Anything in the Name of the Tsar

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 Central Error of Russia

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.

What are the Errors of Russia?

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.