Dead or Red? The Great Dilemma of Our Time in the Fatima Perspective
Our Lady at Fatima: Prophecies of Tragedy or Hope for America and the World? was first published in Brazil in 1967 under the title “Simples relato do que se passou em Fatima, quando Nossa Senhora apareceu.” There it has gone through twenty-three printings to date. The book has also had a Portuguese edition. It has circulated all over the Spanish-speaking world in twenty printings and in Italy with five printings. It has been transcribed in periodicals of the English-speaking world such as Crusade for a Christian Civilization magazine (New York) and TFP Newsletter (Johannesburg). I trust the present expanded edition will be successful as well.
This work by Mr. Antonio Augusto Borelli is the result of an extensive research from various sources that he proceeds to carefully analyze. lt is an intelligent, articulate, and accomplished ensemble of all the facts that are at the heart of the message of Fatima, accompanied by a penetrating and judicious interpretation of several of its aspects.
The American TFP has asked me to write the foreword to this edition thoughtfully coauthored by Mr. John R. Spann.
On accepting the kind invitation, it seemed to me that nothing could be of greater interest to contemporary man -especially American readers- than showing how the contents of the Fatima message bear on the issue of war and peace, particularly when it is considered from the standpoint of the cruel dilemma, ”Better Red than dead” vs. “Better dead than Red.” This is what I will attempt below.
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It is crystal-clear to a great majority of our contemporaries that this is the fundamental dilemma we all face.
In 1917, a few months prior to communism’s seizure of power in Russia and twenty-eight years before the first atomic bomb exploded in Hiroshima, the message of Fatima presented Divine Providence’s solution to this awesome problem with supernatural clarity. Our Lady gave straightforward guidelines for this grave matter through the three little shepherds at Cova da Iria.
For one thing, her message speaks of the errors of Russia
and indicates the means to prevent their spreading. It points to communism as the great punishment to which mankind is exposed on account of its religious and moral decline. So, communism clearly appears as the scourge of Divine Providence for chastising the nations, especially in the West. Nevertheless, men can avoid this by abandoning the mire of irreligion and immorality and by returning to the profession of the true Faith and the practice of Christian morality.
More precisely, a large nun1ber of persona! conversions would not be enough, according to the me sage, to comply with Our Lady’s will. It is necessary that each nation as a whole, particularly in the West devastated by agnosticism and permissiveness, convert to the ultimate consequences and follow the perenni.al moral precepts of the Gospel.
The message, therefore, is not limited to pointing out the danger; it also tells us how to avoid it: not by dying nor much less by becoming communist but rather by fulfilling the will of God and heeding the message of His Mother, the Mother of us all. Let us not forget that one of the conditions for this is the consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary in the terms she requested.
But the message goes even further. lt warns that if this is not done, the justice of God will no longer be restrained. “If they listen to my requests, Russia will convert and there will be peace; if not, it will spread its errors throughout the world, promoting wars and persecutions of the Church. The good will be martyred; the Holy Father will have much to suffer, and several nations will be annihilated. Finally, my Immaculate Heart will triumph.”
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It must be noted that the message does not say that the scourge of communism will be purged from the world without a struggle, be it bloody or unbloody, by merely doing what the Queen of Heaven and Earth requested in order to appease the wrath of God. Rather, the message suggests admirable interventions of Divine Providence in human events that will ensure victory over the communist scourge. At the same time, it leaves an open door to the hypothesis that men may have to contribute to this fight by heroic participation in the great battles wherein the sovereign and crucial help of the Virgin will decide the victory. Indeed, the message excludes the hypothesis of a definitive victory of communism. If men heed the appeal of the Virgin, communism will be defeated without any chastisement for them; if they fail to heed her appeal, communism will scourge them but will be overcome in the end.
In either of the two hypotheses, the Mother of God will be victorious.
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We should point out that, from the Fatima perspective, the chastisement will not be prevented primarily by weapons, however powerful they may be. A high degree of deterrence attained by strong Western defenses can be a legitimate and necessary means to prevent war. However, Our Lady describes the expansion of communism as a punishment resulting from the sins of men. This punishment will not be avoided if men do not convert.
One of the means by which the chastisement could be unleashed upon impenitent n1en may well be the spreading of an unconditional anti-armament stand of a purely emotional, and therefore shortsighted, character. This would prompt manifold attacks by an ever more armed adversary.
But, mind you, war is by no means Divine Providence’s preferred way of checking the communist scourge. The means are the regeneration of men, compliance with the message, and the conversion of Russia. Divine Providence might want to use a war to prepare the ground for its conversion. But this is not mentioned in the message. At any rate, a mere military victory over Russia will neither solve the problem nor keep men away from the Red-or-dead alternative. God wants more; He wants to convert Russia. And it is beyond question that for this He does not need a war. If the West converts, it seems more likely that Russia would be converted by peaceful, persuasive religious means. To be sure, what the message promises is its conversion to the Catholic religion with the corresponding staunch anticommunist position as held by the whole of the Catholic hierarchy at the time when the Fatima message was given to men.
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What is the relationship between this genuine conversion and the extinction of the communist scourge? The answer is obvious. The main focus of world communist propaganda is in the Kremlin; the conversion of Russia would annul it.
Furthermore, a converted Russia would readily and entirely open up to the West. That would make it possible for all men to know much more profoundly and objectively the abyss of spiritual and material evils into which it and its satellites have been cast by long decades under the communist regime. This would open wider the eyes of the peoples of the West to the falsehoods of communist propaganda, immunizing them against it.
Once again I insist: In the Fatima perspective, the conversion of the West is a prerequisite for the conversion of Russia. Moreover, the West’s total abhorrence of communism would result from a sincere and profound conversion, which is obviously what the Blessed Virgin wants.
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Fatima tell us nothing about China, Vietnam, Cambodia, or the misfortune of the other nations under the communist yoke. Nevertheless, it stand to reason that Our Lady, who would wondrously protect a converted West from war, would not fail to also shower those great nations with the same graces of conversion. ln addition, the regimes of Ru ia ‘s Eastern European satellites would stand no chance of maintaining their current status inside a converted Europe.
Regarding the other people, the Christian virtue of hope gives us, or rather, I would say it impose upon us, the certainty that they will be given the mean to break their chains and to know and practice the true Faith.
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Undoubtedly, the above reflections will provoke a skeptical and disdainful attitude in some minds. Men without faith and their kin-those with little faith-will smile and consider these reflections a disconcerting and childish simplification of the conten1porary problems that push the West toward communism and perhaps to war. They will fancy it ridiculous, perhaps even mad, to look for the solution to these problems in the candid message announced by three illiterate shepherd children.
I do not deny the inextricable complexity of contemporary problems. On the contrary, I think their complexity is such as to make them appear humanly insurmountable. This is all the more so since the research and debates of men without faith or with little faith, who try to solve these problems, only make them more complicated.
Do they allege superficiality? I certainly think there is superficiality -not in our camp, but in that of the skeptics. Indeed, I see that for the most part they have a profoundly ignorant, always a priori, and superficial conception of what religion is, of its role in the life of society and individuals, and of its irreplaceable and vigorous potential for solving the problems they are unsuccessfully trying to solve.
This is not the place to elaborate on this lengthy subject. But I cannot resist the desire to help skeptical readers glimpse, as though through a keyhole, at this vast horizon of the assets of religion.
Saint Augusti ne depicts a truly Christian society, the city of God, with its ensuing benefits for the state. ”An army made up of soldiers trained after the doctrine of Jesus Christ; governors, husbands and spouses, parents and children, masters and servants, kings and judges, taxpayers and tax collectors, as the Christian religion has taught that men should be. And then let them (the pagans) dare say that it is adverse to the state’s well-being; rather, let them no longer hesitate to confess that this doctrine, if it were obeyed, would be the salvation of the state.” (Letter 138 2:15)
Due to the unfortunate dynamism of fallen human nature and to the operation of the devil and his earthly agents, man’s inclination to be and act in opposition to the Faith increases to the degree that he departs from it. This is Catholic doctrine. The greater the distance, the greater the transgressions something reminiscent of Newton’s law, something confirmed by experience, incidentally, particularly in our days.
If a society, impelled by the same dynamism of unbelief and corruption, carne to the total transgression of the principles on which the city of God described by Saint Augustine is founded, what political, social, or economic school could prevent its final collapse without the aid of religion?
If men fail to return to these saving principles, nothing will spare individuals and societies a global deterioration of undefinable nature and proportions that will become all the more frightening the longer the process of degeneracy continues and the deeper it penetrates.
Nothing could be more just than for men or nations less affected by this deterioration to ward off the onslaughts of more affected men and nations by arming themselves in a peace-loving attitude of vigilance and deterrence, albeit in readiness for a vigorous and victorious defense.
However, by that alone they will not render obsolete the noxious ferment of modern neopaganism installed in their innermost fibers. This is implicit in the whole message of Fatima.
In view of this consideration, one can better perceive another aspect of the chastisement: its cleansing, regenerating, and reordering character. Interrupting an endless process of individual and collective degradation that portends the greatest risks for the salvation of innumerable souls, the chastisement would effect an about-face, opening men’s eyes to the gravity of their sins, elevating them to the highest levels of contrition and amendment, and, finally, giving them true peace.
Alas, how many will perish! But they will have better conditions to die in the grace of God even as Saint Peter wrote of those who died in the Flood. (See 1 Peter 3:20.)
To die! What sorrow! But noble souls know that death is not necessarily the greater evil. In this, Judas Maccabeus set an example for posterity when he cried, “lt is better for us to die in battle than to see the evils of our nation and of the holies.” (1 Maccabees 3:59)
In current terms, it is better to die than to become Red.
But even better still is to live. Yes, to live the supernatural life of grace on this earth, so as later to live eternally in the glory of God.
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I do not think there is any explicit reference to these last considerations in the message. Nevertheless, they are commonsense and easily understood by unprejudiced and fair-minded people.
The message describes what God will do to punish the sins of a pertinaciously impenitent humanity. Indeed, the message has echoed around the world for seven decades and has not succeeded in converting men. More specifically, it has not succeeded in converting Catholics, upon whose prayers, penances, and amendment the Virgin counts most especially to help hold back the effects of her Divine Son’s wrath and to obtain the coming of her reign. The message says nothing of how the just-those who chose to be receptive to the promises of Our Lady-will be assisted by God during the terrible days of the punishment nor does it say what is wanted of them on that occasion.
Obviously, I am alluding here only to the published part of the message. I know of no absolutely unquestionable conjecture about what the contents of the secret part of the message might be. Only the Holy See knows…
Let me voice here the sadness and perplexity of innumerable faithful among the most fervent Fatima devotees at the possibility of men not being given the chance to know the unrevealed part of the message, even when it could encourage the just and bring those who have gone astray to repentance. Indeed, it is inconceivable that the Mother of Mercy, so willing to help all men with her message, would fail to convey special words of affection, encouragement, and hope for those of whom she asks the arduous and glorious mission of remaining faithful to her in this terrible contingency.
Nothing prevents us from supposing that such words might be in the yet undisclosed part of the secret of Fatima.
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This last consideration sidetracked me from the train of thought I was following. I have only a little left to say.
Probing further into the hypothesis of the punishment, we could say that the context of the message leads us to believe that it would be at least twofold. It might consist of (1) wars that include not only conflicts between nations but civil wars as well, and (2) cataclysms of nature.
Will these internecine wars have an ideological character? Will they be conflicts between faithful and infidels of all kinds (open or veiled heretics or schismatics, non-Christian groups, atheists, and so on)? Or will they be wars without any official ideological connotation like the Franco-Prussian conflict of 1870 or World War I?
The distinction between wars and natural catastrophes seemed very clear in 1917 when the message was communicated to men. Then it seemed impossible for men to provoke cataclysms, which were perceived to result from Divine Justice acting upon the elements of nature.
In reality, this distinction is still valid but with the qualification that men have acquired the possibility of provoking cataclysms of incalculable proportions through atomic fusion without, at the san1e time, having acquired the power to halt them. As a consequence, a future atomic catastrophe of a war engendered by sin would itself alone produce the cosmic chastisements to which the message alludes. But it is also possible that other natural disturbances determined by God will be added to the effects of an atomic hecatomb.
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One observation remains to be made. From the Fatima perspective, the real guarantee against the catastrophe that the future might hold for men lies much less-and in one sense, not at all-in disarmament policies, peace treaties, and so on than in their conversion. In other words, the punishment will come if they do not convert, no matter how hard they may try to avoid it by other means.
On the other hand, if they do amend, God will not only withdraw the plenitude of His vengeful wrath from them but will grant them all the conditions necessary for the preservation of a real and enduring peace. This will be the peace of Christ in the reign of Christ. More specifically, it will be the peace of Mary in the reign of Mary.
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I hope these reflections, which bring the Blessed Virgin’s message to bear on such current problems, will help the reader to draw every possible benefit from this timely synthesis on Fatima.
