Editor’s Note: Our Lady’s Fatima Message is one of eternal salvation during these perilous times: for individual souls, for the world, and for the Church. And as Our Lady Herself declared, only She can help us now. This is why The Fatima Center unceasingly strives to make the Fatima Message fully known, understood, and lived by all. Sister Lucia underscored this truth in a 1946 interview with John Haffert, clarifying that once there is a sufficient number of people fulfilling Our Lady’s requests, the Pope will receive the grace to consecrate Russia. Hearing this, people of good will naturally ask, “What does it mean to live the Message of Fatima?” The most recent Issue of The Fatima Crusader (#135) answers just that question. It contains 21 one-page articles, each dealing with one practice essential to Catholic life. They can all be summed up as a threefold spiritual orientation of Conversion, Reparation, and Consecration. Frère Michel de la Sante Trinité addresses each of these three spiritual themes in his magnus opus, a three-volume work entitled The Whole Truth About Fatima. What follows is an excerpt from his work which details how the theme of Consecration is related to the Message of Fatima.
“God wishes to establish in the world devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.” To this end He wishes to give us a striking proof that through Her, and only through Her, can we be saved from the frightful perils that menace us. Faced with an eternal hell, faced with the hell on earth of the Bolshevik Gulag, God presents the Immaculate Heart of Mary to us as the final recourse, the last hope of salvation for a world on the way to perdition.
This is the oracle which Our Lady repeats insistently: “You have seen hell, where the souls of poor sinners go.” And on June 13, 1929, the events speak for themselves. [We can imagine Our Lady telling us:] ‘You have seen the famines, the wars and the persecutions which overwhelm the poor people abandoned to the living hell of the communist Gulag, the veritable empire of satan.’ Well, Our Lady repeats insistently, to save them “God wishes to establish in the world devotion to My Immaculate Heart.”
It is in the tragic context of 1929, when Stalin was bringing the bloody terror and the horrors of the Gulag to their height, that the great divine promise must be understood. Lucia writes, “It was at this time that Our Lord informed me that the moment had come for me to let the Holy Church know His desire for the consecration of Russia and His promise to convert it.” In another place Sister Lucia calls it His promise “to end the persecution in Russia,” “His promise to save it.” Finally the atrocious butchery, the cynically planned famines, the persecutions, the harassment by the police, the stupid and inhumane socialization, all that was to be ended by the all-powerful intervention of the Mother of God, this Theotokos so beloved to the Russian people who continued to venerate Her icons in secret. …
Clearly, by establishing such a close connection between the conversion of Russia and its consecration to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, God wants to show us how supremely pleasing this consecration is to Him, not only for Russia, but for all nations. What Lucia says about the “Portuguese miracle” applies, a fortiori, to the conversion of Russia. She wrote to Pope Pius XII: “This will be the proof of the graces God would have granted to other nations, if like Portugal they had been consecrated to Her.”
If this is the case, it is clear that all other societies, and persons themselves, will receive great graces by consecrating themselves to the Immaculate Heart of Mary… This is because it is the best way of accepting fully, with love and humility, all the mediations willed by God… All those who exercise any authority, the Pope at the head of the Church, the bishop in his diocese, the King as the head and father of his nation, the pastor in his parish, the father in his family – to show that they hold this authority from God and intend to use it in His name and in conformity with His will – must publicly make this act of obedience to the divine Good Pleasure of the Heavenly Father and His Son. However small or large their flock may be, they must consecrate it to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, which is inseparable from the Sacred Heart of Jesus, as to their King and their Queen, to Whom they belong and Who enjoy the full right of true sovereignty. They can be sure that in exchange for this filial recognition of their power, the Holy Hearts of Jesus and Mary will mercifully bless, protect, and fill with graces all those who shall be confided to Them.
(From The Whole Truth about Fatima, Vol. II, pp. 493-497.)