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When Black is
"Who are you going to
believe?
Me or your own eyes?"
—
Groucho Marx in Duck Soup
by Christopher A. Ferrara, Esq.
 In George
Orwell’s 1984, an allegory of totalitarian communism, the mythical
society of Oceania is ruled by the omnipresent god-like dictator known as Big
Brother. The main character, Winston Smith (who struggles against the
regime’s effort to reprogram him) recalls how the chocolate ration was
cut, but the brainwashed citizens were told the ration had been increased. The
people obediently rejoiced at their good fortune, and praised Big Brother for
his generosity.
The state of
affairs in the post-conciliar Church is similarly Orwellian. We are expected to
proclaim with joy that which is not, while ignoring that which plainly is.
Although the Roman liturgy has been wrecked by unprecedented innovations, we
are expected to rejoice at the “liturgical renewal.” Although
ecumenism is a manifest failure, with Protestant sects drifting ever further
from the true Church and even from the natural law, we are expected to proclaim
the “growing unity” of Christians. Although the great majority of
Catholics practice abortion, contraception and divorce as readily as
Protestants and Jews, we are expected to marvel at the lively faith Vatican II
has engendered. Although Catholics are being slaughtered by Muslim
fundamentalists around the world, local wars rage on every continent, and the
abortion holocaust flames higher and higher in the sight of God, we are
expected to hail the advent of the “civilization of love.”
Much of the human
element of the Church has become enfeebled in its activity and confused in its
message, but the Vatican apparatus proclaims that the Church is more vigorous
than ever. Let us have a Jubilee to celebrate the wonderful news. Yes, let us
have little celebrations for everyone: A Jubilee of Young People, a Jubilee of
the World of Entertainment, even a Day of Pizza Makers. Let us have crowds and
music and thunderous applause for an entire year. Let us rejoice that the
chocolate ration has increased.
And then there is
the Message of Fatima. In 1984, oddly enough, there took place at the Vatican a
ceremony we are now told was the Consecration of Russia requested by Our Lady
of Fatima. Mind you, the Pope himself does not say this. Quite the contrary,
both during and after the 1984 ceremony the Pope clearly indicated in
spontaneous remarks that Our Lady was still awaiting the specific consecration
of Russia. It is not the Pope, but the ecclesial bureaucrats he allows to rule
the Church de facto, who tell us that the 1984 ceremony was the
Consecration of Russia.
Big Brother
This coterie of mini-popes, this Vatican apparatus, is our own Big
Brother1. They control everything in the Oceania of the
post-conciliar Church, while the Pope is kept busy circling the globe in
pursuit of the ever-receding mirage of world peace and brotherhood without the
Social Kingship of Christ and the Queenship of His Blessed Mother.
On June 26, 2000, at the Vatican press conference concerning the
Third Secret, Big Brother ordered us to stop thinking about the Consecration:
“Any further discussion or request [for the Consecration] is without
basis,” declared Msgr. Bertone in the Vatican’s commentary on the
Secret.
But wait a moment. Surely, Big Brother is wrong. Do we not remember
how Sister Lucy let it be known again and again (from at least 1946, per
William Walsh’s Our Lady of Fatima, in L’Osservatore Romano
in 1982 and even after 1984 in Sol de Fatima magazine) that Our Lady
told her Russia must be mentioned specifically in the act of Consecration, and
that the world’s bishops must join in the act together with the Pope? And
isn’t it completely obvious that when Heaven requests the consecration of
Russia, Russia ought to be mentioned somewhere in the act of the
consecration? Yet there was no mention of Russia and the bishops did not
participate in the 1984 ceremony.
Never mind, says
Big Brother. According to Msgr. Bertone, Sister Lucy now says that Russia
was consecrated 16 years ago, despite everything she had said to the
contrary. We are told that Sister Lucy, like Winston Smith in 1984, has
finally come to see that two plus two is five, after all.
Big Brother did
not allow Sister Lucy to come forward and confirm to the public her amazing
change of heart. No, for some strange reason she remains under a gag order
which prevents her from speaking to anyone without the Vatican’s
permission, even though Big Brother declared on June 26 that the Third Secret
has been revealed in full, that it pertains to the past, and that nothing
further remains to be said about the prophetic warnings of Fatima. Instead of
producing Sister Lucy in the flesh, Big Brother referred to a very curious
substitute for her testimony as the only surviving witness: a letter Sister
Lucy is said to have written to an unidentified recipient on November 8, 1989,
more than 11 years ago. In this letter, we are told, Sister Lucy said
“Yes, it [the Consecration] has been done just as Our Lady asked, on 25
March 1984.”
 |
"I want My whole Church to acknowledge that
consecration (of Russia) as a triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, so that
it may extend its cult later on, and put the devotion to This Immaculate Heart
beside the devotion to My Sacred Heart." |
But why did Big
Brother fail to provide a copy of this letter at the June 26 press conference?
And why was the letter’s recipient not identified? Perhaps it is because
the same letter—addressed to a Mr. Noelcker—was published years ago
in the Catholic press, whereupon it was promptly exposed as a fake. When it was
first published (by certain friends of Big Brother) we were asked to believe
that the one-page letter to Mr. Noelcker was typed on a word processor the then
82-year-old cloistered nun had suddenly switched to after a lifetime of writing
everything by hand, including her voluminous memoirs. We were asked to believe
that Sister Lucy herself wrote this letter, even though it claims that Pope
Paul VI performed a consecration of the world when he visited Fatima in 1967.
That Paul VI never performed any consecration — of the world or anything
else — when he went to Fatima is one of those little facts Big Brother
insists we forget. Yet Sister Lucy herself could not have made this blunder,
since she was there in person for the Pope’s visit and knows better than
anyone that there was no consecration of the world on that occasion.
Sister Lucy
Ignored
We are also
ordered to stop thinking about such things as why neither Msgr. Bertone, nor
Cardinal Sodano (the Vatican Secretary of State), nor Cardinal Ratzinger nor
any other Vatican representative asked Sister Lucy about the sufficiency of the
1984 ceremony when they were in Fatima for the beatification of Jacinta and
Francisco on May 13, 2000. Isn’t it rather odd that with the only
live witness available to testify only days before, the Vatican relies entirely
on an 11-year-old computer-generated note, containing a glaring factual error
Sister Lucy herself would never have made?
Ah, but Big
Brother has told us—has he not?—that “any further discussion or
request is without basis.” If Big Brother says that Russia has been
consecrated to the Immaculate Heart, it matters not that Russia was never
mentioned or that the bishops did not participate. Where Big Brother is
concerned, saying makes it so.
But there is
another problem: If Russia was consecrated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary more
than sixteen years ago, what has become of Our Lady of Fatima’s promise
concerning the effect of the consecration?
“You have
seen hell, where the souls of poor sinners go. To save them, God wishes to
establish in the world devotion to My Immaculate Heart ... In the end, My
Immaculate Heart will triumph. The Holy Father will consecrate Russia to Me,
which will be converted, and a period of peace will be granted to the
world.”
So, Our Lady
promised the conversion of Russia as a manifestation of the worldwide
triumph of Her Immaculate Heart, and with it the salvation of many souls from
hell.
What is
“Conversion”?
Webster’s
dictionary defines “conversion” as “an experience associated
with a decisive adoption of religion.” If even Webster recognizes
conversion as the adoption of religion, it can hardly be suggested that Our
Lady of Fatima had something else in mind when She spoke of the conversion of
Russia. A mere change of political systems, from one amoral regime to another,
would not secure the salvation of souls. But the adoption of a new religion
would.
What religion would Russia adopt as the result of its conversion?
Our Lady of Fatima, Who appeared to Catholic children with a message for the
Catholic Pope and the Catholic bishops, could only have meant the Catholic
religion. She could hardly have meant a conversion to the Orthodox religion:
the Orthodox Church was already prevalent in Russia at the time She
appeared; and the Orthodox rejected then as they do now the dogma of the
Immaculate Conception which is the very heart of the Message of Fatima.
Surely,
then, we Catholics know what Our Lady meant by the conversion of Russia.
She meant that Russia would become a Catholic nation. This would mean that the
Russian Orthodox would abjure their schism, submit to the Vicar of Christ, and
renounce their erroneous doctrinal teachings. It would mean in particular that
the Russian Orthodox Church would embrace the Catholic dogma of the Immaculate
Conception, without which devotion to the Immaculate Heart could not be
established in that country.
Now, if Big
Brother tells us that Russia was consecrated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary
more than 16 years ago, then Russia must surely be undergoing the promised
conversion to Catholicism. On June 26, however, Big Brother was strangely
silent about this question. There was no discussion of the conversion of Russia
in the Vatican’s commentary on the Third Secret. Perhaps this is because
not even Big Brother can expect us to believe that what we have seen in Russia
since 1984 is a religious conversion.
Russia not
Converted
We know the
truth. Since the alleged consecration of 1984, Russia has undergone a
spiritual, moral and material collapse. Even the Russian Orthodox Patriarch,
Alexy II, has decried the spiritual decomposition of Russian society since
“the fall of communism.” Indeed, Russia has not even
“converted” to the Orthodox religion: 94% of Russians aged
19-29 do not go to church.2 As for the state of Catholicism in
Russia, the total number of Russian Catholics is 110,000—in a nation of
145 million people. That is less than 1/10 of one percent of the population. In
all of Russia there is a grand total of 114 priests, only three of whom
were trained and ordained in Russia.
There were four
times as many Russian Catholics when Our Lady of Fatima appeared in 1917, even
though the Russian population then was a fraction of what it is today.
There are
now two abortions for every live birth in Russia. The Russian population has
shrunk by 3.3 million people since the alleged “collapse of the
Soviet Union” in 1991. In the year 2000 alone, Russia lost more than
550,000 people. The situation is so desperate that Russian nationalist Vladimir
Zhirinovsky is advocating polygamy to produce more babies. Alcoholism
and violent crime give Russia the world’s highest rate of premature death.
More than 20,000 Russians died of alcohol poisoning in the first seven months
of 2000—a 43 percent increase over the same period last year. Retirement
planning in Russia consists of funeral arrangements. The average male life
expectancy is 59.9 years — down three years over the last decade. The
entire nation lives in grinding poverty, and one-third of the population
receives less than $60 a month.3
Russia is not
converting. Russia is dying. In the face of such evidence, it is no wonder Big
Brother is silent about the conversion of Russia, which he has written out of
the Message of Fatima. But Big Brother has many friends, eager to please him by
telling him what he wants to hear. These friends of Big Brother—the same
people who publicized the Noelcker letter and similar fakes—are spreading
the notion that Our Lady of Fatima never spoke of the religious conversion of
Russia at all, but only the “miraculous” political events we have
seen since 1989. Yes, they say, “conversion” means a change from
communism to freedom, from warlike behavior to peaceful cooperation. Our Lady
of Fatima was the herald of democracy in Russia, and this
represents the Triumph of Her Immaculate Heart.
We shall not
consider the blasphemy inherent in this absurd rendition of the Message of
Fatima, which puts the omnipotence of God at the service of human politics
which still opposes God. Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that Our Lady
of Fatima came to earth to prophesy nothing more than political changes in the
Soviet Union. This is ridiculous, but let us assume for the sake of our
discussion, that it is true. Even this revisionist Message of Fatima is belied
by the empirical evidence.
And the evidence
abounds. For example, the liberal journalist David Frum, writing in The
National Post, declares “In Russia, Putin’s in—and
democracy’s out.” His article details Vladimir Putin’s
systematic “reconstruction of an authoritarian state in Russia controlled
by more or less the same people who controlled the Soviet state that collapsed
in 1991.” Well, Father Gruner has been saying that for years, hasn’t
he? Frum notes that Putin has ordered the arrest of the owner of Russia’s
only independent media outlet on trumped up charges, moved to reseize
Russia’s petroleum industries, and begun to dismantle the independent
judiciary recently created for commercial disputes while giving a high-level
cabinet position to Yevgeny Primakov, the former KGB high-ranking officer and
later prime minister. Primakov is an archetypal Soviet-era thug. Frum concludes
that Putin “should be seen as a dangerous man—dangerous to the world,
dangerous to his long-suffering and once-again disappointed
people.”4
William Safire,
another neo-con/liberal, is just as forthright. In his New York Times
article “KGB is Back Running the Show in Russia”, Safire recounts
the arrest of independent media mogul Gusinksy and how the Russian media
“know they are under surveillance by Vladimir Putin’s KGB no matter
where they go.” Safire—a liberal, I remind you—recounts how
Putin’s “election” as Russian President was in reality a coup
that was accomplished by granting amnesty to Yeltsin, who stepped aside to
allow the interim appointment of Putin (another KGB man), who was then able to
“run for office” from the seat of power in the Kremlin.
The examples of
similarly alarming headlines can be multiplied:
Russian Media Fight to
Live5
Russia’s Putin Outlines Curbs on Small Political
Parties6
Rebel Governor Says Russia Returning to Dark
Days7
US Aid is Funding Russian Weapons8
Russians pick Lenin as ‘man of the century,’ Stalin as runner
up9
When Father
Gruner’s apostolate publishes stories like these, the friends of Big
Brother ridicule him as a “doomsayer” and a “Fatima conspiracy
theorist.” But as the odious strains of Stalin’s national anthem are
heard in Russia again (restored by Vladimir Putin), it is time for sensible
people to listen to the music. As even the liberal David Frum can recognize:
“It’s time to stop hoping for the best and prepare for the
worst.”
That is good
advice for Catholics, especially, who understand Russia from the perspective of
Fatima. Russia is not converting—not religiously, not morally, not
politically. On the contrary, Russia is declining in every way. To attribute
the current condition of Russia to the intervention of the Mother of God is to
make a mockery of the Catholic faith and insult the Blessed Virgin Mary. From
the Catholic perspective then, only one conclusion seems possible: what Our
Lady of Fatima requested has yet to be done, no matter what Msgr. Bertone says.
We have
come to a very bad place indeed when the Vatican apparatus expects us to
believe something which even the liberal press can see is a lie. Archbishop
Bertone may insist that “Any further discussion or request [for the
Consecration] is without basis,” but saying doesn’t make it so. Maybe
in Oceania. But not in the Holy Catholic Church.
FOOTNOTES:
(1) For the
malicious and willfully blind who delight in bashing Father Gruner and this
publication, let me deprive them of yet another deliberate mischaracterization
of the apostolate’s views: As is obvious from the text above, by Big
Brother I do not mean the Pope, but rather the Vatican apparatus which
surrounds and “handles” him. The Pope himself has avoided committing
his own authority to the version of Fatima promoted by the apparatus. Indeed,
the Pope’s sermon in Fatima on May 13, 2000, which warned the Church to
avoid the “tail of the dragon” spoken of in the Book of the
Apocalypse, Chapter 12, was an astonishingly clear affirmation that
Fatima’s prophetic warnings are still very much in effect. The tail of the
dragon is seen sweeping the stars from Heaven, i.e., consecrated souls
(priests, bishops and religious) according to the common Catholic
interpretation of that verse. Was the Pope trying to smuggle a message past the
apparatus, which was clearly seen trying to prevent his very appearance in
Fatima for the beatifications? We can only speculate.
(2)
“Russian Church Failing to Reach Youth” The Wanderer, January
11, 2000, p.9.
(3) The data cited in this paragraph were obtained
from “Wanted: More Russian Babies To Rescue a Fast Dying Nation.”
London Observer, December 31, 2000.
(4) National
Post, June 17, 2000.
(5) Washington Post Service, June 28,
2000.
(6) DPA News Agency, December 27, 2000. Putin has introduced
legislation which essentially outlaws all opposition parties unless they have
at least 10,000 members and offices in at least half of Russia’s 89
regions—an impossibly burdensome requirement.
(7) Reuters,
December 24, 2000.
(8) Insight, January 9, 2000.
(9)
“Lenin the Man of the Century,” December 27, 2000, News World
Communications, Inc.
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