We hear from all over from those who had strange premonitions of the September 11 event. Here in Upstate New York we spoke to a friend who had a dream the night before the attack of an imposing man with a knife. It was striking enough to mention to his wife even before word came of the hijackings (which involved the use of sharp objects). "He looked very tall, like six and a half feet, and he did not look American," said this friend, a Eucharistic minister in a local chapel. "He looked Middle Eastern. And he was not alone. When I found out about the hijackings later that morning, I couldn't believe it." At a local restaurant, a waitress dedicated to the Rosary described a dream of two tall slabs exploding and crumbling. Another person we know expressed a distinct, uncanny feeling. "Something bad's going to happen," he warned his family -- coming back a second time and saying, "Something very bad is going to happen." That was the evening of September 10. And the same is true around the world. In other parts we hear of folks awoken by unsettling dreams and in the months leading up to the attack we carried a number of articles about prophecies warning that foreign powers were conspiring to drag the U.S. into a war and that there was danger on our own soil. One prophecy, known now as the "1990 prophecy," said New York City would see its "pride broken" by 2002. There were also warnings last August that after the stem-cell decision America would quickly experience chastisement.

Clearly, there was agitation in the spirit world, and maybe you have other examples of omens leading up to the horrid event. We're told that on the evening of the attack the Virgin Mary appeared to Medjugorje seer Ivan Dragicevic crying and asking prayers for peace. While there is no indication that September 11 was part of any Medjugorje seers' secrets, there were clearly deep spiritual elements to the event. We have carried items on how demonic faces seemed to appear in the flames and smoke billowing from the World Trade Center. One came from a photographer named Mark Philips, whose photo appeared in the Associated Press. Some looking at it can see eyes, a nose, a mouth, and horns. We have seen other photos with a flurry of other such images. One reader and a neighbor saw swords in the sky above Long Island. These remind us of miraculous formations in clouds or photographs taken at sites of apparition. Somehow the camera occasionally catches glimpses of otherwise unseen presences. In the case of the Trade Center the question is whether such an image if valid is indicating that the devil was behind the attack (which in many ways, of course, he was) or whether it's heaven's way of showing the devil and his minions being purged -- a symbol of the evil in our system. 

We have also heard from folks who have had recent visions of a great battle being prepared, a battle between angels and devils. A seer had warned that a "great event" was coming, and Pat Hull, a Texas woman who allegedly saw this same seer in bilocation, had a similar admonition. "A great blackness of evil was being released," Pat had told us last August. "[The seer] said it that way. And God has held up His hand as long as He is going to, and He is going to take His hand down and there's nothing, nothing, that will stop this, this disaster, from happening. She didn't tell me what the disaster was. She didn't say any kind of a time. We got through with our visit and I wrote it all down. It was about 3:30 that afternoon. So our visit was between 3 and 3:30. I slowly sifted back. Even Friday [the next day] at noon, I still said to my daughter, I'm not all back yet, and I pointed up. I said, 'From here to over here I feel movement, I hear voices, there are angels, good spirits, they are getting ready for a mighty battle. I heard everything they were saying but I can't tell you what they said. They were rushing around going here and there like an army would getting ready to go in battle. That night, I didn't hear the voices anymore, but I sensed movement and feeling."

This is an important moment in both American and human history. If we take the event for what it was -- a purging, a mercy, an evil that God allowed to set us right -- we'll be okay. If we don't, there will be other visions, other dreams... and more such events.