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.
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