By Michael H. Brown

Today is September 11 and some day it may not be as famous as it is today. There will be other events. There will be other dates. This will always be remembered but the future will be a busy one. We believe there are reasons for hope -- any purification ends up good -- and also reasons to expect far more turmoil. Look at today's Mass reading: "I tell you, brothers, the time is short," says 1 Corinthians 7:29, adding a few lines later that "the world as we know it is passing away."

And so it is. Slowly -- in the way God is gradual -- the evil we have manufactured will be broken down. That's good news. But in the meantime, we lament. A cloud has descended. We wrote yesterday about the "1990 prophecy" and how this purported revelation, granted anonymously in a dream, had said there would be an "evil cloud" over New York City for 12 years. September 11 occurred just a year before that deadline passed, leaving a highly visible cloud over New York.

Now, that cloud is moving across the country and to all nations. Have you not felt it lately? Has it not seemed like something has come down upon us? Do you not feel a denseness?

We wrote yesterday about how, in the weeks following September 11, there actually was a strange fog over Manhattan -- in addition to the smoke. A stillness. An eeriness. Now the rest of the country will feel it. September 11 was what might be called a prophetic "high-point" event. It spiked a series of other events. But it should not be seen as alone. It was part of a chain of events, natural and man-made, that have occurred since the late 1980s, when regional events began to intensify and according to the 1990 prophecy will eventually precipitate a truly large event.

September 11 was big in the media but was not quite an earth-stopping event. Rather, it was a signal that societal events -- purification of our materialistic way -- will accompany other forms of purification. As we reported a year ago, strange images appeared in the formations of smoke and flame from the two towers. Many of you saw those demonic formations. They were even visible on videos. Coincidence? We can see many things in any smoke, but the number of detailed images defied such rationalization. 

No: something very spiritual was transpiring. There were the demonic faces, and also many faces of what looked like people -- perhaps victims? Does God allow them to manifest this way? Was there a message to pray for their souls? And as for the demons: was this representative of the evil in those who carried forth this hideous act -- the terrorists -- or did it also symbolize the evil that was being purged?

We're not talking about the victims. We're talking about society in general. When we study the World Trade Center we see certain things God does not like. It was a cold steel idol, and it represented our focus on money and man: on self-idolatry. Was it a coincidence that the financial center of the world was covered in a smoke that carried a sulfur-like acridity for weeks after the event -- the stench of death? Was it a coincidence that photographers spotted a mysterious stranger playing a trumpet near Ground Zero? "Many of the so-called values of present Western civilization are anything but values," said the Vatican's Cardinal Paul Poupard yesterday, in remembering the tragedy. "Rather, they are anti-values that in no way are Christian, but, instead, are the rejection and negation of these values."

Cardinal Poupard referred, for example, to "the destruction of the family, the exaltation of homosexuality, the spread of pornography, growing immorality, abortion, gratuitous violence, the exclusion of God in the edification of society."

Lo: this is not to criticize New York, a city we love, in a nation we love, but to issue a warning. The World Trade Center was but one in a series of heightened events. In the future, it is not only terrorism we will watch, but the signs in other aspects of society, as well as nature. September 11 followed in the wake of hurricanes, floods, droughts, wildfires, and earthquakes that had been building since the 1800s -- since around the time of LaSalette -- and began to spike in the 1980s. 

This spike is only beginning.

Does that mean we fear? Does that mean we cower in terror?

No one has fear who prays adequately.

There is nothing to fear. What God allows He allows for our betterment. Our world will improve. As it says in today's second Mass reading,  from Luke 6:20, "Blest are you who are weeping; you shall laugh."

But for now, there is evil to confront and reality to face. "The artifice shall not stand," said the 1990 prophecy. "Your very conceptions of happiness and comforts are a great evil and falsity. The pride will be broken." The prophecy added: "These chastisements will differ according to regions, and will not always or usually be immediately noticeable for what they are." From the apparition site of Medjugorje -- which is the most impressive site since Fatima -- has come word that one seer who must remain nameless, when asked if September 11 was part of the famous "secrets," allegedly said, "Oh no. They are much bigger."