During the Summer of 2020, I began downloading and listening to Robert Sungenis’ Tuesday and Wednesday night Q&A. I like the questions from the audience and his willingness to give as much time as needed to deal with them. By November 2020, Robert had gotten many questions about Our Lady of Fatima, and I was enthused to hear him say that he was writing a new book on the topic, enthused, because several years back he and I had discussed in the pages of this magazine the “validity” of the consecrations of John Paul II and to what extent the age of Fatima was over. Dr. Sungenis had argued that the age of Fatima was not over. No Pope had properly carried out the consecrations that Mary asked for. I argued that John Paul II did so and that the age of Fatima was over. As it turns out, both of our theses were wrong in different ways, and his current book explains why.

For those who are new to Our Lady of Fatima, the best introduction is the book of that name by William Walsh. Dr. Sungenis’ book is still worth reading as it puts the visions, the secrets and the prophecies connected to the visions in their proper historical light.

To get to the heart of this controversy, in 1917 and 1929, Mary asked Lucia to consecrate Russia to her Immaculate Heart. If this were done, along with a return to penance and reparation for sins, it would begin the conversion of Russia and initiate a period of peace in the world.

In 2013, Dr. Sungenis argued that no pope had properly consecrated Russia following the instructions of Mary, that is to say, in union with the Bishops of the world and naming Russia by name in the consecration. In the Introduction to the current book, Sungenis provides a useful chart showing what element of the consecration was left out by each successive Pope from Pius XII to Francis I. According to Sungenis’s 2013 argument, Mary had rejected all the consecrations of Russia, and the problems of the world could be reduced to one, the failure of the popes to consecrate Russia properly to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. According to his 2021 argument, newly discovered evidence shows that Mary accepted the partial or imperfect consecrations of Pius XII in 1942 and 1952.

After reviewing the failure of Pius XI to heed any message from Lucia, Sungenis focuses on the relationship between Lucia and Pius XII. In 1940, Lucia felt that “nobody took advantage of the opportunity” that the Holy Spirit gave to consecrate Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. In addition, men had not turned away from their sins. And so, much blood would be spilled in a war that would go slowly. That war began in 1939 and we now call it the Second World War.

On October 24, 1940, Sister Lucia wrote to Pius XII, claiming that the “Lord in several intimate communications has not stopped insisting on this request, promising lately to shorten the days of tribulation with which He was determined to punish the world for its crimes through war … if you will consecrate the world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, with a special mention of Russia.” Sungenis reviews the diplomatic concerns that held Pius XII from carrying out the consecration as instructed by Our Lord. Nevertheless, in 1942, he attempted the first consecration of the world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. In that consecration, he failed to make any special mention of Russia. According to Lucia, Jesus partially accepted the imperfect consecration, meaning that the War would end shortly, but that the imperfect consecration delayed the conversion of Russia to a later date.

The Effects of Pius XII's Consecrations

In 1952, Pius XII consecrated Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, but it is not clear whether he did this as instructed, that is, in union with the Bishops of the world. Admitting that the Consecration of 1952 may have been imperfect, Canon Casimir Barthas still observed that one could see beginning in 1953, the year in which Stalin died, the first fruits of the 1952 consecration. Kremlin bosses, while still anti-Christian, lightened their methods of domination and intimidation. The party began defunding foreign communist journals in France and other countries, their journals no longer openly insulted the Pope, and they even commented favorably on Pius XII’s Urbi et Orbi speech of 1955.

Sungenis then notes that Our Lord required more than the consecrations to bring about an end to the Communist plague. He also required prayer and penance of the faithful. Next, Sungenis adds an outline of events that strongly support the claim that the process of the conversion of Russia began already in the early 1950s. When understood in the light of larger geopolitical events, Sungenis’s argument makes sense. That is to say, in addition to the lightening of religious persecution in Russia after 1953, a 1964 US-Society peace treaty began a time of detente. In 1972, both countries signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, in 1975 the Helsinki Peace Accords, in 1979 the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, and two Arms Reduction Treaties in 1991 and 1993. By 1989 the Cold War was effectively over.

From the 1940s to the present, Russia has gradually transformed from a Communist nation to one of the few nations that openly supports Christianity. As early as 1943, Stalin allowed Russians to celebrate Easter, Christmas, and other holidays. He also legalized Orthodoxy as the state religion. In 1958, Khrushchev initiated a brief anti-religious campaign. At the same time, he raised taxes to support the Orthodox Church, indicating that the general religious campaign did not entail the violent murder of millions as happened during the Terror of the Bolsheviks. Since the Cold War ended, Russia has allowed Christianity to be taught in public schools, rebuilt more than 25,000 churches, banned homosexual propaganda directed at minors, banned advertising for abortion, and has become a beacon of hope for Christians in the West suffering reprisals as part of the larger cultural war against the Church. Sungenis lists three pages worth of examples of the emerging Christian practice of Russia. If Russia has not yet started promoting missionary activity to the now decadent West and other parts of the world, she certainly is building up a Christian foundation from which such activity could arise.

Sungenis also presents what for me were some surprising statistics. To begin, abortion rates are much higher in the Middle East, Central Asia, China, Latin America and Africa (in that order) than they are in Russia. In addition, LGBT propaganda and laws approving gay marriage are part and parcel of almost every formerly Christian country of the West. But the Russians have preserved the much more humanly wholesome and Christian teachings on matters related to the family. More Russians now go to Church on average than almost every Western European country. In short, if part of the message of Fatima is that after the consecration of Russia, she would give up her communist ways, and then be part of the solution to the world’s materialist-atheist problems, then the preponderance of evidence points in the direction that heaven has accepted the imperfect consecrations of the Popes, beginning with those of Pope Pius XII.

The same cannot be said for either the West in general or for the United States in particular. As one independent confirmation of this fact, on January 31, 2021, during Episode 360 of the 21st Century Wire Podcast, Patrick Hennigsen noted that a stark contrast emerges when one compares the perception of Russia and the United States in 1950 with 2021. In 1950, Russia was perceived as materialist, atheist, anti-freedom, and promoting communism all over the world. The US was perceived as God-fearing, freedom loving, and promoting the family and do-good capitalism all over the world. Now, Russia defends representative government, religious freedom, and the family while the US imposes War, authoritarian government at home and abroad, materialism, anti-family policies, and moral degeneracy.

A Christianizing Influence?

If one has followed in even a cursory fashion the narrative laid out in this magazine over the past twenty years, then the Pius XII’s Second Consecration in 1952 takes on even greater significance as part of preparing a pivotal year in history, one in which we can see both the weeds and the wheat emerging from the seeds of materialism in East and West. The year 1953 inaugurated the era in which the Americans shifted the anti-communist crusade into high gear. Ironically, 1953 was the year in which Russia was undergoing the gradual process of opening to Christianity, while the United States was initiating Machiavellian practices leading to the construction of the Evil Empire. In 1953 the CIA sponsored its first coup in Iran, soon to be followed by coups in Guatemala and Africa. In the 1950s, as Dave Wemhoff has exhaustively pointed out in his book, the Americans intensified their efforts to turn the institutions of the Catholic Church into instruments for advancing the doctrines of the American Empire. They did this through their promotion of John Courtney Murray in the pages of Time, and, eventually, through nefarious characters like Michael Novak coining terms like “the spirit of Vatican II” in the same magazine.

That trajectory most recently showed itself in a series of mini paper war debates surrounding the stolen election of Joe Biden and how the Catholic Bishops and the Pope responded to the inauguration of the new President. Early on, the Vatican asked the President of the USCCB, Archbishop Jose Gomez of Los Angeles, to delay publishing his first letter to President Biden. In that letter, Archbishop Gomez articulated a general spirit of cooperation with the new President, but also expressed his concern about potential disagreements over abortion and religious freedom. Apparently, Jesuit advisors of President Biden and Jesuit advisors of Pope Francis were hoping for a letter containing a greater hope for cooperation. In the hours and days that followed, two prominent American bishops went on record condemning Gomez’s letter as ill-timed.

The Jesuit advisors of Pope Francis and president Biden, as well as the Bishops who expressed their disapproval of Gomez’s letter limited their statements to vague statements like “there are several issues we can work with Biden on.” One priest writing for the Boston Pilot told Catholic simpletons that these events were all just like parents trying to bring their wayward children back to a sane lifestyle. The recriminations were like leaders disagreeing over what to do, over how to resolve this tension.

The commentators could not get more specific than offering platitudes, because, most likely there is only one issue in which they will be able to work on with the administration, and that is procuring funding to help assimilate Catholic immigrants into the American system. Other than that issue, I see no issue of importance where the Jesuit advisors will find themselves working with the Biden Administration in a spirit of cooperation that offers any real possibility of harmonizing the way the American Empire acts with respect to the common good. Put another way, if the first Catholic who said his faith wouldn’t affect his role as President was John F. Kennedy, and Kennedy’s Catholic operating system was given to him by John Courtney Murray, then, we do not simply have a case of leaders trying to bring back their wayward sons. We have at least some leaders coddling their sons for over 60 years while leading many into the sinful troughs of the American Empire. To the writer of the article in the Boston Pilot, claiming this is the equivalent of family politics, an obvious question would be, well, how well has your strategy been working out for you over the last 60 years?

If we were to survey the landscape of the American Empire, as Catholic leaders on both sides of the political isle have coddled its leaders over the last 60 years, what signs of progress do we see? It’s unfortunate that neither the Jesuit Advisors in DC nor in Rome nor the American Catholic Leadership seems capable or willing to get specific about potential dialogue with the New Administration, even if it were to mean critiquing indirectly serious issues. For example, does either side of the paper war debate have anything to say about the Iraq War, the War of Terror, or the War on Syria? Biden’s foreign policy team is the same one that revamped the War on Terror after the Arab Spring, bringing the world much closer to a serious war in Syria in 2013. They funded the rise of ISIS. Pope Francis led a prayer vigil that year to pray for peace in Syria, and an official in the State Department told me that the Vatican understood that the US was the country primarily responsible for the unjust situation in Syria. Pope John Paul II called the Iraq War a Tragedy. It led to his definitive split with Catholic neoconservatives. Do those who hope to cooperate with the Biden Administration have any real possibility of cooperating with his team on these important problems? Having won the graces of Biden, would they discuss with them how American foreign policy is the cause of so many refugees and immigrants that they seem so zealous to help? Probably not.

What about the economy and the great reset? The fifth commandment also condemns usury, inequality, and conditions that lead to famine. In the last year, the oligarchs, practicing a form of usury that would make Thrasymachus blush have further expanded economic inequalities in the US and throughout the world. The Lockdown has pushed parts of the world to the brink of famine. The fifth commandment also prohibits using humans as experiments in scientific research. Leaving abortion to the side, will Joe Biden’s Jesuit advisor, his local Bishop, or Catholic leaders in DC or Rome dialogue with his administration about these other areas covered by the 5th commandment? The Jesuit advisors seem keen on getting everyone compliant with the Covid Tyranny that the oligarchs have foisted on the world in the past year, destroying small businesses and lives throughout the world. They seem zealous in making sure everyone gets vaccinated in what is, in effect, a massive experiment in the effects of an untested MRNA vaccine. They have poised themselves for dialogue with American oligarchs and organizations like Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum. I see no evidence of any dialogue about the growing economic inequalities during the last year, the increase in suicides, and other sufferings that the oligarchs are imposing on the vast majority of humanity through the times of the pandemic. I see no signs of remorse for the destruction of the middle class in this country, especially that part of the middle class that makes up such a large portion of Catholics who still go to Mass.

One of the difficulties that the Jesuit advisors of Biden and Catholic leadership face is that most of their donors are rich Catholics, who tend to be subservient to the 10 percent or of that class of white collar professionals who serve the 10 percent. These Catholics tend to support liberal political candidates to a much greater degree than working class and middle class Catholics. Catholic Bishops are often in the position of trying to thread the needle between the majority of middle-class Catholics who would agree with them and the wealthier Catholics who voted for the Biden Team. I often sense an inability to piece together any sort of coherent narrative to explain events, and so, they limit themselves to pragmatic arrangements that they can make with governments behind the shadows offered by the paper wars.

No one involved in the paper wars which took place in January and February seems willing to ask the question of either side: “How is that approach going for you?” That is to say, the Biden’s Jesuit advisors and others have been taking the soft approach on abortion with Democratic candidates going back to the 1970s. Catholic neoconservatives have been urging the Bishops to take a hard line on abortion and religious freedom since the 1980s. In that time, the Democratic party has embraced neoliberal capitalism and the American war machine in ways we did not think were possible in the 1970s. The Republican party, the party of the War Machine in the 1980s and early 2000s, has not followed through on its promise to put justices on the Supreme Court who would respect the Right To Life. If both sides of this paper war were to take a step back, considering their positions in the light of the common good and with a little history, they most likely could come up with a more effective approach, but it would require each side to free themselves from the version of Americanism that each still clings to, that is to say, from the categories that Time magazine and John Courtney Murray provided them in the 1950s and 1960s.

Taking stock of the state of the Catholic Church in the American Empire, it seems that the Empire is poised to do far more damage around the world than anything predicted at Fatima. If anything, Russia as part of the prophecy of Fatima, offers a tiny point of light when compared to the havoc that the oligarchs and the American War Machine continue to wreak on the world. It does not seem that Catholic leadership in this country is prepared to offer something close to a diagnosis of the cause of the problem, and so, they will be left quibbling over how to put bandages on the effects.

The Consecrations of John Paul II

Sungenis has defended his claim that it is time to stop hoping for the perfect consecration. He observes that this will not stop Fatima zealots. Now that the 100th Anniversary of the Fatima apparitions has passed, some Fatima experts claim that the Pope has until 2029 to make a successful consecration of Russia. It could be that the world needs another appearance of Our Lady to address the new set of circumstances brought about by the oligarchs and the American Empire, and, as a final note, the events of the last five years. Sungenis’s book leads me to rethink the consecrations that John Paul II carried out in the 1980s. Those consecrations, however filled with piety they might have been, make less sense now.

In 2015, I was told an oral history of John Paul II’s consecrations of Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, which took place after his assassination attempt, culminating on March 25, 1984 in St. Peter’s Square, where the world and especially any nations under atheistic communism was consecrated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. The authoritative witness for this oral history, who was a priest-friend in Rome who relied on the witness of Cardinal Angelo Sodano, claimed, as the go-between the pope and Sister Lucy, that the world was on the verge of a massive nuclear war, that despite two failed attempts by John Paul II to do the consecration correctly, the conversion of Russia had already begun, and that Our Lady accepted the March 25th consecration to stave off impending doom.

In 2000, the Vatican released the Third Secret in Fatima, and some interpreters claimed that John Paul II’s assassination attempt was the fulfillment of the Third Secret. Now that I have read Sungenis’s book, it strikes me that the messages that Cardinal Sodano claimed to deliver to the Pope from Sister Lucia had eerie resonances with the messages that Lucia actually delivered to Pius XII from the 1940s to the 1950s. Were the accounts I heard in 2015 a confection of statements taken from earlier true statements, meant to entertain and convince any who still doubted? Was it the Vatican equivalent of Barak Obama and his administration watching the assassination of Osama bin Laden and his subsequent burial at sea?

However interesting such a debate might be, Sungenis’ book makes that question seem less important now, at least as far as the essential history of Fatima goes. Pius XII carried out two partially successful consecrations. World War II did come to an end. After 1952, as Sungenis points out, the USSR’s persecution of Christians softened and put into motion a gradual process that is still going on in our day.

How can we explain John Paul II’s behavior? John Paul II did not have devotion to Our Lady of Fatima before May 13, 1981, the day of his assassination attempt. As he lay in bed in a Roman hospital recovering, he pondered events leading up to May 13th, read the files on Fatima, and became convinced that he was the figure in white, that the assassination attempt was directed at him, and that he was now involved in the history of Fatima. He also became convinced that re-Consecrating Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary would help also bring about a definitive end to international communism. He had committed the Vatican to working with its wayward children of the West to bring Communism in Russia to its end. Sungenis feels that John Paul II convinced himself that the consecrations of Pius XII in 1942 and 1953 were somehow insufficient. At the very least, another consecration was needed. Even if this is the case, it is telling that his March 25, 1984 consecration made the same error that Pius XII made decades before by not mentioning Russia by name.

Sungenis observes that the events surrounding John Paul II’s three consecrations cannot be verified at this time. Some rely on the oral personal testimony of Cardinal Sodano, who, claiming to be the go-between for Sister Lucia and John Paul II, maintains that the March 25th Consecration was accepted and averted a thermo-nuclear war. And, if we follow Sungenis’ argument, what the 1980s consecrations actually meant is of very secondary importance in relation to the Consecrations that Pius XII made in 1942 and 1953. By the 1980s, communism in Russia had already lost its intellectual credibility, as well as its capacity to spread its errors to more than a handful of countries. There are further difficulties that Sungenis raises that would complicate even written documents between Lucia, Sodano and John Paul II; for example, whether the 1980s Lucia was the real Lucia. A person with limited artistic abilities could replicate face draws of photos of Lucia from the 1950s and photos from the 1980s and see that there is some explanation needed for the wide discrepancies between the two faces.

If John Paul’s consecration was meant to bring about a time of peace, then, the track record of the world since those consecrations does not seem so good. Sungenis lists the number of wars that took place as John Paul II promoted peace throughout the world. He recounts in a striking way the decline of Catholicism in many nations, the loss of priests and religious, the general spirit of rebellion that hardened within the Church during those decades as witnessed by the number of Catholics that did not simply fall into the sins of birth control, homosexuality and abortion, but openly advocated or taught these crimes as somehow desired or valid. The role of the United States, not communist Russia, both in promoting those wars and in spreading subversive morality, is pronounced.

What remains puzzling about Fatima is the Third Secret, and whether it points to a period of catastrophic suffering for the Church and the world. Dr. Sungenis concludes his book arguing that that secret is a “reiteration of what has been stated in plainer words about the course of Christianity in many times in many places.” The language of the Third Secret, like the Book of the Apocalypse of St. John, is largely symbolic, not literal. The third secret introduces us to “the Angel with a flaming sword.” This Angel has a striking resemblance to the one we meet in Genesis 3:24, who guards the Garden of Eden, as well as in St. John’s Apocalypse, 1:15 and 19:15. This Angel prevents anyone who is still a slave of sin from entering the Garden. That is to say, a man must truly repent of his sins if he wishes to see them forgiven. If men continue sinning, then, there is no hope for them to enter heavenly glory. But Mary’s “right hand” stops the sword of judgment, and enables the angel to bring the message of penance to men once again. The Pope is meant to be the leader of those who bear the light of Christ, acting in his stead and leading the Church against her dark foes. The images of the secret tell the story of the persecutions, sufferings, and even martyrdoms that the Popes and saints undergo in their efforts to bring the Gospel to the world. In short, just as St. John’s Apocalypse describes from various points of view the progressive preaching of the Gospel in overcoming sin, and how this will happen until the end of time, the Third Secret of Fatima likewise reminds us of this progression, which will continue to happen until the same End Times. For Sungenis, it is not clear that the man in white in the third secret is John Paul II, meaning some future Pope could fulfill its prophecies.

[…] This is just an excerpt from the February 2021 Issue of Culture Wars magazine. To read the full article, please purchase a digital download of the magazine, or become a subscriber!