January 2, 2021
The
following is the text from a video lecture by Professor De Mattei from the
Lepanto Foundation with his best wishes to all Rorate Caeli readers for
the coming year 2021, in the Light of Our Lady of Fatima: “Light of Fatima, Light without shadows, Immaculate Light, Light of the
Dawn arising: we ask Thee to illuminate our steps in the darkness of the night.”
(The video in Italian can be found here: Il 2021 alla luce del messaggio di Fatima e della retta ragione - Prof. Roberto de Mattei - YouTube and Rorate will post the English video of this superb lecture presently).
The Message of Fatima
What really happened in 2020, the
dramatic year which has just come to an end? And what awaits us in 2021? What
are the prospects for our times?
The panorama we have before us is
hazy, difficult to survey, but I’ll try to do it from the stance of the highest
principles and greatest certainties, in the light of which, the history of the
world must be judged.
Among these great certainties there
is one more than any other that can help us find our way in the present and
future: the Message of Our Lady of Fatima in 1917.
We know well that Divine Revelation
ended with the death of the last Apostle and nothing can be added to it. The
Message of Fatima does not belong to the patrimony of revealed faith. It is
also true however, that, among private revelations, some concern the spiritual
perfection of individual souls, others have, on the other hand, a social reach
because they are meant for all mankind.
Well the message of Fatima is a
private revelation intended not only for the spiritual well-being of the three
little shepherds who received it, but for the entire human-race. And among all
the private revelations of the last century, none have had as much recognition
from the Church as Fatima has. In the space of a hundred years, seven Popes,
from Pius XII to Pope Francis have recognized and honored Our Lady of Fatima,
even if none have completely fulfilled Her requests.
In the year 2000, the Church officially
revealed the so-called Third Secret of Fatima, the last part of the message
revealed to the three little shepherds. An unfulfilled prophecy we must always bear
in mind[1].
The prospect described by the
Message of Fatima is tragic. The first tragedy that Our Lady presents to the
children is the terrible vision of Hell which the souls of unrepentant sinners
fall into.
The second tragedy is represented by
the words of Our Lady Herself, whereby: “God is about to punish the world for its crimes, by
means of war, famine, and persecutions of the Church and of the Holy Father.” If the world does not convert “Russia will spread its errors throughout the world, causing wars and
persecutions of the Church. The good will be martyred, the Holy Father will
have much to suffer, various nations will be annihilated.”
The third part of the tragedy shows
the Pope and with him: “Bishops, Priests, men and women Religious going up a
steep mountain, at the top of which there was a big Cross of roughhewn trunks
as of a cork-tree with the bark; before reaching there the Holy Father passed
through a big city half in ruins and half trembling with halting step,
afflicted with pain and sorrow, he prayed for the souls of the corpses he met
on his way; having reached the top of the mountain, on his knees at the foot of
the big Cross he was killed by a group of soldiers who fired bullets and arrows
at him, and in the same way there died one after another the other Bishops,
Priests, men and women Religious, and various lay people of different ranks and
positions. Beneath the two arms of the Cross there were two Angels each with a
crystal aspersorium in his hand, in which they gathered up the blood of the
Martyrs and with it sprinkled the souls that were making their way to God.”
A short sentence from Our Lady
though, illuminates this tragic scenario with
great hope: “But in the end my
Immaculate Heart will triumph. The Holy Father will consecrate Russia to me,
and she will be converted, and the world will enjoy a period of peace.”
The triumph of the Immaculate Heart
of Mary is announced as certain and unconditional: in any case it will happen.
The chastisement preceding the triumph is, on the other hand, conditional: it
will happen only if mankind does not convert. This conditional nature prevents
us from speaking with absolute certainty about the chastisement, but the
growing apostasy in mankind over the last years, indicates a
quasi-irreversibility of the historical process which leads first to a Great
Chastisement and then the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
The Rules of Reason
The Message of Fatima requires our
faith but faith is based on reason and reason has several basic rules we must
follow.
Father Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange
teaches that the rule of Wisdom is “explaining
the inferior by means of the superior”, “according to the subordination of the causes that lead to the Prime
Cause and the ultimate purpose of the universe, God, Prime Being, Prime
Intelligence and Supreme Good.”[2]
Furthermore, in the cognitive process,
certainty, which excludes any doubt, must not be confused with opinion, which
admits possibility of error, or with hypothesis, which requires being
demonstrated in order to become a given thesis.
The reasoning that
one must follow to transform hypothesis into certainty is called demonstration.
Every demonstration is based on the principal of non-contradiction which
constitutes the foundation of logic.
Sophism or paralogism, a false reasoning, founded on logical errors and
in the ultimate analysis, on the violation of the principal of
non-contradiction, are opposed to true reasoning, based on logic. However it is not possible to conserve logic
without the help of grace, which illuminates the intelligence of man and
strengthens his will. The spiritual life helps the rational activity of man.
Bad use of reason leads to the
precedence of the imagination, a form of knowledge which does not follow
logical steps, but [is] often determined by an emotional state. Reason is
substituted by fantasy and demonstration is substituted by narration. To
explain the significance of the term phantasia
, Aristotle indicates its derivation from light (pháos).[3] Just as luminous
stimulus generate visual sensations, thus the mind produces internally
“phantasms” (phantásmata) or images that don’t always correspond to
reality. Every image that makes an impression on our mind therefore, must be
verified by the light of reason, which is the highest faculty of the soul.
Certainties and
Opinions
In the year 2020,
everything started in January, with the news of an epidemic that had its
epicenter in China, in the City of Wuhan. Globalization not only facilitated
the spread of the virus, but the diffusion, in real time, of all the news
regarding it, in such a way as to create excessive focus on it.
On March 11, the
World Health Organization, having initially minimized the event, later
characterized it as a pandemic of a “coronavirus” , then baptized as Covid 19.
None of us know for sure to what extent the statistical data communicated by
the WHO and all the world governments, is reliable either by defect or excess;
nobody knows with certainty the real benefit of the measures taken to contain
the pandemic, like the mask and quarantine; nobody is able to speak with
certainty about the effectiveness of the vaccines offered solemnly to the world
on December 27, 2020. Regarding these last points, everyone of us can have our
opinions, and put forward hypotheses, but no-one is able to transform these
hypotheses into certainties.
There is some evidence to take into
account in fact. The first, of an economic and social nature, was made manifest
throughout 2020, with the failure of many small businesses, grave loss of
income in the middle classes, unemployment and poverty, while the Nation States
seem incapable of responding to the economic crisis with public funds. The consequences of a psychological nature
due the pandemic appear even graver, caused, in the first place, by the
atmosphere of alarm and fear created all over the world. Fear of the virus has
caused anguish, depression and even a number of suicides, in a society brought
up in the denial of death and the worship of health and wealth. The West, which
has not had the experience of a war in
seventy years, has found itself defenseless faced with what was defined by the
French President, Macron as “a war against an invisible enemy”.[4]
Even graver than fear, it seems, is
the loss of trust in our neighbor, mainly due in this case, to intolerance
towards the frequently confusing and irrational restrictive measures imposed by
governments. In some countries, these
measures have shaken the foundations of the judicial system, as far as the
relationship between emergency and individual liberties is concerned, especially
in relation to religious liberty.[5]
In addition, the
political class relied on health care experts to eradicate the pandemic, but
deep division was soon made manifest among the scientists. Behind them, an obscure fight seems to be
unfolding among the great pharmaceutical companies, for whom the existence of a
pharmacological dependence in the population is certainly convenient.[6] Alongside the
economic interests of these companies, there are those of the financial
capitals, seeing as pharmaceutical industries need to be sustained for the
research and the commercialization of their products. The production of vaccines involves
competition in the National States, disposed to battling it, no holds barred.[7]
As a result of all
this, the trust citizens have in their
governments and the political class is crumbling, but also as regards
the scientific and medical professions.
Distrust is increasing even towards the people close to us, whom we
thought highly of yesterday, and now from one moment to another we no longer
esteem them because their opinion is different from ours.
If the pandemic is
blamed for these events, we would fall into the error of confusing the cause
with the effects, which is one of the typical paralogisms criticized by
Aristotle in his Sophistical Refutations.[8] For example: the
existence of a “healthcare dictatorship” or of an economic crisis after the
pandemic do not constitute proof that the pandemic was unleashed or is being
handled to create a healthcare dictatorship or an economic crisis.
A
natural virus or product of a laboratory?
Alongside the
diversity of opinions on the political and health measures following the pandemic, a plurality of hypotheses about
the origins and the nature of the virus – still shrouded in mystery – have
appeared. For most of the scientists the virus is of animal origins, caused,
according to the evolutionist theories, by a “spillover” from bats to man. Spillover. The Evolution of Pandemics[9] is the title of a
paper written in 2012 by the American scientific publisher, David Quammen, who,
at that time warned in advance of a
possible dangerous coronavirus pandemic
on the basis of data he had gathered during his studies.
There is however a
second hypothesis, that no-one has been able to exclude: the possibility of a
synthetic origin of the pandemic. At Wuhan, there is in fact, a National
Biosafety Laboratory, where both civilian and military research is carried out
on viruses potentially pathogenic for man. The coronavirus might have leaked
out of this laboratory by accident – as a “hazardous event” – or it might have
been the instrument of a deliberate act of biological war.
The hypothesis of a virus leak from
the Wuhan laboratory has been advanced in Italy since January 25, 2020, by the
journalist Paolo Liguori,[10] and in the U.S. in February, by
Steven Mosher, President of the Population Research Institute.[11] Also the French Nobel Prize Winner
for Medicine, Luc Montagnier, in an interview of
April 17[12], sustained the
thesis of the artificial origins of the virus, while on May 3, 2020, in an
interview to ABC News, the U.S.
Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, stated that “a remarkable quantity of proof indicates that the origins of
Sars-CoV2 are from the Wuhan laboratory.”[13] The person who has
developed this hypothesis in greater depth is the Italian researcher Joseph
Tritto, in a study document entitled China Covid 19. The Chimera that Changed the
World.[14]
Along with the
hypothesis of an accidental leak from the Wuhan Laboratory, there is a second
one, where the virus could be a product of Chinese bio-terrorism. A researcher
from the University of Hong Kong, Li-Meng-Yan,[15] who fled to the United States in
April 2020, affirmed on the basis of her studies, that Covid 19, did not
originate from nature, but is a biological weapon deliberately created to kill.
The Indian official Sharad S. Chauhan is the author of a book entitled
COVID-19- Opportunistic
Bioterrorism? A Virus from China set to Change World History,[16] wherein he asserts that the virus was launched by China to change the world to their own advantage.
We must consider in
this regard, that in 1999, a book was published by two Chinese officials, Qiao Lian e Wang Xiangsui, entitled Unrestricted
warfare, wherein the authors
sustained that China, in self-defense, should not hesitate in using all the
instruments it has at its disposal, including biological weapons. And the Wuhan
laboratory is certainly an important instrument to produce these weapons.
The concept of
“unrestricted warfare” reminds us of “asymmetric warfare” : a conflict in which
one of the sides is constrained to defend themselves from an unidentifiable
enemy, who uses unconventional weapons. The use of bio-technologies,
informatics and artificial intelligence are part of the Chinese military
strategy and are typical examples of asymmetric warfare.
An international
treaty (Biological and Toxin Weapons
Convention: BTWC), signed on April 12, 1972 and which came into effect on
March 26, 1975, forbids the experimentation and production of biological
weapons. All the States in the European Union, the United States, Australia and
Japan ratified it, but China didn’t. The Soviet Union adhered to the treaty,
but this did not impede their launching of Biopreparat in the 1970s, a
program of military research in the biological and bacteriological sector. At the beginning of the 1990s, the
structure was officially dismantled, but it would seem that Russia has
inherited most of biological weapons developed during the Cold War.
Biological warfare
is a strategic sector which implies many advantages: it’s warfare that produces
an injurious or mortal effect on things and people and its true origin is
difficult to identify, thus it can be waged in a concealed manner; furthermore,
because of its hidden nature, this war strikes not only the bodies but also the
morale of the population, who blame the damage, not on the ones who caused the
crisis, but on those, inside their own countries, who are trying to deal with
it. During the Cold War, international peace was guaranteed by “the balance of
terror” between Russia and the United States, both aware that the use of
nuclear weapons would have provoked an immediate and devastating response from
the other super-power. No deterrent is possible when the nuclear weapons are
replaced by biological ones, which, by their very nature, lend themselves to
concealed use.
Russia is a
declining power and China is an emerging power, but what the Russia of
yesterday and the China of today have in common is an ideological system,
indicated by Pope Pius XI in his encyclical Divini Redemptoris of March19, 1937[17] as being of a mendacious and intrinsically perverse nature. At Fatima
Our Lady announced that Russia would have spread its errors. Its errors are
those of Communism, destined to spread far beyond the Russian borders, also in
particular after the self-dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. China, like
other countries, develops biological research in both the civilian and military fields. It is probable that the
coronavirus leaked from the Wuhan laboratory, whether it happened as an act of
biological warfare or whether it happened in an accidental manner, during a
bellicose or health program. But this probability doesn’t change the hypothesis
into certainty, until sure proof is presented.
For now the only absolute certitude
is that the upheaval caused by the pandemic is undermining the process of
globalization that has taken place over the last thirty years, founded
precisely on the role of China, which has made available its work force to the
West, while the West has opened wide its market to products Made In China.[18] According to the most recent
analyses, China will surpass the United States and will become the largest
economy in the world by 2028, that is, five years sooner than was previously
estimated. The acceleration came about following the pandemic, but merely
basing the charges on China on the principle post hoc propter hoc, would
be stretching logic.[19] We won’t err however, if we trace
back everything that happened in 2020 to the eternal plans of Divine
Providence.
True
and False Conspiracies
There is another hypothesis which is
being diffused, most of all on Internet: one whereby a Western financial
oligarchy had produced the pandemic and had controlled its diffusion, with the
the aim of subjugating mankind to a one-world-government. If this were true, the coronavirus would not
have its origins in the Chinese laboratories, but in Western ones. The thesis
of the American bacteriological attack was put forward in the first place by
the Chinese Government, which, through the spokesman of the Foreign Minister, accused the United States
of having brought the pathogen agent into China, during the Military World
Games, the international military games held from October 18 to October 27 in
Wuhan in 2019[20].
In Italy, the Neo-Marxist
intellectual, Diego Fusaro, who exercises a considerable influence in
conservative circles, as early as February 26, 2020, on RadioRadio, accused the West, affirming that the hypothesis “which presents the maximum points of
coherence, is that in some way, there is the longa manus of the United States.” For Fusaro the
globalist ideology is the ideological superstructure of the capitalist
structure turned into a single, borderless, global market. It aims at the
creation of a new anthropological model: the individual without an identity,
pure product of the strategies of manipulation.
This totalitarian
and freedom-destroying plan, for some Catholics, would coincide with the reign
of the Anti-Christ. These ideas circulating in the blog-sphere appear seductive
to many, but are expressed in the form of “narration”, more than argumentation.
What renders them fallacious is not the conspiratorial theory underlying them, but the presumption of
establishing a theory through arguments of a merely circumstantial nature, for
the most part inconsistent. For example, the fact that Bill Gates had predicted
the pandemic and invested widely in vaccines, demonstrates his capacity for
prediction and his instinct for business affairs, but does not prove that he
had created the virus. Furthermore, blaming
the pandemic on the dark interests of super-capitalism corresponds in affirming
the primacy of economic interests in world events, overturning Father Garrigou-Lagrange’s principle,
whereby we need “to explain the inferior with the superior”, and not
vice-versa. Those who sustain these theses then, often use “flash sophism”,
which consists in having recourse to generic phrases and peremptory sentences,
which do not convince the sage, but make an impression on the uneducated.[21]
Counter-revolutionary
thought of the 19th and 20th centuries always affirmed
the existence of a historical, anti-Christian plot.[22] The simple
dynamism of human passions and errors is not sufficient in fact to explain the
revolutionary process which for centuries has been attacking the Church and
Christian Civilization which was generated from it. With great logic and
clarity, Plinio Corrêa
de Oliveira writes: “To produce such a
coherent process, with such continuity, like that of the Revolution through the
thousand vicissitudes of entire centuries, full of surprises and setbacks of all kinds, seems impossible to us without the
action of successive generations of intelligently gifted conspirators of
extraordinary powers. To think that the Revolution had reached the state it is
now without such action, is equivalent to admitting that hundreds of alphabet
letters thrown out a window can arrange themselves spontaneously on the ground,
in a way to form a literary work, for example “The Hymn to Satan” by Carducci.”[23]
The identification of the secret
forces that move the Revolution require however accurate documentation,
in-depth study and in the final analysis, great equilibrium.
When these theories are not
well-founded, the suspicion arises that they are being spread by the
revolutionary agents themselves to disqualify any criticism of the secret
forces that move the Revolution. The best way possible to discredit the thesis
of the Anti-Christian plot is in fact that of envisaging fanciful conspiracies,
verging on the absurd. It is rather similar to what happens with private
revelations. The best way for the devil to negate authentic Divine messages is to multiply the
false revelations in order to disparage and ridicule the true ones.
“Windows of opportunity”
A rather different and absolutely reasonable argument, is, of
asserting that the revolutionary forces saw in the pandemic “a window of opportunity”.
The concept of the “window of opportunity” alludes to the
theology of history whereby God is the cause of all good in the universe, and,
when He permits evil, He does so to draw a greater good from it. God is always
the victor in history, and the devil is always defeated. The diabolic strategy,
opposed to the Divine, consists instead of trying constantly to do bad and to
turn bad every good in the universe which God, the author, created. There is,
therefore, “a window of Divine
opportunity” which consists in drawing good from evil and a “window of diabolical opportunity” which
consists in drawing evil from good.
This relates also to the case of the coronavirus, which the Revolution
seeks to use as a “window of opportunity” in order to advance a situation of
uncertainty. This is the underlying thesis of two contemporary, leftist exponents of culture: the Slovenian
sociologist Slavoj Žižeke and the French philosopher Edgar Morin.
Žižek, in his book Virus. Catastrophe and Solidarity,
sustains that for the Communist Revolution, at this moment, “everything is possible, in whatever
direction, from the best to the worst”,[24] whereas Morin in his book Switching Paths. The 15 lessons of the Coronavirus,[25] affirms that the “post-Coronavirus, could be either
apocalyptic or the bearer of hope.” For
both of them the virus is an unexpected event, which must be exploited as a
window of opportunity. It is what the Revolution is doing, by re-launching, for
example, the theory of the “Great Reset”, the egalitarian elimination from
which a new Utopian world should arise.
The German economist Klaus Schwab,
founder of the World Economic Forum, named also the “Davos Forum”, on June 3,
2020, spoke of the “great opportunity” of a “great reset”,[26] following the pandemic. But the
concept of the great reset does not
originate with the coronavirus. Since
last year the Global Compact on Education had been planned in the Vatican on
May 14, 2020, an event based on the idea of an ecological and globalist “great reset”. This event did not take place,
but rather was skipped due precisely to the pandemic.
Whatever the origin of the virus, it
is certain that the revolutionary forces are trying to manipulate the situation
to their advantage. Within them there are probably diverse lines, since the
revolutionary camp is in itself, divided. The final goal of the Revolution
though, is not a “new world order” but organized chaos. The Revolution aims at
undoing the work of creation and the Redemption to form the social Reign of the
devil, a hell on earth which prefigures that of eternity, just as the Social
Reign of Christ, Christian Civilization, prefigures the Heavenly Kingdom. In
this sense the Revolution has its essence in disorder, whereas Christian
Civilization is order par
excellence.
The word
pandemic, which comes from the Greek πάνδημος (pándēmos), “that which interests all people”, is close
to that of pandemonium, “all the demons”,
which is made up of the Greek terms pân (all) and daimónion (demon). The term pandæmonium was coined by the English
poet John Milton in his book Paradise
Lost[27] to identify the
palace built by Satan in Hell.
Pandemonium is a synonym for chaos,
and diabolical chaos seems to be the underlying theme of the pandemic in
course.
A
Lost Opportunity
We would need then to oppose the
“great reset” by the revolutionaries with a “great reset” on the contrary,
based on the return of order and not on the establishment of disorder.[28] Unfortunately the men who govern
the Church have not seen “the window of
opportunity” , which the coronavirus could have been for them.
What should the authorities in the
Church have done, and what should all Catholics do faced with a pandemic like
the one attacking us?
First of all, the Church should be
speaking about death, sin, Divine judgment, and, in the final analysis, the choice
that the Message of Fatima puts before us, between conversion and punishment,
individual and collective.
It is hardly surprising then if
contemporary society, incapable of making any sense out of life, falls into
anguish faced with disease and death. On
the other hand, we are surprised at
the silence of those who would have all the weapons to defeat, not death, but
the anguish that surrounds it. They ought to recall that death and all the
evils of humanity have their origins in sin; that public sin is graver than
individual sin, and that God punishes social sins with plagues of diseases,
wars, famine and natural disasters.
Original sin in fact doesn’t exist
in society, but there is the collective sin of men who are part of it. And God
punishes or rewards individual men in life and in the afterlife, but punishes
and reward societies in their earthly horizon, given that societies do not have
eternal life, unlike men. If the world
does not repent, and most of all if the men of the Church continue to be
silent, the punishments which at the beginning are inflicted in a mild manner,
are destined to escalate more and more, until arriving at the annihilation of
entire nations, as our Lady announced at Fatima.
And Fatima is not an apocalyptic
narration of human origin, but a Divine announcement, recognized by the Church.
The End Times
On these first days of 2021, the
horizon is still shrouded in mystery, but the gravity of the religious,
political and social situation leads us to believe that we are living through
the era of the end times, of which St. Louis Grignion di Montfort and other
saints have spoken. Not the last days preceding the advent of the Anti-Christ,
but those preceding the triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.[29]
The prophecy of
Fatima assures us that we are not living in the age of the Anti-Christ, because
Russia will be converted and a period of peace will be granted to the world. We
don’t know how long this period of peace will last, but we have the certainty
that peace, which is the tranquility of the natural and Christian order,
belongs to our future. St. Pius X, who lived through the terrible crisis of
modernism, feared that the perversity of mind in his times was “the beginning of the evils, reserved for the
last days” and that perhaps “the Son
of Perdition of whom the Apostle speaks was already in the world (II Thess.
II, 3)”.[30] He wrote these
words in his first encyclical, E supremi apostolatus cathedra, of October 4,
1903, when Our Lady was yet to appear at Fatima. We however cannot
ignore the promise of Fatima, which doesn’t address the Anti-Christ and the end
of the world, but the triumph of Her Immaculate Heart and the rebirth of
Christian Civilization.
There is a substantial difference
between the advent of the Anti-Christ and that of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
The lordship of the Anti-Christ will be the supreme expression of evil in
history. On that day Satan will reign over the world and the empire of evil will
extend to the point that it will not be possible to escape the radical choice
for or against Jesus Christ, by hiding. Christ Himself, at the height of the
persecution, will defeat the Anti-Christ and will appear triumphant in His
Parousia (Apoc. 6,11).
On the contrary, the triumph of the
Immaculate Heart of Mary is the outcome of a historical process at the end of
which various nations will be annihilated, but Russia and other nations will be
converted to the true Catholic Faith and this conversion will be all the more
spectacular inasmuch as Russia is a nation that has been dominated by Communism
and still today lives under the deception of the Orthodox Religion. Our Lady
revealed to Sister Lucia that the First and Second World Wars were part of this
process, which experienced new convulsions before reaching its epilogue.
There is also a difference between
the punishment of Hell, which Our Lady shows in the first part of the Fatima
Message and the chastisement of nations which appears in the second and third
part of the same Message. The punishment of souls, at the moment of death, is
instantaneous, and is for eternity. But nations are not eternal and their
punishment occurs in history, following a succession of events, which Our Lady
indicates precisely: war, famine, persecution against the Church and against
the Pope. Some of these events may be natural disasters willed by God through
His Angels, who are the executors of His plans in history, but other events are
willed by men, who cause, with their own hands, their very self-destruction.
The Revolution, as little by little
it nears its final goal, destroys itself.
In fact, if it’s true that “the closer you are to a cause, the more you
experience the effects”[31], this also applies in the opposite
case. If at the beginnings of the Revolution there is the will to destroy, the
initial impetus is destined to wear off, little by little as the destruction
comes with its final consequences; also because evil, which is the privation of
being, cannot attain the extinguishment of being, from which it draws its very
existence.
The drama of evil is this: it cannot
destroy the last remains of good that survives. Its dynamism is destined to
crash against what remains solid in the liquefying it produces. The last step
of the process of auto-dissolution, which today is eroding the rock upon which
the Church is founded, is destined therefore to see the death of the Revolution
and the sprouting of an opposing principle of life: an itinerary of restoration
of the Faith and Morality, of the Truth and the social order that it
corresponds to. This principle is the Catholic Counter-Revolution.
The
“Time of Revolt”
The Revolution has
a single origin and directorial, but when reaching the end of its itinerary, it
tends to become jagged in a chaotic manner.
The chaos is the end, but it is also the end of the Revolution. As a
result of the principle of heterogenesis of purpose, every Revolution in
history has reversed the projects of its architects, in the contrary. Even the
project of the Universal Republic and of the “new world order” , is being
transformed in the scenario of planetary chaos that we see plainly before our
eyes. Protests and social clashes are
spreading and the acts of disobedience against all authority are multiplying in
a perspective of global disorder.
On the night of
July 14, 1789, King Louis XVI learnt from the Duke La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
that the Bastille had been taken. The King asked: “Is it a revolt?” “No sire,
it’s a revolution” replied the Duke.[32] The difference
between a revolt and a revolution that emerges from this dialogue is not
however an antithesis. Each Revolution is born in fact of a revolt in man’s
tendencies. Nonetheless, the revolt is transformed into a Revolution when it is
organized and has a program and a driving direction. When, on the other hand,
the Revolution loses its planning capacity, and its capacity to self -govern,
it disintegrates and regresses, as it were, into a plurality of revolts, bound
together only by the pathos of destruction.
Igor Safarevic documented the spirit
of death and destruction that impregnated literally most of the socialist
theories and movements in history that form their internal impetus. “The death of humanity is not only the
predictable outcome of Socialism’s triumph, but it constitutes its very
purpose.” [33]
Today is the time
of revolts[34] because the
Revolution is in crisis. The rebels are
the ecologists, the pacifists, the anti-racists, the militant LGBT, the Indignados, the Black Lives Matter and
the informatic activists, who in failing to realize their projects, have chosen
the path of permanent war.
At the beginning of the 21st
century, the Marxist philosopher, Toni Negri, in his book Impero,[35] called for a “permanent global war”, not only against the National States, but
against the multinational corporations, the United Nations, the World Bank and
the Davos Club. Today Diego Fusaro calls the “dissenters” of both left and right to revolt. Fusaro’s books have
significant titles: Welcome back Marx and Antonio
Gramsci. The Passion of Being in the World. There are no ambiguities in his
ideas. His latest book, Think Otherwise.
The Philosophy of Dissent, is an apologia
for rebellion and revolutionary dissent.
What is dissent? Fusaro explains: “Revolution and rebellion, defection and
protest, revolt and mutiny, antagonism and discord, insubordination and
sedition, strikes and disobedience, resistance and sabotage, contestation and
uprising, guerilla war and insurrection, agitation and boycott: are all shape-shifting
figures of dissent.”[36]
Fusaro praises the great rebels
against the constituted order of history: Prometheus, Spartacus, Luther, the
Anabaptists, Giordano Bruno, up to Marx, Lenin, Martin Luther King, Che Guevara
and the No Globals.[37] The history of humanity, he
asserts, begins with “the dissent of Adam
and Eve in respect to the Divine imperative, which impedes them from eating
from the tree of knowledge: eritis sicut Dei”. “That original dissent
despite having a high cost, permits man to become truly such, to stand up
autonomous and free faber fortunae suae, superior to the other creatures, given that, he alone can freely
self-determine through his own responsible action.”[38]
Adam and Eve, like Prometheus,
according to Fusaro, “never cease teaching
us about the importance of dissent, but
also, in a related manner, in their preferring a condition of torment and suffering (…) as
opposed to servitude without effort and
toil.”[39]
These are terrible
words. Fusaro avoids mentioning that the
first great rebel, the inspirer of Adam and Eve’s rebellion, the father of all
dissent against the constituted order, was Lucifer. And Lucifer chose and
continues to choose eternal suffering rather than depend on his Creator. Better
suffering and death than obedience: this is Fusaro’s message, who is one of the
best-known exponents of the techno-capitalist conspiracy theory, against which
he incites revolt, in the name of the “philosophy of praxis”.
The light of Fatima in the darkness of night
We live in the age of chaos, but we
have one certainty: nothing that happens is casual or fortuitous; everything
depends on Divine Providence. The designs of God are inscrutable, but are
infallibly realized. God, through second causes, regulates the chain of cause
and effect in our lives and in history.
We don’t know if Covid-19 is a
natural or artificial event. What is certain is that every disaster that befalls man is a
punishment, and punishments for impenitent mankind were pre-announced by Our
Lady at Fatima.
To deny that the coronavirus is a
chastisement for the sins of men would not only be a rejection of the Fatima
Message, but a profession of practical atheism, and in the final analysis,
blasphemy.
Let’s leave it to the world to
blaspheme, as Voltaire blasphemed when the earthquake happened in Lisbon in
1775.[40] We turn our eyes to the Cova da Iria, where in
1917, Our Lady entrusted to three little shepherds a message of tragedy and
hope for humanity.
Against the philosophy of revolt,
against the philosophy of dissent, against the philosophy of the Revolution,
which has the devil as its prime inspiration, we oppose with the philosophy of
obedience to the Divine Law, violated and offended all over the world.
It is for the sake of this supreme
obedience, that we are ready to withdraw our obedience to men, even those of
the Church, if grave circumstances require it. But if this happens, we do so
with sorrow, we do so with respect, by renewing our spirit of obedience to God
and His Law, renewing our love for the Church and our neighbor: to every
brother, whose will we wish to do, according to the priorities of dependency
and hierarchy, which regulate the universe.
We love order and we combat
disorder. Our struggle against disorder is called Counter-Revolution, a movement
whereby order is re-established and restored. The order that we want restored
in its foundations is Christian Civilization, the image and earthly
reflection of Paradise. Our Lady at
Fatima gave the name of the Triumph of Her Immaculate Heart to the victory of
the Counter-Revolution. This is our
prospect for 2021, as it has been for
all our life. And to hasten this triumph we launch an appeal to all men of good
will in the year we celebrate the 450th anniversary of the Victory
at Lepanto, and also the year dedicated to St. Joseph, Protector of the Church
and the Counter- Revolution.
The Message of Fatima is the light
that guides us in the Age of the Coronavirus.
Light of Fatima, Light without
shadows, Immaculate Light, Light of the Dawn arising: we ask Thee to illuminate
our steps in the darkness of the night.
Translation: Francesca Romana
[1] Congregation
for the Doctrine of the Faith, The Message of
Fatima, Vatican City 2000.
[2] Réginald
Garrigou-Lagrange o.p., Il senso
del mistero e il chiaroscuro intellettuale, italian translation Fede & Cultura,
Verona 2019.
[3] Aristotle, De anima, III, 3, 429, a 3.
[4] https://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2020/03/17/nous-sommes-en-guerre-face-au-coronavirus-emmanuel-macron-sonne-la-mobilisation-generale_6033338_823448.html
[5] Fabio Adernò,
La libertà religiosa nella legislazione
d’emergenza, in
Covid-19 vs. Democrazia. Aspetti giuridici ed economici nella prima fase
dell’emergenza sanitaria, edited by
Michele Borgato and Daniele Trabucco, Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, Naples 2020,
pp. 77-102.
[6] Cf. Joseph
Tritto, Cina Covid-19. La chimera
che ha cambiato il mondo, Cantagalli, Siena 2020, pp. 207-218. Even the boycott of a drug such as hydroxychloroquine must be framed within
a struggle between Gilead Sciences, producer of Remdesivir and Sanofi, producer
of Plaquenil (chloroquine).
[7] Aldo
Giannuli, Coronavirus: globalizzazione
e servizi segreti. Come la pandemia ha cambiato e cambierà l’ordine mondiale,
Ponte alle Grazie, Florence 2020, pp. 198-205.
[8] Aristotle, Le confutazioni
sofistiche, introduction, translation and comments by Paolo Fait,
Laterza, Rome-Bari 2007.
[9] David Quammen, Spillover. L’evoluzione delle pandemie, italian translation
Adelphi, Milan 2014.
[10]
https://www.tgcom24.mediaset.it/2020/video/paolo-liguori-questo-virus-nasce-in-un-laboratorio_13934963.shtml
[11] Steven Mosher, Don’t buy
China’s story: The coronavirus may have leaked from a lab, in New York
Post, 22 febbraio 2020.
[12] https://www.lemonde.fr/les-decodeurs/article/2020/04/17/le-coronavirus-fabrique-a-partir-du-virus-du-sida-la-these-tres-contestee-du-pr-luc-montagnier_6036972_4355770.html
[13] Enormous Evidence Coronavirus Came from Chinese
Lab, in The
Guardian, May 30, 2020.
[14] Joseph
Tritto, Cina Covid-19. La chimera
che ha cambiato il mondo, cit.
[15]
https://zenodo.org/record/4028830#.X2YSU2czbUr
[16] Sharad
S. Chauhan, Covid 19 Or Opportunistic
Bioterrorism?: A Virus from China Set to Change World History!, Unistar Books Pvt. Limited, 2020.
[17] Pio XI,
Encyclical Divini Redemptoris of
March 19, 1937, in Acta Apostolicae Sedis,
29 (1937), p. 96 (pp. 65-106.)
[18] Salvatore
Santangelo, Geopandemia. Decifrare
e rappresentare il caos, Castelvecchi, Rome 2020, pp. 17-18.
[19] This is the
response of the analysis carried out by the Centre for Economics and
Business Research (Cebr) in the annual report
published on 26 December 2020.
[20] Germana Leoni, Guerra biologica, in “NexusNewTimes”, n. 145 (october-november 2020), p. 28.
[21] Padre
Enrico Zoffoli, Principi di
filosofia, Edizioni Fonti Vive, Rome 1988, p. 554.
[22]
Cf. for exemple Mons. Henri Delassus,
La conjuration antichrétienne:
le temple maçonnique voulant s’élever sur les ruines de l’Eglise catholique,
Paris 1910, 3 voll., with a preface letter from the cardinal Rafael Merry del
Val.
[23] Plinio
Corrêa de Oliveira, Rivoluzione e
Contro-Rivoluzione, Sugarco, Milan 2009, p. 90.
[24] Slavoj
Žižek, Virus. Catastrofe e solidarietà, Ponte alle Grazie, Florence 2020.
[25] Edgar
Morin, Cambiamo
strada. Le 15 lezioni del Coronavirus,
italian translation Raffaello Cortina Editore, Trebaseleghe (PD) 2020.
[27] John Milton,
Paradise
Lost, I, 753-756.
[28] https://fatimatragedyhope.info/it/2020/12/23/abbiamo-bisogno-di-un-great-reset-ma-non-di-quello-che-pensate/
[29] Cfr. Roberto de Mattei, Plinio Correa de Oliveira, Apostolo di Fatima, Profeta del Regno di Maria, Edizioni Fiducia, Rome 2017, pp. 281-364.
[30] http://www.vatican.va/content/pius-x/it/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-x_enc_04101903_e-supremi.html
[31] Saint Thomas of Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, III, q.
27, a. 5.
[32] François Bluche
cita l’aneddoto nel suo Dictionnaire des
citations et des mots historiques, Éditions du Rocher, Paris 1997.
[33] Igor
Safarevic, Il socialismo come fenomeno storico mondiale,
La Casa di Matriona, Milan 1980, p. 365.
[34] Donatella
Di Cesare, Il tempo della rivolta,
Bollati Boringhieri, Turin 2020, pp. 10 e ss.
[35] Toni Negri,
Impero. Il nuovo ordine della globalizzazione, with Michael Hardt, Rizzoli, Milan 2002.
[36] Diego
Fusaro, Pensare altrimenti.
Filosofia del dissenso, Einaudi, Turin
2017, p. 3.
[37]
Ibid., pp. 3-4.
[38]
Ibid., p. 13.
[39]
Ibid., p. 14.
[40] Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne, in Œuvres complètes di Voltaire,
Garnier, Paris 1877, t. 9, pp. 470-479.
