There’s a new argument going around that says that Russia HAS ALREADY been consecrated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, thus fulfilling Our Lady’s request at Fatima. We should be wary of this ill-begotten position, however.
The argument goes something like this: Russia, unlike other places in the world, has its churches open and is a Christian nation once again following all those years of tyranny. Therefore, the consecration was completed. Half of the world’s Eastern Orthodox live in Russia and are practicing happily in contrast with western civilization and its lockdown paranoia. With all the burgeoning joy of Christian love in Russia, we can set aside our Fatima-fundamentalist concerns over a consecration. The issue resolved itself with the culmination of communism in the east. Russia was consecrated; let’s worry about our business now. At least that’s what we’re being told.
This of course ignores the fact that the consecration has never been attempted the way Our Lady requested (by the Pope in communion with ALL the bishops of the world). To his credit, St. Pope John Paul II attempted a consecration in 1981, but he failed to command the bishops to join him. This doesn’t matter to those who think Russia has turned a new leaf away from its days behind the Iron Curtain. Some even go as far as to say that Russia has officially adopted Christianity as its state religion (this is false; no evidence for it), disavowing the several decades of forced atheism.
Nevertheless, if we confine our understanding of Russia to reality, we can plainly see that the fruits of Russia are rotten and indicative of a place NOT consecrated to Our Lady’s Immaculate Heart. Russia leads the world in abortions. It’s near the top of the world in other categories such as suicide, alcoholism, single motherhood, divorce, etc. If you think the U.S. is bad with abortion (it is!), you don’t want to delve too deeply into Russia. They have 53.7 abortions per 1,000 women. The U.S. has 20.8 per 1,000 women. In other words, the U.S. is closer to being abortion-free than it is to Russia’s astronomical rate. The second-most-child-slaughtering country is Vietnam (the USSR’s old commie buddy), which kills at a rate of 35.2 per 1,000. Kazakhstan is third at 35 per 1,000 women. Most of the world’s worst offenders are connected to the old Soviet bloc one way or another. Their child-murdering habits give no indication that they ever repudiated material atheism and totalitarianism.
I could spend all day detailing why Russia remains economically backwards and has been the great harbinger for everything American and wretched in the 2020’s, but the abortion issue tells the story with perfect lucidity. Would it be much of a stretch to say that abortion is the perfect proxy for communism and brutality? Russia, just like the US, doesn’t engage in child sacrifice either. That’s being way too generous. That implies that women committing their abortions VALUE their children beforehand. Unlike Abraham, who didn’t want to sacrifice Isaac but was willing to do so out of fealty to God, today’s women place no value in their offspring. Most find the prospect of motherhood contemptible, an obstacle to further fornication, and an economic albatross. This means that their abortions are nothing better than an outright slaughter, and the eugenicist dictators, marionetted by Satan, are overjoyed by it. Russia, the U.S., and the rest of western civilization fall squarely into this demonic paradigm.
These countries never truly disavowed communism. They may have renamed their authoritarianism or dressed it with a different set of trousers. Irrespective of whether we choose to acknowledge it, the U.S. has a long love affair with all 10 Planks of Marxism. It takes nothing more than a pair of working eyes to see the obvious horror of these social-political circumstances for a world that’s not even in the ballpark of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. To suggest otherwise, would be to diminish the purity and splendor of Her Immaculate Heart to the point of blasphemy.
If we take seriously Our Lord’s admonition of “by their fruits, you’ll know them,” then we ought to ponder long and hard about the condition of the Russian Federation (still second in the world in suicides) and whether it comports itself to the holiness of the Blessed Virgin. It’s either that or we have completely misunderstood the significance of a consecration. Bad fruits come not only from false prophets and bad teachers, but also from wicked nations that follow the model of the Old Testament kings, ignoring the good prophets and warnings from heaven:
“Sedecias was one and twenty years old when he began to reign: and he reigned eleven years in Jerusalem. And he did evil in the eyes of the Lord his God, and did not reverence the face of Jeremias the prophet speaking to him from the mouth of the Lord.“
– 2 Chronicles 36: 11-12.
The visions of Our Lady of Fatima were not only seen by the three holy children: Lucia, Jacinta, and Francisco, but by some 70,000 others as well. Although the Church will never elevate an apparition of private revelation to the binding level of holy scripture, and by extension, God’s holy prophets, we have good reason to believe that Our Lady of Fatima was the most significant revelation since St. John’s Apocalypse. When clergy and secular rulers ignore such warnings, they do so at the peril of their subjects and citizens, just like Sedecias and the Old Testament kings did by ignoring Jeremiah and the prophets.
We don’t have to be part of any “Cult of Fatima” to see that Russia spread her errors long ago and has not since recovered. Pray for the consecration of Russia. Pray for the poor Russians. Pray for the healing of the entire world, which has had an Iron Curtain descend upon it.
Catholics Aren't Zombies! 