Precious insights into God's predilection for the Immaculate Heart of Mary were given to Sister Lucia at Pontevedra, Spain in 1925 and again at Tuy, Spain in 1929. On 10 December 1925 she was an 18 year old postulant in the convent of the Sisters of Saint Dorothy in Pontevedra. That evening she had just returned to her cell after supper when she was visited by Our Lady and the Child Jesus. She writes of herself in the third person:
On December 10, 1925, the Most Holy Virgin appeared to her, and by Her side, elevated on a luminous cloud, was the Child Jesus. The Most Holy Virgin rested Her hand on her shoulder, and as She did so, She showed her a heart encircled by thorns, which She was holding in Her other hand. At the same time, the Child said: 'Have compassion on the Heart of your Most Holy Mother, covered with thorns, with which ungrateful men pierce It at every moment, and there is no one to make an act of reparation to remove them.'
This image of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, first shown to Lucia on 10 December 1925 at Pontevedra, is the same as that which Jesus revealed to Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque on 16 June 1675 at Paray-Le-Monial in France. Jesus had explained to Margaret Mary that the flames depicted his burning love for souls and the thorns depicted his pain that his love was neither appreciated nor returned. Consider the insight of John Paul II that
"when Jesus on the Cross said: 'Woman, behold your son (John 19:26), in a new way he opened his Mother's Heart, the Immaculate Heart, and revealed to it the new dimensions and extent of the love to which she was called in the Holy Spirit by the power of the sacrifice of the Cross..."
Given that insight, does this vision of the Immaculate Heart of Mary not reveal that the hearts of Jesus and Mary beat as one in the predilection of the Father? Thus, while the triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary certainly includes the assertion in the Vatican’s
The Message of Fatima that “The Heart open to God, purified by contemplation of God, is stronger than guns and weapons of every kind, “and that “thanks to her Yes, God could become man in our world and remains so for all time.” Its significance within the whole cloth of the first and second parts of the Secret of Fatima and the subsequent visions and messages given to Sister Lucia at Pontevedra and Tuy comprehends much more.
Mary told the seers at Fatima that God
…punish [es] 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…In the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph. The Holy Father will consecrate Russia to me, and she will be converted, and a period of peace will be granted to the world.
Given God’s predilection for her Immaculate Heart, one can conclude that the conversion of Russia will occur by the power of the Holy Spirit given to Russians in response to the requested consecration of Russia and the First Saturday devotions, both to her Immaculate Heart. From such triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary a period of peace will be granted to the world.
Our Lord, himself, explained this to Lucia as she stated in a hand-written letter to Father Goncalves on 18 May 1936. As Adolph Hitler was then preparing Germany for an aggressive war and Joseph Stalin was fomenting civil war in Spain, Fr. Goncalves had written asking Lucia concerning the consecration of Russia. She replied:
Intimately I have spoken to Our Lord about the subject, and not too long ago I asked Him why He would not convert Russia without the Holy Father making that consecration?
[Jesus replies.]’Because I want My whole Church to acknowledge that consecration as a triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, so that it may extend its cult later on, and put the devotion to This Immaculate Heart beside the devotion to My Sacred Heart.’
[Lucia then pleads with Jesus.] By my God, the Holy Father probably won’t believe me, unless You, Yourself move him with a special inspiration.
[Jesus.] ‘The Holy Father. Pray very much for the Holy Father. He will do it, but it will be late. Nevertheless the Immaculate Heart of Mary will save Russia. It has been entrusted to Her.’ [Emphasis added]
On 13 June 1929 both Jesus and Mary appeared to Lucia in the convent chapel at Tuy and told her that the time had come for her to communicate Heaven’s plan for peace revealed at Fatima to the Holy Father. She did in at least two letters to Pope Pius XI through her spiritual director and through her bishop, but received no response. Jesus, himself, confirmed both his vicar’s receipt of this plan for peace from Lucia, and His Holiness’ failure to comply, in an apparition to Lucia at the little seaside chapel in Rianjo where she was recuperation from a lingering illness in August 1931. Lucia explains this in a letter to her Bishop written 29 August 1931:
My confessor orders me to inform Your Excellency of what took place a little while ago between the Good Lord and myself: as I was asking God for the conversion of Russia, Spain and Portugal, it seemed to me that His Divine Majesty said to me: ‘You console Me a great deal by asking Me for the conversion of those poor nations. Ask it also of My Mother frequently, saying: Sweet Heart of Mary, be the salvation of Russia, Spain, Portugal Europe and the whole world. At other times say: By your pure and Immaculate Conception, O Mary, obtain for me the conversion of Russia, Spain, Portugal, Europe and the entire world.
Make it known to my ministers that given they follow the example of the King of France in the delaying the execution of My request, that they will follow him into misfortune. It will never be too late to have recourse to Jesus and Mary.[Emphasis added.]
Lucia reiterated the consequences of His Holiness’ inaction in a letter to Fr. Goncalves written on 21 January 1935:
“Regarding the matter of Russia, I think that it would please Our Lord very much if you worked to make the Holy Father comply with His wishes. About three years ago our Lord was very displeased because His request had not been attended to and I made this fact known to the bishop in a letter.” A year later, as part of the letter to Fr. Goncalves detailing the apparition at Tuy, Lucia repeats Jesus severe warning of August 1931:
“Later on, by means of an interior communication, Our Lord complainingly said to me: ‘They did not want to heed My request. Like the King of France they will repent and do so, but it will be late. Russia will already have spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church. The Holy Father will have much to suffer!”
On the Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, 17 June, and again on 28 August, 1689, St. Margaret Mary Alacoque wrote to Mother de Saumaise, her prioress at the Visitation Monestery of Paray-le-Monial, to have a message the saint had received from Jesus requesting that the King consecrate France to His most Sacred Heart, delivered to him.
Margaret Mary expressed Heaven’s wish that Jesus’ Sacred Heart receive
“the consecration and homage of the king and the entire court. Moreover, this divine Heart wishes to become the protector and defender of his sacred person against all his enemies visible and invisible, to defend him against them, and assure his salvation by this means.”
The saint added that Jesus had chosen that the Jesuits deliver this message to Louis XIV and spread this devotion to His Sacred Heart, specifically mentioning a Father de la Chaise because of his influence over Louis’ heart. Historians surmise that Fr. De le Chaise either refused to deliver the message to Louis, or was not willing to advocate that the king comply, or that Louis XIV soul was not sufficiently humble to comprehend the greatness being offered. It is certain that this initiative of Jesus’ Sacred Heart was not understood and Margaret Mary’s admonitions were of no avail. There can be no doubt of the consequences of the refusal of kings Louis XIV through XVI to comply with Heaven’s will regarding the consecration of France and devotion to Jesus’ Sacred Heart. One hundred years tot eh day after Margaret Mary penned her first letter to her prioress, the French peasants, led by atheist philosophers and Masonic anti-Church propagandists, overthrew the Catholic monarchy and proclaimed their new National Assembly to be the legitimate government of France. The subsequent terror included the suppression and fanatical persecution of the Catholic Church, the French nobility and the execution of King Louis XVI on 21 January 1793.
While the French revolution could not have happened without the well-known injustices callously inflicted on those outside the privileged and elitist classes within the nobility and even within the church during the eighteenth century, one must consider how Catholic France fell to such moral, spiritual, material and social misery. Although that question is beyond the scope of this talk, the texts of Heaven’s messages to both Saint Margaret Mary and to the seers of Fatima strongly suggest that in the century following the death of Louis XIV in 1701 France was
“deprived of the increase of extraordinary graces and miraculous help of the Sacred Heart” and was unable to cope with the internal
“frivolousness, deadly errors, cowardice and betrayals which soon brought about its ruin.” The theological heresies, the Masonic Counter-Church and a
“satanic hatred against God, against Christ and against His Church” were thus able to exploit the wide-spread misery to prepare the revolution.
By a parity of reasoning the same inferences can be made regarding the disastrous consequences for the world and for the Church of the failure of the succession of Roman pontiffs from Pius XI to John Paul II to comply with Heaven’s request, although there are good reason to conclude that John Paul I would have complied, but for his sudden, tragic and mysterious death. Albino Cardianl Luciani of Venice had visited Sister Lucia in Coimbra privately for several hours in 1977 just months before he became Pope John Paul I. Lucia requested the private visit after Luciani had celebrated mass for the cloistered Carmelites, Cardinals having access to the seer without Vatican permission. We don’t know if or how much of the third part of the Secret of Fatima Lucia revealed to the Cardinal, but in early 1978 the usually jovial prelate explained his apparent pensiveness and absorption to his brother and sister-in-law, Edoardo and Antonietta Luciani, by saying that
“I was just thinking of what Sister Lucia told me at Coimbra…The Secret, it’s terrible.” Luciani held Lucia in high esteem and it is probable that he would have acted on Heaven’s Plan for Peace, had he lived.
Given that Jesus’
“ministers” have failed to
“heed My request” proposed at Fatima in 1917 and made at Tuy in 1929, one could conclude that they also have been
“deprived of the increase of extraordinary graces and miraculous help” from Heaven to prevent the
“satanic hatred agains God, against Christ and against His Church” of its enemies, visible and invisible, within and without the Church , from influencing pivotal decisions and initiatives that have yielded tragic consequences for the Church and the world.
Had Pius XI or Pius XII obeyed Heaven’s request for the consecration and First Saturday reparatory devotions communicated through Sister Lucia in 1929, the Queen of Heaven would have been graced to convert Russia and lead that nation to convert the world to Christ. World War II would have been avoided and the world would have been blessed with a period of peace. Instead Russia still spreads her errors throughout the world, souls are lost to occultism, atheism and sin of all kinds, and we live in a state of continuous war. Further, a sad a disappointed Jesus had warned Lucia in 1931 that if his
“ministers” were late in performing the consecration and leading the Church in the First Saturday reparatory devotions, they would suffer the same fate as the Kings of France. It appears to many, including myself, that Jesus’ warning has been and will continue to be fulfilled in the persons of our pontiffs. Had they obeyed would not God have blessed their sowing with super-abundant fruit and opposed the contrary efforts of all their enemies, visible and invisible, within and without the Church?
In making Peter and his successors his vicars on earth Christ has irrevocably delegated to them his authority over all people, including those in schism or accepting heretical and even atheistic and pagan beliefs. As Leo XIII explained in his encyclical of 25 May 1899, Annum Sacrum, the whole can be consecrated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus
: “Indeed the empire of Jesus Christ does not extend to Catholic nations only…But the power of Christ extends also over all those who live outside the Christian faith; it is thus an unquestionable truth that the whole human race is under the power of Jesus Christ.” With faith in Jesus our pontiffs could follow Peter and in obedience to Heaven’s request, pay out their nets for a catch. As Peter’s nets were filled with fish then, today many souls would be saved, Russia would be converted and the world would be blessed with a period of peace. But Satan’s hand is clearly revealed working against compliance through the complexities, betrayals and intrigues that have confronted our pontiffs through the last century and into the present.
Pope Pius XI began his reign on 6 February 1922 by following the Ostpolitik begun by Benedict XV understandably seeking to cooperate with the Soviet Government to mitigate the Russian misery following the Great War and the Bolshevik revolution and to secure the safety of both Orthodox believers and the Roman Catholic Church in Russia. In early 1930 the pontiff received but remained incredulous to Sister Lucia’s communications of Heaven’s request for the consecration and First Saturday devotions. He believed that such a serious request, if from Heaven, would have been communicated directly to him. Moreover, what was suggested
“seemed to him contrary to his designs. The direction of the Church was his business – he knew, better than anybody else, the road to follow! But after 15 years of vainly trusting in Vatican diplomacy to accomplish these ends amid the communist terror, genocide, persecution of the Church and the torture and murder of thousands of priests and bishops, and imprisonment or death of millions of the faithful, his holiness published on 19 March 1937 an incisive encyclical against communism,
Divini Redemptoris. After detailing the methodical persecutions in Russia, Mexico and Spain as barbarous, intrinsically perverse and diabolical, the pontiff repeated several times
that “communism directed by Moscow” accomplished these atrocities which
“are the natural fruits of a system which is lacking all interior restraints.” He concluded with an unambiguous order to the Church:
“Communism is intrinsically perverse, and no one who would save Christian civilization may collaborate with it in any undertaking whatsoever.” The pontiff urged his Bishops that, following the teaching of Christ to his apostles, they must lead the fight against demonic Communism by fostering and intensifying
“the spirit of prayer joined with Christian penance.”
But Satan works his mystery of iniquity against Jesus’ Church beyond organized communism. His holiness had finally come to see the demonic behind other enemies of the Church in the systematic attempt to drive God from the hearts and minds of the Mexican people in the 1920’s. In 1926 the Freemason Plutarco Calles became president. He was fanatically anti-Catholic and determined to exterminate Catholicism by legislating and strictly enforcing the anti-Catholic provisions of the new Constitution of 1917, and adding others of his own. In 1926, Calles regime launched a new offensive to bury the Church. He wrote:
Now there must be a psychological revolution. We must penetrate and take hold of the minds of the children and the youth because they must belong to the revolution. The Catholic schools were shut down, the congregations expelled, Christian trade unions forbidden numerous churches confiscated and profaned or destroyed. Public school attendance became mandatory atheism was officially taught, and religious symbols such as medals, crucifixes, statues and pictures were forbidden even in private. Catholic public figures were assassinated and girls leaving church were kidnapped, imprisoned, even raped. The Archbishop of Baltimore complained that U.S. friendship has encouraged Calles to destroy the idea of God in the minds and hearts of millions of Mexicans. On 28 May 1926 Calles received the Masonic medal of merit from the hands of the Great Commander of the Masonic Scottish rite in Mexico. On 12 July 1926, International Masonry
accepted responsibility for everything that was happening in Mexico, and prepared to mobilize all its forces for the methodic, integral application of the agreed upon program for this country.
By 1927 hundreds of priests and laymen had been killed and 20,000 Cristeros combatants took up arms in defense of the faith. Their number rose to 30,000 by the end of the year, and to 50,000 by 1929. Beginning with little, they armed themselves with captured weapons and horses. The people supplied their material needs and the fight became a crusade! In 1927 they defeated the government forces in several battles. By November the US military attaché’ began to worry about the success of the “fanatics,” as 40% of them were now equipped with captured Mauser rifles. The Cristiada was a succession of miracles.
In 1928 Mexico’s rural population was sent to concentration camps where famine and epidemics decimated them. Those who resisted were massacred.
Harvests and flocks were seized, grazing land burned, and villages destroyed by the thousands. Despite this scorched earth policy the Cristeros stood fast like latter-day Maccabees.
By 1929, Cristeros victories forced the government to abandon the rural war. Three-fourths of inhabitable Mexico was in the hands of the Cristeros. They had won military victory, and in the United States Herbert Hoover, who was not a Mason, was elected president! Then the Cristeros learned that secret negotiations between the Mexican government and the Vatican had relulted in an accord. On 21 June the Mexican episcopate signed
a resolution of the conflict with the ruling power. The accord provided for immediate, unconditional cease fire and the resumption of the public worship began the next day. It restored the same situation that prevailed in 1926 with all the anti-Catholic laws then in effect, including the registration of priests! In the text, the Cristeros were called fanatics directed by a few third-rate priests; their revolt was an error, imprudent, even a sin. They must lay down their arms under pain of excommunication…
The commander in chief of the Cristeros, Jesus Degollado, addressed his troops in a voice breaking with sorrow:
His Holiness the Pope, by the intermediary of the most excellent Apostolic Nuncio, has decided, for reasons which are unknown to us but which, as Catholics, we accept, that public worship will be resumed tomorrow without the law being changed…This arrangement…has wrested from us that which is most noble and most holy on our flag, at the moment when the Church has declared that she will resign herself to what she has obtained…Consequently, the National Guard assumes responsibility for the conflict…As for ourselves as men, we have a satisfaction that no one can take from us; the National Guard does not disappear defeated by its enemies, but rather abandoned by the very ones who were to be the first to receive the fruit of our sacrifices and abnegation! Ave, Christ! Those who for You are going to humiliation, to exile, and, perhaps, to an inglorious death,…with the most fervent love salute You, and once more proclaim You as King of our country.
Six thousand Cristeros obeyed, and were immediately massacred. In three years, they had lost 5,000 men in combat! The Mexican episcopate decreed the excommunication of the Cristeros priests, but those 180 who had not been killed during the war had already been martyred…all was lost.
The new president, the Masonic lawyer Fortes Gil, rejoiced. At the summer solstice banquet he acknowledged his astonishment at the unconditional capitulation of a victorious army, and stated his intention to continue the fight: The fight did not begin yesterday. The fight is eternal. The fight began 20 centuries ago.
(Adapted from M. Olivier Lelibre, The Cristeros, Catholic Soldiers of Christ)
By 1935 Pius XI had earned by bitter experience that it was the same enemy of God and his Church that drove both the communists in Europe and the Freemasons in Mexico. After Divini Redemptoris it was unthinkable for any in the Church to collaborate with communism or freemasonry in any undertaking whatsoever.
Following the aging pontiff’s death his Secretary of State, Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli, was elected to succeed him on 2 March 1939, taking the name Pius XII. Pope Pacelli had learned on the job the reality of communism. But after Adolph Hitler led his Nazis to attack Russia on 22June 1941 the pontiff was required to temper his leadership against communism at least partly because the American President, freemason Franklin Delano Roosevelt, pressured him that Stalin was needed as an ally against Hitler. On 3 Sept 1941 Roosevelt urged Pius XII that the Soviets had changed for the better:
The churches in Russia are open. I believe there is a real possibility that Russia may, as a result of the present conflict, recognize freedom of religion in Russia, although, of course, without recognition of any official intervention on the part of any Church in education or political matters within Russia…I believe that this Russian dictatorship is less dangerous to the safety of other nations than is the German form of dictatorship.
Because communism was founded on atheism and hatred for Christ, Pius knew it was an enemy of His Church with whom accord or coexistence was possible and after the war he strictly forbade any Vatican relations with it. Pius XII died of a lingering illness on 9 October 1958 and Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli was elected Pope John XXIII on 28 October. John XXIII immediately reversed the direction of Pius XII politically by enthusiastically embracing Ostpolitik, or dialoguing with the Communist eastern European countries, and theologically by introducing what he considered to be a vital aggorimento, or updating of the Church to adapt to modern times.
On 17 August 1959 Pope John received an envelope containing the third part of the Secret of Fatima which he read several times both on his own and with the help of Portuguese translators. Its contents were shared with the leaders of the Holy Office, the Secretariat of State, and a few others. He said he preferred to leave to others the appraisal of it, writing only a personal note that was resealed it in the envelope with Lucia’s letter and kept on his writing table until his death. In fact by withholding the long-awaited and eagerly anticipated third part of the Secret from the Church and the world Pope John had de facto judged it unworthy of publication. The consequences of that papal decision are incalculable, but surely include a further loss “of extraordinary graces and miraculous help” so desperately needed to guide the Church in its conflict with those forces, visible and invisible, that are led by Satan’s cunning.
On 25 November 1961 the pontiff received birthday greetings from the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev praising his recent expressions of hope for world peace “as well as to the solution of international problems thanks to frank negotiations.” In joyful response Pope John privately expressed his belief that “Something is moving in the world. The Lord is using the humble instrument that I am to budge history. Today we have had a sign of Divine Providence.”
Pope John felt inspired to call for a new ecumenical council that he hoped would be the occasion for a new springtime, a “New Pentecost” in the Church, to which he, ardently desired that members of the Russian Orthodox Church attend. To that end Cardinal Eugene Tisserant for the Vatican and Russian Orthodox Metropolitan Nikodim for the Soviet Union concluded the “Vatican-Moscow Agreement” or “Metz Pact” at Metz, France on 18 August 1962. In consideration of the Soviets sending two Russian Orthodox observers to the council, the Vatican agreed tha the Second Vatican Council would abstain from any consideration of Communism and Russia. “Ever since that time the Holy See considers itself as still bound by the engagements taken by John XXIII. Communism is no longer ever mentioned by name in any pontifical document.”
On 11 October 1962 Pope John opened his council with a joyful and upbeat address, but included an explicit rejection of warnings such as those of Sister Lucia: “We feel that We must disagree with these prophets of doom, who are always forecasting worse disasters, as though the end of the world were at hand.” Tragically, the prophet to which he refers is not Sister Lucia to whom she appeared and spoke, but the “Woman clothed with the sun,” our August Queen of heaven and earth, of angels and men!
On 11 April 1963 John XXIII signed Pacem in Terris, his internationalist encyclical on World Peace, in which “he officially recognized the ‘charter of the rights of man’ of the United Nations, and he extolled a world community, of liberty equality and fraternity” wherein ideal societies of the future would “constructed on the good will of all men. And at the same time, the Pope practically lifted the prohibition of collaborating with the communists.” Moreover, he wrote that such collaboration “may possibly provide the occasion or even the incentive for their conversion to the truth. “ Pope John here officially promoted collaboration with Communists, accepting them as reasonable men of natural moral integrity. He might have said the same of Freemasonry. It appears that the pontiff here fails to fully grasp or appreciate the demonic spirit and the perverse nature of a totalitarian system such as communism, by whatever name it may call itself from time to time that demands the unconditional and uncompromising personal commitment of a de facto religion. This is surely because of the diabolical disorientation of the mystery of iniquity. That is why we must pray for our Pope as never before, or I believe errors will continue.
One cannot logically separate a communist from the errors of communism by whatever name they may call themselves as if a communist or a freemason were merely an atheist with strong socialistic or intellectual convictions. For a communist believes the ultimate good is the dictatorship of the proletariat, or other totalitarian regime, and all means that achieve that end are good. Morally-ethical categories are replaced by political expediency. As Harry and Bonaro Overstreet reported in their seminal study of communism in 1958, the necessary lie, slander, intimidation of the masses, and the liquidation of oppositional groups and hostile classes must not only be obediently carried out, but conscientiously accepted as the right thing to do by party members. In 1957 Margarita Aliger confessed during a conference of Soviet writers in Moscow that she had sometimes substituted “morally-ethical categories for political categories…[whereas] All the work of a Soviet writer is political work, and to accomplish it honorably is possible only when one follows firmly the party line and party discipline.” Hence, moral integrity consists in total personal dedication to use all means, including deception, liquidation, imprisonment, violence and terror, to achieve the ultimate good. A party member is forbidden to love his enemies and is obligated to define as enemies “all who are outside the ideological pale.” Cannot the same be said of the Freemason Calles in Mexico in the 1920’s?
