When most Catholics hear of revelations, they are understandably skeptical. After all, they say, do we not already have the teaching of Christ, the inspired word of God in the Scriptures, and the dogmatic teaching of the Church? What need do we have of revelations? They are, of course, right. But what happens when the teaching of Christ that may still be alive in the mind goes dead in the heart, as did the love of God when Jansenism was rife in the Church? Christ Himself appeared to St. Margaret Mary—not to give us a new teaching but to set us afire once more with the teaching of the Sacred Heart that restated the love of Christ poured out on the first Pentecost Day.
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The same happened in the last century, when hearts that once practiced loving God became hardened and turned to self-love instead. It was then that Our Lady of Fatima appeared to call people to practice loving God again, by repenting, praying, and making sacrifices. This was not a new teaching, for it was the teaching that her Beloved Son had taught; but her children had forgotten it—at least forgotten to practice it.
However, when, in 1959, Pope John called a meeting of cardinals to discuss the third Fatima secret, which he had prematurely opened, he decided to shelve the contents and call a council instead. Although we do not know the actual date of Doomsday, we know that it took place in 1959, thanks to Cardinal Bea who told his friend and colleague Fr. Malachi Martin about it immediately after he left the meeting. The meeting had been called to decide whether or not to do what Our Lady had told the pope to do. According to Fr. Malachi, Cardinal Bea said, “Those fools have just condemned millions of people to death.” In hindsight, he would realize that far greater damage was done.
Our Lord, the head of the Church, did not ask His mother, the Mother of the Church, to deliver His message to the pope for him to decide whether or not to proclaim it to the world in 1960 but to do it.
Let us be clear about this: the Church herself has declared that Our Lady’s appearances at Fatima were authentic and that her message was authentic too. The message came from the head of the Church, through His Mother to His Vicar on earth, and His Vicar decided to disobey Him, with the diabolical consequences that we can now see for ourselves. These consequences could have been avoided because the most important part of the message of Our Lady was that the whole Church should have been called to repentance, prayer, and sacrifice in 1960.
If he had called an ecumenical council to decide how best this could be implemented in every diocese and every parish in the world, then we would not be in the dire spiritual straits in which we find ourselves today, nor would we be in fear of the consequences that Our Lady promised would afflict those who would not heed her message. In 1959, it would seem that these consequences were only conditional; now it would seem they are inevitable. Indeed, they have long since begun—and in the highest places in the Church.
Let me review the historical events that led up to the terrible moral malaise that, without realizing it, the Church found herself in on the eve of the Second Vatican Council, although they became more pronounced after the Council.
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The Modernism that was born at the Renaissance—whose creed began with the words, “I believe in Man”—did not of course exclude God at first but paid homage to the masterwork of God’s creation, who would shortly come of age at the Enlightenment and finally rise above himself to rule where God ruled before. But the decline of the God-centered spirituality that prevailed before the Renaissance and the rise of the man-centered spirituality that began to prevail after the Renaissance received a decisive “shot in the arm” after the condemnation of Quietism, as I have shown in previous articles. It was then that the deep prayer—called contemplation—that leads to union with God was extracted from Catholic Spirituality for all but a remnant.
Long before a person can tangibly experience God’s love, something has to happen within prayer that is the key to everything. That something is that we must be weaned from the cupboard love that has infected us from the very beginning of the spiritual life. Far from experiencing spiritual delights at the outset of prayer, a beginner has to experience darkness, dryness, and aridity, not to mention battalions of distractions and temptations that make the believer think they are on the wrong path. It has been the teaching of Catholic Spirituality from the beginning that it is in continually turning away from distractions and temptations that a person is making acts of love that eventually lead to a habit of selfless loving.
The mystic St. Angela of Foligno calls this loving “divine loving” because it is the same sort of selfless, unconditional loving with which Christ loves us—and it is the only form of loving that, when learned in years rather than months, can unite us with Christ. Then—in, with, and through Him—we can contemplate God the Father and receive in return what St. Thomas Aquinas calls the fruits of contemplation—namely, the infused theological, cardinal, and moral virtues and the gifts of the Holy Spirit—to share with others.
