Given the life-changing nature of this revelation of God the Father, it is significant that there have been no serious critiques or controversies concerning the encounter. The approval of the relevant Church authorities after intensive investigation and interrogation, in large part, pre-empted future objections.

Having said this, we note that there is one wholly unserious attempt to attack the provenance and authenticity of the reported revelation. We will address the charges made by the source of these attacks. While addressing his arguments, we will not name him simply because we do not want to give any publicity to someone whose treatment of the revelation to Mother Eugenia is both slanderous and blasphemous.

The credibility of this critic is questionable as pointed out by others familiar with some of his writings.

Jeff Mirus, the co-founder of Christendom College and CatholicCulture.com, says about him that he

never expresses the slightest hesitation or the slightest doubt on any complex issue. Salvation outside the Church? No problem. The proper way for women to behave? Simple and clear. The very specific rule people should follow in determining how frequently to receive Communion? [His] one size fits all. [He] draws his ideas from private revelation, favorite saints, or simply his own dubious spirituality. After all, he has already warned us that the Faith is much bigger than the Magisterium, and that it is actually a heresy to rely overmuch on the Magisterium. And so—on his own sole authority—he blithely explains everything you always wanted to know about Catholicism but were afraid to ask. … He is simply very fond of private revelation and of his own private ideas.1

Another observer says this about the critic:

He “has predicted a ‘Warning’ associated with the Garbandal apparitions for three years in a row running.
2008–he said it would occur, no fail, 100% confidence
2009 –recalculated and said it would occur, 100% confidence
2010 –March or April date—didn’t materialize.
[He] frequently misrepresents his speculative innovations as Church teaching.

[He] makes light of things like imprimaturs, nihil obstats, bishop approval, catholic publishers and other theologians, his criticisms throw them all into the one bag of being unreliable and essentially makes the contrasting point that he can be trusted.

He has neither his Bishops approval for his writings, a good and faithful Catholic publisher, a nihil obstat, an imprimatur, nor a recommendation from any other theologian, bishop, priest or credentialed authority recommending his books or writings.
Look for a foreword page and you will find no one editing, proofreading or recommending his books. This is a ‘one-man band’, self-publishing all his books with his own internet presence through a website.
Moreover, if you want to know an authoritative answer or delve into the teachings of the Catholic Church, then he has all the answers.
Want to know the date of the Second Coming
“Jesus Christ returns from Heaven, with the Virgin Mary, in the year 2437 A.D.”2

With this background in mind, we will not be surprised to find that the attacks launched by the critic, who specializes in providing supplies for surviving the coming apocalypse, are at best juvenile and at worst blasphemous. They resemble the trick questions used by the Scribes and Pharisees to trap Jesus. The format of the criticisms is one of grand pronouncements and strings of cliches. Also, since his own private revelations about the “end-times” have been demonstrably false, we cannot take seriously his claim to be able to infallibly pronounce on other private revelations – particularly one that has been approved by the Church.

These are his principal charges:

  • The promise that those who turn to God as Father will not perish is an empty promise of salvation which takes away from the Incarnation of Christ.
  • The appearance of the Father as a young man detracts from the Incarnation of Christ.
  • The demand of venerating an image of the Father is placed as a condition of salvation which takes away from the Christian message.
  • The Father’s desire to be honored is blasphemous because God is perfect and has no desires.
  • The focus on the Father takes away from the necessary focus on the suffering and death of Jesus and its salvific effect.
  • The revelation says that people have lived in excessive fear of the Father and falsely says that this fear should be removed.
  • This private revelation is said to be more important than the Incarnation and is on a par with Sacred Scripture.
  • The roles of the Persons of the Trinity are confused.

It is clear from his charges that the critic has very little understanding of Trinitarian theology or the theology of the Father.  Further, he deliberately misrepresents key statements made in the messages. Anyone who has read a book like Vatican theologian Jean Galot’s Abba Father We Long to See Your Father will recognize the startlingly superficial nature of the critic’s comments on the Father, the Trinity and the Incarnation. 

Galot says:

“The declaration, ‘Whoever has seen me has seen the Father,’ shows us that all study of the Gospel must culminate in the Father. In every aspect of the revelation of the incarnate Son, it is important to discover the Father. Beyond the reading of the Scripture texts and beyond exegesis, the ultimate goal of the study of the Gospel must be the Father, a Father discovered in the pulsation of Jesus’ filial life.”3

“The Son receives everything from the Father by reason of the fact that he is begotten by the Father, so that the Father’s priority is total and the Father is the origin of everything that Jesus is and of everything he does. But since the Son receives everything, he possesses everything the Father possesses. He is “one”, one single Being with him. He receives the plenitude of divinity and that is why he is God like the Father, perfectly equal to the Father in possessing his divine nature.”4

“Salvation is governed by the Father’s intention to establish his universal fatherhood. That is the fundamental truth emphasized in the hymn at the beginning of the Letter to the Ephesians (Ep 1:2-14). … In his plan for universal fatherhood, the Father willed to become the Father of all human beings in the Son and through the Spirit.”5

“When Jesus teaches his disciples in explicit terms how to pray, he asks them to address the Father. The only prayer formula he transmits to them begins with the invocation to the Father and is totally directed to the Father. … Prayer addressed to Christ or to the Holy Spirit reaches the Father even if the Father is not named. … Indeed, all prayer is brought to the Father by Christ in the Holy Spirit.”6

It is these very themes – that are biblically fundamental and yet widely ignored – that are crystallized in the messages received by Mother Eugenia.

Each one of the critic’s charges is demonstrably false as we see below.

Charge – The promise that those who turn to God as Father will not perish is an empty promise of salvation which takes away from the Incarnation of Christ.

Response – We have seen earlier that Jesus himself said that eternal life comes from knowing the Father and the one whom he sent. We have seen also that this promise cannot be seen in isolation from the Father’s requirement (in the same message to Mother Eugenia) of keeping the commandments, receiving the sacraments, turning to Jesus and the Holy Spirit and trusting God. But much like the promises made in the Sacred Heart, Fatima and Divine Mercy revelations, a specific action (in this case sincerely turn to God as Father) will result in God providing the graces necessary for salvation. It is a starting-point not the end-point!

Charge – The appearance of the Father as a young man detracts from the Incarnation of Christ

Response – This charge is nothing less than silly. Anyone familiar with Andrei Rublev’s famous icon of the Trinity will recall that all Three Persons are shown as being of the same age with no beards. The icon derives from the three angels visiting Abraham who Christians later interpreted to be the Persons of the Trinity. God is not physical but (as we have seen), he can use physical vehicles to manifest himself. In the case of Jesus, of course, we uniquely honor the Eternal Son truly taking on a human nature. In the appearance to Mother Eugenia, the Father specifically dispels the false notion that he is to be thought of as “a frightening old man.” He emphasizes the fact that there is no “age difference” between the eternally existing Persons of the Trinity. This should be obvious to anyone who is theologically literate but is sometimes forgotten in popular piety. Jean Galot writes, “ The perfection of fatherhood cannot be conceived in a static manner. The Father’s paternity is a welling up of divine life. Far from suggesting aging, as do certain pictures of the Father representing him as an old man, it is totally new and young. The One Jesus called “Abba” is younger than all other fathers.”7

Charge – The demand of venerating an image of the Father is placed as a condition of salvation which takes away from the Christian message.

Response – Images are associated with other private revelations. For instance, special blessings are promised to those who venerate the images of the Sacred Heart or the Divine Mercy. In the case of Mother Eugenia, the Father says that he desires families to prominently display an image of himself that he revealed to her and that those who do so will receive his “special protection.” Nowhere in the messages does it say that venerating the image is a condition of salvation. The promise is no different from the promises made in the Sacred Heart and Divine Mercy revelations. And the image is a finite icon that draws our minds and hearts to the reality of the infinite Father and not an idol to be worshipped. We do not stop at the image but use it as a vehicle to “connect” with the eternal Father whom we are called to worship “in spirit and truth.”

Charge – The Father’s desire to be honored is blasphemous because God has no desires and emotions.

Response – The inanity of this attempted critique is obvious from Scripture itself:

“When the LORD saw how great the wickedness of human beings was on earth, and how every desire that their heart conceived was always nothing but evil, the LORD regretted making human beings on the earth, and his heart was grieved.” (Genesis 6:5-6)

“The anger of the LORD shall not abate until he has carried out completely the decisions of his heart.” (Jeremiah 23:20)

“How could I give you up, Ephraim, or deliver you up, Israel? … My heart is overwhelmed, my pity is stirred.” (Hosea 11:8)

“At the sight of the crowds, his heart was moved with pity for them because they were troubled and abandoned, like sheep without a shepherd.” (Matthew 9:36)

“As he drew near, he saw the city and wept over it.” (Luke 19:41)

In these verses we see emotions, feelings and desires attributed to God. We know that in his infinite perfection, God has no change or need. Yet we also know that God is infinite love. This love is unchanging but it is experienced by us as divine wrath or mercy – or a divine desire (“The LORD has sought out a man after his own heart.” 1 Samuel 13:14).  The Father tells Mother Eugenia that he desires us to know, love and honor him. This is also what he told the prophet Malachi: “A son honors his father … If, then, I am a father, where is the honor due to me? … So says the LORD of hosts to you.” (Malachi 1:6.). It is not that the Father “needs” anything from us. Rather, we can reach the perfection proper to us only in knowing, loving and honoring the Father. Honoring the Father helps us not him. As he says in his messages, “It is not because I need My creature and his adoration that I desire to be known, honored and loved; the only reason why I am stooping down to him is to save him and give him a share in My glory.”

Charge – The focus on the Father takes away from the necessary focus on the suffering and death of Jesus and its salvific effect.

Response – The New Testament shows each Person of the Trinity playing a specific role in salvation history. As we have seen, the Father sends us the Son and the Spirit to draw us to the salvation that is union with him. This role played by the Father was obscured in subsequent Christian history. The revelation to Mother Eugenia has served as a necessary corrective to bring us back to the truths already found in Scripture. It should be mentioned that in this revelation the Father highlights the importance of the suffering and death of Jesus for our salvation: “for you, the Cross is the way to ascend to My Son, and from My Son to Me. Without it you could never come to Me, because man, by sinning, brought on himself the punishment of separation from God.” The Father also emphasizes the importance of the devotions to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Kingship of Christ both of which are rooted in the Incarnation.

Charge – The revelation says that people have lived in excessive fear of the Father and falsely says that this fear should be removed.

Response – The critic maintains that there is no excessive fear of God in the faithful and he says, in fact, that we should seek to have a holy fear of God. But he is wrong on the first count and misleading on the second. Most people, including most Christians, do have an image of a harsh, condemning God. This is precisely why the Divine Mercy revelation to St. Faustina was necessary and why it met such resistance. While the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, we should not stay at the beginning. We should be afraid of breaking the laws of God but this should not affect our understanding of God. Through his parable of the prodigal son, Jesus shows us the unconditional love of the Father. It is precisely this love that the Father manifests in his messages.

Charge – This private revelation is said to be more important than the Incarnation and is on a par with Sacred Scripture.

Response – One wonders which revelation he is talking about. In his messages to Mother Eugenia, the Father asks her to go back to Scripture and ties all that he is saying to specific biblical verses and to events in Old and New Testament history. What the Father’s revelation does is to take us back to the sources of our faith: Scripture, the Incarnation, salvation history, the sacraments. It presupposes the truth of all of these. As we have said, the messages are not the revelation of any new truth but a request to return to the fullness of the original revelation that constitutes Scripture. The messages underline the love of the Father of which Scripture already speaks: “I am speaking to all men, the world over, making this appeal of My fatherly love ring out, this infinite love that I want you to know is a permanent reality.” And it calls for unconditional trust and confidence in the Father – which is also a hallmark of each book of the Bible.

Charge – The roles of the Persons of the Trinity are confused.

Response – It is the critic who is confused perhaps because of his misconceptions about the Trinity.

We have seen that that, in his messages, the Father takes us back to the original revelation of the Trinity and makes the actions of the Divine Persons as concrete as we find them to be in Scripture. The messages, like Scripture, show that the Three Persons are mutually distinct and mutually indwelling.  The critic on the other hand keeps moving between the opposite and equal heresies of tritheism and modalism – and complains that the messages do not follow in his footsteps.

In addition to the messages cited earlier, this excerpt from the prayer given to Mother Eugenia (which the critic ignores) makes it strikingly clear that there is no confusion of Trinitarian roles:

“Grant me the light, the grace and the power of the Holy Spirit! Strengthen me in this Spirit so that I may never lose Him, never grieve Him nor weaken His voice in me. My Father, it is in the Name of Jesus, Your Son, that I ask You for this. O Jesus, I ask You to open Your Heart! Put my heart into Yours and offer it, together with the Heart of Mary, to our Divine Father. Obtain for me the grace which I need!”

And, as we have seen, the Father specifically asks for the Three Persons to be honored in the Church and by humanity with a special devotion so that we can recover the fullness of the revelation of God.

In conclusion, these outrageous attempts to smear the grace-giving revelation received by Mother Eugenia tell us very little about the revelation itself. But they tell us a lot about the mind-set of the critic.  They remind us to return to the warning of Jesus: “Do not give what is holy to dogs, or throw your pearls before swine, lest they trample them underfoot, and turn and tear you to pieces.” (Matthew 7:6). In the words of St. Ambrose, this “mystery ought to remain sealed up with you … that it be not made known to those for whom it is not fitting.”

End Notes

1https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/magisteriumism-and-other-myths/

2https://www.rationalresponders.com/forum/15400

3Jean Galot, Abba Father We Long to See Your Face (New York: Alba House, 1992), 29.

4Ibid., 71.

5Ibid., 120, 131.

6Ibid., 186.

7Ibid., 68.