Afghanistan

A remarkable yet possible plan of Heaven for today’s world can be guessed at, if Orthodox Christianity is reviving within Russia in the manner described to me a few days ago in London by a Russian. His description corresponds to the impression brought away from Russia by an American friend visiting St Petersburg a few years ago – the average Russian has distinctly more spiritual substance in him then has the average spiritually wasted Westerner. Does this connect with Our Lady of Fatima . . .?

The Russian in London told me that the Orthodox Church in Russia is following rather than leading a revival of Orthodoxy amongst the people. Attendance at the Orthodox liturgy has increased by half over the last two years, and now 80% of Russians are at least calling themselves “Orthodox,” i.e. believers. New parishes are springing up everywhere. Bibles are snatched up as soon as they come on sale. Religious literature is flourishing, whilst atheistic propaganda is dying. “Holy Russia” is rising from the grave in which Communism from 1917 to 1989 strove to bury it.

For when the Communist structures of the Soviet “empire of evil” (Pres. Reagan) collapsed in 1989, the Russians turned for an ideology to replace Communism not to Western Liberalism but to their national and religious roots in Russian Orthodoxy. What indeed had the decadent West had to offer to Russia’s new needs in the 1990’s? In economics, the plundering of their wealth by capitalist vultures; in politics, the still on-going encirclement of their frontiers to ensure the United States’ permanent global hegemony by the construction of a ring of military bases which are one, if not the real, reason for the disastrous occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan never to come to an end; in religion, the attempted push eastwards into their land of Conciliar ecumenism, with which apparently the Russian churchmen want nothing to do – on the contrary, they are aware of the Traditional Catholic movement, and support it.

However, let us be under no illusion: Russian Orthodoxy welds together religion and patriotism in a not wholly godly mixture, and Orthodoxy is still schismatic by refusing the Papal Supremacy, and heretical by refusing a number of dogmas, so Russians do need to be converted to the truly Universal or Catholic Church. But if Our Lady of Fatima has singled out their country for the Consecration to her Heart, may the reason not be, not that the Russians are still wicked Communists but that the Russian people’s huge sufferings from their 70 Babylonian years of Communist captivity are calling forth from the always religious depths of “Holy Russia” an upsurge of spiritual vitality? And could this not save the true Church, presently wilting in the West, where the mainstream Church may still have large numbers but has little Faith whilst the Traditional remnant has the true Faith but negligible numbers? God knows how the Western Church also needs conversion!

May it then be Russia’s smashing of the encirclement in a Third World War leading to an occupation of Europe, which will at last drive the Latin Pope to consecrate Russia to Our Lady’s Heart, as she has so long been asking for in vain? Will at that moment the Russians’ renewed religious vigor save our languishing Catholic Tradition, whilst our Tradition will cleanse their errors? If so, then God will once again have “concluded all in unbelief, that He may have mercy on all . . .How incomprehensible are His judgments, and how unsearchable His ways . . . To Him be glory for ever” (Rom. XI, 32 . . .36).

Catholics, mainstream and of Tradition, pray your hearts out for the Consecration of Russia to the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of the Mother of God, or “Theotokos” as she is known in the Eastern Church.

Kyrie eleison.