October 2026
An address by Archbishop Viganò delivered on 7 October 2022 to members of the Liberi in Veritate committee on the occasion of Victory Week—Settimana della Vittoria; an annual Italian observance focussing on prayer, penance, and fasting, encouraging participants to attend Mass and offer spiritual support to those feeling vulnerable before global moral and social disasters.
The week commemorates the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, referencing the Miracle of the Sun as a prefiguration of spiritual triumph over ideologies such as communism and liberalism; viewed as part of a broader struggle to restore the Social Reign of Christ and counteract the influence of Freemasonry and secularism on society. Translated from the Italian. Our title/subheads.
Fatima: Harbinger of Victory!
On October 13, one hundred and five years ago, before thousands of people gathered in the Cova da Iria, the Blessed Virgin concluded the series of apparitions of Fatima, crowning them with the famous Miracle of the Sun, by which she prefigured the triumph of her Immaculate Heart, as a prerequisite for the restoration of the Social Reign of Our Lord. It was October 13, 1917; the previous February, Bolshevism had just launched the revolution that would lead to the social rupture of class struggle, the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and a century of wars, famines, and conflicts. On May 13th of that same year, Benedict XV consecrated as bishop the young Eugenio Pacelli, who would later reign as pontiff from 1939 to 1958. The months dedicated to Our Lady always bring great blessings to her devout children.
Europe, caught in the vice-like grip of materialistic Communism on one side and Masonic Liberalism on the other, found in the Apostolic See a firm defender of Catholic truth and natural law. This defence was crucial for countering atheistic materialism while simultaneously protecting the legitimate rights of workers, often exploited by their employers. The latter—typical Liberals of a Protestant stamp—thought only of profit, even when it entailed gruelling shifts for labourers, subhuman working conditions, promiscuity, child labour, and abysmal sanitary and health conditions.
The Masonic Whore: Portugal Besieged
It is no coincidence that both errors—Communism and Liberalism—manifest cruelty and inhumanity in direct proportion to their hatred of the Catholic religion. It is also no coincidence that the promises made by these two social scourges—founded on the illusion of an earthly "paradise," whether for the working class or for the elite that exploits it—reveal themselves to be colossal frauds. This happens precisely because they attempt to implement—in an artificial manner—that liberty, equality, and fraternity while severing them from their necessary foundation: reliance on God and respect for His holy Law.
After centuries of bloody struggles and terrible persecutions, we should have learned that there can be no peace where Christ is not the cornerstone on which the entire social edifice is built, and that there is no greater calamity than a state governed by the principle of secularism in public affairs, where morality is rejected in the relations between citizens.
Indeed, in early twentieth-century Portugal, the State was dominated by Freemasonry, which had been plotting against the Christian order since the beginning of the nineteenth century. It began its nefarious work during the French occupation under Junot and Masséna—a campaign intended to overthrow the monarchy, imprison the legitimate king, and undermine the geopolitical stability secured by the kinship ties between ruling houses. The Prime Minister, Marquis of Pombal, was a proponent of the Enlightenment and sworn enemy of the Church. It was through him that this hostile force managed to infiltrate the highest levels of state institutions, aided by international Freemasonry and big capital, to whom the goods of the religious orders were sold at auction. During those same years, revolutions financed by the elite also erupted in Mexico (1917) and later in Spain (1931), bringing with them forms of outright tyranny masked as democracy and, as always, the corruption of public officials.
Alongside the unrest, an economic crisis spread, workers' wages plummeted, and pressures mounted—both from England externally and from the disruptive forces of the Portuguese Republican Party and the subversive press internally. On February 1, 1908, King Carlos I and Crown Prince Luís Filipe were assassinated in Lisbon in an attack orchestrated by members of the "Carbonari" who subsequently fled to Mexico and France. Eighteen-year-old Manuel II ascended the throne; yet, as early as April of that same year, the Republican Party began advocating for a revolution against the monarchy, tasking António José de Almeida with organising secret societies—such as the Carboneria and Freemasonry—which succeeded in attracting many members of the Army and Navy to their cause. On October 5, 1910, King Manuel II of Braganza was deposed in a military coup, and the dreadful Joaquim Teófilo Braga was appointed president, heading a cabinet of Masonic ministers. Braga declared: "The ministers of the provisional government, driven by a profound sense of patriotism, have consistently sought to translate the highest and most pressing aspirations of the old Republican Party into their decisions, in order to reconcile the enduring interests of society with the new order of things."
Scenes of desecration, sacrilege, looting, and the destruction of churches, convents, and Catholic institutions were accompanied by laws suppressing all religious orders and congregations, as usual under the direction of the Lodges. Divorce and civil marriage were immediately legalised; the religious oath during civil ceremonies was abolished; and the secularisation of the State, the abolition of noble titles, and the right to strike were decreed. The cremation of corpses was authorised; religious instruction in schools was suppressed, and the wearing of the cassock was prohibited. Ringing of church bells was drastically restricted, and religious holidays—including popular ones—were curtailed. The government claimed the right to appoint seminary professors and determine their curricula. This long series of laws culminated in the law separating Church and State, passed on April 20, 1911. And as a final sign of cultural dissolution already in progress, the orthography of the Portuguese language was simplified, as happened later in Greece in 1976 with the suppression of the katharévousa and its replacement with dhimotikí or popular language.
There is no Catholic nation in Europe that has not been subjected to the ideological hatred of Freemasonry. And this is the great enemy, the Babylonian harlot of which the Apocalypse speaks, “sitting upon the great waters, with whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of fornication” (Rev 17:1–2). "Mystery, Babylon the great, the mother of harlots and of the abominations of the earth" (ibid., 5), seated upon the scarlet beast with seven heads and ten horns, "full of names of blasphemy" (ibid., 3)—names such as secularity of the State, the usury of Ashkenazi high finance, divorce, abortion rights, euthanasia and gender and LGBTQ ideologies.
Miracle of the Sun
Yet, precisely while Portugal—where, until a few years prior, Catholic monarchs had still reigned—was taking the first steps toward that infernal "Great Reset" already implemented elsewhere through the corruption of rulers and their subservience to the infamous sect; while the anticlerical press mocked the three shepherd children—attempting first to brand them as frauds, then as mad, and finally as dupes of the clergy—the Mother of the Saviour and our own Mother, the Patroness and Queen of Portugal, appeared in the gloomy skies of Fatima, above fields sodden with rain and mud. And so that the visions and messages conveyed by the Virgin to the humble peasant children might not be doubted, she deigned to perform the Miracle of the Sun, compelling even the most incredulous—the fiercest mockers of "clerical superstition" and the staunchest proponents of science’s primacy over faith—to witness with their own eyes the dance of the Sun. It appeared, rending the leaden sky beneath which everyone—whether out of devotion, curiosity, or the vain hope of debunking the "ravings of three ignorant little shepherds"—awaited the foretold prodigy.
We never cease to marvel, to be stupefied by the perfection and simplicity of God’s action in history—an action that unfolds within the economy of salvation, as well as through apparitions and miracles, thanks to the Woman of the Apocalypse crowned with stars: She who, in her holy humility and immaculate virginity, gave birth to the incarnate Son of God to rescue souls from the tyranny of Satan.
Our Lady always plays a very special role in God's work, whether in joys or victories, or times of trial and sorrow. Our Lady’s interventions always point back to God, to the Most Holy Trinity. And so, also in the Cova da Iria, the apparition of the beautiful Lady—unassuming in form yet momentous in substance—was accompanied by a marvellous pedagogy through an extraordinary spectacle of nature, obedient to its Creator when commanded to suspend His laws. And just as in certain ancient depictions we see the Pantocrator holding the sphere of the world in His hands, so it must have seemed to the faithful and the people gathered in the rain that the Lord Himself was demonstrating the power which made our forefathers tremble under the ancient law—that power that the world deems audacious because it brings man—with his pretensions, rights, and absurd claims—back to what he truly is: a creature in need of God, of His divine Providence, His omnipotence, and His mercy.
In that blazing Sun, we must see today—just as the thousands of people at Fatima recognised on that 13th of October one hundred and five years ago—the figure of the Sol Invictus (the unconquered Sun), Our Lord Jesus Christ, the centre of the cosmos created by Him—omnia per ipsum facta sunt, et sine ipso factum est nihil quod factum est (Jn 1:3)—and, even more, the centre of the Redemption, that sets the Earth’s axis to rotate around the Cross: stat Crux, dum volvitur orbis (The Cross stands, while the world revolves).
Christ, King and High Priest, who unites within Himself the sovereign power derived from His being God and from having redeemed us through His own Sacrifice, is King by divine right, by right of inheritance, and by right of conquest. Christ is the Eucharistic King, radiant in the Church as in a monstrance, as the sun in the sky of Fatima and as Christ the Judge of the end of time.
Wise and Solicitous Mother
A little more than three centuries earlier, Mary Most Holy, Mediatrix of All Graces, sought to obtain from Heaven the victory of the Christian army over the Mohammedans on October 7, 1571. She had done so before, and she will continue to do so throughout history. And always, together with her and thanks to her, her triumph prepares for us the triumph of her divine Son, which we know is certain, dazzling and unconditional. She is the Queen of Victories, intrepid conqueror of the old Serpent, the formidable vanquisher of the harlot of Babylon who besieged the Portuguese in 1917 just as today and who, with ever-increasing arrogance, besieges the Western world; she "with whom the kings of the Earth have fornicated"—the servants of Davos, of the New World Order, of globalism.
What does Our Lady ask of us? Her few words at the Wedding Feast at Cana are clear: Do whatever my Son tells you (Jn 2:5). In Her apparitions, she reiterates the same precept, deepening it: penance, prayer, recitation of the Rosary; union with the Passion and Sacrifice of Christ—as His Mystical Body—to complete in our own flesh what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ (Col 1:24).
As a wise Mother, who is provident and attentive to our needs, the Virgin warns us of the calamities looming over the world and the Body of the Church should we fail to convert—should each of us fail to renounce the deadly poison of revolutionary demands that has come to infect even Catholics and traditionalists.
Dear friends! the Most Holy Virgin is our Mother in the most intimate and profound way imaginable, for her motherhood toward us is grounded in the fact that we are children of God and heirs of Christ. And as a Mother, we may be certain that she will leave nothing undone—whether before the Throne of God or here among us—to save our souls and make us holy, for her Son wants us to be saints.
And if she intervened when the threat was so great and imminent, even if limited to certain nations, how can we doubt that she will intervene with even greater impact and miraculous protection now that the entire world has plunged into apostasy, dragging the very Hierarchy of the Church along with it?
Victory Guaranteed!
The enemy is always the same: Freemasonry—enslaved to Satan and highly organised in its diffusion and its network of accomplices. Our own weaknesses are always the same: sin, lukewarmness, and weakness before the seduction of the harlot, leaving us "intoxicated with the wine of her fornication."
Satanic fury is always unleashed against the same targets: the Church of Christ, the Holy Mass, religious life, Catholic education, the simple yet profound faith of the people, purity, and Christian order. True, we have an adversary [Francis] upon the Chair of Peter—no longer a guide and an ally—but was it not Our Lady herself who, at Fatima, warned us of the apostasy and the errors that would spread throughout the world and strike the Church if we failed to consecrate Russia to her Immaculate Heart, and who urged us to penance and prayer?
Today, that Soviet, communist, and materialist Russia is no more. Its errors have spread across the globe, merging with those of liberalism. The Holy Alliance—initiated by the Tsar prior to the Bolshevik Revolution precisely to defend the Christian Order and unite peoples against a common enemy—can serve today as an inspiration for resistance and opposition to the New World Order.
If we view the events unfolding around us through a supernatural lens, we must acknowledge that Russia is currently the only power fighting the globalist harlot; for this very reason, it is now the target of attacks and provocations by the international deep state and the ideological fury of the World Economic Forum—an organisation that sees as nearing completion its subversive coup d'etat to establish a synarchic dictatorship.
In these days of great anxiety regarding the fate of world peace—as we witness the disastrous consequences of Agenda 2030 on the economy, employment, the cost of living, and our own physical health—we must call upon the Queen of Victories, the Mediatrix of All Graces, whom we invoke as the Queen of Peace because she is the Mother of Our Lord, the Prince of Peace.
Let us implore her to avert the scourges and catastrophes that the world deserves due to the public sins of nations and the scandals of those who worship the filthy idol of Pachamama while persecuting Catholics faithful to the traditional Liturgy, so that she may grant us the peace that only her Son can bestow: pax Christi in regno Christi.
In this Victory Week, I urge you to devote more time to prayer, to undertake acts of penance and fasting, to attend the Holy Mysteries with greater fervour, and to offer words of comfort and encouragement to those who feel alone and defenceless in the face of the great disasters that the wicked want to inflict upon the world, above all upon the good.
The triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary is guaranteed by the certainty of Christ’s victory; He will glory in vanquishing this kingdom of darkness, sin, and death, not only by virtue of His own obedience to the will of His Father, but also thanks to the humility and purity of His Most Holy Mother—she who, from the very first instant of her Immaculate Conception, crushed the most proud head of the dragon through her humility (Exorcism of Leo XIII). Amen.
+ Carlo Maria Viganò, Archbishop
October 7, 2022
Feast of the Most Holy Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary