The Last Secret of Fatima by Tarcisio Bertone
Author:Tarcisio Bertone [Bertone, Tarcisio]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2011-12-02T10:55:47+00:00
AN ONGOING REVELATION
"When you see a night illumined by an unknown light, know that this is the great sign given you by God that he is about to punish 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." We know from contemporary newspaper reports that a spectacular aurora borealis occurred just before the outbreak of World War II. But what else might Mary's dark and threatening words refer to? Perhaps Sister Lucia understood the phrase "consecrate Russia" in the sense of reconsecrating it, rather than simply of erecting a bulwark against Communist ideology, or of converting the Soviet Union from atheism to Catholicism. In any case, the Third Secret stipulates the consecration of Russia as the condition upon whose fulfillment "a period of peace will be granted to the world."
Now, many people, starting with the Lefebvrites, dream of a Catholic Russia. This dream brings me to a controversy about the validity of the consecration ceremony the pope performed in response to Our Lady's request. In October 2000, for instance, the statue of Our Lady of Fatima traveled to Rome, and John Paul II read out an Act of Entrustment before the image. However, he did not explicitly mention Russia (which was by that time no longer Communist). Nor had he mentioned Russia in his two earlier Acts of Entrustment, which he had performed in 1982 and 1984, respectively. The consecration of Russia obviously posed a very tricky religio-political problem for Pope John Paul II. The pope, not wishing to offend the sensibilities of our "separated brethren," the Orthodox, remained cautious. An explicit consecration would have been received by the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, Alexei II, as a declaration of war. Which of all the Acts of Entrustment most closely conforms to Our Lady's wishes?
I want to make it clear that Lucia didn't conceive of the consecration of Russia as a strategy for capturing this great Christian country for Catholicism. That wasn't the intention of the consecration, which was actually meant to help Russia return to its Christian heritage, to recover its identity as a nation devoted to Our Lady. Remember, the Communist revolution had betrayed and violated Russia's Christian identity, using the might of the state to transform the country into a model of atheism. Although several popes had already entrusted the world to Mary, John Paul II wanted to comply fully with the request Our Lady had made at Fatima. To this end, he composed an Act of Entrustment, which he performed on June 7, 1981. He repeated it in Fatima in 1982. Then, spiritually united with the world's bishops, he closed the Holy Year of the Redemption (1983-1984) with a revised version of the text on March 25, 1984, the feast of the Annunciation. It would be a good
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