Editor’s Note: Today – October 25, 2024 – marks the 107th anniversary of the outbreak of the horrific Bolshevik Revolution which destroyed traditional Russian society and created the first Communist nation on earth.
Our Lady appeared at Fatima to forewarn us and avert this disaster from overtaking the entire world. Since Her requests have gone unheeded, the errors of Russia have now spread throughout the world and claimed well over 100 million lives.
Communism’s death toll far exceeds that of any other ideology or political system. Yet it remains a powerful and popular belief system today, in part because it is adept at propagandizing, morphing, and cloaking itself in deceit. The latest issue of The Fatima Crusader (see below) serves to unmask Communism’s global influence. The Fatima Center will post additional articles on this topic at our website in the coming weeks.
Papal Teaching
No one has been as vigilant as the Roman Pontiffs in issuing warnings to the people about every destructive socio-political development since the toppling of the order of Altar and Throne during the so-called Age of Democratic Revolution – meaning the violent overthrow of Catholic confessional states by the enemies of Christ and His Church.
Thus, to provide just two examples, in 1864, Pope Pius IX issued his Syllabus of Errors, condemning the separation of Church and State and the unlimited “freedom of thought” that were leading to the total abandonment of religion in public life and the moral collapse of an entire once-Christian civilization. Next came Pope Leo XIII, who authored the landmark encyclicals Libertas Praestantissimum (On the Nature of Human Liberty) and Immortale Dei (On the Christian Constitution of States). In 1878, Leo’s encyclical Inscrutabili Dei Consilio (On the Evils of Society) warned that “the widespread subversion of the primary truths on which, as on its foundations, human society is based” was a “deadly kind of plague which infects [it] in its inmost recesses, allowing it no respite and foreboding ever fresh disturbances and final disaster.”
A Deadly Plague
That “final disaster” arrived in the form of Soviet Communism, the means by which the “errors of Russia,” including official state atheism, abortion on demand, and divorce would spread throughout the world. Marx’s theoretical construct would take shape in Russia after the defeat of the communistic Paris Commune by the forces of the “Party of Order” in 1871, leaving France still in the grip of a revolutionary process that would equate opposition to Socialism with “conservatism” while abandoning any possible return to the Christian constitution of states essayed by Pope Leo.
The Church – Bulwark Against Communism
Following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, and the subsequent spread of Communism to China and Southeast Asia with the aid of the Communist International (Comintern), Pius XI, in 1937, issued his own landmark encyclical Divini Redmptoris (On Atheistic Communism) in which he issued this grave warning concerning Communism:
[O]ne convulsion following upon another has marked the passage of the centuries, down to the revolution of our own days. This modern revolution, it may be said, has actually broken out or threatens everywhere, and it exceeds in amplitude and violence anything yet experienced in the preceding persecutions launched against the Church. Entire peoples find themselves in danger of falling back into a barbarism worse than that which oppressed the greater part of the world at the coming of the Redeemer. This all too imminent danger, Venerable Brethren, as you have already surmised, is bolshevistic and atheistic Communism, which aims at upsetting the social order and at undermining the very foundations of Christian civilization.
“In the face of such a threat,” Pius XI continued, “the Catholic Church could not and does not remain silent. This Apostolic See, above all, has not refrained from raising its voice, for it knows that its proper and social mission is to defend truth, justice, and all those eternal values which Communism ignores or attacks.”
Pius XI went on to reference the aforementioned Syllabus of Pius IX – much maligned by “liberal Catholics” today, who have essentially “made peace” with the very revolution in the socio-political order that threatens to destroy them and even the Church, were that possible. In the Syllabus, wrote Pius XI, his predecessor had prophetically condemned – not long before the fall the of Paris Commune – “that infamous doctrine of so-called Communism which is absolutely contrary to the natural law itself, and if once adopted would utterly destroy the rights, property, and possessions of all men, and even society itself.”
And so it was. Marxian Communism in practice – the “errors of Russia” then spreading throughout the world – involved, as Pius XI wrote, a “pseudo-ideal of justice, of equality and fraternity in labor [that] impregnates all its doctrine and activity with a deceptive mysticism… in substance based on the principles of dialectical and historical materialism previously advocated by Marx.” According to this system, “there is in the world only one reality, matter, the blind forces of which evolve into plant, animal, and man. Even human society is nothing but a phenomenon and form of matter, evolving in the same way… towards the final synthesis of a classless society.”
The moral results of this “philosophy” from the pit of hell were already evident: “[T]here is no room for the idea of God; there is no difference between matter and spirit, between soul and body; there is neither survival of the soul after death nor any hope in a future life.” From which follows, as night follows day, the total negation of Christian morality, particularly in the realm of marriage, family, and procreation, and the banishment of the Church from any influence over the body politic, even where the Church is not openly persecuted. And this total debasement of civilization, even in 1937, was the result, said Pius, of “the rapid diffusion of the Communistic ideas now seeping into every nation, great and small, advanced and backward, so that no corner of the earth is free from them.”
The Church Infiltrated – Apostasy
That is, the spread of the “errors of Russia” throughout the world. The Fatima prophecy fulfilled in consequence of the failure to consecrate Russia – and only Russia, not an assortment of objects to obscure the act – to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. And now, as the ultimate consequence of that failure, we are living amid the events foretold in the Third Secret of Fatima: the apostasy in the Church that “begins at the top,” as Cardinal Ciappi revealed. From which our only hope of rescue is the inevitable final and definitive Consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. We can only hope and pray that this will occur before the devastation depicted in the visional aspect of the Secret – from which precisely those at “the top” of the Church have stripped the words of the Blessed Virgin, which surely foretell the state of affairs we now endure.
O Holy Virgin Mary, Who destroys all heresies, pray for us!
Read more about how the ‘errors of Russia’ have spread across the world in the 133rd Issue of The Fatima Crusader (Fall 2024), Communism: An Error of Russia.