Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira

In the article "Be Consistent," published on May 9, commenting about the unusual luminous phenomenon observed in the skies of the United States on the night of April 12, 1981, I said that this phenomenon could very well be a sign announcing chastisements for mankind, as was the aurora borealis observed in Europe in 1938.

My conjecture stems from the revelations Our Lady made at Fatima to three little shepherds in six apparitions, from May 13 to October 13, 1917. She said that the world was in a state of generalized and very grave sin, an offense to God provoking His wrath. As the Mother of God and the Mother of men She was striving to avoid this by praying for men and asking the world to amend, to stop sinning and to do penance. The sins were impiety   that is, lack of faith  and impurity. She also asked that the Pope consecrate Russia to Her Immaculate Heart.

In one of the apparitions, that of July 1917, She revealed three secrets. The first was a vision of hell; the second was that Russia would spread its errors throughout the world and some nations would disappear. The third secret, probably a message for the whole world was known only by the recent Popes and a few other people to whom it might have been told.

From that time on, impiety and the corruption of morals have increased enormously. Russia has indeed spread its errors throughout the world. The essential conditions requested by Our Lady at Fatima have not been met. A chastisement is to be feared. Was World War II not a chastisement, preceded by a strikingly uncommon aurora borealis? According to statements made by Sister Lucy after the apparitions, the chastisement began with World War II. From this stand point, the present "state of war" would be a continuation of World War II.

Furthermore, the luminous phenomenon recently seen in the United States   aurora borealis or not, its scientific classification is unimportant - permits one to conjecture that what follows 1981 will be symmetrical to what followed 1938.

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The assassination attempts against John Paul II and Reagan, for example, had proximate and specific causes which we, the public, are ignorant of because they were not sufficiently investigated. But the general state of disorder, tension, and unrest in the whole world is somehow reflected in these attempts. And this unrest can be seen as the effect of impiety and moral corruption.

With respect to the attempt on John Paul II's life, I see a special link to Fatima: previous to it many people, caught up in the general optimism, didn't take the warning of Fatima seriously. Then came the attack which with good reason traumatized the whole world. It can be seen as the expression of the profundity of a state of disorder that may give rise to the wars and catastrophes foretold in Fatima. Countless people tell themselves they didn't think things would go so far. The attack made them see that we live in terrible days and that, if we don't open our ears to the message of Fatima, we may very well be surprised by the punishments foreseen by Our Lady.

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Brazil's current situation participates in the agitation of the world. It is part of an ensemble of circumstances that could give rise to an even greater expansion of the errors of Communism, as well as tensions and agitations of all kinds, within the panorama described by Our Lady at Fatima.

Let's take the Ten Commandments of the Law of God as the criteria for our judgement. If we compare the morals prevalent in the Brazil of 1917 with those of today, we will see that if the Commandments were then transgressed to a degree "x," they are now transgressed to a degree "x times x." And the implantation of divorce in Brazil vividly shows how far people's morality has strayed from the Commandments. The same can be said of the widespread practice of contraception.

In the socioeconomic field, there is the socialization not only of half the industries, but progressively of all private property through colossal taxation; concentration of the population, of which a large part is in grave need, in overgrown urban centers when our country has an abundance of undeveloped State owned land that should be populated; the almost inexhaustible resources of the sea, insufficiently exploited to support the population, and so on. This picture causes profound concern.

Not only do we have a number of problems, but they are the kind that communism infects, aggravates and feeds on. So we draw near the fulfillment of Our Lady's prediction, "communism will spread its errors..."

Here, then, is the profound link between the message of Fatima and the present state of mankind.