Manuela – How Beautiful and Precious is the Church

Who is Manuela Strack?

The experiences of Manuela Strack (born in 1967) in Sievernich, Germany (25 km from Cologne in the diocese of Aachen) can be divided into two phases. Manuela, whose alleged mystical experiences began in childhood and intensified from 1996 onwards, first claimed to have received a large number of messages from Our Lady, Jesus, and the saints between 2000 and 2005, including locutions of a surprising theological and poetic density which she attributed to St. Teresa of Avila. Twenty-five “public” Marian apparitions took place between 2000 and 2002: in the first of these, the Mother of God asked Manuela, “Will you become a living Rosary for me? I am Mary, the Immaculate.” She also revealed to her that apparitions had already occurred in Sievernich during the Second World War but were hidden by the Nazis (the parish priest, Fr. Alexander Heinrich Alef, was an opponent of Hitler and died in a concentration camp).

The messages received in this first cycle of apparitions emphasize—in line with many other serious prophetic sources—the importance of the sacraments, the loss of faith in Europe, the dangers of theological modernism (including plans for the abolition of the Eucharist), and the coming of events predicted in Fatima.

The second phase in Sievernich began on November 5, 2018, with the appearance of the Child Jesus as the Infant of Prague (a form He had already taken in 2001). In this second ongoing cycle of apparitions, a central place is accorded to devotion to the Precious Blood of Jesus, the eschatological character of which is emphasized (Rev. 19:13: “He is clothed with a mantle dipped in blood”). Simultaneously Child and King, Jesus promises to rule His faithful with a golden scepter, while for those who do not want to welcome him, He will rule with a scepter of iron.

In the messages, there are references not only to many biblical passages—with a particular emphasis on the Old Testament prophets—but also to the mystics of the Church. The apparitions especially speak about the “Apostles of the Last Times” described by St. Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort (1673-1716): the Child Jesus appears several times with the “Golden Book,” the Treatise of the True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary of the famous Breton preacher whose writings were forgotten for over a century after his death prior to their re-discovery in the mid-19th century. There is also a reference to The Warning prophesied in Garabandal (1961-1965), with the Child Jesus pronouncing the Spanish word “Aviso” when describing the prophecy; the fact that Manuela Strack did not understand this allusion (thinking that the word was Portuguese) strongly suggests that this was indeed a locution heard from “outside” rather than coming from her own imagination.

In certain messages attributed to Jesus and St. Michael the Archangel, we find repeated admonitions concerning the gravity of legislation against God’s law (abortion…), the threat posed by revisionist German theology and abdication of pastoral responsibility on the part of the clergy. The locutions include a striking symbolic interpretation of the burning of Notre Dame in Paris in 2019 as well as warnings about an armed conflict involving the United States, Russia, and Ukraine that could endanger the whole world (message of April 25, 2021). A message given in December 2019 and revealed on May 29, 2020 announced “three difficult years” to come.

A book on the Sievernich apparitions, In Namen des Kostbaren Blutes (In the Name of the Precious Blood), was published in January 2022, with commentary on the messages being provided by the German journalist Michael Hesemann, a specialist in church history.