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Father Jean-Baptiste Vianney, Rector of Ars, was, as everybody knows, a very saintly priest, who appears to have been endowed with extraordinary mediumistic faculties. The prophecy in question was made public in 1862, three years after the miracle-worker’s death, and was confirmed by a letter which Mgr. Perriet addressed to the Very Rev. Dom Grea on the 24th of February, 1908. Moreover, it was printed, as far back as 1872, in a collection entitled, Voix prophetiques, ou signes, apparitions et predictions modernes. It therefore has an incontestable date. I pass over the part relating to the war of 1870, which does not offer the same safeguards; but I give that which concerns the present war, quoting from the 1872 text:

“The enemies will not go altogether; they will return again and destroy everything upon their passage; we shall not resist them, but will allow them to advance; and after that we shall cut off their provisions and make them suffer great losses. They will retreat towards their country; we shall follow them and there will be hardly any who return home. Then we shall take back all that they took from us and much more.”

As for the date of the event, it is stated definitely and rather strikingly in these words:

“They will want to canonize me, but there will not be time.”

Now the preliminaries to the canonization of Father Vianney were begun in July, 1914, but abandoned because of the war.

I now come to the Sonrel prediction. I will summarize it as briefly as possible from the admirable article which M. de Vesme devoted to it in the Annales des sciences psychiques.[1]

On the 3rd of June, 1914–observe the date–Professor Charles Richet handed M. de Vesme, from Dr. Amedee Tardieu, a manuscript of which the following is the substance: on the 23rd or 24th of July, 1869, Dr. Tardieu was strolling in the gardens of the Luxembourg with his friend Leon Sonrel, a former pupil of the Higher Normal School and teacher of natural philosophy at the Paris Observatory, when the latter had a kind of vision in the course of which he predicted various precise and actual episodes of the war of 1870, such as the collection on behalf of the wounded at the moment of departure and the amount of the sum collected in the soldiers’ kepis; incidents of the journey to the frontier; the battle of Sedan, the rout of the French, the civil war, the siege of Paris, his own death, the birth of a posthumous child, the doctor’s political career and so on: predictions all of which were verified, as is attested by numerous witnesses who are worthy of the fullest credence. But I will pass over this part of the story and consider only that portion which refers to the present war:

“I have been waiting for two years,” to quote the text of Dr. Tardieu’s manuscript of the 3rd of June, “for the sequel of the prediction which you are about to read. I omit everything that concerns my friend Leon’s family and my private affairs. Yet there is in my life at this moment a personal matter, which, as always happens, agrees too closely with general occurrences for me to doubt what follows:

“‘O my God! My country is lost: France is dead!… What a disaster!… Ah, see, she is saved! She extends to the Rhine! O France, O my beloved country, you are triumphant; you are the queen of nations!… Your genius shines forth over the world…. All the earth wonders at you….'”

These are the words contained in the document written at the Mont-Dore on the 3rd and handed to M. de Vesme on the 13th of June 1914, at a moment when no one was thinking of the terrible war which to-day is ravaging half the world.

When questioned, after the declaration of war, by M. de Vesme on the subject of the prophetic phrase, “I have been waiting for two years for the sequel of the prediction which you are about to read,” Dr. Tardieu replied, on the 12th of August: