Heaven warns: 'Three-quarters of men will die'

MANY believers, even or especially devout ones, have trouble reconciling the Christian belief in a merciful, all-loving God with biblical tales of divine punishment and visions and warnings of apocalyptic war, plague, calamity and death, including those said to come from our Lord Jesus Christ himself and our Blessed Mother Mary.

Take one of the many terrifying messages conveyed to and relayed by 19th-century French stigmatist Marie-Julie Jahenny of La Fraudais in Brittany, France, whose miraculous agonies said to most closely replicate Jesus' sufferings in his Passion and Death, cited in our August 18 column and recounted in the book Revelations: The Hidden Secret Messages and Prophecies of the Blessed Virgin Mary.