Some thoughts on the 100-year anniversary of the Miracle of the Sun at Fatima

This is a huge day in the life of the Church. The Miracle of the Sun at Fatima is the greatest and most widely witnessed divine intervention since the Resurrection of Christ.

It is such a big day in fact that I feel somewhat forced to have some sort of commentary on the day itself, untrue to form. There are many much-better informed followers of Fatima, so I'll try and keep my statements brief.

The eminent historian Roberto di Mattei wrote a splendid piece which was published on Rorate Caeli. In it he writes a bit of what happened on that day, but much of his text has to do with how the 9 popes since the apparition have failed to honour the Virgin's request to have Russia consecrated to her Immaculate Heart.

There are some who feel that the consecration of Russia has been carried out and that the positive changes we see in Russia have occured as a result of that consecration. There were positive developments when Pope Pius XII consecrated the whole world to the Blessed Virgin, a fact Sister Lucia was keen to point out, but she was keen to point out that the consecration had not heeded our Blessed Mother's wishes. The Second World War did indeed end and we did indeed have a period of peace, but the world was soon plunged into the chaos of the Cold War, and the errors of Russia continued to spread. Indeed, Roberto di Mattei catalogues this.

Now some will say that Russia has changed and this and that.; facts hardly open to dispute. Anybody who argues that Russia is still communist is as ignorant as he is stupid, I would argue. Well, either that or you are accusing the Russian leadership of complete ignorance of what communism is. After all, communists specialise in destroying churches, not in building and re-building them. If you don't believe me, just as the Chinese and the Soviets!

One would think that people as wise as those in charge of Russia - people, it has to be admitted, who manage to outmanoeuvre the combined intellect of the entire Western world combined seemingly without even trying - would be in the know as to the basic tenets of communism, if that was the ideology that they secrectly espoused. The charge of the Russian leadership being crypto-communists really does not stand up even to the slightest bit of scrutiny.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia has built over 10,000 churches, many if not most with government money, I would assume, since there is simply no way that the Orthodox Church in Russia, persecuted and infiltrated by communists for so long, with barely any Mass attendees, would be able to afford such an undertaking. Some reports I have seen have claimed as much as 28,000 churches have been built in Russia since the fall of communism, a figure that seems rather fanciful to me, but which I would happily accept if it were proved to be true.

The president, Vladimir Putin, routinely attends church services, as does prime minister  Medvedev and defence minister Shoigu. These, I would argue, are the 3 most important public figures in Russia and they are doing everything they can do to prop up the Russian Orthodox Church. Although there is much to go before Russia can be called a Christian nation - the abolition of abortion being the foremost - there is not much more that the current leadership of Russia could have done to help Christianity regain its place at the centre of Russian life.

That it is the Russian Orthodox Church being propped up and not the Catholic Church will offend some, but it does not offend me. To any impartial observer, the Russian Orthodox Church certainly appears more Christian than the Catholic Church. Only the learned will bother to find out that the claims of the Russian Orthodox Church are bogus, but few ever go that far. Externals matter and the fact of the matter is that the primate of Russia behaves in a much more Christian way than does our pope, or whatever Bergoglio is.

Furthermore, it has always been the role of the Russian leadership to support Russian Orthodoxy and I am at a loss to understand how these people think that the Russian leadership can impose the Catholic faith on people who have been hostile to the Catholic Church for centuries. These rifts have nothing to do with Vladimir Putin or even the communists, and they cannot be healed by political figures, although I grant that political figures can do much to push the re-unification. The fact of the matter is that the Blessed Virgin Mary provided us with a roadmap of how to convert Russia back to Catholicism, and that is through the consecration of Russia.

Rumour has it that Putin even asked the pope to consecrate Russia; so much for the politicians being communists. That the popes have failed to do this is to their eternal condemnation. It would be one thing if they did not believe in the Fatima message, but pope after pope has paid homage to the apparitions at Fatima so it beggars belief that they will not do what they were asked to do.

Back to the topic of the consecration and the accompanying warnings...

Whereas Russia can be said in many ways to have rejected the errors of Russia, these errors are all-pervasive in the West. Whether it is the attack on the Christian faith, the destruction of the family, the promotion of sodomy, fornication homosexuality and feminism, the attack on human nature through transgenderism and materialism, the attack on the sacredness of human life through euthanasia and abortion, the promotion of Islam, witchcraft, scientism and atheism, the errors of Russia have spread into the West like wild-fire and there seems to be no stopping them.

I repeat that I am no expert of Fatima but it is my understanding that the Blessed Virgin never promised that the errors would destroy Russia herself but that Russia would spead her errors if her requests were not granted. It is therefore of little merit to point and Russia and say that she has left her errors as proof that the consecration had taken place when the very warning had to do with the spread of errors beyond Russia, a phenomenon which is virtually indisputable at the time of writing.

In typical fashion, Mundabor came up with a good analogy, that of a erroneous home-blessing and it goes something like this: Imagine you asked a priest over to your house to give you a house-blessing. Once at your house, the priest  blesses all the houses in the world, which obviously includes your house but that would not be what you had asked of the prist in the first place. You would be aggrieved and with good reason.

Inspired by his analogy, I'll try out one of my own. Imagine you are a woman and your wedding anniversary is very important to you. Your husband decides, for once - after much pestering -, to remember it and makes special plans for dinner and invites your closest friends. As part of the dinner he decides to toast to the occasion, and instead of toasting to your many years of marriage, he devotes his toast to all the marriages in the world without mentioning yours, or mentioning yours only cryptically. I bet there is no woman in the world who would feel honoured by what had taken place, so it is astonishing to imagine that the Virgin Mary is pleased with the alleged crypto-consecrations of Russia.

Another analogy: Imagine that at the wedding Mass the priest blesses not the couple in front of him, but all the couples in the world, and not the rings the couple in front of him will wear the rest of their lives, but all the rings in the world. Since this is a nit-picky priest, let's even assumes he confines himself to allt he wedding rings of the world, which would exclude at least mafia rings and the likes. Would you feel that the priest has done his job in blessing your marriage? If not, then we cannot expect the Virgin Mary to feel that her request was heeded.

This is basic common sense!

Now many will ask: Why does Russia need to be consecrated when they seem to be doing much better morality-wise than most? Fr. Gruner often received this question and his answer was more or less along the lines of that people who have that view misunderstand he concept of consecration.

In simple terms, consecration sets things aside for God. Russia has been given the singular honour by Almighty God through the Blessed Virgin Mary to be the tool of devotion to her sacred heart, and the conversion of nations. It is Russia which has been singled out, presumably through no merits of its own. It is an honourable thing, and not a castigation of what is going on in Russia now, or even what went on in Russia before necessarily, seeing as thge Fatima apparition came before the Bolshevik revolution.

I must admit that the importance of the Fatima Message was completely hidden to me even maybe up to last year and that I owe Fr. Nicholas Gruner a lot for his dogged stubbornness regarding the value of obeying the Blessed Virgin Mary and his tireless work of promoting the Message of Fatima.

Another point brought up frequently is the absurdity of the consecration by Pope John Paul II being valid when Sister Lucia had first of all claimed that it was not (only to later 'change her mind'), and when Pope John Paul II did not even mention Russia in his consecration. The only one who mentioned Russia was Pope Pius XII, a fact which di Mattei also writes about and which John Salza has also spoekn about through the Fatima Center. If his consecration was valid, why not not the others? This has led to the theory that the letters from Sister Lucia claiming that the consecration was valid are forgeries, but that's a story for another day.

Put quite simply: It is absurd that previous consecration which mentioned Russia were deemed invalid while one which did not mention Russia was deemed valid.

The world seems to be hell-bent on destroying itself by denying God, first and foremost. Whether or not the consecration of Russia can save us now is anybody's guess. My understanding is that it might not, given that something which was to be done by 1960 was not done within the time for the deadline.

In the end, the Blessed Virgin Mary tells us that her Immaculate Heart will triumph, consecration or no consecration. We would do well to at least heed her request, lest we find ourselves on the wrong side of her triumph.