Vassula Ryden is the most wretched human being on the planet. She is a contemptible evildoer, an inveterate sinner. A sheep so black she leaves a soot trail. This is not a matter of opinion or conjecture. It is the gospel according to the Lord Jesus Christ.

“I asked God why he had chosen me as the channel of his message,” she declares. “He said, ‘Because you are wretched. In your wretchedness, I can show my mercy’. Though there are many wretched people in the world, He told me I was the most wretched. What wretched means in God’s eyes, I don’t know exactly but I don’t think it was a compliment.

“God is attracted by wretchedness. Jesus runs after the people who are wretched. He runs after the sick, the weak, the wicked. To someone who is doing alright, He will say, ‘You’re doing fine, let Me go and get this one who is about to fall’.”

When Vassula Ryden says she asked the Almighty this or He told her that, she is not speaking figuratively. She does not communicate with the Lord through anything as nebulous as common prayer or acts of devotion. Her intimacy with the Heavenly Father does not operate on a kneel-to-know basis.

Vassula and The Creator are confidantes. She calls Him her “Great Lover.” He, meanwhile, urges her to, “call Me Daddy.” They hold conversations with each other every day, literal conversations. From God’s lips to her ears.

These cosy tête-à-têtes have made Vassula the latest star in the international constellation of novelty Catholic prophets. For a religion that claims exclusive rights to the unchanging, eternal Truth, its followers seem to have a remarkably voracious appetite for new messiahs. Such gurus are, if not quite ten a penny, at least one a penny.

News of Vassula Ryden’s daily chats with Christ has spread like wildfire on the pietistic hush-hush bush. She now travels the world, spreading her mad tidings from on high. She has published six books outlining the messages bestowed upon her from the Lord. They have been translated into no less than 33 languages.

All too predictably, Ireland has proven itself especially fertile soil for her supernatural shtick.

The rich you have always with you. This is one of the central lessons that Vassula Ryden teaches us. We must scorn not the affluent or the well-to-do. They too have their story.

It is a curious characteristic of the Ryden cult that a large swathe of her following, in Ireland at least, is drawn from the moneyed, gin-and-Jag classes. During Vassula’s recent visit to this country, she bunked with a family of devotees in opulent and chic Shrewsbury Park, in the leafy, cloistered heart of Dublin 4’s most expensive real-estate belt. Many of her biggest admirers hail from similarly privileged locales, in both the republic and Northern Ireland.

Shrewsbury Park is the epitome of suburban prosperity. The houses are stately, forbidding and ivy-wrapped. Most appear to have tinted windows, fashioned from that impenetrable dark glass you usually see in sleek limousines.

The most prominent architectural features in the area are the craggy-faced gardeners pottering about on the front lawns, clipping shrubbery and cultivating an air of arrogant superiority.

Even in mid-afternoon on a weekday, almost every homestead has a 96-reg Beamer or Merc glistening in the driveway. It’s the kind of neighbourhood where the vigilantes would carry croquet bats; that is if there were any need for vigilantes which there most certainly isn’t.

Admittance to Shrewsbury Park is only possible through coded security gates. God Himself couldn’t gain entry without prior arrangement. I am greeted just inside the gates by a Mr. Frank Reynolds, the bespectacled, elderly chairman of The True Life In God Association Ireland Committee, the Vassula Ryden fan club.

The stated aims of this group are, “Scripture study, adoration, reparation, penance and evangelising” the message of Vassula, “one of the greatest mystics and seers of our times.” Their ultimate ambition is “to make Ireland truly an island of saints once again.”

Frank Reynolds doesn’t live in Shrewsbury Park; his home is in Ratoath, County Meath. He’s here because he likes to sit in on press interviews with Vassula, ostensibly to help out with her “faltering English” but really to keep a watchful eye on the questions being asked by impertinent journalists.

As The True Life In God Association make clear in their periodic committee bulletins, they have little time for the scepticism and disbelief of “those who do not consciously want to be with God.”

Frank Reynolds leads me into a sumptuous sitting room where the walls are cliffs of leather-bound books and the porcelain ornaments on the mantelpiece look like they come with a sticker price exceeding the annual industrial wage. Vassula Ryden is perched on a fringed, velvet armchair in a corner, her black sweat-panted legs tucked underneath her haunches like a schoolgirl.

“God has not spoken to me yet today,” she declares, matter-of-factly. “Today, I just ask the Holy Spirit to open my mouth and speak through me for all these interviews. I don’t want to be Vassula speaking, I want the Holy Spirit to say today what He wants. You will be talking to the Holy Spirit through me.”

54-year-old Vassula was born in Egypt of Greek parents. She was nominally baptised a Greek Orthodox Catholic but grew up without formal religious education, and was effectively lapsed by adolescence.

According to her assiduously nurtured legend, Vassula was a feckless, licentious young woman. However, if you press for specific instances of debauchery from what she dubs her “wilderness years,” you soon discover that her use of the term wilderness years loses a little something in translation.

“I was not following a prayerful life,” she confesses, a heavy sigh deploring the heinous abyss of her depravity. “I was baptised as a Christian but not really practising my religion or following the church. I was only going to church for the occasional funeral or marriage. Not that I was anti-God or against the church. I was not instructed, if you like, and brought up in a way to feel that I should be living a real Christian life. I was aloof from all those things.”

In her late 20s, hellraisin’ Vassula married a Swedish man whose work, she says, vaguely, involved “helping developing countries.” Together, they spawned two sons, now aged 20 and 25 respectively. In the early 80s, Vassula and her family were stationed in Bangladesh where they enjoyed what Vassula describes as “the glitzy life.”

“I was very absorbed with my social life,” she recalls. “Because of the job my husband had, we had to socialise a lot. There were a lot of cocktail evenings, parties, dinners. When you live abroad like we did, you spend a lot of your time in clubs – sports clubs, social clubs, drinking clubs. You have a lot of friends and you socialise almost every night. It was this sort of life that I led, not even thinking once about God.”

Then came the explosion of divine revelation, the mystical payoff without which any tale of salvation is about as much use as a jock strap in a nunnery.

One afternoon, in November, 1985, Vassula Ryden sat down at her kitchen table to compose a shopping list of requisites for the cocktail party she was planning to host that evening. “Suddenly, I felt there was another influence moving my hand and I had no control of it,” she claims. “That’s when my guardian angel manifested himself.” The cocktail party was cancelled.

Vassula’s guardian angel proclaimed that his name was Daniel. Vassula couldn’t actually see him. Rather, she insists, she felt “his presence within me, very, very powerfully.” She also “saw him interior-ly.”

Dan The Cherub was, apparently, a friendly sort. He wasn’t one of those pushy celestial beings who barge in unannounced and inseminate any virgins you happen to have in the house. Politely and gently, Dan ‘told’ Vassula that he had been sent by God to prepare her for her “vocation and mission in life.”

“It was good that God came in a way that was not frightening,” Vassula avers. “The angel came to give me a purification. I wasn’t terrified or upset by the angel. I felt comfortable with him, and this allowed me to get used to the idea. After that, I met God.”

God (or ‘God’ as He likes to be known) has visited Vassula every day ever since. He can drop around at any moment. There is no fixed routine to His movements, there being many other important calls on His valuable time.

“He came into my life when I was not even seeking him,” Vassula affirms. “There was no particular problem in my life and I was happy living my life. Sometimes, people have experiences with God if they are having a problem, if there is a sadness in the family. They turn to God and have an experience. God proves to us that He can come any time in your life, no matter how secure and happy you are.”

Perhaps this is why Vassula’s testimony is greeted so warmly among the wealthy and materially snug? “God is for everyone,” she replies tartly. “The poor and the rich.”

Some days, God and Vassula just bat the breeze and chew the fat. Most days though, the Almighty has some stuff He wants to get off His Infinite, Supreme and All-Merciful chest. That’s when Vassula is obliged to fulfil her “vocation and mission in life.” She takes dictation.

“God takes control of my hand and I write what He wants to write,” she maintains. “I write in a special way when I am in His power. This writing has been analysed by different experts. One of them is an exorcist, who has been dealing with automatic writing all his life. I have been accused of automatic writing which is Satanic. This is not automatic writing.

“The writing I do has been defined as ‘hieratic’, which means ‘secret writing’. There is a big difference between this and automatic writing. With automatic writing, you just let your pencil flow and it’s all nonsensical. What I write is messages from God. They have been studied by experts and renowned theologians, and have been shown to be completely consistent.”

Vassula’s role as a part-time spiritual secretary to the senior chief executive officer in the sky has taken over her entire existence to the point where she regards all else as unwelcome intrusion.

“It has become my daily normal life,” she avers. “I don’t see anything special or extraordinary about it anymore. I see it as a very normal daily life, to be in communication with God. It is my great joy. The hours can just flow by very fast, without me noticing. I look at my watch and three hours have gone just like this (clicks fingers) and I don’t even notice it.

“Three hours would be the average time I spend writing but it can reach nine hours. I have spent many days in constant writing from morning to evening. I do not know what I have written until I read it back later.

“I have to be prepared to start writing at any moment. God is all the time there and when He wants to speak, He can speak, whether I’m standing on a road waiting for a bus or thinking of Him. He has said this will go on for the rest of my life. That was one of the first questions I asked. He said, ‘This is the gift I have given you until the end of your days’.

“With apparitions of Mary, for example, she often says she will come again tomorrow at 4pm. God says, ‘Call me any time’. I am allowed to call Him when I need to. When I call Christ or Jesus, when I call His name, I immediately hear Him say, ‘I am here within you’. This is not just to please me. It is an example to you and to everybody that, whenever you utter God’s name, He answers. Even if you’d don’t hear Him, He’s there.”

Vassula Ryden is a spooky woman, and not only because she hears voices in her skull. She brooks no suspicion or doubt about her story. Her response to disbelief is to bare her teeth in a smile that looks more like an exit wound. Her eyes squint and her lips curl in a sulky snarl, an expression that most of us reserve for the split-second after the sucking of a lemon.

“Why should I invent such a thing?” she scolds. “There is no means of inventing such a thing and keeping it up for ten and a half years. Where else would all this spirituality come from?”

Having taken daily letters for the Lord for three years solid, during which time she and her family moved to Switzerland, Vassula began her globe-trotting ministry.

“God was training me at first,” she argues. “Then, he thrust me out internationally. He had told me this would happen. ‘From a rivulet, it will become like a river, then gush into an ocean’, He said. ‘It will go into all the nations’. After a couple of meetings in Switzerland, word spread and I was invited all over the world.”

Queries about the financing of her mission are accosted by another suck of the lemon. “I take the plane as if it was a taxi cab,” she states. “God inspires the programme. He looks after everything like that. I don’t worry. Everything financial is covered by the people who invite me.

“The money from the books helps run the operation. I spend a lot of my time at home opening letters, dealing with faxes, sending out messages the Lord has given me about unity in the church, apostasy, the Holy Spirit. and bring out extracts.

“In January, I go to Guam island in the Pacific, then New Guinea,

Indonesia, the Philippines, Japan, Taiwan. I am also travelling to the States for 23 meetings in 25 days. All that costs a lot of money but it’s there when it’s needed. I just concentrate on being available to God. I spend a lot of time reading over the passages, and praying that I will choose right passage for public reading.”

Vassula’s spiritual advisor is a Doctor Michael O’Carroll, a Jesuit priest based in Dublin’s Blackrock College. Dr. O’Carroll declines to speak to the media about his involvement with Vassula. He obviously feels that he has no need to explain himself. He was, after all, hand-picked by the Father of Jesus Christ for the job.

“Father O’Carroll and I met in Blackrock College a while ago,” Vassula recalls. “We got to know each other. He came to Switzerland several times. Then, we understood that God wanted him to be my counsellor. I received a message from God saying that he is my counsellor. Michael advises me, reads the messages. He has written two books on the subject and is working on the third.”

Essential to the appeal of the Vassula Ryden cult is the stringent traditionalism of her message. God is angry with us, she contends. The end of the reign of Satan is nigh. The time of repentance is now. Abortion is a crying shame. Pope John Paul is a top bloke. Ecumenism is a good idea, but don’t get carried away.

“There’s nothing new to add to the Bible,” Vassula expounds. “God says this very explicitly. All is within the Bible. If you do not understand the Bible, you must try harder. He talks about our lethargy in spirituality. We go to mass and communion but we are lethargic and tepid. He grieves very much because He’s very anxious to save us.

“God is hurt by the apostasy of the church that is happening now, and a rebellion that is going on around the Pope. Jesus says, ‘Do not listen to those who oppose the Pope and rebel against him. Do not change your style of following the tradition of the church. do not fall into the trap of liberalism. Be careful of these movements, come back to the old tradition that He has given us’. We should keep our traditions without changing a comma.

“To unite the church by trying to be flexible, and giving up devotions of the Sacred Heart, let’s say, or the Rosary to please certain other people, then it’s a false Ecumenism and He doesn’t want that. He is very strict about this and I’m very strict when I talk.

“Jesus says we are living in the end of times which does mean that this is the end of the world. It’s the end of one epoch, this apostatised, sinful epoch. We’re going through a very difficult time in the church. The second epoch is going to be the accomplishment of the prayer of Pope John XXIII when he was praying for unity and the second Pentecost.

“That’s happening in our time, your time, my time. The coming of the second epoch will be fulfilled in our lifetimes. Jesus says ‘Very soon, soon’. I said, ‘Whose soon – Your soon or my soon?’ His soon could be 500 years. He said, ‘Before the end of your days, Vassula’.”

God is a great conversationalist, says Vassula Ryden. He is amiable, wise and witty. He is also a good listener. Those of us who don’t share a chinwag with Him are missing out on what Vassula describes as “a real treat.”

“God is very informal, “ she attests. “This is what I want to pass on to people, that he is at everyone’s reach. He speaks in English because English is the language I can dominate best from all the languages I know. God will always talk to you in the language that you can control best.

“The Father is very paternal. He’s got a very paternal voice. The way he speaks and brings up things, you feel that he is a real father. He makes you feel that you are his child. You feel comfortable, at ease. You can just converse with him. We converse, in my head, and it is beautiful and fun.

“With Jesus, it’s the same thing. He is our holy companion, our best friend. He will understand you 100%, even if you blurt out your feelings in a wrong way, He will understand what you meant. What more can we ask? Of course, he’s also got humour. God has more humour than we have. He has just a wonderful humour.”

For example?

“I was in a church in Rhodes island in Greece,” Vassula recounts. “It was Summer, very hot. It was the Vespers of Our Lady, in August. There I was in this chapel standing, there were no seats. It was very hot, maybe 40 degrees. We were standing two and a half hours, and it was never-ending. They were singing hymns but were completely out of tune. The songs were not the best. I was getting tired of standing, and feeling guilty at the same time. Here I was in a church, I should be tolerating all this.

“In the end, I looked up at the dome of the little chapel. Always on an orthodox, there is a Pantocrator, an image of the Almighty, Jesus, sitting there with a book on His lap. I was admiring this, grateful that they hadn’t made Him look too stern. They often put very hard lines on he faces of the icons.

“While I was watching Jesus, He winked at me with His right eye. He closed His eye to me. I felt that He was teasing me. He knows I’m tired. He just jokes with me. He is very funny.”

Does the Lord tolerate back-cheek?

“God is your real father, before your father on Earth and you should behave towards Him like a child, converse with Him straight from your heart,” avows Vassula. “But He adds to this, ‘Never forget that I am holy’. That means you must have fear of the Lord too, at the same time. You cannot be cheeky but you can be informal.”

Does He ever lose the rag ?

“God is paternal in all His ways, very gentle. With Jesus, it depends on what message He’s giving. If He’s talking about the rebellion, He will raise His voice. When He talks about how His mystical body, the church, is bleeding, He speaks completely in grave tones, aggrieved. But, mostly, His tone is paternal.”

Vassula Ryden flashes her incisors, a grin to put the fear of God in a mere mortal like myself. “You too can talk to the Lord and hear His voice in your heart,” she promises. “Try it. Identify with me. People do identify with me. They say, ‘If these things happen to this certain Vassula, they can happen to me’. There is a hope, there’s a chance. I’m just living for God now. I have given up all my activities of before, tennis, painting, modelling, parties, everything. I just live for this. You should too.

“If it happens to me, it is for you too. Everybody should take away my name and put in their name instead. If God speaks to me, He speaks to you. I am just another wretched person.”