I said that I was a liberated woman but in fact I was chained to Lucifer. I saw the black chains with which Satan was binding me. They were large black chains. I also saw the devil with a pitchfork. He was all black, with a very mean look. The chains that I saw were all the sins that I had committed and that kept me linked to various demons of hell's hierarchy. Only Jesus with His Precious Blood could cut these chains."
There is the intense spiritual warfare. There are the encounters with Jesus. There are the fresh insights on sin. There are the ways to prepare properly for Mass. And in Fabienne's case -- and perhaps in many of our own, more than we realize -- it took and takes many of them to begin to clear away the debris.
Fabienne certainly makes you think. She causes you to examine your conscience -- for sure. And provides guidelines for that.
We'll let her tell the rest, which we are providing for your discernment.
"Dear brothers and sisters, for each of my sins, I was bonded to the hierarchy of demons," she says. "In hell, there is an entire army of demons that we must resist. This can be done with fasting, prayer, penance and the Holy Rosary. Jesus told me: 'Escape from the world.' I understood that He was telling me this because I spent a lot of time in the beauty salon, in fancy restaurants, in nightclubs, traveling to dream places, and buying luxury clothes in the high-end stores. I then understood that it was the devil that tempted me to do all these things so as to lose my soul. As long as I lived in the world, I did not think of the poor, which is why I was condemned because of the love of money. Satan then told me: 'I keep you bound.' I can assure you that the chains that kept me bound to the infernal hierarchy were very heavy."
[resources: My Testimony]
