Bearing Bad Tidings, As Our Lady Predicted
by Thomas A. Droleskey
What exactly, my friends, has Russian been "converted" to since the ostensible demise of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on December 25, 1991? Some observers, including many in the counterfeit church of conciliarism, have concluded that the "conversion of Russia" spoken of by Our Lady to Jacinta and Francisco Marto and Lucia dos Santos during her apparition in the Cova da Iria near Fatima, Portugal, on July 13, 1917:
"To prevent this, I shall come to ask for the consecration of Russia to my Immaculate Heart, and the Communion of Reparation on the First Saturdays. If my requests are heeded, Russia will be converted, and there will be peace; if not, she will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church. The good will be martyred, the Holy Father will have much to suffer, various nations will be annihilated. In the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph. The Holy Father will consecrate Russia to me and she will be converted, and a period of peace will be granted to the world." (Mary's words at Fatima)
To what has Russia been converted? To what? Catholicism? Guess again. To a "peace loving" country that has made it more possible for there to be a "Western-style" democracy with "religious freedom"? Keep guessing. Keep guessing.
Russia, steeped in over a millennium of errors stemming from Orthodoxy and its own national character of xenophobia, has been "converted" to nothing, not that the Mother of God would have spoken of any other kind of conversion than to the Catholic Faith! No other "conversion" would occupy the time of the very woman in her whose Virginal and Immaculate Womb was conceived the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity by the power of God the Holy Ghost. No Russia remains now what she has been throughout most of her history: a land steeped in the darkness of heresy and national pride eager to devour its neighbors at a moment's notice.
Alexis de Tocqueville noted that Imperial Russia in the Nineteenth Century, expanding across the expanses of Eurasia long before the birth of Vladimir I. Lenin, was bound to conflict with the United States of America:
There are now two great nations in the world which, starting from different points, seem to be advancing toward the same goal: the Russians and the Anglo-Americans. Both have grown in obscurity, and while the world’s attention was occupied elsewhere, they have suddenly taken their place among the leading nations, making the world take note of their birth and of their greatness almost at the same instant. All other peoples seem to have nearly reached their natural limits and to need nothing but to preserve them; but these two are growing…. The American fights against natural obstacles; the Russian is at grips with men. The former combats the wilderness and barbarism; the latter, civilization with all its arms. America’s conquests are made with the plowshare, Russia’s with the sword. To attain their aims, the former relies on personal interest and gives free scope to the unguided strength and common sense of individuals. The latter in a sense concentrates the whole power of society in one man. One has freedom as the principal means of action; the other has servitude. Their point of departure is different and their paths diverse; nevertheless, each seems called by some secret desire of Providence one day to hold in its hands the destinies of half the world. (Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume 1, part 2.)
These observations were made in the 1830s. The rise and the ostensible "fall" of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics has not made these observations about Russia any the less relevant, although De Tocqueville's sanguine view of the United States of America has been proved to be without merit. The country on which he lavished such praise has used economic and military and political might to exert its own national-self interest in various parts of the world, being willing to sacrifice any semblance of an adherence even to the truths of the Natural Law in order to attain various geopolitical objectives. Indeed, the United States, founded on false, naturalistic, anti-Incarnational, religiously indifferentist and semi-Pelagian principles that its various wars and adventures have spread into Catholic nations, thereby taking untold numbers of souls out of the true Church, has enabled the slaughter of thousands upon thousands of Catholics in the Americas, especially during the Masonic persecutions of the Church in Mexico in the second and third decades of the Twentieth Century.
That qualification having been duly noted, however, De Tocqueville was entirely correct in his analysis of Russia's aims and methods. These have not changed whether Russia has been in the control of czars or commissars or the neo-czars of its post-Soviet history. Russia is indeed in need of conversion to nothing other than the true Faith, which is why the devil has worked overtime to frustrate its collegial consecration to Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart by a true pope with all of the Catholic bishops of the world. The conciliarists have moved Heaven and earth to deconstruct the meaning of Our Lady's Fatima Message and to turn that Message most perversely into a vehicle for its own false ecumenism. Russia continues to spread its own naturalistic errors as a result.
Our Lady promised on July 13 1917, to return to request the consecration of Russia by the Holy Father. She came to visit Sister Lucia in Tuy, Spain, on June 13, 1929, to specify the terms of this consecration:
"The moment has come in which God asks the Holy Father, in union with all the Bishops in the world, to make the consecration of Russia to my Immaculate Heart, promising to save it by this means. There are so many souls whom the Justice of God condemns for sins committed against me, that I have come to ask reparation: sacrifice yourself for this intention and pray." (Mary's words at Fatima.)
As I have noted on this site before, some will protest that the Church never passed on the June 13, 1929, apparition of Our Lady to Sister Lucia in Tuy, Spain, believing that the terms of the proper consecration of Russia were spelled out in the July 13, 1917 apparition, which terms were fulfilled, they believe, when Pope Pius XII singly consecrated Russia to Our Lady's Immaculate Heart in 1952. Others, however, believe, as I do, that Our Lady came in 1929 to make the specific request for the consecration of Russia to her Immaculate Heart by a pope with all of the world's bishops. As was pointed out in
Our Lady Does Not Act on Her Own ten months ago now, the Church never ruled on Our Lady's December 10, 1925, apparition to Sister Lucia dos Santos wherein she specified the practice of the Five First Saturdays to be kept in reparation for sins against her Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart:
Have compassion on the heart of your most holy Mother, covered with thorns with which ungrateful men pierce it at every moment, and there is no one to make an act of reparation. Look, my daughter, at my heart, surrounded with thorns with which ungrateful men pierce it at every moment by their blasphemies and ingratitude. You at least try to console me and say that I promise to assist at the hour of death, with the graces necessary for salvation, all those who, on the first Saturday of five consecutive months, shall confess, receive Holy Communion, recite five decades of the Rosary, and keep me company for fifteen minutes while meditating on fifteen mysteries of the Rosary, with the intention of making reparation to me."
The Church has given, at least in a de facto sense, recognition to this private apparition made in 1925, making it plausible, at the very least, that the 1929 apparition of Our Lady to Sister Lucia in the convent at Tuy, Spain, in which Our Lady called for the collegial consecration of Russia by a pope with all of the world's bishops to be an elaboration on that same July 13, 1917, message in the Cova da Iria in which she first called for the Communions of reparation on the First Saturdays and called for the consecration of Russia to her Immaculate Heart by the pope. Although even some who accept the legitimacy of the 1929 apparition contend that the time for such a collegial consecration has passed, noting correctly that World War II could have been prevented by such a collegial consecration, Sister Lucia continued to insist that the collegial consecration needed to be done. With all due respect to those who do not accept these conclusions, I would like to submit that the recent actions of the Russian Federated Republic against the Republic of Georgia are reminders that Russia has indeed been "converted" to nothing and that the Russian bear, far from being de-fanged, is on the loose once again.
Mind you, it is probably most true that the President of the Republic of Georgia, Mikheil
Saakashvili, fell into a trap that had been laid for him by the Russians when he ordered military operations in the breakaway region of South Ossetia, thus giving Russia the pretext it was looking for to taking military action against Saakashvili's pro-Western regime, sending a signal at the same time to the equally pro-Western government of The Ukraine, home to over four million Catholics, that its leaders had better think two or three or four times about their geopolitical leanings. And even though the neoconservative war hawks, ever ready to do the bidding of the State of Israel, which has played its own role in the region by helping to embolden the Georgians by providing their military with advisers and armaments, are already baying at the moon to involve the United States of America in yet another conflict, it is still nevertheless true that what has been happening in the Caucasus this past week has been planned for a long time by the Russian Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin, the former head of the Soviet K.G.B. and the former President of Russia who is pulling the strings as the head of the government while the the chief of state, the current Russian President, Dmitri
Medvedev (who plays the role of George W. Bush to Putin's Richard Cheney), bobbles his head approvingly at Putin's bold moves to reassert Russian military and geopolitical influence in the former republics of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
(Putin would have moved against Georgia at some point even if the latter's leaders hadn't been emboldened, if not egged on by, Israel's military advisers. It is also interesting to note that most adherents of the Talmud today are not physical descendants of Abraham. They are descendants of the Khazars, who converted to Judaism in the ninth century, who controlled much of what is now southern Russia for about three hundred years at the end of the First Millennium, including the northern region of the Caucasus. Talk about the errors of Russia!)
Although many of us were deceived, at least for a time, into thinking that the events of 1989 in Eastern Europe and those of 1991 in the old Soviet Union represented the end of Communism, the truth soon become evident before too very long. Russia, which has been ruled by autocrats throughout its history, had not changed. The former apparatchiks of the Soviet bureaucracy had not changed. Oh, the rhetoric was a little softer now and again. The reality was harder to discern in the midst of the giddy self-delusion concerning the "end of Communism (which was then--and is now--very much alive in such places as Red China, North Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba). The reality, though, was that the anti-Incarnational, statist errors of Russia continued to spread throughout the world in the 1990s while most Westerners deluded themselves into thinking that Russia had been transformed into a Western-style capitalistic republic.
The delusion about the "conversion of Russia" has been fed, obviously, by the counterfeit church of conciliarism, which entered into the notorious Balamand Statement with the Orthodox confessions on June 24, 1993. Any talk about the "conversion of Russia" runs afoul of the following provisions of that Balamand Agreement, which is why Our Lady's Fatima Message has had to be deconstructed and distorted by the conciliar troika of Joseph Ratzinger, Angelo Sodano and Tarcisio Bertone:
22) Pastoral activity in the Catholic Church, Latin as well as Eastern, no longer aims at having the faithful of one Church pass over to the other; that is to say, it no longer aims at proselytizing among the Orthodox. It aims at answering the spiritual needs of its own faithful and it has no desire for expansion at the expense of the Orthodox Church. Within these perspectives, so that there will no longer be room for mistrust and suspicion, it is necessary that there be reciprocal exchanges of information about various pastoral projects and that thus cooperation between bishops and all those with responsibilities in our Churches can be set in motion and develop.
23) The history of the relations between the Orthodox Church and the Eastern Catholic Churches has been marked by persecutions and sufferings. Whatever may have been these sufferings and their causes, they do not justify any triumphalism; no one can glory in them or draw an argument from them to accuse or disparage the other Church. God alone knows His own witnesses. Whatever the past may have been, it must be left to the mercy of God, and all the energies of the Churches should be directed so that the present and the future conform better to the will of Christ for His own.
24) It will also be necessary—on the part of both Churches— that the bishops and all those with pastoral responsibilities in the Churches scrupulously respect the religious liberty of the faithful. In turn, the faithful must be able to express themselves for this purpose. In fact, particularly in situations of conflict, religious liberty requires that the faithful should be able to express their opinion and to decide without pressure from outside if they wish to be in communion either with the Orthodox Church or with the Catholic Church. Religious freedom would be violated when, under the cover of financial assistance, the faithful of one Church would be attracted to the other, by promises, for example, of education and material benefits that may be lacking in their own Church. In this context, it will be necessary that social assistance, as well as every form of philanthropic activity, be organized with common agreement so as to avoid creating new suspicions.
25) Furthermore, the necessary respect for Christian freedom— one of the most precious gifts received from Christ—should not become an occasion for undertaking a pastoral project which may also involve the faithful of other Churches, without previous consultation with the pastors of these Churches. Not only should every form of pressure, of any kind whatsoever, be excluded, but respect for consciences, motivated by an authentic exigency of faith, is one of the principles guiding the pastoral concern of those responsible in the two Churches and should be the object of their common reflection (cf. Galatians 5:13). Balamand Statement
There can be no talk of a collegial consecration of Russia by a pope with all of the world's bishops when the false "pope" and his equally false "bishops" (save for those Eastern rite bishops who have been consecrated in their own rites by true bishops) have abandoned all talk of seeking with urgency the conversion of those steeped in the errors of the heretical and schismatic Orthodox confessions, including Russian Orthodoxy. There can be no place in the counterfeit church of conciliarism for any discussion of the "conversion of Russia" as requested by the Mother of God herself. To extent that such a "conversion" is even acknowledge any longer, most conciliar apologists claim that it was the "end of Communism" in Russia to which Our Lady referred on July 13, 1917, not a conversion of the entire nation to the Catholic Faith.
Oh, yeah? Says who?
Didn't Our Lady seek the conversion of the Americas to Catholic Faith by appearing to Juan Diego in 1531.
Didn't Our Lady appear to
Pierre Port-Combet near Plantees, France, on March 25, 1656, to tell him that he would go to Hell unless he abandoned his Calvinist heresy and converted back to the Catholic Faith?
Didn't Our Lady appear to the Catholic-hating Jew named Alphonse Ratsibonne on January 20, 1842, as she appeared on the Miraculous Medal in order to effect his conversion to the true Faith?
Who says that the Mother of God knows of any other type of "conversion" than to the Catholic Faith? And who says that a true pope is going to be careful not to antagonize the Russians too much in order to preserve the illusions of false ecumenism as he appears "fair and balanced" in the eyes of the world:
Consider how Pope Saint Pius X handled a Russian diplomat in 1914 just weeks before his own death:
"There was no shade of weakness in him", Cardinal Merry del Val wrote, "He had the inflexible firmness of a ruler convinced of the responsibilities his high office imposed on him, and he was determined to fulfill them, cost what it might."
The Russian ambassador to the Vatican once discovered the firmness of the Pope. Shortly before his death [in 1914], Pius X granted this ambassador an audience. But he received him sternly, without a trace of a smile on his face. Full of majesty, he turned to his visitor. "I cannot accept good wishes from the representative of a power that fails to keep the promises it makes. Until now Russia has not kept a single one of the promises she made to the Catholics of Russia."
The ambassador had not expected such a greeting, and he was frightened. "Holy Father," he stammered, "this is not true!"
The Holy Father rose from his throne and, with a gesture that betrayed deep indignation, cried, "I will repeat what I have said: not a single promise has been kept! And you dare to say that I lie, Mr. Ambassador! I must ask you to leave this room!"
As pale as death, the ambassador stumbled out the door.
So with firmness and mercy, Pope Saint Pius X carried on his work--a worthy successor to Peter, of him it was said, "Upon this rock I will build my church." (Father Walter Diethelm's Saint Pius X: The Farm Boy Who Became Pope (published originally by Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, Inc., in 1956, and republished by Ignatius Press in 1994, p. 118.)
Those possessed of the Catholic Faith do not hesitate to act and to speak as Catholics in the face of Russian treachery. The same cannot be said of the conciliarists.
Some have asked me in the past two years how the collegial consecration of Russia to Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart is supposed to take place when we lack a true pope and true bishops? Others have suggested that such a collegial consecration is really not necessary. I will only submit once again the observation that Our Lady's 1929 call for the collegial consecration must be legitimate if one only stops to consider the incredible lengths to which the conciliarists have gone to attack its necessity and to deconstruct Our Lady's Fatima Message.
Indeed, as I have noted on this site several times in the past thirty months or so, there can be few greater, although certainly temporary, triumphs of the devil have than to place imposters in positions of apparent ecclesiastical authority so as to convince the average Catholic that these imposters have dispensed with the necessity of a collegial consecration and that we can now "get on" with the business of working for a One World Church as the Fatima Message is transformed into its very antithesis, a sappy message of ecumenical sentimentality. And as this exercise in and subterfuge deception continues to proceed with alacrity, you see, Russia continues to spread its errors and to bare its fangs in behalf of its various nefarious designs on its neighbors.
Leaving aside the theological arguments advanced by those opposed to sedevacantism and/or of those who believe that such a condition does not exist at this present time, some very sincere Catholics who are concerned about the apostasies of the moment are nevertheless puzzled as to how Our Lady's Fatima Message can be fulfilled if there isn't a true pope and if there are not true bishops to make the collegial consecration. I would only point out that an equally puzzling question is this: would it not take a miracle for men who have made war against the Fatima Message and who are committed to false ecumenism (and the appeasement of the Orthodox at every turn) to fulfill this Heavenly message? How is such a consecration supposed to take place when the men who are deemed, albeit wrongly, to hold ecclesiastical office are bereft of the Catholic Faith.
True, the Fatima Message does fall into the category of what is known as "private revelation." However, as Father Martin Stepanich, O.F.M., Cap., pointed out to me on Friday, July 4, 2008, we would be most foolish to ignore the words of the Mother of God and Heaven's true peace plan for the Church and for the world. Only those who want to ignore that we have been living in the Age of Mary since the time of Our Lady's apparitions to Saint Catherine Laboure and Sister Justine Bisqueyburo in the convent of the Daughters of Charity on Rue de Bac in Paris, France, in 1830 and 1840, respectively, have hearts cold enough and proud enough and stern enough to ignore the simple fact that God has indeed given us a way out of the mess in which we find ourselves, and that way is Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart.
Alas, this triumph of the devil is only temporary. Our Lady did promise us that "her Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart would triumph in the end. Indeed it will. Indeed it will. How? God is Omnipotent, is He not? He will bring about a restoration of the Church Militant on earth as He sees fit in His good time.
Did Noe demand an "end game" scenario when he was commanded by God to build the ark? He trusted God, Who shut the door on the ark Himself. The door opened when God sent clear signals to Noe that it was safe to do so.
Did Abraham question God when he was asked to offer His beloved son Isaac?
Did Saint Peter even know that he was going to be released from his chains by the work of angel when he was imprisoned?
Did the English Martyrs who remained steadfast against all pressures to succumb to the blandishments or the threats of the Anglicans because they did not know how long the Anglican schism would last? Did they demand an "end game" scenario?
Those of us who recognize that sedevacantism is the canonical doctrine of the Catholic Church and that it applies at this time of apostasy and betrayal should not be vexed by the lack of a true pope. We must be careful to keep Our Lady's Fatima Message in our own lives, mindful of the fact that each Rosary of reparation we pray will help to plant the seeds for the miraculous restoration of the Church Militant on earth.
We must not be shaken by the fact that the Russian bear continues to bear bad tidings. The errors of Russia are alive and well in our own midst, as was demonstrated ten months ago now:
The spread of the errors of Orthodoxy, especially as regards the rejection of Papal primacy and thus the Social Reign Christ the King, came back to bite the Russian czars themselves a well-armed, well-financed and well-organized minority of Bolshevik cadres took advantage of the weakness caused by Imperial Russia's involvement in World War I to begin the process in 1917 of exacting total control over an empire that had expanded greatly in the Nineteenth Century, although it took a three year civil war between the Red Russians (the Bolsheviks) and the White Russians to solidify that power. One solidified, however, Bolshevism began to spread a whole litany of errors, many of which have been adapted in the "democratic" West. Consider once again, if you will, some of the ways in which these errors have been spread into the midst of our own lands:
1) Although private ownership has been retained in the West, nationalization of major industries began common after World War II in the United Kingdom, France, the countries of Scandinavia and elsewhere. True, national socialism, practiced in Italy and Germany and Japan before World War II (and Argentina after World War II) also featured nationalization of some industries. However, the practitioners of national socialism also permitted a degree of private ownership of major industries as long as those industries manufactured what the state dictated and sold their products according to the prices it, the state, established. Those Western countries, such as the United States, that did not nationalize major industries in peacetime began, however, even before World War II to confiscate private property, namely, the "wealth" of its citizens, by means of confiscatory taxation policies, most of which are absolutely unconstitutional under the terms of the Constitution of the United States of America, in order to redistribute income by means of government programs of social engineering. This confiscation of income, although not a strict abolition of private property as such, nevertheless limited the legitimate freedom of citizens and made their dependent upon the "largesse" of the civil state, making it more difficult for them to meet their own daily needs and, in man instances, forcing wives and mothers who wanted to stay at home with their children to go into the workplace simply to make income to pay these confiscatory taxes.
2) Private property in the West has also become heavily regulated since the dawn of Bolshevism in order to realize whatever goals the social engineers believed were necessary to pursue at any given moment, whether it be the displacement of citizens to facilitate "economic development" favorable to corporations whose executives donate heavily to candidates of both major political parties or to realize the goals of "environmentalists" and "animals rights" activists to limit the just use of one's own property in the defense of his family (from, say, bears and other predatory animals). One is a prisoner on his own property to the dictates of various statists, whose whims change from moment to moment.
3) Political power has been concentrated increasingly in the past ninety years or so in a duopoly called the "Republicrats," shall we say, career politicians who seek more and more to increase the size of the Federal budget and to make ever more future generations of Americans indentured servants of the government as these same career politicians enable the robber barons of the credit industry to charge usurious rates of interest to finance loans for automobiles and homes, thereby keeping large segments of the population even more indentured at almost every turn of their lives. This duopoly of power justifies almost every effort to increase surveillance of ordinary citizens, using the old shibboleth of "national security" to cower people in a "republican" system of government to surrender voluntarily what the Bolsheviks had to take from the Russians by armed force.
4) "Information" is manufactured by the government and disseminated for popular consumption and acceptance. Obviously, "Russia" did not invent this. However, Russian Orthodoxy's rejection of the Social Reign of Christ the King and its subordination of the schismatic and heretical Orthodox "church" paved the way Protestantism's and Freemasonry's embrace and promotion of this same error, thereby making the state to be a "demigod" beyond criticism and whose "information" must be accepted in the name of "patriotism." Thus it is, for example, that events such as the attacks on September 11, 2001, which even some former officials of the George W. Bush administration testified before the "9/11 Commission" have not been explained adequately (such as how steel columnized towers could collapse merely because they had been hit by airplanes and why the government of the State of Israel had ordered all of their personnel out of the twin towers of the World Trade Center that day and why an Israeli film crew was positioned in New Jersey, directly across from the twin towers, at the exact moments that the planes hit each building) were used as a pretext for launching the "global war on terror" and for attacking Iraq, which had no role to play in those attacks whatsoever. It is been only in the last few months, as the body count of our citizens serving in Iraq has begun to rise once again, that the mask of this pretext has begun to be stripped away somewhat, not that this has deterred George W. Bush in the slightest from finding new pretexts ("al-Qaeda will follow us home if we leave" Iraq; al-Qaeda had no entree to Iraq prior to the American destabilization of that country!) to justify the pursuit of the American delusion of progress by means of "American civil liberty." This propaganda campaign could have been borrowed from the years of the Soviet's war in Afghanistan (1979 to 1989).
5) Any country that rejects the Social Reign of Christ the King, the linchpin of both Orthodoxy and Protestantism and all subsequent social revolutions, as it must be exercised by the Catholic Church must attack the rights of the family, seeking to destabilize the family so as to make more and more citizens dependent upon the state and its "experts" as to how to conduct their lives. Freemasonry's spirited push for the "liberalization" of existing divorce laws in the United States of America at the end of the Nineteenth Century, especially in North Dakota after it was granted statehood in 1889, was the logical consequence of Orthodoxy's and Protestantism's acceptance of divorce and remarriage. The later acceptance of contraception by Orthodoxy and by most, although not all, Protestant sects would further destabilize the family, mirroring Bolshevism's complete arrogation of the the rights of the family unto the civil state, which could accuse parents of "abuse" if their children were subjected to "counter-revolutionary" ideas. Something quite similar has been occurring in the United States and elsewhere in the West as home-schooling parents are carefully monitored for any signs of "bigotry" or "intolerance" that might "deform" their children, thus necessitating the intervention of the civil state to "rescue" the children from these "backward" parents. The state must thus carefully construct and enforce curricula of study, imposing said curricula with "religious: zeal.
6) Constant warfare must be waged against the true Church, the Catholic Church, founded by Our Lord upon the Rock of Saint Peter, the Pope, and brought to birth this very day, Pentecost Sunday, as the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity descended in tongues of flame upon the Apostles and our dear Mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary, in the same Upper Room in Jerusalem where Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ had institute the priesthood and the Eucharist some fifty-two days before. Some civil states in the West, most notably Canada, have imitated Bolshevism quite directly by waging relentless campaigns to silence Catholics about the truths of the Faith, especially as it relates to opposing baby-killing under cover of law and opposing the social promotion of perversion. More commonly, however, the civil state in the West, aping Bolshevism, permits the most aggressive and vile attacks upon Our Lord and Our Lady and the true Church in the nooks and crannies of popular culture, all in the name of a "false" civil freedom, the likes of which were condemned by Pope Gregory XVI in the passage from Mirari Vos cited at the beginning of this article. The constant warfare against the true Faith unites the naturalism of Bolshevism with the naturalism of the Western liberalism and pluralism and religious indifferentism that made possible its ascendancy in the first place.
The errors of Russia helped to merge with so many other errors to produce the ethos of conciliarism itself, resulting in utter silence about Communism at the "Second" Vatican Council, the fruit of the "Metz Accord" (which guaranteed silence at the "council" about Communism in exchange for the presence of "observers" from the Russian Orthodox Church) and the betrayal of the late Joseph Cardinal Mindszenty, to say nothing of Joseph Ratzinger's recent sell-out of the underground Catholics in Red China.
Is it so unreasonable to think that Our Lord Himself has given us a simple way out of these problems by simply fulfilling Our Lady's Fatima Message? The Fatima Message is no more "our religion" than Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary is "our religion." The Fatima Message, which stresses the simple Catholic teaching about the necessity of doing penance for one's sins while instituting in a specific way devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, especially by means of praying the Rosary daily and keeping the Five First Saturday devotions, is simply a means by which we can better live the Catholic Faith in our own personal lives and the means by which the Immaculate Heart of Mary can triumph over the adversary and his minions at this time in the Mystical Death and Burial of her Divine Son, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
One of the essences of God is simplicity. His commands are simple. He tells us to do good and to do avoid evil by obeying His Ten Commandments as we seek to cooperate on a daily basis with the graces He won for us by the shedding of His Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross and that flow into our hearts and souls though the loving hands of Our Lady, the Mediatrix of All Graces. Our human intellects, darkened by the vestigial after-effects of Original Sin and by our own Actual Sins, seek to make complex that which is simple. Consider the case of the Naaman as recounted in the Fourth Book of Kings:
So Naaman came with his horses and chariots, and stood at the door of the house of Eliseus: And Eliseus sent a messenger to him, saying: "Go, and wash seven times in the Jordan, thy flesh shall recover health, and thou shalt be clean."
Naaman was angry and went away, saying: "I thought he would have come out to me, and standing would have invoked the name of the Lord his God, and touched with his hand the place of my leprosy, and healed me. Are not the Abana, and the Pharphar, rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel, that I may wash in them, and be made clean?" So, as he turned, and was going away with indignation, his servants came to him and said to him: "Father, if the prophet had bid thee do some great thing, surely thou shouldst have done it: how much rather what he now hath said to thee: 'Wash, and thou shalt be clean'?"
Then he went down, and washed in the Jordan seven times: according to the word of the man of God, and his flesh was restored like he flesh of a little child, and he was made clean. (4 Kings 5: 9-14.)
What if the matter of resolving our ecclesiastical and civil problems is as simple as simply obeying Our Lady's Fatima Message? The conciliarists have made war against this message, have they not? There must be good reason for their doing so. And while it is certainly true that the Fatima Message concerning the collegial consecration of Russia with by a pope with all of the world's bishops to the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary cannot be fulfilled until there is a true pope on the Throne of Saint Peter once again, which will occur when and in a manner willed by God Himself, possibly coming after a chastisement of epic proportions and the details of which we entrust to His own Providence, there is no harm praying for this fulfillment as we keep about the business of fulfilling our our daily duties and as we strive to keep the Fatima Message in our own personal lives, especially in our homes by means of the praying of the family Rosary on a daily basis.
The cost of infidelity to Heavenly messages, although constituting private revelation, can be deadly. Our Lord Himself mentioned this to Sister Lucia in 1931:
Make it known to My ministers that since they follow the example of the King of France in delaying the execution of My request, that they will follow him into misfortune.
Remember, my friends, Our Lord specifically requested through Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque the consecration of the entirety of France to His Most Sacred Heart. King Louis XIV and the bishops of France refused, consenting only to consecrated Paris to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus. The year? 1689? The results? 1789 and the "principles" with which the counterfeit church of conciliarism has made, according to none other than Joseph Ratzinger himself, a "reconciliation."
Sister Catherine Laboure was being rebuffed repeatedly by her spiritual director and confessor, Jean-Marie Aladel, when she told him of Our Lady's apparitions to her and what she had requested. (Similarly, Father Aladel did not act at first on the messages about the Green Scapular being given to Sister Justine Bisqueyburo, also a Sister of Charity.) This is what Our Lady told Saint Catherine Laboure about Father Aladel's diffidence:
"Never mind," the voice replied, "he is my servant, and would fear to displease me."
We should always fear to displease Our Lady, who was sent to earth ninety years ago to implore us to turn away from our sins and to make reparation for them. Private revelations nourish and augment the Holy Faith without supplanting It. Who but a fire-breathing Protestant (or perhaps a conciliarist) would say that it would be wise and efficacious for our salvation to do without the Holy Rosary and without the Brown Scapular and without the Miraculous Medal as great aids to help us get home to Heaven? Living now in these terrible times the effects of the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King became more and more manifest in the midst of each nation on the face of this earth, who would want to take the risk of ignoring or denigrating Our Lady's Fatima Message that was authorized by none other than her Divine Son Himself, Who was pleased to appear with her just ninety years ago this past Saturday? (Our Lady Does Not Act on Her Own.)
Saint Thomas Aquinas preached for forty straight days in Rome, Italy, just on the Hail Mary! Is it any accident that Angelo Roncalli/John XXIII made the praying of the three Hail Marys after Low Mass "optional" in his insidiously modernized missal promulgated in 1961? Is it any accident that Giovanni Montini/Paul VI entirely suppressed those three Hail Marys in 1964 with issuance of the Ordo Missae? Given the fact that Saint Thomas Aquinas preached for forty consecutive days on just the Hail Mary and that the conciliarists sought to eliminate its recitation after Low Mass, we had better keep the ancient practice of saying three Hail Marys upon arising each day and before going to bed each night, adding the invocation, "O Blessed Mother, help us to be like thee."
Saint Louis de Montfort explained the importance of each Hail Mary that we pray:
The Heavenly Salutation draws down upon us the blessings of Jesus and Mary in abundance, for it is an infallible truth that Jesus and Mary reward in a marvelous way those who glorify them. They repay us a hundredfold for the praises that we give them. "I love them that love me...that I may enrich them that love me and fill their treasures." Jesus and Mary have always said: "We love those who love us; we enrich them and fill their treasuries overflowing." He who soweth in blessings, shall also reap blessings.
Now, if we say the Hail Mary properly, is not this a wa to love, bless and glorify Jesus and Mary?
In each Hail Mary we bless both Jesus and Mary: "Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of they womb, Jesus."
By each Hail Mary we give Our Lady the same honor that God gave her when He sent the Archangel Gabriel to greet her for Him. How could anyone possibly think that Jesus and Mary, who often do good to those that curse them, could ever curse those that bless and honor them by the Hail Mary?
Both Saint Bernard and Saint Bonaventure say that the Queen of Heaven is certainly no less grateful and conscientious than gracious and well-manner people of this world. Just as she excels in all other perfections, she surpasses all in the virtue of gratitude; so she would never let us honor her with love and respect without repaying us one hundredfold. Saint Bonaventure says that Mary will greet us with grace if we greet her with the Hail Mary.
Who could possibly understand the graces and blessings which the greeting and tender regard of Our Lady effect in us? From the very first instant that Saint Elizabeth heard the greeting that the Mother of God gave her, she was filled with the Holy Ghost and the child her womb leaped for joy. If we make ourselves worthy of the greeting and blessings of Our Lady we shall certainly be filled with graces and a flood of spiritual consolation will come down into our souls.
It is written: "Give and it shall be given unto you." To take Blessed Alan's [de la Roche] illustration of this: "Supposing each day I give you one hundred and fifty diamonds, even if you were my enemy, would you not forgive me? Would you not treat me as a friend and give me all the graces that you were able to give? If you want to gain all the riches of grace and of glory, salute the Blessed Virgin, honor your good Mother." He that honoreth his mother (the Blessed Virgin) is as one that layeth up a treasure." So every day do give her at least fifty Hail Marys--for each is worth fifteen precious stones and they please Our Lady far more than all the riches of this world put together.
And you can expect such great things from her generosity! She is our Mother and our friend. She is the empress of the universe and loves us more than all the mothers and queens of the world have ever loved any one human being. This is really so, for the charity of the Blessed Virgin far surpasses the natural love of all mankind and even of all the angels, as Saint Augustine says.
One day Saint Gertrude had a vision of Our Lord counting gold coins. She summoned the courage to ask Him what He was doing. He answered: I am counting the Hail Marys that you have said; this is the money with which you can pay your way to Heaven." (Saint Louis de Montfort, The Secret of the Rosary, pp. 47-48.)
Folks, the hour is late. Very late. Can we not throw out the television once and for all and turn off the radio as we live more penitentially by being more and more detached from the false allurements of this passing, mortal vale of tears in order to pray as many Rosaries each day as our states-in-life permit as we give all of our actions to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary? Each of us has many sins of our own for which to make reparation. Little acts of penance each day, given freely to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary, will help us to pay back what we owe for our own sins and for those of the whole world.
We should not fear as Russia spreads its errors. We should not fear if a man, Barack Hussein Obama, whose mind, such as it is, was shaped by a Communist, Frank Marshall Davis, is elected President of the United States of America on November 4, 2008. We should simply trust in Our Lady, recognizing that a world where her Divine Son's Social Reign has been overthrown will never be set right again until Catholicism, not its counterfeit ape of conciliarism, is restored as the foundation of all personal and social order everywhere.
Our Lady's Fatima Message is the key to our own sanctification and salvation. It is also the key to resolving the inter-related crises that afflict the Church Militant and the world-at-large. Shouldn't we take this message seriously and act accordingly?
Isn't it time to pray a Rosary of reparation?
Viva Cristo Rey!
Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for us now and the hour of our death.
Saint Joseph, pray for us.
Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.
