De Mattei: Shedding Light on Today’s Crisis
Italian historian Roberto de Mattei, whose columns we bring you here first in English each week, was stateside in Washington, D.C. last night. Below are his prepared remarks, well worth a read.
RORATE CAELI
Roberto de Mattei
The Cosmos Club – Washington.
March 27th 2017
Anniversaries in 2017
As in the lives of men, anniversaries are also celebrated in the lives of peoples. And 2017 is full of anniversaries; not all anniversaries however, merit a cake with candles.
The most talked about anniversary has been Martin Luther’s. Five hundred years have passed since October 31st 1517 when Luther nailed his 95 theses on the great door of Wittenberg Cathedral. An action which would set in motion the so-called Protestant Reformation and mark the end of Medieval Christendom.
Two centuries later, on June 29th 1717, The Grand Lodge of London was founded. This event is considered the birth of Modern Freemasonry, which in turn, is directly connected to the French Revolution. The Masonic Lodges in effect, were the intellectual, operative laboratories in which the Revolution of 1789 was hatched.
On October 26th or November 7th 1917, depending whether the Gregorian or the Julian calendars are adopted, the Lenin and Trotsky Bolshevik Party occupied the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. Thus, the Russian Revolution entered history and has yet to leave it.
1517, 1717, 1917, then, are three symbolic dates, three events that are part of a single process. Pius XII, in his speech to the men of Catholic Action on October 12th 1952, summed it up like this: “Christ yes, Church no; (the Protestant Revolution against the Church); then: God yes, Christ no; (the Masonic Revolution against the central mysteries of Christianity); finally the impious cry: God is dead; rather: God has never existed (the atheistic Communist Revolution). And here – Pius XII concludes – is the attempt to build the structure of the world upon foundations that We do not hesitate in pointing out as, the principals responsible for the danger that threatens mankind”.
Three stages of a single process which is now reaching its pinnacle. The Church called it Revolution, with a capital R, to describe its metaphysical essence and historical, centuries-old significance.
Yet, this year there is a fourth anniversary which, till now, has been discussed very little. 2017 is also the first centenary of the Fatima apparitions and it is in light of the Fatima message that I propose to examine the three revolutions that are commemorated this year.
Some principals to remember
The first element to emphasize is that we are speaking here about historical facts.
The apparitions of Our Lady at Fatima, between May 13th and October 13th 1917, are an objective historical fact, not a subjective religious experience of Our Lady appearing to the three little shepherds.
Historians imbued by rationalism, including many Catholic ones, would like to expel all that is supernatural from history – miracles, revelations and heavenly messages – consigning them to the private sphere of the faith. However, these miracles, these apparitions and these messages, when they are authentic, are part of history, in the same way as war and peace and all that happens in history and which history records.
The Fatima apparitions were events that happened in a precise place at a particular moment in history. Events verified by thousands of witnesses and a thorough canonical investigation, which ended in 1930. Six Popes in the 20th century publically acknowledged the Fatima apparitions, even if none of them fully complied with the requests. Paul VI, John Paul II and Benedict XVI visited the sanctuary as Popes, while John XXIII and John Paul I went there when they were still Cardinals, Roncalli and Luciani. Pius XII, sent his delegate, Cardinal Aloisi Masella. All of them honoured Fatima.
But the message of Fatima represents a historical event for another reason: it is a private revelation not only for the spiritual good of those who received it – the three little shepherds – but for all of humanity.
The Church makes a distinction between public Revelation and private revelations. The public Revelation of the Church ended with the death of the last Evangelist, St. John. However, St. Thomas Aquinas teaches that revelations and heavenly prophecies continue even after the conclusion of public Revelation, not to complete or propose new doctrine, but to direct the behaviour of men in conforming to it[1]. Sometimes private revelations are reserved for the spiritual perfection of those who receive these supernatural gifts. At other times, as in the case of the Sacred Heart Messages to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, they are directed to the good of the Church and all of society. The Sacred Heart of Jesus is at the centre of the Paray-le-Monial revelations and the Immaculate Heart of Mary is at the centre of those from Fatima. Fatima and Paray-le-Monial are private revelations for all of mankind. They have the characteristics of great “spiritual direction” which the Lord offers us to guide the behaviour of men at certain times in history
A third principle arises from the fact that some private revelations, like Fatima, are reserved not for the good of single individuals but for the whole of society, in a determined historical period. Private revelations help us to interpret the historical times we live in, but the times we live in help us, in turn, to understand more deeply the significance of the revelations. There is a reversibility. If it is true that Divine words project light in the darkest ages of history, the opposite is also true: the course of historical events, helps us to understand the meaning, at times obscure, of prophecies and revelations. In the centenary of the Fatima apparitions, it is necessary then to read Our Lady’s words in light of what happened during the last century, a ravaged century[2], to make sure that the light of this message illuminates with greater clarity the darkness of the times we are now living in.
The Russian Revolution of 1917
The historical background in which the Fatima apparitions took place is that of a terrible war, historically called “The Great War”: the war between 1914 and 1918 which saw more than nine million victims in Europe alone. A holocaust of blood, defined, in that same year 1917, by Pope Benedict XV as a “useless massacre”[3]. A useful massacre only to the anti-Christian Revolution that saw in the war the chance “to republicanize Europe“[4] and to complete the goals of the French Revolution.
The war overturned the political order that had been in force in Europe since 1815: that of the Congress of Vienna, which saw a Holy Alliance between the Empires of Austria and Russia against the liberal Revolution. The troops of the Hapsburg Empire and those of the Germans, lined up on the eastern front, contributed to the collapse of the Czarist Empire.
On April 3rd 1917, a month before the apparitions, the head of the Bolshevik sect, Vladimir Ilic Lenin (1870-1924), until then in exile in Zurich[5], returned to Russia in a sealed train-wagon made available by the German Joint Chief of Staff, who wanted to make Russian fall into complete chaos. Lenin set fire to Russia. However, the end never justifies the means and the chaos swept through not only Russia, but the entire world.
The same year, on January 13, 1917, another Russian revolutionary, Leon Trotsky and his family crossed the Atlantic Ocean and landed in New York. Antony Sutton put a good question: “How did Trotsky, who knew only German and Russian survive in capitalist America?“[6]. What is certain is that American President Woodrow Wilson provided Trotsky with a passport to return to Russia to “carry forward” the revolution[7]. In August an American Red Cross Mission, made up of lawyers and financiers, arrived in Petrograd. The mission was in fact a mission of Wall Street financiers to influence and pave the way for control, through either Kerensky or the Bolsheviks revolutionaries, of the Russian markets and resources [8].
There was then a convergence of interests among the German military and American financiers. This cloaks the origins of the Russian Revolution in a certain mystery.
The Russian Revolution, started by Lenin was carried out in two stages: the first was the so-called February Revolution, which led to the abdication of the Czar and the instauration of a liberal-democratic republic, under the leadership of Alexander Kerensky (1881-1970).
The second stage was the October Revolution, which brought about the fall of Kerensky and the instauration of Lenin and Trotsky’s Communist regime. There then opened up a killing season of no historical precedent.
The Russian Revolution, like the French Revolution, was the work of a minority, and was carried out with surprising rapidity, without anyone being quite aware of what was happening. John Reed, an American journalist and socialist, who took part in the Revolution, wrote a book entitled: “Ten Days that Shook the World”, in which he describes the atmosphere of those days efficaciously:
“Superficially all was quiet; hundreds of thousands of people retired at a prudent hour, got up early, and went to work. In Petrograd the street-cars were running, the stores and restaurants open, theatres going, an exhibition of paintings advertised…. All the complex routine of common life-humdrum even in war-time-proceeded as usual. Nothing is so astounding as the vitality of the social organism-how it persists, feeding itself, clothing itself, amusing itself, in the face of the worst calamities….”[9].
Fatima 1917
The Russian Revolution was not only a historical event, it was a philosophical event. In his theses on Feuerbach (1845), Karl Marx sustains that the task of the philosopher is not that of interpreting the world, but of transforming it[10]. The revolutionary has to demonstrate in praxis, the potency and efficacy of his thought. Lenin in achieving power, performed a philosophical act because he didn’t theorize it, but brought the Revolution about. In a manner of speaking, Marx and Engel’s Socialism, thanks to Lenin, became ‘incarnate’ in history. The Russian Revolution appears then like a diabolical parody of the Mystery of the Incarnation. Jesus, by His becoming incarnate, wanted to open up the gates of Heaven to men: the Marxist Revolution, closed the gates of Heaven in order to make of the Earth its impossible paradise. It was an eruption of the demonic into history.
However, Heaven responded with an eruption of the sacred upon the earth. At the other end of Europe, during those same months, something else was taking place:
On May 13th 1917, at the Cova de Iria – an isolated place of rocks and olive trees, near the village of Fatima in Portugal “a lady dressed all in white, more brilliant then the sun, shedding rays of light, clear and stronger than a crystal glass filled with the most sparkling water, pierced by the burning rays of the sun” appeared to three children who were watching over their sheep, Francesco, Jacinta Marto and their little cousin Lucia dos Santos. This Lady revealed Herself as the Mother of God, entrusted with a message for mankind as She had done before in Paris, at Rue du Bac in 1838 and at Lourdes in 1858. Our Lady gave an appointment to the three shepherd-children for the 13th of every subsequent month until October. There were six apparitions. The last apparition ended with a great atmospheric miracle, a miraculous seal from Heaven. “The dance of the sun”, witnessed by thousands of people who were able to describe it in great detail and which was seen even from 40 kilometres away[11].
From that moment on, the history of Fatima and Russia has been intertwined together.
The history of the 20th century, until our days, has seen the struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness. The first nourish themselves on what we might call the spirit of Fatima; the second on the spirit of the Prince of Darkness, which, in the twentieth century was manifested above all under the form of Communism and its metamorphoses.
The Secret of Fatima
Prior to being a place Fatima is a message.
The message revealed by Our Lady at Fatima contains three parts, called secrets, which form an organic, coherent whole. The first is a terrifying vision of hell into which the souls of sinners precipitate; the mercy of the Immaculate Heart of Mary counters this punishment [and is] the supreme remedy offered by God to humanity for the salvation of souls.
The second part involves a dramatic historical alternative: peace – fruit of the conversion of the world and the fulfilment of Our Lady’s requests, or a terrible chastisement would await mankind if it remained obstinate in its sinful ways. Russia would be the instrument of this chastisement.
The third part, divulged by the Holy See in June 2000, expands on the tragedy in the life of the Church, offering a vision of a Pope and bishops, religious and laity struck dead by persecutors. Discussions that have opened up in recent years about this “Third Secret” risk however in obscuring the prophetic force of the Message’s central part, summed up in two decisive sentences: Russia “will scatter her errors throughout the world” and “in the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph”.
Russia will scatter its errors throughout the world
“Russia will scatter her errors throughout the world”. The term errors is precise: the error is the denial of the truth. Truth then, exists and there is only one truth: that which is preserved and diffused by the Catholic Church. Russia’s errors are those of an ideology which opposes the natural and Christian order, by denying God, religion, the family and private property. This complex of errors has a name: Communism and has in Russia its universal centre of diffusion.
Too often Communism has been identified with a purely political regime, neglecting its ideological dimension, whereas it’s precisely its doctrinal dimension that Our Lady highlights.
The anti-Communism of the 20th century has often been limited by identifying only the Communism of the Soviet tanks or the Gulags, which are certainly an expression of Communism, but they are not its heart. Pius XI, emphasized the ideologically perverse nature of Communism.
“For the first time in history – stated Pius XI in his encyclical Divini Redemptoris of March 19th 1937 — we are witnessing a struggle, cold-blooded in purpose and mapped out to the least detail, between man and all that is called God.” (2 Thess. 1,4)”.
Many anti-Communists have neglected this aspect, under the illusion of arriving at a possible compromise with a “humanitarian” Communism, purified of any violence. They have not understood the intrinsic ideological malice in Communism. What are the origins of this ideological malice? The Communists themselves sum up their errors in the formula of dialectic materialism: the universe is matter in evolution and Hegelian dialectic is the soul of this evolution. This philosophical, pantheistic vision has its political expression in a classless society. Social and political egalitarianism derives from metaphysical egalitarianism, which not only denies the distinction between God and man, but by divinizing matter, denies every distinction between men and created things.
The genealogy of errors
Errors do not spring up from nowhere. Russia’s errors, like all errors, sprung forth from previous errors and they, in turn, generate further errors. In order to fully understand their nature, we need to ask where these errors came from and where they are taking us.
Communism’s base text is The Manifesto of the Communist Party, published by Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) in February 1848. This text was commissioned to Marx and Engels by The League of the Just, a Communist group devoted to the ultra-Jacobin ideas of Gracchus Babeuf (1760-1797). Among the direct precursors of Socialism, Engels counts, alongside the Jacobins, also the Anabaptists, the “levellers” of the English Revolution and the philosophers of the Enlightenment in the 18th century[12].
The Anabaptists represent the far-left of the Protestant Revolution, what the historian George Hunston Williams (1914-2000) described as the radical Reformation, opposed to the magisterial Reformation of Luther and Calvin[13]. In reality, it was not about opposition, but development: what characterizes all Revolutions is that their potentialities are contained in their genetic instant and the principles at the roots of Anabaptism originate from the impetus, that Luther,from the very beginning had impressed on the religious Revolution of the 16th century.
Professor Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira (1908-1995) observed that:
“Like cataclysms, evil passions have an immense power-but only to destroy. In the first instant of its great explosions, this power already has the potential for all the virulence it will manifest in its worst excesses. In the first denials of Protestantism, for example, the anarchic yearnings of communism were already implicit. While Luther was, from the viewpoint of his explicit formulations, no more than Luther, all the tendencies, state of soul, and imponderables of the Lutheran explosion already bore within them, authentically and fully, even though implicitly, the spirit of Voltaire and Robespierre and of Marx and Lenin.”[14].
We need to emphasize a second point here. It is true that “Ideas have consequences”[15], but not all consequences are coherent with the intentions. A German philosopher, Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920), coined the expression “”heterogony of ends“(Heterogonie der Zwecke,) to describe the contradictions that often exist between the intentions of man and the consequences of his actions. This heterogony of ends is typical of all utopias, which in denying reality, are doomed to be contradicted by it.
Luther, for example, theorized faith alone, denying any value to human reason. Yet, at the same time, he denied the Church’s authority, in the name of Sola Scriptura, interpreted according to the principle of free examination. The Italian Anabaptists, who go by the name of Socinians, because they follow the ideas of the Sienese heretics, Lelio (1525-1562) and Fausto Socino (1539-1604), ascribe a primary role to reason, thus demolishing the very texts of Holy Scripture with their criticism.
Socinianism is a form of radical Protestantism which moved from Italy to Poland, where it flourished between the 16th and 17th centuries; it then migrated to Holland and from Holland it reached England at the time of the English Revolution. Socinianism is a point of passage among religious sects of the Anabaptist types in the 17th and 18th centuries, along with the philosophical sects of a Masonic structure in the 18th century. In the “lay temple” of social virtues – the Masonic Lodge – the cult of a new ethic freed from the bonds of all dogma and religious morality, was practiced.
The relationships between Socinianism and Freemasonry can be followed through the figure of John Toland (1670-1722), author of a work entitled Pantheisticon (1720 – in which he illustrates the doctrine and the organisation of a society of “sodales socratici”, which were presented as centres not only for philosophical and political discussion, but also for an esoteric introduction to Pantheism and proposed to their members the realization of an egalitarian republic, free of every form of “religious superstition”[16]. Pantheism and egalitarianism are always connected.
In 1723, after the foundation of the Grand Lodge, a Presbyterian clergyman, James Anderson published The Constitutions of the Free-Masons. This work was reprinted in Philadelphia in 1734 by Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), who was that year elected Grand Master of Masons in Pennsylvania. In December 1776, Franklin was dispatched to France as commissioner for the United States. During his stay in France, Benjamin Franklin was active as a Freemason, serving as Venerable Master of the Lodge Les Neufs Soeurs. The foundation of the Grand Orient in 1773 marked the beginning of a new phase: a political campaign outside the lodges. Freemasons controlled the elections of March-April 1789 in France and a bloc was formed in the third state that was led by Masonry. Among the associates of the French lodge, was Count Mirabeau (1749-1791), a former French ambassador in Berlin, orator and statesman, who in early 1791 would be elected president of the National Assembly.
The Librarian of Congress, historian James H. Billington writes: “Mirabeau pioneered in applying the evocative language of traditional religion to the new political institutions of revolutionary France. As early as May 10, 1789, he wrote to the constituents who had elected him to the Third Estate that the purpose of the Estates-General was not to reform but “to regenerate” the nation. He subsequently called the National Assembly “the inviolable priesthood of national policy,” the Declaration of the Rights of Man “a political gospel,” and the Constitution of 1791 a new religion “for which the people are ready to die” [17].
Mirabeau was a member of the Illuminati of Bavaria, a secret society founded in 1776 by Adam Weishaupt, a professor of Canon Law at Ingolstadt University in Germany. The two prime source books for our knowledge of Adam Weishaupt’s Illuminati conspiracy are professor John Robison’s Proofs of a Conspiracy, first published in 1798, and the Abbé Augustine Barruel’s four-volume study, Memoirs illustrating the History of Jacobinism, published in 1799. I recommend these books. The purpose of the Order was to destroy all religions, overthrow all governments and abolish private property.
The Russian Revolution did not arise spontaneously, but was the outcome of a process going way back. The Communist theorist, Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), sums up this revolutionary process in the formula “the philosophy of praxis”. “The philosophy of praxis is the crowning point of this entire movement; (…) it corresponds to the nexus Protestant Reformation plus French Revolution. It is a philosophy which is also a politics, and a politics which is also a philosophy”[18].
The Revolution betrayed
However, a false philosophy, when it is politicized – that is – when it is carried out in the praxis – always betrays its premises. Only the truth is coherent with itself. Error is always contradictory. In this sense, the Revolution can only establish itself if it betrays itself. As in every Revolution, also the Communist October Revolution was a Revolution betrayed. The debate between Stalin and Trotsky is eloquent. Trotsky accuses Stalin of having betrayed the Revolution. Stalin responds that the praxis, that is the conquest and preservation of power, demonstrates the truth of his thought. Both were right and both were wrong. Those who fight the truth, fight themselves.
What is certain is that in the 20th century there are no other crimes comparable to Communism for the temporal space in which it spread, for the territories it embraced, for the quality of hate that it was able to secrete. But these crimes are consequences of errors. After the collapse of the Soviet Union these errors were as if released from the wrapping that contained them, to propagate like ideological miasma over the entire West, under the form of cultural and moral relativism.
The relativism today professed and lived in the West is rooted in the theories of materialism and Marxist evolutionism; in other words, on the denial of any spiritual reality and any stable and permanent element in man and society.
Antonio Gramsci is the theorist behind this cultural Revolution which transforms the dictatorship of the proletariat into the dictatorship of relativism. The task of Communism, for Gramsci, is to bring to the people that integral secularism, which the Enlightenment had reserved to a restricted élite. On the social level, this atheistic secularism is actuated, according to the words of the Italian communist, by means of a “complete secularisation of all life and all customs connected to it”, that is, through an absolute secularisation of social life, which will allow for the Communist “praxis” to extirpate in depth the social roots of religion. The new Europe with no roots, which has expelled every reference to Christianity from its founding Treatise, has fully realized the Gramscian plan for the secularisation of society.
We need to acknowledge the fact that the Fatima prophecy, in which Russia would have scattered Her errors throughout the world, has been fulfilled. The fall of the Iron Curtain made the diffusion of these errors unstoppable. The decomposition of Communism has putrefied the West. Anti-Communism, for its part, has vanished, because “very few have been able to penetrate the true nature of Communism” as Pius XI had warned in Divini Redemptoris. Nowadays, one feels almost embarrassed to say they are anti-Communist. This is Communism’s great victory: that it is has gone down without shedding a drop of blood, without being put on trial, without an ideological indictment, which would condemn its memory.
Vladimir Bukovsky, in his Judgment in Moscow wrote:
“Any event in our lives, even if it is of small significance, comes under the scrutiny of some commission or other. Especially if people have been killed. A plane crash, a railroad disaster, an industrial accident – and experts argue, conduct analyses, seek to determine the degree of guilt (…) even of governments if they had the slightest connection with what occurred.(…) Yet here we have a conflict (…) which affected practically every country in the world, cost scores of millions in lives and hundreds of billions in dollars, and – as has so often been claimed – almost brought about global destruction, which is not being examined by a single country or international organization.
Is it so surprising that alongside our willingness to examine every accident, we refuse to investigate the greatest catastrophe of our time? For in our heart of hearts we already know the conclusions such an investigation would yield, as any sane person knows full well when he has entered into collusion with evil. Even if the intellect provides specious logical and outwardly acceptable excuses, the voice of conscience whispers that our fall began from the moment we agreed to “peaceful coexistence” with evil.”[19]
Unfortunately the Catholic Church has promoted, and is promoting, this “peaceful coexistence” with evil.
The Communist dictator, Fidel Castro, when he died on November 26th 2016, received praise from the entire West, and even from the Catholic Church. Pope Francis, the seventh successor to Pius XI, in an interview given to Eugenio Scalfari compared Communism to Christianity and affirmed that inequalities are “the greatest evil that exists in the world”[20]. Yet, the essence of Communism lies precisely in the suppression of any form of social differences and the religious expression of this egalitarianism is the ecumenical equalization of all religions, just as its philosophical expression is ecological pantheism.
Pope Bergoglio recently received in the Vatican the exponents of the so-called “popular movements”, representatives of the new Marx-Ecologist left and expressed his liking for the pro-Marxist regimes of the Castro brothers in Cuba, Chàvez and Maduro in Venezuela, Morales in Bolivia, Rafael Correa in Ecuador and José Mujica in Uruguay.
Cardinal Zen, the Bishop Emeritus of Hong Kong and China’s highest-ranking prelate, in an interview accuses Pope Francis of “selling out” Chinese Catholics by striking a deal with the Communist government[21].
The errors of Communism have not only been scattered throughout the world, but have penetrated into the temple of God, like the smoke of Satan enveloping and suffocating the Mystical Body of Christ.
The Smoke of Satan in the Church
And it is not only this. At Fatima, Our Lady showed the three little shepherds the terrifying vision of hell where the souls of poor sinners go and it was revealed to Jacinta it was the sin against purity that leads most souls to hell. Who could possibly have imagined one hundred years later, that the public profession of impurity would have been added to the immense number of impure sins that are committed, under the form of sexual liberation and the introduction of extramarital unions, even homosexual, into the laws of the most important nations of the West?
And who could have ever imagined that a pontifical document, Pope Francis’ post-synod Exhortation, Amoris Laetitia made public on April 8th 2016, would endorse adultery? The Divine and natural law does not admit exceptions. Those who theorize the exception destroy the rule.
In one of the “dubia” formulated by the Cardinals to the Pope we read: “After “Amoris Laetitia” (n. 301) is it still possible to affirm that a person who habitually lives in contradiction to a commandment of God’s law, as for instance the one that prohibits adultery (cf. Mt 19:3-9), finds him or herself in an objective situation of grave habitual sin?”
The fact that today a doubt of this sort can be presented to the Pope and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, indicates how very grave and deep the crisis the Church is immersed in, is.
Cardinal Kasper and other pastors and theologians, have stated that the Church must adapt its evangelical message to the praxis of the times. But the primacy of praxis over doctrine is the heart of Marx-Leninism. And if Marx stated that the task of philosophers is not to know the world, but to transform it, today many theologians and pastors retain that the task of theologians is not that of spreading the Truth, but to re-interpret it in praxis. We need not then reform the habits of Christians in order to bring them back to Gospel teachings, but adapt the Gospel to the heteropraxis of Christians.
In the end my Immaculate Heart will triumph
The antidote to the dictatorship of relativism is the doctrinal and moral purity of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. It will be Our Lady and not men, who will destroy the errors that threaten us. Heaven, though, has asked for mankind’s concrete collaboration.
Our Lady states that the conditions to avoid chastisement are: a public and solemn act of the consecration of Russia to Her Immaculate Heart, done by the Pope, in union with all the bishops of the world and the practice of reparatory Communion on the first Saturdays of the month.
The Ecumenical Council Vatican II would have been a great opportunity to fulfil Our Lady’s requests. In 1965, 510 archbishops and bishops from 78 countries signed a petition in which they asked the Pope in union with the Council Fathers, to consecrate the whole world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and in a special way Russia and the other nations dominated by Communism. Paul VI however, paid no heed to the request.
Pius XII and John Paul II made partial acts of consecration to Russia or to the world, fruitful, not lacking in effects, but incomplete.
Benedict XVI on May 12th 2010, in the Chapel of the Apparitions, raised a prayer of entrustment to Our Lady, asking for the liberation: “of every danger threatening us”. But also this act was incomplete.
Those devoted to Fatima hoped in something more from Pope Francis, compared to his predecessors, but were disappointed. In his Marian act of October 2013, the Pope did not mention the Immaculate Heart nor the world, nor the Church, let alone Russia. Pope Francis will go to Fatima this coming 13th of May. What will he say and do there?
Today the consecration of Russia has still not been done, the practice of reparatory Communion on the First Saturdays is not being spread; and above all the atmosphere in which we are immersed is a spirit of degenerate hedonism, in the satisfaction of every pleasure and desire, outside the moral laws. Who could claim then, that the prophecy of Fatima has been fulfilled and that the great events preannounced by Our Lady in 1917 are behind us?
Our Lady, at Fatima, did not only ask the hierarchy of the Church for public acts. Along with these necessary actions there has to be a profound spirit of interior conversion and penance, as we are reminded in the Third Secret, in the triple call of the Angel to do penance.
Penance signifies above all repentance, a spirit of contrition, which makes us aware of the gravity of sins committed by us and others, and which makes us detest them with all our hearts. Penance signifies a doctrinal and moral revision of all the errors embraced in the last century by Western society. The Fatima message reminds us explicitly that the alternative to penance is a terrifying punishment which threatens mankind.
For the world to avoid this punishment it must change its spirit, but it cannot do so if it won’t recognize the enormity of the sins that are committed, starting with the introduction of mass-murder and homosexual unions into laws. Both these cases are sins directly against God, Creator of nature: sins, as the Catechism teaches, that cry out to Heaven for vengeance; in other words, they incur a great chastisement.
Without repentance the chastisement cannot be held back. Without reference to this chastisement, the message of Fatima is emptied of its deep significance.
Penance signifies repentance; penance signifies detestation and hate for sin: the hate for sin must impel us to fight it and when the sin is public, it must impel us into public action, to combat the roots and consequences of the evil in society. For this the call to penance in the Fatima message is also a call to combat the errors which are corrupting the whole of society today.
The Fatima message is not only an anti-Communist message; it is also an anti-liberal and anti-Lutheran message as the errors of Russia descend from the errors of the French Revolution and Protestantism. They are the errors of the anti-Christian Revolution, which the Catholic Counter-Revolution opposes. As Count de Maistre states, this is not a Revolution in the opposite way, but is the opposite of the Revolution in all its political, cultural and religious aspects[22].
Fatima directly opposes 1917, 1717 and 1517. We won’t be celebrating any of these dates.
Allow me to recall a revelation from Our Lady at Fatima which we learned about only a few years ago; exactly in 2013 when the Carmel of Coimbra published the volume Um Caminho sob o olhar de Maria.
Around four o’clock in the afternoon on January 3rd 1944, in the convent chapel of Tuy, in front of the Tabernacle, Our Lady urged Sister Lucia to write the text of the Third Secret and Sister Lucia recounts:
“I felt my spirit inundated by a mystery of light that is God and in Him I saw and heard the point of a lance like a flame that is detached touch the axis of the earth and it trembles: mountains, cities, towns and villages with their inhabitants are buried. The sea, the rivers and clouds exceed their boundaries, inundating and dragging with them in a vortex, houses and people in a number that cannot be counted; it is the purification of the world from the sin in which it is immersed. Hatred, ambition, provoke the destructive war. After I felt my heart racing and in my spirit a soft voice that said: ‘In time, one faith, one baptism, one Church, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic. In eternity, Heaven!’ This word ‘Heaven’ filled my heart with peace and happiness in such a way that, almost without being aware of it, I kept repeating to myself for a long time: Heaven, Heaven!!”[23].
Our Lady reminds us that a dreadful chastisement threatens mankind and that profession of the Catholic faith in its entirety is necessary in the dramatic age we are living in. One Faith, one Baptism and one Church. We need not then leave the Church, but turn back to Her and live and die in Her, since outside the Church there is no salvation. Outside Her doors there is only the inconsolable abyss of hell. The alternative remains that between Heaven and Hell, which have their own foretastes on this earth. Hell for the nations is: atheistic, anarchistic, egalitarian society. Paradise for the nations is: austere, hierarchical, sacred, Christian Civilization.
We conquest Heaven on earth by fighting in defence of the true Church, so often abandoned by Churchmen.
And the final exclamation: “Heaven! Heaven!” seems to refer to the dramatic choice between Heaven, the place where souls that are saved reach eternal happiness, and hell, the place where the damned undergo sufferings for all eternity.
Those who want to escape death, in time and eternity, have only one path before them: to fight against the disorders in the modern world, to affirm, in their lives and in society, the perennial principles of the natural and Christian order. This was the path chosen by many saints who should be our models, such as St. Maximilian Kolbe (1894-1941).
On October 17th 1917, on the eve of the Russian Revolution and without knowing anything about the apparitions at Fatima, the young Polish Franciscan founded the Militia of the Immaculate to combat Freemasonry which was celebrating the 200th anniversary of the constitution of London’s Grand Lodge with blasphemous parades through the streets of Rome. St. Maximilian Kolbe is one of the saints who prophesised the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
The Triumph of Mary’s Immaculate Heart, which is also the Reign of Mary announced by many privileged souls, is nothing other than the triumph in history of the natural and Christian order, preserved by the Church. Our Lady announced this triumph as the final outcome of a long trial, of tragic days of penance and struggle, but also of immense trust in Her promise.
Let us turn to Her then, in this Centenary of Her apparitions, asking Her, to make haste, this moment, making of ourselves an instrument, in our times, for Her victory against the Revolution: super Revolutionem victoria in diebus nostris, which is equivalent to saying:
In the end Her Immaculate Heart will triumph.
Translation: Contributor Francesca Romana
[1] St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II-II, 174, 6 ad 3.
[2] Robert Conquest, Reflections on a ravaged Century, W. W. Norton & Company, New York 2001.
[3] Benedict XV, Letter of 1 August 1917, in AAS IX (1917) p.421-423.
[4] Ferenc Fejtő, Requiem pour un empire défunt, Lieu Commun, Paris 1988, pp. 308, 311
[5] Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Lenin in Zurich, Book Club Associates, London 1976.
[6] Anthony Sutton,Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, Arlington House, New Rochelle 1974, p. 22
[7] Sutton,op. cit., p. 25
[8] Sutton,op. cit., pp. 86-88
[9] John Reed,Ten Days that Shook the World, Boni and Liveright, New York 1919, p. 112
[10]Tesi su Feuerbach, tr. it. in Feuerbach-Marx-Engels,Materialismo dialettico e materialismo storico, a cura di Cornelio Fabro, La Scuola, Brescia 1962, pp. 81-86
[11]Martins dos Reis,O Milagre do Sol e o Segredo de Fátima, Ed. Salesianas, Porto, 1966
[12] Frederick Engels, The Development of Socialism. From Utopia to Science, 1878, tr. tr. it. Editori Riuniti, Roma 1958, pp. 15-17.
[13] George H. Williams, The Radical Reformation, Westminster Press, Philadelphia 1962
[14] Plinio Correa de Oliveira,Revolution and Counter-Revolution, The American TFP, Hanover, PA, 2002, p. 25
[15] Richard M. Weaver, Ideas have consequences, The University of Chicago Press, Chigago & London 2013.
[16] Margaret C. Jacob, The Newtonians and the English Revolution, Cornell University Press, Ithaca 1976
[17] James H. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith, Basic Books 1980, pp. 19-20.
[18]Antonio Gramsci,Quaderni dal Carcere, [Prison Notebooks] edizione critica dell’Istituto Gramsci, by Valentino Gerratana, Einaudi, Torino 1975, vol. III, p. 1860
[19] Vladimir Bukovsky, Gli archivi segreti di Mosca, tr. it., Spirali, Milano 1999, pp. 62, 65.
[20] La Repubblica, November 11th 2016.
[21]LifeSiteNews 22nd February 2017.
[22] Joseph de Maistre, Considérations sur la France, cap. X, 3, in Œuvres complètes, Vitte, Lyon-Paris 1924, t. I, p. 157
[23] Carmelo de Coimbra,Um Caminho sob o olhar de Maria, Ediçoes Carmelo, Coimbra 2012, p. 267
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Posted by Adfero. at 3/29/2017 12:21:00 PM
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Jesus Walking on Water by Michael D. O’Brien
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