What is the Church's official stand on these prophecies of Alois Irlmaier?  Have they been approved or condemned?  I can't find anything on the internet saying that the local bishop ever gave approval.  In fact I can only find the opposite.  There are a couple of websites that have Mr. Irlmaier listed as being a false prophet who made false statements about the three days of darkness and the war which precedes it.  This is entirely possible seeing that several other approved visionaries have made predictions about these events. 

http://forumarchedemarie.forumperso.com/t2775-liste-de-faussaires-de-dieu

There are ample private revelations from fully approved sources that give a clear indication of what we can expect in the near future without chasing after ones that have never received any approbation from the Church.  I personally would only give credence to the approved ones.

Yeah, non-approved doesn't necessarily mean illegitimate.  There's almost nothing related to the faith in his predictions, so it's not like someone could somehow get bad doctrine from reading his predictions.  He was not silenced by the Church either.  But the Church is very cautious about giving approbation to anything, and especially when the prophecies / visions / locutions have little or no bearing on the faith.  It would be quite another thing if there was any theological content in the messages.  Given that there isn't, the Church probably saw no value in even investigating.

Here's a Brit tutorial on dowsing for water. 



In the intro, he states the first recorded use of dowsing rods was by Queen Elizabeth I, in preparing for battle against Catholic Spain.  England needed to find copper & silver mines so they commissioned German dowsers to find them and they did.

But, there is a preternatural side to it that is scary.  In this Cockney Brit tutorial, he speaks of creating an "association" between yourself and the divining rods to look for silver.  It requires that one ask the rods a series of questions.



Note: Per above, little mention is ever made of the Queen's witch, John Dee and his curses used to overturn the Spanish Armada.

I do know he was using divining rods, which is a superstitious practice that the Church has condemned.

Don't be so hard on yourself.  That's what this forum is for.  I'm sure it's a condemnable practice if one attributes some kind of "superstition" to it, but there are more things under heaven and earth that are dreamt of in the philosophy of "modern science".  There's probably some scientific explanation for how / why this works ... even if we don't know what that is yet.  We see that all the time where, if modern science can't figure out how or why something happens, they dismiss it as fake or fraudulent or superstitious.  I doubt that modern science understand 1% of our physical reality, and probably understand at least 50% wrong or incorrectly.  They do that constantly in the medical field, where the deride some of the medical practices of past generations or past civilizations as stupid ... only to find out that they were onto something.  Those old Farmers' Almanacs made better predictions about the weather (using whatever methods of prognostication they employed) than modern meteorologists.  There's probably some simple farmer out there that can smell the air and thereby accurately predict the weather for days or weeks out, whereas I can't trust "AccuWeather" to be even close more than 2 days out.

Finally, an (alleged) Irlmaier statement should be mentioned in this context, which was published in 2002 in Magazine-2000/No. 171 by Bernhard Bouvier (pseudonym), according to which the victim of assassination number three would be a US president. B. Bouvier quotes there the Irlmaier-witness „Gärtner“, who in turn is said to quote Irlmaier:

„The spheres of influence and areas of interest of the USA and Russia collide; There are already minor skirmishes; USA/Russia peace conference in Bucharest; The American president is αssαssιnαtҽd, whereupon the vice-president immediately declares war. …“ […]

Irritating only that another author (Leo DeGard „Armageddon“, 2003) also interviewed the witness Gärtner, but clear differences to the Bouvier version emerged. DeGard changed the location of the assassination from Bucharest to Budapest. Also, the conference in Budapest is said to have been convened „at short notice“ after Russian troops had already advanced to Belgrade (!) – and thus already violated NATO territory. Then DeGard states:

The witness […] today thinks that the ‚high-ranking person‘ is a youthful-looking American president.

I don't know if you're on twitter at all @Ladislaus, but this gentleman is a good Catholic https://twitter.com/AloisIrlmaier and he posts a lot of prophecies, and often digs up some I've never heard of. Worth checking out his post/reply history.