Ricardo SaludoTime for a history lesson. The history of our world and our time. And perhaps the future history of our souls.In his speech last Monday to Washington’s Cosmos Club, Italian historian Roberto de Mattei expounded on the march of today’s liberal ideas and values from their beginnings in Protestant Europe half a millennium ago to their global dominance today. Plus their seeming victory against their main opponent through the centuries: the Catholic Church < https://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2017/03/de-mattei-shedding-light-on-todays.html >.He first cited major anniversaries this year. Half a millennium ago, on the last of October 1517, the Christian priest Martin Luther nailed his 95 “theses” about abuses in the Catholic Church, on the door of Wittenberg Cathedral in present-day Germany. That, said Mattei, “would set in motion the so-called Protestant Revolution and mark the end of Medieval Christendom.”Two centuries later, the Grand Lodge of London was founded on June 29, 1717. That, said Mattei, gave birth to modern freemasonry, whose liberal ideas and activist leaders directly spurred the French Revolution. The 1789 upheaval, in turn, spawned the democratic liberalism and scientific rationalism of the Enlightenment, which spread in the West and eventually the world.Two more jubilee events cited by Mattei, both in 1917. On October 28 a century ago, Lenin’s communist Bolshevik Party occupied the Winter Palace, the Czar’s home in St. Petersburg. Thus began the Russian Revolution, which brought atheistic communism across the planet.Fatima vs Luther, Descartes and LeninThe tradionalist Pope Pius XII, who reigned from 1939 to 1958, summed up the three revolutions in a speech to the Catholic Action movement on October 12, 1952, one day before the 35th anniversary of the last apparition of Our Lady of Fatima:“Christ yes, Church no [the Protestant Revolution against the Church, as Mattei annotated]; then: God yes, Christ no [the Masonic Revolution against the central mysteries of Christianity]; finally the impious cry: God is dead; rather: God has never existed [the atheistic Communist Revolution]. And here is the attempt to build the structure of the world upon foundations that We do not hesitate in pointing out as the principals responsible for the danger that threatens mankind.”For Protestants, freemasons, communists and atheists, of course, their ways of thinking, living and ruling are anything but dangerous to humanity.Indeed, they have argued through the centuries that their principles, practices, and policies spell advancement and upliftment through liberalism and democracy, science and technology, and acceptance of all lifestyles. And judging from history, the world has largely agreed.In place of the Ten Commandments containing God’s will for man, the world has instituted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Against the Lord’s forbidding, governments have allowed or even promoted and funded abortion, contraception, divorce, same-sex marriage, and euthanasia. And from Christian nations ruled according to the teachings of Christ, we now have the separation of Church and State.In the Philippines, perhaps the only major Christian nation still enforcing Church family morals, secular liberalism is also eroding religious taboos, as seen in open violations of the Fifth Commandment by law enforcers, and of the Sixth Commandment by the leaders of the land.Plus direct and vulgar affronts to the Church and its prelates by no less than the President. And with contraception, including abortive devices, enshrined in law, liberal legislators will push divorce and same-sex unions.‘I am of heaven’In this liberalizing and secularizing age, the fourth jubilee event happened 100 years ago next month. On May 13, 1917, the Blessed Virgin Mary made the first of her six apparitions to three shepherd children in the rural Portugal town of Fatima, Lucia Dos Santos, then 9, and her Marto cousins Francisco, 8, and Jacintha, 6.Says Mattei: “The Fatima message is not only an anti-Communist message; it is also an anti-liberal and anti-Lutheran message as the errors of Russia descend from the errors of the French Revolution and Protestantism. They are the errors of the anti-Christian Revolution, which the Catholic Counter-Revolution opposes. As [French monarchist and traditionalist] Count de Maistre states, this is not a Revolution in the opposite way, but is the opposite of the Revolution in all its political, cultural and religious aspects.”“Fatima directly opposes 1917, 1717 and 1517,” Mattei summed up. In fact, apart from our Lady’s message, her very apparitions themselves refute Protestantism, the Enlightenment and communism.For those who do not reject outright the accounts of innocent children, as well as stories of countless eyewitnesses in the last apparition on October 13, 1917, Mary’s presence showed that God exists, that Jesus Christ wields His power, sending His mother to earth; and the Catholic Church preaches the truth in giving honor to the Blessed Virgin, whom many Protestant sects reject and even desecrate.God’s supernatural power and paramount regard for Mary is manifest in her very first appearance. Recounts Lucia of what they saw going down a slope with their sheep: “... there before us on a small holm oak, we beheld a lady all dressed in white. She was more brilliant than the sun, and radiated a light clearer and more intense than a crystal glass filled with sparkling water, when the rays of the sun shine through it.”Lucia continued: “We stopped, astounded, before the apparition. We were so close, just a few feet from her, that we were bathed in the light that surrounded her, or rather, which radiated from her.”The girl asked where the woman was from.“Eu sou do céu,” our Lady replied in the children’s native Portuguese, meaning, “I am from or of heaven.”So, in the face of ideologies that set human reason in place of divine inspiration as the measure of what is true, right and just — “I think, therefore I am,” as the Enlightenment philosopher René Descartes said — Our Lady of Fatima delivered God’s word, reprising her role 2,017 years ago as bearer of the Eternal Word of God.Whom you believe will determine the future of your soul.
