FATIMA - A WARNING AGAINST THE MISTAKES OF THE WORLD

LIDIA DUDKIEWICZ

Our Lady of Fatima was warning on 13 July 1917 that if people did not answer to her call, then Russia ‘would spread its mistakes all over the world, leading to wars and persecution of the Church’.

The whole world trembled when on 13 May 1981, on the St. Peter’s Square in Rome, a Turkish assassin Ali Aga fired at the Holy Father John Paul II. After this event Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger said: ‘The fact that the Mother’s hand changed the direction of the lethal bullet is only another evidence that there is no irreversible destination and that faith and prayer are power which can influence the history and that finally a prayer turns out to be more powerful than bullets, and faith – more powerful than division’.

A threat of rejecting God by a man

A year after the assassination, on 13 May 1982, John Paul II said in Fatima to where he had taken the lethal bullet: ‘In the light of Mother’s love we understand the whole message of Our Lady of Fatima. The biggest obstacle in the man’s road to God is a sin, living in a sin and, finally, rejecting God, conscious excluding God from the world of the human thought, separating the whole earthly human activity from God’.

Referring to the mistakes to which Our Lady pointed out in the beginning of XX century, during his pontificate John Paul II drew attention to the threat of particular nations and the whole world by apostasy that is, going away from God and moral degradation. Three years after the assassination, on 25 March 1984, the Polish Pope fulfilled the Fatima request and devoted Russia to Our Lady. Later, although the godless communism collapsed, which had persecuted the Church, mainly in the Middle and Eastern Europe the moral crisis of the world did not stop deepening, visible also in the Catholic part of Europe built on Christian roots. Soon John Paul II pointed out that the world is endangered by replacing Marxism with another form of atheism, which by praising freedom, is aiming at destroying the basis of natural order and Christian morality. Towards the deepening crisis of values in the world, in 2003 in the apostolic Exhortation ‘Ecclesia in Europe’, the Polish Pope wrote: ‘The European culture makes an impression of a silent apostasy of a rich man who lives as if God did not exist’ (no 9).

Sins of the world

Evil spreading all over the world takes on various forms and the message of Fatima seems to be an answer to secularisation of the contemporary world. During her first revelation in Fatima, on 13 May 1917, Mary asked: ‘Say the Rosary prayer every day, in order to gain peace for the world and the end of the war’. The call of Our Lady to the Rosary prayer in the intention of peace is still valid and facing a big global war against the unborn is becoming even urgent – thinks Dr. Antoni Zięba, a fervent defender of the unborn life. He notes that the year of the first revelations in Fatima (1917) is also a year of the victory of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, directed by Włodzimierz I. Lenin, a creator of the atheist communist system who, through his unscrupulous wave of persecutions, led to 100 million of human victims in the scale of the world. There is a fact not popularized enough that the number of victims of mass abortions on the globe scale exceeded 1 milliard. And the XX century influenced this black statistics in a special way: first in 1920 in the communist Soviet Union the killing of the unborn babies was ‘legalised’ and later this criminal freedom was imposed on other countries and on Poland – since the year 1956.

Dr. Zięba reminds that in Germany, before the reign of Adolf Hitler, a complete prohibition of killing the unborn was binding. Soon after taking over the authority by this genocide, in 1936 a ‘legal’ possibility of killing German unborn babies was introduced who were seriously ill or burdened with faults from the birth. At that time in Germany euthanasia started to be committed in a big scale. Besides the classical war pursued on many fronts and the extermination the conquered nations, Hitler also started a war against the unborn babies of nations in captivity. In western countries the life of conceived babies had been protected till the 60th of the last century. Later there was a legalisation of abortion in the West, among the others, in Great Britain, France and also in the USA. – Dr. Zięba thinks that the big confrontation of life and death, widespread all over the world – has been lasting till today. So the call of Our Lady of Fatima to an act of contrition and conversion is still valid.

In reference to the struggles of the life civilisation with death civilisation we must remember that Our Lady announced in her revelations in Fatima: ‘My Immaculate Heart will win’. The mission of Fatima is not finished. God is still looking for people ready to sacrifice themselves for others, in order to save the world.

‘We do not live for ourselves’

In 2017 we will celebrate the 100th anniversary of ‘the first visit paid in Fatima by the Lady arriving from the Heaven’. Within the preparations for this jubilee there if a Great Fatima Novena initiated on 13 May 2009. Every year of the novena has its program slogan, referring to the message of Fatima. In 2012 these are the words: ‘We do not live for ourselves’, drawing attention to the necessity of compensation to God for the sins of the world. - Considering the realisation of the words of Mary pronounced in Fatima, it is worth reminding that in 1939 s. Łucja was writing to the Holy Father Pius XII that if people had made more effort to promote and accept the Divine service of the first Saturdays of months, there would not have been the Second World War – noted Fr. Dr. Krzysztof Czapla, a director of the Fatima Secretariat in Krzeptówki, coordinating the process of the Great Novena of Fatima. – Each of us should become a witness of the Fatima message through personal practising and fulfilling the appeal which Our Lady addressed to the world in Fatima. And she reminded and taught us that God wants to save sinners, the world and the Church through the Divine service to Her Immaculate Heart – says the director of the Fatima Secretariat. In his opinion the call of God’s Mother still remains valid and is waiting for an answer, expressed by compensation for others, especially for stubborn sinners. In order to save the world, the knowledge about the revelations of God’s Mother in Fatima is needed, as well as the faith in the supernatural power of these revelations.

Each of us can join the Great Novena at any time through the everyday Rosary prayer, sacrifice given from love and obedience to God’s will, and also through the Divine Service on the first Saturdays of months and conscious devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. The information on the Novena can be obtained on the website: www.sekretariatfatimski.pl.

On the threshold of faith

The Holy Father Benedict XVI, similarly as his predecessor John Paul II, became concerned about the Fatima message. Worried about the fate of the world trying to live as if God did not exist and throwing away the cross from the public space, established a Papal Council for Developing New Evangelisation in 2010, explaining that countries and nations of the West ‘are exposed to a hard trial and sometimes they are subjected to a process of radical changes resulting from the wide-spreading indifference, secularisation and atheism’. Benedict XVI also announced the Year of Faith which will begin in October 2012. It will be a chance for the world so that it would strengthen its Christian face and people who went away from God, would be under a special care of the Church and receive a grace of return.

(AA)

"Niedziela" 20/2012

Editor: Tygodnik Katolicki "Niedziela", ul. 3 Maja 12, 42-200 Czestochowa, Polska
Editor-in-chief: Fr Jaroslaw Grabowski • E-mail: redakcja@niedziela.pl