Tag: Russia

A+M+D+G

PART 3 of the series of Fatima Centenary talks in 2017

 A Day With Our Lady of Fatima, Saturday 19 August 2017OUR LADY of FATIMA and the Russian Connection

Exactly one hundred years ago today, three young shepherds in Portugal were tending their flocks in a place called Valinhos. It was a Sunday evening in 1917 and the children had just emerged from a traumatic three days in prison. Without warning there came a flash of light and the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to them.

For Lucy and her two cousins Jacinta and Francisco this was an unexpected visit. They had missed their August rendezvous with Our Lady. As in the previous months of May June and July it was designated for the 13^th day of the month.

Word had spread like wildfire across Europe. Thousands of pilgrims had flooded into Portugal for the intended August 13^th apparition. But the Masons who governed the country were determined to put a stop the religious hysteria. On the very day the apparition was due to occur, the Administrator of the local council had abducted the three little shepherds. He imprisoned them, subjected them to exhausting interrogations and even threatened to throw them into a cauldron of boiling oil – all in an attempt to make them admit they were lying and had invented stories. Paradoxically, he also wanted them to reveal the secrets that the Blessed Virgin had given to them in July!

Response of the children to imprisonment and death threats:

Despite their treatment these young children, aged between eight and eleven, resisted the bullying. They clung to the truth; refused to disclose the secrets confided by Heaven. For 72 hours they resisted, to heroic degrees, fortified I’m sure by their experiences with the Blessed Mother. When their lives were threatened, according to the memoirs of Sister Lucy, little Jacinta’s face lit up with joy. “How wonderful!” she cried, “I so love Our Lord and Our Lady and this way we’ll be seeing them very soon!”

This was the response of a nine year old girl to death threats. This tells us how real, how totally absorbing, how profound had been the effect of the Heavenly Mother’s visits over the past few months.

During her appearance on that Sunday evening of August 19^th, Our Lady had looked very sad. She encouraged once again the daily praying the Rosary every day, and reaffirmed the ongoing visits on the 13^th of each month. Her final words were: “Pray! Pray very much, and make sacrifices for sinners, for many souls go to hell because they have no-one to sacrifice themselves and to pray for them.”

Pope Benedict – Fatima is not over:

Often, when speaking of Fatima, there can be one of three responses from those who are not convinced of the importance or authenticity of the 1917 revelations. They will shrug and quickly brush it aside: “Oh yes, it’s a nice little story, prayer and penance and the rosary. Of course, it happened back in history before our scientifically advanced age.”  There’s a tendency, even among Vatican officials, to consign Fatima to the past.

Thankfully Pope Benedict refuted all these dismissive comments when he was at Fatima on May 13^th 2010. “Whoever thinks the prophetic mission of Fatima is over,” he said, “is deceived!” He spoke of the increasing relevance of the Fatima message for our times, and the approaching Triumph of the Immaculate Heart.

Fatima – only private revelation?

The second response to Fatima is another pet phrase: “it is just private revelation”.

Here I will quote well-known Fatima author, lecturer and crusader, Christopher Ferrara: “No,” he writes, “the Fatima event is no mere private revelation. It is a public, prophetic revelation. First of all, the Catholic Church has officially declared, through the local bishop of Fatima and a series of popes, that these apparitions constitute an authentic supernatural event and that the message of Fatima is worthy of belief (….) As well as the accuracy of the prophecies and the testimony of a series of great popes, a MIRACLE was foretold three months in advance (….)

Miracle foretold in advance:

Our Lady promised she would obtain this miracle at precisely the date and time predicted – twelve noon, solar time, October 13^th – so that “ALL would see and believe”. In the entire history of the Church, or indeed of the world, the Miracle of the Sun is the only miracle announced in advance, which a vast crowd had assembled to witness.

You can read the full text of Christopher Ferrara’s comments for yourself in this new booklet just released by the Fatima Centre. There are copies here for you to take home.

Is Fatima alarmist?

The third reaction to Fatima, especially when the prophetic element is highlighted, is that promoters of the message are being “alarmist”. But we need to be alarmed, don’t we?

We need to be awoken from our Kiwi complacency. The innocent children of Fatima were alarmed. The vision of multitudes of people falling into hell, alarmed them greatly. It also spurred them into action, to greater prayer and sacrifice for sinners. Little Saint Francisco’s mission became one of consoling God who is saddened by the loss of souls.

Spiritual weapons – prayer and sacrifice – more relevant today:

Could it be that the spiritual weaponry of prayer and sacrifice, which Our Lady of Fatima begged for, is more necessary now than back in 1917? The brutality of the First World War pales beside the suffering, the atrocities and military arsenal we see in Syria and more and more places today – along with the escalating development of nuclear missiles being readied for use. Of course, this is not to diminish the horror of World War One but simply to put it in perspective with the technological proficiency of 21^st century warfare. In her last public interview of 1957, Sister Lucy told Father Augustin Fuentes, that Russia was to be the “instrument of chastisement” chosen by God to punish the world for its sins. “Tell them, Father,” she said, “that the Most Holy Virgin told my cousins Francisco and Jacinta, as well as myself, that many nations will disappear from the face of the earth.”

Could it be that our future security, in a world so currently insecure, may hinge upon re-reading the simple requests of Fatima and following them faithfully?

Our Lady’s conditions for peace:

These requests are MORE than simply praying the Rosary every day. The conditions Our Lady outlined for obtaining peace were first and fore-mostly for people to turn back to God. That’s the call of the Gospel – for genuine, honest repentance and conversion of heart.

And to repeat her words at Fatima on August 19^th, “Many souls go to hell because they have no-one to sacrifice themselves and pray for them.” Do we imagine this situation has improved since then? Sadly, a century later, the word “sacrifice” is slowly vanishing from our everyday Catholic vocabulary, its meaning almost lost.

Apart from making sacrifices, probably the best definition of “offering sacrifices” is this: “To accept with a loving heart the disagreeable things which God’s Providence has allowed in our day…”

So, Our Lady asks for sacrifice and prayer to save many souls from eternal damnation. Prayer of reparation for the sins of the world is another vital element of Fatima’s message; and the devoted practice of the Five First  Saturdays of Communion to make repair for the five insults against Mary’s Immaculate Heart. And yes, the daily rosary, investment in the Brown Scapular… these are essentials of whole-hearted devotion to the Immaculate Heart.

Cardinal calls for Consecration of Russia:

Cardinal Raymond Burke made the news recently, calling for a renewal of the consecration of Russia to Mary’s Immaculate Heart. Not consecration of the world this time, but Russia alone, specifically named. Up until now this actual naming has been prevented by political sensitivity and an agreement between Rome and Moscow during the Second Vatican Council.

Russia’s Errors:

But why Russia? That’s a question often posed. I mean, Russia is just another nation, isn’t it?  – no worse than any other, surely?

“Russia’s errors” which Our Lady spoke about are much MORE than just the spread of Communism. Communism is, after all, simply a political force, an imposed systematic atheism. But this is the end product of a whole distorted mode of thinking.

The errors which fuelled Communism and emerged in Russia from 1917 were, primarily, caused by rejection of God and His existence. This opened the way to absolute materialism. While materialism is commonly believed to be a love of material goods, that’s only one aspect. Materialism is a denial of the supernatural and spiritual realm with sole focus on the physical world. Once God’s Word and God’s Laws are abandoned we see greater errors spawned: the substitution of Divine Creation with Darwin’s theory of evolution – a theory now taught as absolute fact – the upsurge of divorce, abortion, dismantling of the family unit – which is the basic cell of social order – the denigration and objectivising of women, motherhood and home secondary to the work-force, manipulated by economic pressure and feminist ideology.

Abortion was legalized in Russia in the 1920s. It took another fifty years for this and other errors to be absorbed into western culture.

By the 1970s divorce and abortion had gained legal status. Next: legalized prostitution, same-sex marriage, the current gender ideology and so on. Now we are facing the normalizing and acceptance of euthanasia, one of the very facets of the Nazi culture which the West once fought a war against!

Probably the two main pillars of false teaching which have infected human thinking like a cancer this last century, arose earlier in the 19th century: Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto in 1848, a blueprint for a global utopian society, dispensing with God and Kings, and in 1859 Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species. Only weeks after Fatima’s Miracle of the Sun, the fruits of these false teachings became evident in the Bolshevik revolution which plunged Holy Mother Russia into a bloodbath.

Lenin and Stalin:

Two of the cruelest dictators of the new regime had both lost their faith after embracing Darwin’s pseudo-scientific doctrine of evolution. Vladimir Lenin had been a devout believer. His successor, Joseph Stalin, a brilliant seminarian, stopped studying for the priesthood, and in the name of evolutionary progress and a Marxist utopia, he and Lenin purged the Soviet Union of an estimated sixty million of their own countrymen.

When Russia eventually exported its manifesto to China so Communism could govern one third of the earth’s surface, it was not the teachings of Marx, Lenin or Mao Tse Tong which were preached in compulsory seminars but evolution – simply because it could be used to remove people’s faith in God, in the soul, and in the after-life, so Communism could then take root.

Disinformation- Russia’s devious propaganda tool:

In 2013 a hugely insightful and vastly-documented book was published unmasking the inner workings of the Kremlin. The title of the book is Disinformation, the name given to Russia’s devious propaganda tool, and the co-author is an ex-Soviet spy who defected to America in the late 1970s with a multi-million-dollar bounty on his head. Lieutenant General Ion Pacepa was the right-hand man of Ceausescu (Chow-oo-shes-cu), the Romanian tyrant who was toppled in 1988. Ion Pacepa’s first book, The Red Horizon, was instrumental in bringing this dictatorship to an end.

During his career as an intelligence man for Romania and the Soviet empire, Ion Pacepa was involved in KGB strategies, primarily aimed at destroying the public’s perception of the Church and its credibility. Right from Day One, Russian communism has fundamentally been an all-out effort to rid the world of Christianity, mistakenly seen as an offshoot of Capitalism. Its attack has taken three forms: (1) to discredit the Church (2) to undermine the faith of its people, (3) to distort and dilute doctrine. One of its most brilliant concepts, says Ion Pacepa, was something called Liberation Theology.

Liberation Theology was concocted by the KGB to make Marxism appear to be compatible with Christianity. It was fed into the World Council of Churches; then disseminated in South America, which Russia saw as fertile soil for revolution. Ex-Jesuit Malachi Martin tells us in his monumental expose, The Jesuits, that many in this order poisoned South American Catholics with this teaching. As a result thousands of priests and lay people were killed NOT as martyrs for the Gospel but as socialist revolutionaries, pawns in the fight to overthrow Capitalism and establish Communist rule.

Both Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI sternly denounced Liberation Theology. Meanwhile Columbia, Bolivia, Venezeula, Nicaragua, Argentina, all expelled the US from their embassies and rely nowadays upon Russian naval defense. Didn’t Our Lady foretell that Russia would foment wars and revolution?

Ion Pacepa reveals in Disinformation that he rubbed shoulders not only with Kruschev, his supreme boss, commonly known as “the butcher of the Ukraine”, but also Mikhail Gorbachev. He makes clear that Glasnost and Peretroika of the late 1980s was a clever disinformation programme to convince the West they could relax because the Soviet Union had transformed into a modern democracy, no longer a totalitarian state. In fact, the Russian word “glasnost” actually means “polishing one’s image”.  Today, under the reign of Vladimir Putin, Marxist power continues to flourish. Putin, a self-styled Stalinist who reveres his cruel predecessor, has filled his government with six thousand ex-KGB men like himself and crushes and eliminates any opposition.

Make no mistake, Ion Pacepa assures us, Communism is still alive and well in Russia and seeking world domination together with China.

Our Blessed Mother in recent reliable apparitions and messages has said the same. Communism is everywhere, She says, even in My Son’s Church, and you do not recognize it. We need to pray for discernment.

So did the story of Fatima conclude in 1917? Or with the last major apparition of 1929 when Russia’s consecration was requested? Did it conclude in 1938 when the Great Sign predicted at Fatima took place? On the evening of January 25^th that year the sky was illuminated by the most spectacular and unearthly colours. All of Europe was in panic. Many believed the lights heralded apocalyptic events, even the end of the world. Scientists smiled and labeled the event as an Aurora Beouralis. Much later they admitted it wasn’t the case, the lights were of an unknown source. Sister Lucy from her convent in Coimbra confirmed that this was the prophesied sign that a second and more terrible war was about to begin. Six weeks later Hitler marched into Austria.

Hiroshima Miracle:

In 1945 the message of Fatima was connected to an extraordinary miracle. When the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima it obliterated everything for several kilometres – except for one church. It was right near the blinding centre of the nuclear flash, ground zero. Inside were eight members of a small Jesuit community performing their usual daily Fatima devotions and praying the Rosary. Unbelievably, all of them survived, untouched by radiation. Scientists have never been able to offer any explanation. At Nagasaki there was a similar miracle. The Franciscan Friary established by St Maximilian Kolbe was also totally unharmed.

The Fatima effect continues:

After the Second World War, Austria became subject to Soviet tyranny when the allies left. A Rosary Crusade was organized by a Father Petrus who won the support of seven hundred thousand Austrians pledging a daily rosary. On May 13^th 1955, the anniversary of Fatima, the occupying Russians withdrew. With Austria a strategically-located war prize, the Russians’ evacuation made no sense. To this day historians are baffled by the pull-out.

Fatima secret not disclosed – new apparitions of Our Lady:

Moving along to 1960: when  the sealed secret of Fatima was opened as Our Blessed Mother instructed, and the contents not disclosed, within 12 months She began appearing further north on the Iberian Peninsula. From 1961 to 65, an unprecedented number of apparitions and supernatural events unfolded in a tiny remote Spanish village called Garabandal. Appearing as Our lady of Mt Carmel as she had in the final Fatima vision of 1917, Immaculate Mary warned of a decline in faith and less importance being given to the Blessed sacrament. Garabandal remains under Church investigation but it is extremely interesting that Our Lady expressed there great concern for the priesthood, and repeatedly stressed the holy and sacred character of matrimony. These two areas, priests and marriage, have been the target of the enemy since 1965.

In 1973 in a little lay convent in Akita, Japan, Sister Agnes Sasagawa was visited by the Mother of God in a series of mystical events culminating with an intensive message of warning on October 13^th, anniversary of Fatima’s miracle of the sun. The diocesan bishop recognized the authenticity of these interventions and Pope Benedict, as Cardinal Ratzinger, confirmed that the message of Akita was “essentially the same message as Fatima” and the then-unknown Third Secret which he had sighted.

A year earlier, 1972, at the actual apparition site of Fatima, an Italian priest, Father Stefano Gobi received the first of his locutions which would lead to the establishment of a worldwide Movement of Marian Priests, a work which Our Lady herself initiated. More than 600 messages followed, heralding an apocalyptic time and the Church’s greatest trial. These locutions ended in 1997 and Fr Gobi passed to his eternal reward in 2004.

Another Fatima anniversary, 13^th May 1981, the Holy Father St John Paul Two, was hospitalized after a near assassination attempt. As he was carried from St Peter’s Square, the pope was heard calling to the Madonna to come to his aid. Less than six weeks later she began appearing just across the Adriatic Sea in a small village deep in the heart of the Communist stronghold of Yugoslavia: Medjugorje. An explosion of the Spirit was sparked, which led to millions of pilgrims from all parts of the world experiencing miraculous healings, conversions, and signs and wonders, including the sun spinning in the sky.

St John Paul Two said Medjugorje was the heart of the spiritual world; several weeks ago the Church finally gave its approval to the initial events at Medjugorje; and Sister Lucy who was privileged with private visions of Our Lady up until her death in 2005, stated categorically that Medjugorje, where Mary appears as the Queen of Peace, is the continuation and the completion of Fatima. 36 years later, to this very day, Medjugorje still radiates an atmosphere of heaven come to earth.

So yes, the Fatima revelations continue, prophecies being fulfilled right under our very noses. “Pray very much,” Our Lady said to Sister Agnes at Akita, “I alone am able still to save you from the calamities that approach. Those who place their confidence in Me will be saved.”

And at Fatima, “In the end My Immaculate Heart WILL triumph!”

Sister Lucy reported in her memoirs that Saint Jacinta once told her:

“Do not be afraid to tell everyone about devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. God has entrusted the peace of the world to her.”

Completed on                                                                                             

Tuesday 15 August 2017

Feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary’s Assumption

By Crusader Chris

 

Note: The highlighting and the sub-headings have been added  by R.S. for this post.