Roberto de Mattei
Lepanto Foundation
October 7, 2020
In Heaven, which is the place of perfect divine liturgy, some
anniversaries are commemorated and among them is the 7th October
1571, a special day, celebrating the victory of the Christian fleet against
Islam at Lepanto.
That victory was a result of the courage of the Christian combatants who braved a ferocious and powerful enemy with the firm determination to win or die. Many died, but the Christian armada attained the victory.
More than in the courage of men, the reason for the victory, however, was in the spiritual strength of the man who created The Christian Holy League and aided it day by day with his prayer: St. Pius V.
As a reward for his faith and trust, the Pope obtained knowledge from
Heaven, in Rome, about the victorious outcome
of the battle at the precise moment it ended, more than a thousand kilometers away.
Pius V attributed the merit of the victory, not to himself, nor to the
bravery of the armada, but to the One he had entrusted everything to. Thus, he
ordered that the invocation “Auxilium Christianorum, ora pro nobis”, be
added to the Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and fixed October 7 as a Feast
in honor of Our Lady of the Rosary. In the same way, the Republic of Venice had
this inscription painted on its Senate House: “Not bravery, not armies, not
commanders, but Our Lady of the Rosary made us victors.”
Venerable Pope Pius XII, in a speech given on October 7, 1947 to a group of senators and representatives of the United States Congress, declared that “October 7 is a memorable day in the annals of Western Europe. On that day in the year 1571 the powers representing Christian civilization united to defeat the colossal threat from the East in the battle of Lepanto. It is a day of thanksgiving commemorated in the calendar of the Church, not only because the sanctuaries of Europe and their altars were thus saved from utter destruction, but also because the prayers ordered by the then Pope St. Pius V were universally given a large share in the victory” .
The victory then came, above all, from Heaven, like any good action performed on Earth, given that man, on his own strengths is capable only of evil, whereas he is capable of good only when he collaborates with God and is aided by His Grace.
And since God uses the Angels to carry out His plans, on that day of
Lepanto, we have to believe that the Angels, favored the victory, under the
guidance of their Queen, the Most Blessed Virgin Mary. And it is thus that on
October 7, in Heaven, the Angels celebrate Mary, Auxilium Christianorum, Our Lady of Victories, Victrix over all the
enemies of the Catholic Church, both external and internal.
On October 7, 2001, a month after the Twin Towers, at the Palace of the
Chancellery in Rome, the Lepanto Cultural Centre organized a major conference
celebrating the 430 years from the Battle of Lepanto, in the presence of
eminent cardinals and descendents of many families who had fought at Lepanto. Well
then, starting from now, I hereby make an appointment with you in Rome on
October 7, 2021, to celebrate together that glorious day for Christendom. We
still have a year to go, but today, October 7, 2020 - what we might define a
jubilee year - opens. This is how the Spanish Bishop of Alcalá de Henares,
Juan Antonio Reig Pla, defined it in a pastoral letter when he declared:
“In the 16th century the enemy of
Christian civilization was a reality in the Ottoman Empire. Today the enemy is
more watered-down and is even rendered present inside the Church. Today the attacks
are not localized in a specific territory, but have penetrated inside souls.
Ours is a situation in which God is out
of the picture and the “de-structuring” of the human being, the family,
education and the Christian sense of social and political life is sought. Today
we are facing a cultural battle which has been shaping principles and dogmas
for centuries.”
I endorse this appeal for a jubilee year and invite all the friends of the
Lepanto Foundation to join us, under the protection of Our Lady, the Angels and
St. Pius V, an example of a Catholic Pope even for the 21st century.
But our initiative does not intend only to be an act of commemoration; it
intends first of all to be a declaration of war, or rather, a response to a war
that was declared on us centuries ago and to which we intend responding with
all our strength, without abandoning the place each one of us has been assigned
by Divine providence.
Wars have accompanied the history of mankind from the very beginning as
a consequence of original sin, but with the French Revolution war changed its
face: it has become a civil war, an ideological war, a total war, between those
who have the faith, charity and hope of the Catholic Church on their banner,
and those who place the principles of 1789 on theirs: liberty, equality, fraternity,
meant as supreme and absolute values, with nothing that transcends them. The
idea of permanent war springs from the
revolutionary principle of perpetual peace and universal brotherhood, adopted as
supreme values. For this, it is necessary to oppose the Anti-Christian
Revolution which has threatened us since that time, with a coherent and
integrated Catholic Counter- Revolution, just as our faith needs to be.
Leo XIII, in his encyclical Humanum genus of April 20, 1884, described the role of Freemasonry in this fierce war against the natural and Christian order.
After the French Revolution, the Communist Revolution followed in 1917. In his encyclical Divini Redemptoris of March 19, 1937, Pius XI described the role of Communism - which Masonic Liberalism had paved the way for - affirming that “for the first time in history we are witnessing a deliberate, cold-blooded battle, carefully prepared by man against “all that is divine” (I Thessalonians. 2,4).”
The encyclical by Pius XI was published twenty years after the
apparitions of Our Lady, who in 1917, the same year as the Russian Revolution,
announced at Fatima that if mankind did not amend its sinful ways, Russia would
have scattered its errors all over the world.
The Fatima prophecy has yet to be completely fulfilled. The errors of
Communism have contaminated the entire world like a maleficent virus. Those who believe that Communism has become
extinct with the collapse of the Soviet Union, are committing a deadly error in
judgment.
Since the 1970s, following the directions of Antonio Gramsci and the
“Frankfort School”, after the ideological war, Communism, has developed into a
new type of war: a psychological war, which, through the weapons of words and
images, aims at striking souls before striking bodies, and in souls, the
profound tendencies in man, his sentiments and emotions.
This war has penetrated inside the Church, since the Church, which is
the enemy par excellence of the
Revolution, is also the place where souls are formed for battle. The souls of the
Church’s sons and daughters - especially since the Second Vatican Council -
have been victims of a process of deformation. Thus, the Second Vatican
Council, whatever theological judgment is given to its documents, has the
historical responsibility in the loss of the militant spirit and of the
psychological and moral disarming of Catholics.
Why should we be surprised then if today this ideological and
psychological virus would be followed by a biological virus, an enemy that seems
to be the physical symbol - even if it is invisible - in this process of cultural and moral poisoning of mankind? Why
should we be surprised then, if after the ideological and psychological war,
there followed an organized pandemic, fabricated in a laboratory by professional
manipulators? Each day that passes the
doubts about the synthetic origins of the virus are vanishing increasingly. And
why should we be surprised if this virus had its origins in Communist China, a
country that officially still claims the ideas of Marx, Lenin and Mao, making
these their program for the future?
We have entered into the phase of biological warfare, which doesn’t
signify the end of the ideological or the psychological war. The mental anarchy the world is experiencing
in this time of the Coronavirus is a consequence of this psychological war
which acts upon that which is called “cognitive dissonance”. The principal of
cognitive dissonance pushes the individual into preferring a deformed
representation of reality to reality itself, even when the facts disprove it,
because the distorted idea the individual has made of reality, is not fruit of
a logical analysis of the facts, but of a visceral sentiment originating from
what the individual wants to believe, or better, what the disinformation
specialists want the individual to believe. One of these manipulations of
reality, is pushing the belief that the West is the cause and not the victim of
the war in progress.
The psychological war has fostered, in turn, a social Revolution, which
will develop into the last phase of the conflict to bring the world – not towards
a New World Order – but towards a New Planetary Disorder - not towards a political or sanitary
dictatorship - but toward the reign of Chaos, hoped for by the powers of
darkness, as a reflection of Hell. A global disorder in which the Revolution
attains its apparent victory, but will experience also its own defeat, since the
law of creation is order and a return to order is the program of all those
opposed to the Revolution.
Divine Providence is order; everything that happens is envisaged,
permitted and ordered by Providence. And we want to be instruments of Divine
Providence in this battle we are fighting on the ideological and psychological
levels, but most of all on the spiritual level, by counting not only on our weak
forces, but on the help of the One who in 1571 made the victory at Lepanto
possible. To the Mother of God “august Sovereign
of the Church Militant” terribilis
ut castrorum acies ordinata, “terrible as an army set in array” (Canticle of
Canticles 6, 10), Pius XII points
out that the name of “Our Lady of
Victories” is rightly deserved. And at Fatima the Most Blessed Virgin Mary
revealed, that after the terrible trials which would have seen the annihilation
of entire nations, there would come the final triumph of Her Immaculate Heart.
We believe in this promise and we fight to contribute to its
fulfillment. But it is She - Our Lady of Victories, who organizes the army,
chooses the commanders, defines the hour, the manner and places of the battles.
With this message, we simply want to respond to the call coming from
Heaven, because Heaven never ceases to turn its gaze on men who are active on
Earth and it awaits theirs and our response. Auxilium Christianorum ora pro nobis.
Translation: Contributor Francesca Romana
