A former fundamentalist and radio talk-show host from Illinois asserts that he has seen a coming "great storm" in visions granted to him by the Archangel Gabriel and Blessed Mother -- visions that occurred with great specificity in 1993, 1995, and 1997.

The former broadcaster, Charles Johnston, once of WKRS (a station based in Waukegan), now a salesman in Belleville, Illinois, warns that mankind is approaching a great purification -- something we have heard from many mystics and which we submit only for discernment.

Please note that we always underscore the mercy of God. Also, we must caution about dates and other such specifics, which for the most part we avoid. The timetable is always God's; such are provided only for prayerful consideration (in accordance with Scripture). As we have frequently noted, legitimate prophecy is most often meant to inform us of what will occur if conditions present at the time of the prophecy persist.

Please note too that prayer, fasting, and conversion can lessen many things. In the end, what God offers us is joy.

But there is a serious side of life and Johnston indicates that despite "false dawns," aspects of that serious side are about to intensify. He has been granted such indications since childhood (he is now in his forties) but the specifics, he claims, have arrived recently -- and we are presenting them because as far as we can tell at this point, he is an astute, qualified observer, with a background as a newsman, a devout man, according to the priest who serves as his spiritual director.

"From the time I was a little boy and first started being shown the shadows of the events which began in the last decade and are now unfolding to all, I was terrified of them and pleaded with the Lord that it not be so," says Johnston, who was also a professional political consultant (directing a campaign for U.S. Senate). "I am ashamed to say that for a long time whenever the Church said, 'Come, Lord Jesus,' I was silent, for I found what it really meant. Most of my involvement in politics has been a frantic but feeble effort to forestall this."

Although coming events had long been indicated to him, it has only been in the last ten years, says Johnston, that he has seen specifics in what he terms three "great visions."

"The first great vision was in March of 1993," he says. "I was told the spirit of anti-christ was already in the world. It was very simple, and in that simplicity is its deception. It is the institutionalization of the belief that good could be done without reference to God."

When that occurred -- when he watched as the world seemed to turn topsy-turvy, with good considered evil and evil good -- Johnston says he became startled and knew it was leading to the events he was shown in the visions. He says that in those premonitions is general upheaval, a breakdown in technology, and a "global civil war" -- with the dividing line the issue of abortion.

While Johnston also sees signs in natural happenings, it is his belief that the major events will be spawned by man.

There are "legions," he says, that have given themselves over to Satan. He believes that abortion is a satanic "sacrament." And as a result, the world is in for a roller-coaster ride during the next 14 years, he says, with major events preceded by "rumblings" like September 11 that will lift the veil and show us the real existence of good and evil. "There will be more than a few false dawns, and people will deceive themselves during these periods that the crisis is past," claims Johnston. "Then: sudden terror, more starkly terrifying than all that has gone on before."

Again, we caution discernment. Let us also caution that if we feel fear, we need only pray. We must cast off all anxiety and test the spirits.

At the same time, we are told not to despise prophecy -- and Johnston's warning is not out of line with the warnings issued by major Christian "prophets" and at major sites of apparition, which is why we have decided to grant his prophecies an airing.

We are not speaking about the end of the world but of major events that if Johnston is correct will take place in various ways in parts of the world. The Lord seeks not to destroy, says Johnston, but to deliver.

It relates to the many weeping statues, which cry, he says, because of the sorrows we have to go through -- the way God has to right things that we should have righted ourselves.

"The sequence of ever-deepening chaos will continue until mid-October of 2017," he asserts he was told by the Blessed Mother. "Despair will reign throughout the world. Then, between October 13-17 of 2017, the world will be miraculously, utterly, and visibly delivered from the terror by the Intercession of Our Lady the Immaculate Conception. Christianity will be reunified, Satan will be shackled, and the world shall enter a glorious period of peace and harmony under the rule and protection of the one, triune God."

We are on the threshold, he claims, of new miracles. There will be a time of great healing. But before that will be trauma. The coming events, he believes, will take up to six million lives. He claims he was told this too by the Virgin Mary. He points out that as "wars" go, this is not a high number -- that World War One and World War Two took many more lives (and indeed when one considers that there were less than two billion people on earth at the time of World War One, which took 10 million military lives, versus six billion in the world today, the toll of what Johnston is prophesying is dramatically less -- five times lower). The difference, he says, is that this war "will take place all over."

It will involve terrorism, he says, but goes beyond that and will include persecution.

"This war shall ultimately become a death struggle between the authentic Judeo-Christian values of classical Western Civilization and the false gods that are ascendant throughout the world," warns Johnston. "Let me draw this point finely -- when I speak of 'false gods,' I do not mean merely other religions. I include the false gods of materialism, hedonism, the 'culture of death,' and other such idols that cross national and religious boundaries."

"This is a definitive struggle between the values of Christian Western civilizations and forces that want to destroy that. It is a battle for the soul of the world," is the way he synopsizes it.

He also states that there will be a breakdown in our technology and infrastructure. "Technology won't cease to exists," he says. "But there will be a greater simplicity with everyone. We will know the nature of the battle we are in when our technology fails -- and fail it will. It is not that the laws of science are going to be revoked; rather, we are almost unaware of what a fragile hothouse plant our sophisticated technological systems are. Satan has seduced many souls by filling them with an unwarranted confidence in themselves and the work of their hands."

It is this self-sufficiency, maintains Johnston, this idea that we are our own gods, that will be broken down -- at times unpleasantly. Johnston claims he was told to pay special heed to Fatima because it remains at the "center" of everything. "At the time [of the vision], I didn't consciously know what Fatima was," says the former fundamentalist, who converted to Catholicism in 1991. "I'm sure it wasn't the first time I heard of it, but it was the first time I paid attention. I was told that Fatima, Lourdes, and Medjugorje are all manifestations of one single event, and that the circus atmosphere that sometimes surrounds Medjugorje is a sign of some of the degeneration that has come, but that nonetheless it is a manifestation of that single event and that I needed to pay attention to this and that the time was coming close that I would get more instructions. The circus atmosphere is like barnacles on a venerable ship."

The important point, he says -- and the point made at places like Medjugorje -- is that it is time for all mankind to make a decision. In March of 1995 Johnston started to see an Opus Dei priest as a spiritual director, and the priest told him that most such experiences were a deception and that he should put it out of his mind. Johnston felt relieved in many ways. But there were messages telling him to provide more details of his experiences to his spiritual director -- then to let him discern. That seemed to change the priest's approach to it, and Johnston was told to remain open to what he was experiencing. "Through all these years I've been trying to get out of what was being asked, at times desperately. It also looked scary to me. It's most often Gabriel who instructs me. He never told me who he was until I suspected he was Michael. Then he corrected me. I didn't specifically foresee the World Trade Center, but he had come to me in July of 2000 and started talking to me in specifics about the 'storm' that is coming and some preparations that needed to be made. Whenever any of them talked to me about that I would plead for more time for humanity -- for time for us to get our act together. Usually they had been very indulgent about that, but not this time. He just fixed me with a steely glare and said, 'You must tell them true and they must choose or perish.'"

"They showed me very dramatically how it would come, how it would shake up the entire world, how it would dislocate everything, and showed with a great deal of detail what was demanded of me.

"[They showed me] that the whole world was about to undergo a terrible trial. The things that people had confidence in were going to fail them. I was shown that souls were perishing at an unprecedented rate, and that God was going to let us see a bit of the consequences of our actions in order to reclaim us. Wars. The economic system. Just dislocated -- people frightened. Whatever it is you take the most security in, it will be taken from you. Until we understand that the only thing obligatory for our confidence is God, we will lose those things. I was shown that the biggest portion of my work was to explain what God is doing and why He is doing it, which is the only reason there are specific predictions that have come to pass. People need to know that God loves them and calls all men to salvation."

"I can't tell you the authenticity of it, what he's seeing or whatever, but I can attest to his character," his spiritual director, who wishes to remain unnamed, told Spirit Daily. "What he's claiming is pretty incredible. I guess the thing I can summarize is that he's a stable individual, he has a stable personality, and he's a man of deep prayer. Has he predicted things? Yes and no. He's been right on some things and wrong on others. He's a man of prayer and well-grounded. Is there undisputable evidence? No."

Which predictions have come to pass?

Before the "storm," Johnston says, he was told there would be the "rumblings." In early 2000 he was telling people -- including his spiritual director -- that something was so seriously wrong with the presidential election that year that there may not be a presidential election at all. This would be one of the first rumblings, he says. "I did not predict the World Trade Center," he acknowledges. "What I did say was that very quickly there would be large-scale terror, because that's the weapon that Satan was left with, the primary weapon after the weapon of deception was taken from him -- but that the immediate effect of his terror would be to begin to lift the veils that have obscured the difference between good and evil. And that would be the primary effect of the rumblings that precede the storm. People would once again see that there is good and there is evil and begin to make their choices."

Johnston also had warned long before the recent crisis that the storm would break through North Korea. "North Korea is the dragon's tail," he says. China? "You got it," he says. "China is a very bad actor. You'll know for certain that the storm has broken in its fullness when it comes through North Korea. For almost a decade now I have shuddered with an unknown and supernatural dread at the mere mention of North Korea."

Johnston acknowledges that he has not always been correct. He had thought, for example, that the Pope was going die last year. He was not told that by the Blessed Mother or Gabriel. But he had been correct when he prophesied that there would be a scourging of the Church -- though he believes the scandal is only the beginning of that scourging.

The Virgin reputedly appears to him as a woman in her mid-twenties, which is older than she is described in some major apparitions. He claims he was told that the time is coming when Christ will recognize no prayer that is not directed through His mother. "She appears differently to different people," he notes. "More frequently she has appeared under the form of Our Lady of Tepeyac [Guadalupe], and one of the things that she told me specifically is that it's through Our Lady of Tepeyac that the Church will be renewed. She specifically instructed me that this was her proper title, in part because the Old World evangelized the New World and now it is through the New World that the Old World will be evangelized. That is the proper title."

She looks normal in size, he asserts, and sometimes she arrives while he is doing something like reading. When she or the Archangel Gabriel come, maintains Johnston, he sees them very briefly -- because then a vision of events begins.

"And the vision is not like a movie, but like you're there," he says. "Like you're living in the surroundings and [Gabriel and the Blessed Mother] are narrating. The turmoil will be throughout the world. It's like being shown the scope of sorrow and suffering and being in the midst of it. I asked what would happen if I said 'no' [to the call of prophecy] and I was immediately surrounded with a swirling mass of people falling into a great abyss and cursing me because I had know but had done nothing, and that had a profound effect. That was the second great vision and it was in 1995."

"Trying to interpret things ahead of time is almost useless," notes Johnson. "We are never co-planners or sharing in God's secret plan. God tells us these things in order that we can watch and wait and understand when they begin to happen and His loving intention for us. When you see these things come, then you understand what's happening. It's very important to understand that Christ does come with the sword, but He doesn't come to punish us. He comes to reclaim those who can be reclaimed -- that's what the use of His sword is. A lot of people think they're on the inside with these things, but every soul is made in God's image. We're going to see our own deficiencies. We're called to love people. If people think they have the inside track, they will be rudely disabused of that notion. Whatever makes you think that you are sufficient to yourself, it will be taken from you. God will make it very clear that we are not in control. That's what the purpose of the false dawns are."

"In the late summer and early fall of 1997, I consecrated myself to Our Lady over a period of 40 days and that's when I was given the third great vision," says the former news commentator. "Much was shown there. I've always seen the storm as a ship pushing out to sea and crossing a great stormy sea. What I was shown over that 40 days was that the ship had just shoved off from shore. It was still in the shallows, but I had to jump aboard or forever let it go."

There have been little signs along the way, some tangible indications. Once, Johnston recalls, he did a novena to St. Therese of Lisieux and soon after found a brown scapular buried in the soil while he was digging a hole for a rose bush in her honor. This was odd because the previous owner of the home was a Lutheran.

"What very much is my mission is to reassure people of God's loving Presence in these things and how it manifests," he says. "I used to be scared to death of these things, but what must come must come. Are weather patterns a part of it? Yes. This SARS business? I suspect but do not know that the reason China has acted as it has is because this is a part of its own biological program and got away from them. I have not gotten that in vision. That's my intuition. My purpose is to reassure people of God's loving intention for them in the trials that are now breaking, to help strengthen them to endure until the time of deliverance."

Next: how the Pope allegedly fits into the prophecy and a new spin on the Fatima secret