What Did the 20th Century Saints Say about the Coronavirus?

Typically, such prophecies very quickly gain additions and embellishments from some not very intelligent “zealots”. They make up everything that comes to mind. They shamelessly invent and add to the words of the saints their personal fantasies about the “apostasy of hierarchs”, about the “crowning of the Antichrist by the Orthodox Patriarch”, etc. These fantasies, along with real prophecies, appear in pamphlets with the biographies of the heroes of piety of the twentieth century. Many people start to think that the saints actually said so — but they didn’t!
Here’s an example. I personally talked a lot with the late Schemanun Vera (Chmykhova), the favorite spiritual daughter of Saint Kuksha of Odessa, who grew up at his feet.

She told us all the time and showed us in books, what the saint actually said in his lifetime and which of his alleged prophecies were made up by later “eschatologists” and printed in millions of copies. Trust me, the difference is huge. Most likely, that is the case with many other ascetics of the twentieth century.

Can you elaborate on what the saints were saying and what they weren’t?

I’ll give you some more details about the words St. Kuksha of Odessa said. What he did not say, but is said to have said, is a very broad and quite sensitive topic, which, I believe, we can talk about in more detail when the time comes. The same is true of Saint Lawrence. This can be indirectly proved by the fact that the same prophecies of St. Lawrence are sometimes presented with completely different details in different literary sources.

Well, there you go. If we sift out all anti-Christian inventions from the prophecies of the saints of the twentieth century, then there will remain a mention of the time with golden domes and the impossibility to go to the temples of God, as St. Lawrence said. St. Kuksha warned that the time would come when it would be necessary to stock up for six months with Artos, antidoron, prosphoras, and holy water. Churches will be open but one won’t be able to partake in them for six months. Does it ring a bell?

Sounds like today.

Yes, it does. For the Orthodox in Australia, the United States, and Europe, it’s the reality of today. For us, it’s probably the reality of tomorrow. Oh, and one more thing. We have one parishioner who worked as a nurse at Kiev Military Hospital in the mid-1990s. The Kievers, and not just them, remember Schema-Archimandrite Theophilus (Rossokha), a man of faith of the twentieth century.

Shortly before his death, somewhere in 1995 or 1996, he was being treated in the hospital. Our parishioner was very impressed by his words, “When there’s an epidemic, do everything like you did with cholera. Pray to the Mother of God. Tell that to everyone! When there’s an epidemic, do everything like you do with cholera.” He gave her an icon of the Mother of God of the Sign. She couldn’t understand what kind of epidemic it would be all these years. Who was she to pass his words on to? Eventually, she forgot Father Theophilus’s words. Now, his words struck her memory like a lightning bolt. Things started to make sense. The epidemic has begun. Why did Father Theophilus say it was “like cholera”? What does cholera have to do with it? Remember the cholera epidemic of 1970? It was the time of Hegumen Paphnutius’s (who later became Schema-Archimandrite Theophilus) active pastoral work. Older priests still remember that time. They remember the unprecedented measures taken in all churches that year! Nobody murmured or accused the hierarchy of “deviation from faith.” That’s the story.

According to the prophecies of the same saints and people of faith of the twentieth century, we, the Orthodox, have yet to experience the great heyday of our Church and our people. However, to achieve this, the world has to “reset” and “restart”, which we are maybe witnessing right now.

Translated by The Catalogue of Good Deeds
Based on http://www.pravoslavie.ru/130278.html