Chapter VII
Why The Blessed Virgin?
    Fatima is not a magic cure-all for the world's ills but holds the secret of the remedy which lies in our power to apply.  In a mystical interpretation of the Old Testament story of Jacob and Esau,   St. Grignon de Montfort explains that these two are the figures of the natural  and unregenerate man and of the predestinate.  Esau, the natural man, is strong and robust and self-reliant.  Jacob, the predestinate, is the weaker, the stay-at-home.  When Esau was out hunting, Rebecca (their mother.) warned Jacob and told him to take two kids from the flock which she prepared in a dish relished by Isaac. (their father.)  Moreover she clothed Jacob in skins, so that Isaac was deceived into thinking that it was the hairy skin of his elder son Esau.  Thus Jacob received the greater blessing from his father, Esau receiving the blessing of earth and being placed in subjection to his brother.
    The mystical interpretation is that Rebecca, figure of the mother, transforms the weaker son and adorns him in such a way that it is he who receives the coveted blessing.  In the same way we may present Our Lady with our love, our good works, our very selves, as Jacob gave her the two kids, and she will transform them and us into fit objects for our Father's blessing.

No Christian is without respect and honor for the Blessed Virgin. He could not adore Christ without honoring her.
    But few Christians have learned to regard her as a mother not only of Christ, but of themselves.  Few Christians, therefore, really understand what Christ meant when He said: "I am the Vine, you are the branches"; few Christians understand that they have part with Christ, which honor to the Blessed Virgin automatically brings to men.
    Fundamentally this, and this alone, is the reason why in giving the message of Fatima she said: "My Divine Son wishes to establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart." Because as Our Lord chose to be born in a stable through her . . . so it is now necessary in a similar manner to have Him come once again into the stable of our tarnished world.
    It is important for the Catholic reader, as well as the non-Catholic reader, to understand the role of the Mother of Christ.
In the early cneturies, devotion to the Mother of Christ . . . who was called "The new Eve" . . . was fervent among all Christians.  It was not, as some supposed, idolatrous.  She was revered as the greatest of saints, and her prayer before the throne of God . . . Who had chosen Her as His Mother when He became Man . . . was greatly esteemed.
    After the Reformation the Christian world came to be divided on the subject of devotion to her, so that today it can be said that she constitutes one of the principal differences between Catholicism and Protestatism.  Within the Catholic Church there is unity of doctrine about her but difference of opinion as to just how much eminence should be given to her.  Some say that devotion to her is overemphasized, and some say it is not emphasized enough.
    Today, Saint Gignon de Monfort, Saint Alphonsus Ligouri, Saint John Eudes and others have largely contributed to the belief that Devotion to the Blessed Virgin is such an essential part of Christianity that until devotion to her is put in its proper perspective Christianity will never achieve the world perfection to which it is destined.
    This perspective sees the Mother of Christ in the role of co-Redemptrix and Mediatrix.  It presupposes that her relation to the souls of the world did not cease with the single act of cooperating in the Incarnation, but rather that it began with that act.  It is pointed out that God could have become man simply by appearing from nowhere at the age of thirty, and commencing public life; indeed, on the surface it would seem more fitting that He should have thus appeared without multiplying miracles.  But He chose to have a human mother in order that He might thus honor all mankind through her, and restore to all men a woman and a Mother who might return what Eve had lost for us.
    The most unfortunate and deplorable intellectual loss of our age is the loss of faith in Christ, and for Christians of all creeds that is the loss which interest in devotion to the Mother of Christ can restore.  We cannot honor her without, by that very fact, showing understanding and appreciation of God having become a man . . . and that He has a constant and active part in our struggle between good and evil.  Thus, to honor her presupposes and includes a supreme honor to Him.  She is a physical and intellectual link between ourselves and the Incarnation.  In associating her in the act of becoming man, God associated us . . . all mankind . . . in that act; and in asking her cooperation for the Incarnation and for the act of Redemption which followed, He asks us . . . because she is one of us.

    A diagram-description may help us to understand what all this means.
 
 

    From the fact that it was the Blessed Mother who appeared to the children, we are not to gather that mere devotion to Her will convert Russia . . . any more than Patrick Henry's speech freed America. But devotion to her brings about fuller devotion to Christ and thus to God . . . and the consequence of this in daily living is what will convert Russia.

Chapter VIII
There Will Be Peace
    Consequently there is a historical as well as a theological reason for saying that the modern loss of appreciation of the Blessed Virgin is not only concomitant with a decline of Christianity but is an integral part of that decline.  The restoration of our understanding and devotion to her will necessarily herald a fresh turn from the atheists' camp into a deeper and fuller knowledge and love of Christ.  This fact is not understood.
    Pope Pius X said:  "Unless devotion to the Blessed Virgin is restored as it should be, we will not have Christ restored to His rightful place."  Pope Leo XIII said: "We look to her for the salvation of the modern world."  Father Faber expressed it completely and firmly: "Devotion to Mary is not the prominent characteristic of our Religion which it ought to be.  It has no faith in itself.  Hence it is that Jesus is not loved, that heretics are not converted, that Christianity is not exalted; that souls, which might be Saints, wither and dwindle; that the Sacraments are not rightly frequented or souls enthusiastically evangelized.  Jesus is obscured because Mary is kept in the background . . . It is the miserable unworthy shadow which we call our devotion to the Blessed Virgin that is the cause of all the evils, omissions and declines."

    Pope Paul VI, proclaiming Mary as Mother of the Church at the closing of the third session of Vatican Council II on November 21, 1964, stated: "The intimate, the primary source of the sanctifying effectiveness of the Church is to be sought in its mystic union with Christ; a union which we cannot conceive as separate from her who is the Mother of the Word Incarnate and whom Jesus Christ Himself wanted closely united to Himself for our salvation."
    Our greatest danger to success in obtaining fulfillment of the glorious promise of Fatima is probably not the atheists (who are rather objects of the promise than persons expected to fulfill its conditions.)
    Perhaps our greatest danger lies in our own failure to accept such a simple solution to the world's problems, and to accept the message of Fatima for what it is.
    For those who want to be sure that they are carrying out the message of Fatima, they need only to make and keep the Blue Army pledge.  And if they want to be sure that they are effectively causing the message of Fatima to be fulfilled by others in the world, they need merely see that this pledge is made by others, even as they keep it themselves.
    By this effort the world-force of atheism is going to be converted.  How this will come about is something of which, as we have said, most of us have little idea.
    In a manner of speaking, Saul of Tarsus could be called the first "Red."  He was a short, stocky man with tremendous vitality, physical courage, sense of principle and leadership.  He was present when a Disciple of Jesus Christ (named Stephen.)  was hustled outside the gates of Jerusalem to be killed.  Saul joined, and helped murder the first Christian martyr.
    As Saint Stephen fell under a rain of stones, bleeding and dying, he cried out the words used by His Master a short time before: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."
    Saul mounted his horse.  Leaving Stiphen's battered corpse he started to ride towards the city of Damascus with letters entitling him to supervise and carry out the death of every Christian in the city.
    Can any of us imagine how different history might be if that fiery agent . . . Saul of Tarsus . . . had continued that ride and he, as well as all the agents of anti-christ, had succeeded in their immediate goal of exterminating Christianity?
    As he galloped along the road, lightning suddenly flashed from the sky and struck Saul from his horse!  Bruised and blind, he lay helpless in the dust of the road, and out of the sky came the majestic words: "Saul, Saul . . . why persecuteth thou ME?
    The world's first Red stumbled back upon his horse, made his way to Damascus, changed even his name to wipe out the past, and labored until he had turned the network of Roman roads into a highway to Christianity.  Saint Paul had been converted.
Today, Russia is a Saul of Tarsus. Many in Russia and in the Third International hate and persecute Christianity because they have been reared to an opposite ideology.  They do not know what they are doing.  The writer has talked with Communists in Europe and America, and he has yet to meet an atheist who understands Christianity.  For most of them, Alexander VI is still in the Vatican and Church property is what keeps the people poor.  Like Saul and his followers striking out at Stephen, they strike out because they confuse peace with materialism, they mistake socialism for love of society, the cross for defeat. They have no idea whatever of what the Angels meant when they sang over Bethlehem:  "Peace on earth to men of good will."
    Once again, lightning is going to strike from the sky . . . and militant atheism will fall into the dust, blinded momentarily to all their false ideas, and in that moment of  blind light they will hear the words:  "Why persecuteth thou Me?
    And they will rise.  They will go to the ends of their International . . . turning the perfection of their world organization and following into a highway to Christianity. And there will be peace . . . for humanity.
 
 

    The "Fatima Secret" has given rise to many discussions.  It has aroused the curiosity (though often not the zeal.)  of many people.  Let us read what the Bishop of Leiria tells us in his Pastoral Letter of July 25, 1966:

    "We feel well, dear diocesan people, how difficult it is, and even dangerous, to broach this subject.  But we cannot help doing so, although in few words, because now and then there appear certain affirmations and they assume certain attitudes which can only prejudice the Message of Fatima, which is all light.  In Her apparitions Our Lady came from the Orient in a perfect symbolic demonstration that She came from Christ, unfading light of the Father, which only leads to Christ.
    "More than once, not without certain difficulty as it was disagreeable, we had to give serious warnings over certain illusory and spectacular hopes which we need not repeat here.
    "Fatima's mission is not to fill with fantasies those who live, or wish to live, in dreams or hallucinations.  Fatima is a diaphanous light that comes from the East.
    "Neither is Fatima in accord with auguries of universal catastrophies.  Fatima cannot be seduced to sensational prophecies of terrible wars.  Much less can Her message, essentially pacific, be directed against any country, particularly, that well beloved nation Russia--a victim, alas, of doctrine that is very contrary to Her dearest traditions.  Fatima can never be a name given to party factions in which more earthly values and politics are at stake.
    "We affirm that Fatima is something far more serious than all that.  Fatima, in this, really exercises the whole meaning of a Church set eschatologicallly towards a future which is safe in the hands of God, but which is also comprised by the mystery of iniquity which is already at work. (2 Thess., 2, 7.)
    "We wish to say, dear diocesans that nobody can place in Fatima, in spite of all its immense power of intercession before God Our Lord, an illusory hope that has not been consolidated in the holy fear of God, the beginning of His love; (Ecc., 25, 16.) in perserving prayer, based on the infinite merits of Christ, and in the intercession of Our Lady.  It is always within these great Christian truths that Fatima works the prodigies of divine mercy in these times for the Church.
    "It is in this meaning that the Church's eschatologic future has to be unrolled.  It is in this perspective that Fatima must be understood, and in this acquire the full significance of those consoling words: 'In the end my Immaculate Heart will triumph.' "

    Cardinal Ottaviani, on the 11th of February, 1967, said:

    "She (Lucia.) has written in Portuguese, on a sheet of paper, what the Holy Virgin has asked her to say to the Holy Father.
    " . . . The envelope containing the secret of Fatima was handed to the Bishop of Leiria and, though Lucia has told him that he might read it, he wouldn't do it.  He wanted to respect the secret, perhaps as a sign of respect to the Holy Father.  He delivered it to the Apostolic Nuncio, then Msgr. Cento present here.  Msgr. Cento transmitted it carefully to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and, always closed, it was given to Pope John XXIII.  The Pope opened the envelope, and read its contents.  Though the text was written in Portuguese, he told me that he had understood it thoroughly.  Then he himself put it into another envelope, sealed it and laid it in one of those archives which are like a deep and black, black well in the bottom of which no one sees anything at all.  So it is very difficult to say where the secret of Fatima is now.
    "Meanwhile, what matters is the public message.  The secret is a matter for the Holy Father, to whom it was addressed.  It was he who was the addressee.
    "If the addressee of the secret has not decided to declare: 'Now is the moment to make it known to the world,' we must be content with his wisdom which wished it to remain a secret.
    "What matters, is that we should know how to conform our life, our actions and our activities with the spirit of the public message, as Lucia was not only charged to transmit the secret to the Pope, but to make known the public message to all the world; the public message, which is condensed into these two words: Prayer and Penance."

   (From the address of Cardinal Ottaviani given on the 11th of February, 1967, when the 50th Anniversary of the Apparitions of Our Lady at Fatima was celebrated in Rome at the Antonianum.)
 
 

    Dear Queen and Mother, who promised at Fatima to convert Russia and bring peace to all mankind, in reparation to your Immaculate Heart for my sins and the sins of the whole world, I solemnly promise: 1) To offer up every day the sacrifices demanded by my daily duty:  2)  To say part of the Rosary (five decades)  daily while meditating on the Mysteries;  3)  To wear the Scapular of Mt. Carmel as a profession of this promise and as an act of Consecration to you.  I shall renew this promise often, especially in moments of temptation.

    A complete pledge blank will be sent to anyone who sends a stamped self-addressed envelope to the Blue Army, Washington, New Jersey,  07882.

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