As I've said before, Our Lady at Fatima spoke of the errors of Russia, not simply the errors of Communism.
Let me add a quick note: I am not here saying that Communism is not an error, that the Fatima secret does not refer to Communism as among the errors of Russia, or in any way trying to rescue the reputation of the murderous Soviet regime. Not at all.
Again, our touchstone for truth, our way of testing to see what is erroneous and what is real is the teaching of the Church, and the Church has condemned, fought, and often overcome Communism.
However, I reiterate: Our Lady spoke of the errors (plural) of Russia (not the Soviet Union). To presume that the errors of Russia referred to in Fatima must only refer to Communism, one must overlook the way that "anything in the name of" also characterized tsarist rule in Russia.
And perhaps the easiest way to make the point that there was something dramatically wrong with pre-revolutionary Russia is simply to point to Rasputin.
Mistaken in his own lifetime for a holy man, Rasputin slept his way through Russian high society, held enormous sway over Tsarina Alexandra because she believed him the only person who could heal her son of hemophilia, and before he died, had so hollowed out the Russian government through his control of the royal family that the revolutions of 1917 followed.
How did such a man not just gain access to the ruling classes, but to the imperial family itself? How did such a strange figure become so immensely consequential in Russia?
"Anything in the name of."
The tsarina would do anything in the name of her son's health. The tsar would do anything in the name of his wife. And under the absolutist rule of the tsar, the whole of Russia would do anything in the name of the tsar...until they'd suffered beyond endurance, and turned to do anything in the name of eating; anything in the name of survival; anything in the name of changing the status quo.
It should be a matter of fascination for historians that the Russian Orthodox hierarchy wasn't able to serve as an immune system against Rasputin's ascent. Indeed, his place in the royal family exposes another toxic element of the pre-revolutionary period: There was a lot of occultism extant in Russia at the time. In "Occultism as a Response to a Spiritual Crisis," Dr. Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, professor emeritus of history at Fordham University, writes:
The occultism of prerevolutionary Russia is important, firstly because aspects of the most popular doctrines—Spiritualism, Theosophy, and Anthroposophy—became embedded in the wider culture; secondly because occultists
who emigrated after the Bolshevik Revolution gained European and American admirers who disseminated their ideas; and thirdly because ideas drawn from the above doctrines were recycled (with some modifications) in the 1960s and after in both the Soviet Union and the West. ...
And a few more notes, working from the teachings of the Church.
Tsarism, like the royal absolutism of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I in England, claimed for the secular monarch authority over the sacred, over the Church, in a way that the Catholic Church has made clear is illegitimate.
Further, such centralization of power in, essentially, a despot leads to the creation of a national church, an ecclesial community that quickly attaches to its membership criteria of patriotism, and membership in a particular ethnicity or nation.
That means that on both theological and political grounds, any sort of communion with the bishop of Rome, let alone abiding under his authority as the Vicar of Christ, becomes difficult to impossible for nationalist churches or ecclesial communities.
It was just such vesting of all power in a single figure in Nazi Germany; just such a fascination with the occult; just such an ethno-nationalism and a co-opting of Christianity (or purported Christianity) into the service of narrow nationalist interests that characterized the Third Reich. The errors of Russia certainly had spread to many nations, and certainly caused the destruction of many nations.
But the rot didn't stop with World War II. Rather, World War II was both caused by the errors of Russia and helped launch the errors of Russia into geo-politics as the ordinary means of policy and statecraft. More on that to follow.
The heart of the errors of Russia, and the error behind all the errors that would spew forth into the world, causing WWII and then being spread across the globe by WWII, was diagnosed by the creator of Hobbits, Ents, and Middle-Earth.
J.R.R. Tolkien was a rare genius. Among his greatest achievements is the core moral theme at the heart of The Lord of the Rings: do not do evil so that good may come of it.
Or, to put it another way, always refuse to do "anything in the name of."
Saruman was willing to do "anything in the name of" bringing about the rule of the wise in Middle-Earth, and so he became a fool.
Denethor was willing to do "anything in the name of" victory over Sauron, and so he destroyed himself and almost destroyed his line.
Character after character is tempted to take up the One Ring, the Master Ring, the Ring of Power, and usually, they are tempted to do so for some particular good. Gandalf was tempted to take it to do good. Galadriel, the same. Sam, to establish the garden to end all gardens.
Again and again and again, the characters of Lord of the Rings are tempted to take up the ultimate weapon in order to serve a good cause, home, family, justice, the common good. They are tempted to do evil so that good may come of it, tempted to accept any cost in the name of a particular good.
They are tempted by the oldest temptation in the world, in other words, and by the temptation that undergirds all ideologies and excuses that led to WWII.
Nazism? A system built around doing anything in the name of the Volk, the German people, the Fuhrer; anything in the name of power, of strength, of appetite. In the end, this led to slaughter, to extermination of scapegoats, of the weak. Anything in the name of Germany turned into a willingness to destroy Germany.
Communism? A system built from Marx's ideology, an ideology with an absolute faith in historical processes in place of God, a system looking to the Revolution to do atheistically what Judaism and Christianity look for in the day of the Lord. And at the heart of the expectation of the Revolution as the day when all wrongs shall be made right, all injustices corrected, all inequities remedied, is the essential willingness to do anything in the name of justice. Anything in the name of the Revolution. From there flowed every other evil of Communism enacted in Russia--anything in the name of Lenin, for he was the bringer of the Revolution. Anything in the name of the Party, for they bring the Revolution. Anything in the name of Comrade Stalin, for he is synonymous with the Party. Anything in the name of the Soviet Union, for that is the place where Communism has been made real, the Revolution has occurred, where all is just, because it must be just, because the Revolution has occurred...
But don't stop there. Look also at Tsarism. Of that, more tomorrow.
So Our Lady of Fatima didn't reveal everything she had come to convey in 1917. No indeed: The secret of Fatima, given in July 1917, clearly indicates that Our Lady would be visiting again later in order to reveal the First Saturdays devotion and the essential elements of the consecration of Russia.
But she also revealed a great deal in that secret, including that if her requests were not heeded, World War II would come because of the spread and effects of the errors of Russia..
And that crucial warning caught my attention in the midst of reading and study.
After all, the average Catholic who pays attention to Fatima associates the errors of Russia with the Communist totalitarianism that came into being in Russia in October/November, 1917. Many have childhood memories of praying the Rosary for peace in the world and for the conversion of Russia, and given the hard years of the Cold War, this interpretation is hardly surprising.
But it overlooks the crucial point that the errors of Russia caused World War II, according to Our Lady, and while Stalin's Russia certainly helped launch the war with his unlikely alliance with Hitler's Germany, it's a stretch to say that Communism caused Nazism, or to attempt to claim that Nazism would not have caused a world war without Communism.
How, then, can we look at the causes of the war and find their roots in Russia?
Several crucial ways.
1) One of the most influential texts in Nazi Germany was the anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. According to the noted scholar Hannah Arendt, the Protocols didn't just serve the Nazis' propaganda goals of supposedly laying out a shadowy Jewish conspiracy to control the world. No--the Nazis actually used the Protocols as a "textbook for global conquest." They modeled their Third Reich off of the Protocols--and the Protocols were fabricated in Russia, and published in 1902-1903.
2) Why do we assume that when Our Lady spoke of the errors of Russia in July 1917 she was necessarily referring to solely to the errors of Communism? July was between revolutions. The Tsar had lost power, but Lenin and his heirs had not yet seized it. Indeed, had Our Lady meant to solely speak of Communism, she could easily have said so. In fact, she probably would not have spoken of Russia. She would have said, "The Soviet Union," or some other phrase that would have pointed solely at what was to come.
No. I think that when we read the secret, we need to look at Russia, both before and after the Revolutions of 1917, in order to find what Our Lady meant by the errors of Russia.
Now--a few necessary qualifications.
Key among them: There is nothing new under the sun. In the secret of Fatima, the errors of Russia are nowhere said to be new, or somehow unheard of before 1917. The errors of Russia will be errors that have been present in Russia in a particularly powerful or dominant way, not necessarily emerging for the first or only time from Russia.
Second, the errors of Russia will lead to World War II. The war was the sign that the best hour had come and gone for the First Saturdays and the consecration of Russia. It's the crucial symptom that a virus had gotten loose into the whole world.
Thirdly, our guide to which errors are at play cannot be our political party, our personal biases, or our preferences for whom Heaven condemns. Rather, our guide to error must be truth. We must know the right answers in order to discern where Russia had gone wrong, and where her errors had spread to lead the world wrong. What, then, is our touchstone? The Church, the pillar and foundation of the truth (see 1 Tim 3:15). Relying upon Scripture and Tradition, the magisterial teaching of popes and ecumenical councils, and the writings of saints and doctors, we can come to a clear perception of the errors at play by comparing them to the truth taught by the Church.
And at the core of all of the errors of Russia, I think there's one error in particular--one that a certain professor of languages diagnosed in the heart of the war itself. More to come.
So in 2016-2017, I did a bunch of reading, research, and writing about Fatima. It was the 100th anniversary of the apparitions, it was timely, and it was interesting.
As I was doing this work, one thing came into clear focus for me: World War II was an optional event.
I mean, living in the world that World War II created, it can easily be mistaken (by American eyes like mine) an inevitable, apocalyptic clash in which the Allies took on the forces of Anti-Christ, goodness won, and a free world was reborn. The world was saved, and blessed are we if we have leaders as great as those who then strode the earth.
But I realized that's not the view of the world given by Our Lady of Fatima.
Rather, the second part of the secret of Fatima indicates that World War II was avoidable if her requests were heeded, if the Church reacted in a timely fashion, making the First Saturdays of reparation and the consecration of Russia. If the requested devotion to Mary's Immaculate Heart had spread, then the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart would have come before the start of World War II. Indeed, there never would have been a war. Millions of lives could have been saved. An ocean of suffering could have been avoided.
Studying Fatima further, I even encountered the turning point in history, the year when the Church could have redirected the world away from war, according to Our Lady of Fatima. As Fr. Apostoli's excellent book Fatima for Today lays out, drawing on Sr. Lucia's own writings, the apparitions of Fatima didn't just come in 1917. There were the apparitions of the angel of peace, the angel of Portugal in 1916, and there were a number of subsequent apparitions to Sr. Lucia--as of course there had to be.
When you read the 1917 secret, look at it as though for the first time, as though we didn't know anything more than the events up to July 1917. You'll notice that she promises she will come again (emphasis added):
... If what I say to you is done, many souls will be saved and there will be peace. The war is going to end: but if people do not cease offending God, a worse one will break out during the Pontificate of Pius XI. When you see a night illumined by an unknown light, know that this is the great sign given you by God that he is about to punish the world for its crimes, by means of war, famine, and persecutions of the Church and of the Holy Father. 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. ...
Our Lady did not ask for the consecration of Russia in 1917, nor did she then ask for the first Saturdays of reparation. 1917 was not the turning point toward or away from World War II.
When, then?
She came in 1925 to ask for the First Saturdays, and for the first time explained what they entailed. The Church could not have responded to this request until then. And Our Lady came to ask for the consecration of Russia in 1929.
And then she and Jesus both came to Sr. Lucia in 1930, complained that "they"--the hierarchy--were not listening. They said that the consecration would be made, but it would be made late.
And here we have the crucial year, the hinge, the turning point. 1929-1930. Perhaps the progress toward war could still have been arrested till the predicted unknown light shone in the sky Jan. 25-26, 1938. Perhaps we had our chance for several years.
But these are the crucial years when we could have averted WWII.
And that forced me to another conclusion: The errors of Russia can't have merely been the errors of Communism. More on that tomorrow.
I just finished watching The Avengers for the umpteenth time, and was struck once again by how Marvel's story people are somehow writing celebrations of the culture of life. Nick Fury refuses a direct order from the shadowy Council that oversees S.H.I.E.L.D because it's an unjust, wrongful order--to nuke Manhattan in a desperate attempt to stop the Chitauri invasion.
It's a classic Cold War move. Mutually Assured Destruction (MADD) rather than accepting defeat. We would rather cast fire upon the earth and perish with our enemies rather than accept subjugation.
And of course, on some level, I understand the instinct. Human beings are certainly capable of such wrath, tempted to it. I have been furious at bullies in my past, furious to the point of not caring what the consequences were so long as I was able to land a punch.
But the Council's choice--the Cold War choice--was born out of the heart of the errors of Russia, out of the error that undergirds most all of the other errors.
Do anything in the name of a good cause.
Do anything in the name of defending freedom, of protecting planet Earth, of winning over the alien invader.
Do anything in the name of goodness, even embracing evil, even becoming evil.
It's an ancient temptation; the first temptation, in fact. Take the forbidden fruit in order to be like God. It looks tasty, and much to be desired for the wisdom it promises. Take that which God has forbidden, and set aside that God which has permitted. Take, and eat, and seize divinity for yourselves!
The thing is that if Adam and Eve had eaten of the tree of life, they would have also gained knowledge of good and evil, for experience is the best of teachers. They would have also gained divinity, for Adam's life had come through the breath, the Spirit of God being breathed into his nostrils, and the Trinity indwelt Adam and Eve through the sanctifying grace animating their souls till original sin. Adam is listed in the genealogy of Christ as the Son of God, and so he would have remained--indeed, even entered into glory--had he remained faithful (see Lk 3:38).
The devil tempted them with what they already had in their grasp, and they fell.
So, too, is it with the temptation today of doing anything in the name of a particular good.
We have faced much evil and suffering these past 400 years, since the apparition of Jesus to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque and the request for the consecration of France to the Sacred Heart. The Church and the world have seen unprecedented slaughters, and acts of terrible inhumanity, fueled by the extraordinary technological achievements of the modern age. Far too many Stark Industries have built far too many weapons of mass destruction. And far too many people have fallen to the lies that undergird our current crises.
"Are you willing to give 110%?"
"Are you willing to do whatever it takes?"
Thank God for the sane and healthy ordinary folk for whom these are simple motivational slogans. Thank God for the many for whom there are lines they will not cross, evil deeds they will not do, compromises they will not make.
Thank God for fairy tales, and the warnings they convey, of stories about deals made with Rumpelstiltskin, or with Ursula the Witch, of the dangers of love potions and the price that crones will ask for their magic. Thank God for stories warning that your first-born child is all too often the price of professional advancement, of power, of wealth, of following the left-hand path to gain the golden calves of this world.
These are the errors of Russia, the errors that spread out from Russia, weaponized and contagious in WWII, prophesied at Fatima in 1917 and again in 1930, when Jesus and Mary lamented that the consecration would be made late.
These are the errors of Russia. Look at Communism, with its complete faith in historical processes grinding their way through human lives to a revolution that would solve everything, that would establish justice in the world through the dictatorship of the proletariat, the slaughter of the "oppressors," and in whose name every evil could be and was justified. Look at Tsarism, in which one man is given autocratic rule of a country, where he and his family turn to spiritualism and ultimately the demonic deceptions of Rasputin--anything in the name of the heir; anything in the name of the Tsar's rule, anything in the name of the Tsar.
Then look at the way war was waged during World War II. Look at the ethos that began with Stalin and Hitler, with any evil done in the name of the leader of the Communist Party and any evil done in the name of the Fuhrer, the volk, the German people. Look at the ethos that spread to the Allies throughout the war--anything in the name of victory, including Japanese internment camps, the firebombing of cities, and ultimately the Manhattan Project's terrible fruits. Look at how that ethos governed the waging of the Cold War--MADD is the doctrine and ruthless the war, and the waging of it. Any manipulation of the facts in the name of Communism or stopping Communism; any weapon to hand; anything in the name of--not even victory, for in the event of a nuclear war, there was no expectation of victory. No--anything in the name of no surrender.
Anything--and so it was spy versus spy; intelligence service versus intelligence service; the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, seized and eaten again and again and again, for we sought salvation in knowledge, in intelligence, in gnosis, in secrets and the Inner Ring, in blunt instruments of government policy (Ian Fleming's description of James Bond) doing anything in the name of Queen and country in order to stop the Soviet agents from doing anything in the name of the Revolution and the Party.
The same errors at the roots, the same bad first premises skewing our worldviews and our understanding for the last several hundred years--all for the lack of a consecration of France, and a late consecration of Russia.
An ideological infection that began in France in the 1600s and spread to the world bore terrible fruit, especially in 1917, in 1929-1945, and has continued to bear fruit ever since then.
The remedies? They exist; they are powerful; they have been used to a certain extent, but we must take them up in our turn and hasten the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart as much as possible. The sooner the Queen of Heaven wins her victory, the better.
For the wise, there are more complicated tools at hand--revising our understanding of history to spotlight and help us fight particular errors.
For all of us, there is devotion to the Immaculate Heart. Possible ways to live this:
living a good, ordinary Christian life
receiving the Sacraments regularly
attending Mass on Sundays and holy days of obligation
performing the works of mercy
the First Saturdays of reparation
Marian consecration
the daily Rosary for peace in the world
other Marian devotions, such as the Miraculous Medal, the scapulars (especially the Brown, the Green, and the Blue)
enthroning a statue or another image of Our Lady in your home, especially of her showing her Immaculate Heart
leading devotions in your parish
Marian processions
studying Mariology
A morally good act requires the goodness of the object, of the end, and of the circumstances together. An evil end corrupts the action, even if the object is good in itself (such as praying and fasting "in order to be seen by men").
The object of the choice can by itself vitiate an act in its entirety. There are some concrete acts - such as fornication - that it is always wrong to choose, because choosing them entails a disorder of the will, that is, a moral evil.
It is therefore an error to judge the morality of human acts by considering only the intention that inspires them or the circumstances (environment, social pressure, duress or emergency, etc.) which supply their context. There are acts which, in and of themselves, independently of circumstances and intentions, are always gravely illicit by reason of their object; such as blasphemy and perjury, murder and adultery. One may not do evil so that good may result from it ...
Some rules apply in every case:
- One may never do evil so that good may result from it;
- the Golden Rule: "Whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them."
- charity always proceeds by way of respect for one's neighbor and his
conscience: "Thus sinning against your brethren and wounding their
conscience . . . you sin against Christ." Therefore "it is right not to . . . do anything that makes your brother stumble." (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1755-1756, 1789).
It's always interesting encountering people with whom one disagrees on fundamental things in everyday life.
On the one hand, there's the option of simply ignoring the differences, focusing on the things held in common, and moving on.
On the other hand, there's more and more an insistence that everyone else be in accord on certain fundamentals, whether those be the priorities of the left or of the right, before a person may be accorded any kind of respect or treated with any dignity.
It's a tricky thing--of course, human dignity is intrinsic and inalienable. Fundamental respect and love for our neighbor is essential, in the full, philosophical sense.
And yet that doesn't mean every opinion can be allowed to pass unremarked, can it?
Certainly people in power need to be challenged on matters of fact, on areas where they jeopardize other peoples' well being. Certainly we now look back and wish for a world in which Hitler had been greeted by an outraged uprising of the whole world, an utter refusal to countenance his racial and nationalistic insanity, and a swift and certain challenge that could have headed off Holocaust and the slaughter of war.
So there are certain opinions, certain attitudes, that ought bring out a resolute opposition from us, reflecting perhaps the example of Dietrich von Hildebrand, recognizing certain evils as fully incompatible with Christianity or civilization.
And yet in an era where the errors of Russia influence almost all of us; when our first premises are so often out of whack in ways of which we are completely unconscious, what gives us the right to decide that we have accurately discerned whose opinions we must repudiate utterly? Left and right justify dehumanizing policies, governing choices that do actively lead to the deaths of innocents. We are faced with a world looking more and more like the milieu of the Caesars than the city of God.
How are we to oppose when we are so often, unconsciously, part of the problem?
