October 2017
1917:
The Fatima Ultimatum
THE EDITOR
| - 13 July – |
"[Our Lady] opened Her hands once more, ... and we saw as it were a sea of fire. Plunged in this fire were demons and souls in human form, like transparent burning embers ... raised into the air by the flames that issued from within themselves, ... amid shrieks and groans of pain and despair, which horrified us and made us tremble with fear...." |
| - Sister Lucia |
"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, raising up wars and persecutions of the Church.... The good will be martyred; the Holy Father will have much to suffer; various nations will be annihilated." |
| - Our Lady |
| - 13 October – |
"This was not the sparkling of a heavenly body, for it spun round on itself in a mad whirl, when suddenly a clamour was heard from all the people. The sun, whirling, seemed to loosen itself from the firmament and advance threateningly upon the earth as if to crush us with its huge fiery weight. The sensation during those moments was terrible." |
- Dr. Almeida Garrett |
Throughout this year we have featured the ominous convergence of several anniversaries: Fatima, Masonry, Protestantism, and Bolshevism. Yet if 2017 is the Year of the Omens, 1917 was the Year of the Ultimatum: variously delivered by the Miracle of the Sun, the vision of Hell, and the threat of unleashing Russia and its "errors" on the world (— the latter prophecy making no sense at the time, given the powerless and impoverished state of then Christian Russia).
Judgmental Reminder
The stupendous event of 13 October 1917 was more than just the greatest public miracle in history. It was the biggest reality check in history. The ultimate reminder that God isGod ALMIGHTY—exercising TOTALcontrol of ALLthings: both we His creatures, whose existence He mercifully sustains from moment to moment, and the wondrous natural world He has gifted to us.
Wiped from all memory and consideration by our techno age of self-regard and self-reliance, similar fearsome reminders of this awesome power and dominion litter the Old Testament.
Whether provoked beyond all endurance by His own forgetful and ungrateful people, or by those who ignored the warnings of His prophets to stop oppressing His chosen ones, the Divine wrath repeatedly brought death and destruction upon individuals, families and nations.
Thanks to its arrogant rulers, Egypt for one learned the hard way that God doesn't bluff. He doesn't do 'dialogue,' 'listening' and 'mutual enrichment'. When pushed too far, He thunders! And so He did. "I will... kill every firstborn in the land of Egypt both man and beast: and against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgments: I am the Lord." [Exodus 12:12]
The fanciful attempt to replace this Mighty Judgmental God with a non-judgmental godling — a small "c" Christ without a Cross, who dispenses unconditional false-mercy and wrist-slaps to Catholic crybabies and secular snowflakes — is the puerile nub of FrancisChurch. No matter how many scriptural passages he truncates, edits or ignores to suit his Modernist ideology, however, the reality of God shatters this pet Bergoglian project.
Holy Shock and Awe were instruments of Divine Justice thousands of years before the unholy variety gave the phrase a bad name.
Reduced to a catchy slogan to fit their one-sided TV war beamed into living rooms the world over, the vainglorious "shock and awe" touted by the Bush Neocons murdered, maimed and/or displaced untold millions. Long planned in plain sight, it was finally perpetrated under cover of bogus claims about weapons of mass destruction, nearly all of which had been destroyed by Saddam under UN supervision ten years beforehand (apart from those still periodically unearthed which had been "abandoned, forgotten and lost," according to the CIA’s definitive post-war investigation). And all this scheming and killing for what and for whom? Did it serve truth and justice? Or Neocon ideology, the Zionists, and corporate interests? Self-serving hardly covers it.
Truth Himself, on the contrary, has no need for such beat ups and falsehoods to exercise right judgment and mete out equitable justice. As biblical scholar Nathan Schmiedickie has explained, Old Testament accounts of wholesale slaughter of men, women and children underline that being in a right relationship with God equals LIFE; not being in a right relationship with God equals DEATH.
Which is to say that living in a supernatural state of grace, by respecting His laws set forth by His Teaching Church, unites us to God, earning peace and blessings in this life and the next. While conversely, a purely natural plane of existence separates us from God, leading to Luciferian autonomy and the same free choice of Hell — and hell on earth!
"I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing. Choose therefore life, that both thou and thy seed may live." [Deut. 30:19]
Hence the current Culture of Death that devours the innocent like a modern-day Moloch. The new pagans — heads down, ipods in hand, earphones in place — opt to shut out God and the silent screams of His pre-born; each and every one of whom He "knew" even "before" He "formed" them in their mothers' wombs. [Jerem.1:5]
Although it stopped short of a physically devastating Old Testament-reminder, the Miracle of the Sun was another dramatic response to bad choices. If it momentarily terrified the people, at least they lived to tell the tale. Moreover, far from being wiped out, their rain-sodden clothes were instantly dried after the event; an exquisite reminder of Our Heavenly Mother's solicitude for her children. Nonetheless, it was enough to shake the most hard-hearted sinner; a wake-up call we do well to relive:
Suddenly, at 12 noon, Lucia was heard to cry out, "Look, the sun!" Her cry was relayed through the great multitude. People looked up. There were great shouts and exclamations as the people beheld a stupendous phenomenon. The sun burst through the clouds. It immediately began to radiate a kaleidoscope of brilliant colours.
It trembled. It began spinning. Then zigzagging. People were falling to their knees in the mud. Then a terrible cry went up, because the sun suddenly began to plummet to the earth. There were cries for mercy. There were people confessing their sins unabashedly, others were reciting an act of contrition. They feared that they would be crushed to death. Then, the sun stopped and slowly returned to its place in the sky. The whole experience lasted about 8 minutes.
Describing his childhood experience in Alburitel, eighteen kilometres from Fatima, Father Joaquim Lourenco echoed the sheer terror that gripped souls:
I feel incapable of describing what I saw. I looked fixedly at the sun, which seemed pale and did not hurt my eyes. Looking like a ball of snow, revolving on itself, it suddenly seemed to come down in a zig-zag, menacing the earth. Terrified, I ran and hid myself among the people, who were weeping and expecting the end of the world at any moment.
Even the media-gods of naturalism in Portugal and around the world, to include the secular Jewish New York Times, reported this extraordinary spectacle. They could hardly ignore it, since employees of the Portuguese press, who for months had mocked the children's promise of a miracle on a specific day at a specific hour, witnessed its fulfilment! Present in Fatima, the editor of the masonic daily O Seculo, Avelino de Almeida, hitherto a chief mocker, reported truthfully:
The sun trembled, the sun made sudden incredible movements outside all cosmic laws — the sun 'danced' according to the typical expression of the people. It shook and trembled; it seemed like a wheel of fire.
Hell
There was simply no way to suppress or falsify reportage — as one suspects they might have done three months earlier, had they been apprised of the other reminder-cum-ultimatum to mankind: namely, the vision of Hell shown to the little seers by Our Lady.
If the sight of the damned nearly paralysed the children with fright and a dread of joining them, it also filled them with a passionate desire for Heaven. It was meant to rekindle the same salvific fear and desire in all of us. Yet one hundred years later, the very thought is anathema to the reigning Pope and his inner circle (aka "the apostasy at the top"). Cardinals Schönborn, Marx, Kasper, et. al., view Hell, holy fear, and the Fatima seers themselves as worthy of nothing more than a good psychoanalysis. — In which case, let them analyse this!
As Our Lady spoke these last words, She opened Her hands once more, as She had done during the two previous months. The rays of light seemed to penetrate the earth, and we saw as it were a sea of fire. Plunged in this fire were demons and souls in human form, like transparent burning embers, all blackened or burnished bronze, floating about in the conflagration, now raised into the air by the flames that issued from within themselves together with great clouds of smoke, now falling back on every side like sparks in huge fires, without weight or equilibrium, amid shrieks and groans of pain and despair, which horrified us and made us tremble with fear. (It must have been this sight that caused me to cry out, as people say they heard me.) The demons could be distinguished by their terrifying repellent likeness to frightful and unknown animals, black and transparent like burning coals. [Here, in her "Third Memoir" of 31 August 1941, Lucy added] That vision lasted only a moment, thanks to our Good Mother of Heaven, Who, at the first apparition, had promised to bring us to Heaven. Without that, I think we would have died of terror and fear.
Terrified and as if to plead for succour, we looked up at Our Lady, who said to us, so kindly and sadly:
"You have seen hell where the souls of poor sinners go...."
Thus did Sister Lucia relate to her Bishop the first part of the Secret entrusted to the children.
No wonder "they" silenced and isolated Lucia, and still won't release her additional 25-line text of Our Lady's explanation of the lengthier vision-text released by Rome on 26 June 2000. For, the divine signs and messages of Fatima are a compendium of "the faith once delivered to the saints" [Jude 1:3] — central to which are regular warnings to repent, or else!
In the same letter to her Bishop (set out in Fatima in Lucia's own words), Sr. Lucia wrote of the special grace God had given her little cousin in this regard:
How is it that Jacinta, small as she was, let herself be possessed by such a spirit of mortification and penance, and understood it so well?
I think the reason is this: firstly, God willed to bestow on her a special grace, through the Immaculate Heart of Mary; and secondly, it was because she had looked upon hell, and had seen the ruin of souls who fall therein.
Some people, even the most devout, refuse to speak to children about hell, in case it would frighten them. Yet God did not hesitate to show hell to three children, one of whom was only six years old, knowing well that they would be horrified to the point of, I would almost dare to say, withering away with fear.
Jacinta often sat thoughtfully on the ground or on a rock, and exclaimed: "Oh, Hell! Hell! How sorry I am for the souls who go to hell! And the people down there, burning alive, like wood in the fire!" Then, shuddering, she knelt down with her hands joined, and recited the prayer that Our Lady had taught us:
"O my Jesus! Forgive us, save us from the fire of hell. Lead all souls to heaven, especially those who are most in need."
Pope Francis and the Superior General of the Jesuits, Fr. Arturo Sosa Abascal, would chuckle over all that. Francis holds the heretical view, expressed in a March 2015 interview with La Repubblica, that if Hell does exist, no person suffers there forever, since those who totally reject God are merely "annihilated." While Arturo insists that it is all about "social conditioning," since "We have created symbolic figures, such as the devil," and therefore Hell, only in order to explain evil. (But then Fr. Abascal also insists that we don't know what Jesus actually said about divorce because His words weren't tape-recorded!)
Cardinal Ratzinger, on the other hand, echoed Jacinta's reaction. "Yes, I have read [the Third Secret]," he wrote. "[It refers to] a radical call to conversion; the absolute seriousness of history; the dangers which threaten the faith and the life of the Christian and therefore (the life) of the world." [Jesus magazine, 11/11/84]
This grave summation reflects the immediacy and urgency conveyed by the July vision and the October miracle, both of which we continue to ignore at our peril. After all, they were effected, as Our Lady stated, "so that all might believe," and thereby return to God and His Law through "devotion to My Immaculate Heart" — thus avoiding Hell, "where the souls of poor [unrepentant] sinners go."
Russia
But again, free will is a constant. It was precisely because men chose not to heed the ultimatum publicly proclaimed by the solar prodigy — to repent and do penance for their sins — that the second part of the Secret came to pass: as all hell broke loose in the forms of World War II and the Communist scourge.
Whatever the benefits mercifully granted in response to numerous imperfect consecrations (such as the shortening of WWII and the peaceful rending of the Iron Curtain), due to the signal failure of post-Fatima popes and bishops to fulfil Our Lady's consecration request specifically, the atheistic "errors of Russia" have now metastasised into Western errors.
Amoris Laetitia, the Pope's poisonous Apostolic Exhortation, is their latest spiritual and moral manifestation. While at the material level, the Socialist death camps of Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany have given way to workaday Western death chambers and the banalisation of genocide: viz., taxpayer-funded abortuaries that annually murder millions of babies developing peacefully in utero.
Does anyone truly believe that Divine Justice weighs this unspeakable situation in Church and State less strictly than sins which earned previous generations the Divine retribution of Stalags, Gulags, and decades of bloodcurdling mayhem in Europe and beyond? That we will be spared God's wrath under a pope sowing moral and spiritual mayhem while befriending leaders of the Culture of Death (— such as Emma Bonino, the notorious Italian abortionist and proud moral degenerate, lauded by Francis as one of Italy's "forgotten greats")?
These questions naturally lead on to the third and final part of the Secret.
This was clearly a warning that the Russian "errors" would infiltrate the Church Herself, and take hold after 1960. At that time, Sister Lucia told Cardinal Ottaviani in 1955, the meaning of the Third Secret would be "clearer." On prophetic cue, the "opening to the world" at Vatican II soon followed, as infiltrators long ensconced in the Church commenced a new virulent phase of ecclesiastical subversion, opening the door wide for their comrades to join them. First alluded to by Paul VI, their Trickle-Down Apostasy flagged their satanic presence long before their sexual perversions and crimes filled the headlines. And now they are making common cause with the worst of the worldlings — their naturalistic allies — as all parts of the Secret coalesce.
A convergence at once ideological, cultural and political, it positively reeks of hierarchical brimstone.
Firstly, the aggressive collusion of Francis and his Modernist coterie with pro-abort population-controllers of cultural Marxist stripe.
Secondly, their shameless touting of Marxist liberation theology (aka the "social gospel"), even as they cover for brutal Marxist regimes. Consider their complicit silence before the terrorising, starvation and murder of Catholic Venezuelans. "The pope is closer to the communist left than to Christ. Define yourself, Bergoglio!" cried Venezuelan singer José Luis Rodríguez on behalf of his oppressed compatriots. Catholic Columbians and Catholic Chinese feel similarly betrayed.
The Wages of Sin
Difficult to watch and endure, we should pray and hope against hope that this ecclesiastical reckoning is not merely the start of Almighty God delivering on His Fatima ultimatum. For, it was immediately after revealing the vision of Hell to the children on 13 July, that Our Lady of Fatima warned them that "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." They continued to offend Him, and paid a price even more terrible than the devastating punishments meted out under the Old Covenant.
And yet, without the power of the Holy Rosary the 20th century would have been more bloody still!
Like the Miracle of the Sun, this is a matter of public record. As recalled herein, Russian occupations were ended and Soviet nuclear arsenals destroyed in the post-War era due to the efficacy of this prayer before the Most High.
Doubtless, recitation of the Rosary also shortened the First World War, since Our Lady had repeatedly urged the little seers to pray it daily, "in order to obtain peace in the world and the end of the war." During the final apparition of 13 October 1917, she instructed them for the last time to "Continue to pray the Rosary every day... If people amend their lives, the war would end this very day." She added: "You may expect the soldiers home very soon." In the event, WWI effectively ended just a year later.
The irreligious comprehend none of this, of course. Too busy blaming God (the same One they furiously deny) for every misfortune that befalls them, they fail to see how obedience to heavenly demands (being in a "right relationship with God") is amply rewarded, while disobedience triggers not only spiritual, emotional, psychological and social turmoil, but at times corporal punishmentson a massive scale.
Deaf, dumb and blind to this supernatural cause-and-effect, great swathes of humanity continue to live in utter disregard for God and His Commandments.
Jesus Himself complained to Sr. Lucia "bitterly and sorrowfully" about this unbelief and disobedience.
Forever preferring pagan idols (currently technology and "human rights"), men foolishly refuse the evidence of their own eyes that speaks to His existence [Rom. 1:19-25], thereby denying Him and His rightful dominion over them. As St. Paul explains, this denial ultimately leads to homosexuality and every kind of unspeakable vice.
Yet whereas the heedless and rebellious of yore were content with committing "sins that cry to Heaven," the current generation has institutionalised them! And since "The wages of sin is death" [Rom. 6:23], it is little wonder things go from bad to worse as never before.
In 1920, as she lay dying in the Lisbon orphanage, little Jacinta confirmed all of this. She informed the superior, Mother Godinho, that Our Lady had told her expressly that "Wars are the punishment for sin."
Which is to say that wars — to include the wars on Catholic dogma and morals, the pre-born, childhood innocence, marriage, the family, and reality itself— are God abandoning men to themselves: after they have abandoned Him.
The Immaculate Heart of Mary: Devotion and Reparation
Nonetheless, in spite of all, Almighty God still extends the painless means by which to restore our relationship with Him. Rather than treat His defiant children as a lost cause, even at this late stage of their regression to pagan barbarism and loss of all sense of sin, our merciful Father will withdraw His 1917 ultimatum if certain conditions are met.
The non-negotiable provisos were laid down by Our Lady of Fatima: to pray the Rosary daily; to wear the scapular; to do penance and exercise the natural and spiritual virtues according to our station in life.
Added to these is the major condition of making reparation through increased devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, including the Communion of reparation and devotions attached to the Five First Saturdays, and the Consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart. These will lead not only to the conversion of Russia and the rescue of a Western world enslaved by Cultural Marxism, but also to the elevation of the Immaculate Heart as Jesus requested.
In his book, More About Fatima and the Immaculate Heart of Mary, Father Montes de Oca, C.S.Sp. presents the comments of the seers themselves tounderscore its prime importance in God's plan:
Lucy relates that on 13 June 1917, after speaking at length about her Immaculate Heart, Our Lady of Fatima again stretched forth her hands, throwing on the children the rays of that immense light in which they saw themselves as if immersed in God... The Blessed Virgin held in her right hand a Heart surrounded by thorns, which pierced it from all sides. The seers understood that it was the Immaculate Heart of Mary, afflicted by all the sins of the world, which demanded penance and reparation.
"It seems to me," said Lucy, "that on that day, the purpose of the light was to pour into us a special knowledge and love of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, as on other occasions it infused into us the knowledge and love of God, and the mystery of the Blessed Trinity. From that day, indeed, we experienced a more ardent love for the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
Francis [St. Francisco] had observed that this supernatural light, that the Blessed Virgin threw on them and on the world, seemed to come from her Heart. Afterwards he asked Lucia: "Why did the Blessed Virgin hold a Heart in her hand throwing on the earth this great light which is God? You were with the Blessed Virgin in the light that went down to the earth, while Jacinta and I were in that which went up to heaven!"
"It is because you and Jacinta will soon go to heaven", replied Lucia, "while I shall remain some time longer on earth with the Immaculate Heart of Mary." [...] Jacinta seems to have received "a special light to understand intimately and in detail the meanings of these heavenly revelations."
Before leaving for the [Lisbon] hospital in 1919, Jacinta told Lucia: "I am going soon to heaven. You will remain still on earth to make known to men that the Lord wishes to spread in the world devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. When you have to speak about it, you will no longer have to hide yourself! Proclaim openly to the whole world that:
"It is through the Immaculate Heart of Mary that God wishes to grant us His graces!" ... "The Heart of Jesus wishes the Immaculate Heart of Mary to be venerated with His own!" ... "It is through the Immaculate Heart of Mary that peace must be asked, because it is to that Heart that the Lord has confided it."
"Besides," Fr. de Oca concludes, "the best commentary on the devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary is that left us by the children in the admirable example of their lives. After the revelations,.... They loved this Immaculate Heart ardently, they invoked it constantly, they spoke about it enthusiastically, and they multiplied sacrifices to console it and to make reparation for all the blasphemies and offences that cause it to suffer."
In this centenary month of the public miracle that testified to the veracity of their visions and their role as messengers of God's ultimatum to mankind, how overjoyed the seers must be, therefore, with recent consecrations to the Immaculate Heart.
Locally, England's 1948 consecration by Cardinal Griffin was renewed at Westminster cathedral last February, while the Scottish hierarchy followed suit on 3 September (see inside back-cover). The latter was preceded by "40 Days of Spiritual Preparation" ardently promoted by Bishop John Keenan of Paisley, who wrote:
Our people sense some deep-seated need for reparation and purification in the Church.... I wonder if this reparation and consecration are not the best and only path to the renewal of the Church we all crave, so that our Church appears beautiful and humble once more.
It is also not news that Scotland puts more and more of its hope for a brighter future in the hands of our politicians and constitution. Yet Scotland does not need more political solutions so much as it needs a national spiritual regeneration, which we could do no better than to entrust to the grace of the Immaculate Heart of Mary ... and see what Our Lady will do!
Elsewhere, on 8 September, all the faithful and parishes of Poland were re-consecrated to the Immaculate Heart.
Slowly multiplying, these consecrations at national, diocesan and parish levels, surely prefigure the universal Consecration of Russia. For Our Lord assured Sr. Lucia that although performed "late," it will be done. At which time — her intercessory power made manifest by Russia's conversion and a peaceful sea change in world affairs — the veneration of Our Lady's Immaculate Heart will finally assume its rightful place: alongside the Most Sacred Heart of her Son.