From Doomsday 1959 to Dire Straits 2024

"Pope John XXIII’s decision to ignore the message of the third Fatima secret and instead call an ecumenical council has had dire consequences."

From Crisis

By David Torkington

Pope John XXIII’s decision to ignore the message of the third Fatima secret and instead call an ecumenical council has had dire consequences.

When most Catholics hear of revelations, they are understandably skeptical. After all, they say, do we not already have the teaching of Christ, the inspired word of God in the Scriptures, and the dogmatic teaching of the Church? What need do we have of revelations? They are, of course, right. But what happens when the teaching of Christ that may still be alive in the mind goes dead in the heart, as did the love of God when Jansenism was rife in the Church? Christ Himself appeared to St. Margaret Mary—not to give us a new teaching but to set us afire once more with the teaching of the Sacred Heart that restated the love of Christ poured out on the first Pentecost Day. 

The same happened in the last century, when hearts that once practiced loving God became hardened and turned to self-love instead. It was then that Our Lady of Fatima appeared to call people to practice loving God again, by repenting, praying, and making sacrifices. This was not a new teaching, for it was the teaching that her Beloved Son had taught; but her children had forgotten it—at least forgotten to practice it. 

However, when, in 1959, Pope John called a meeting of cardinals to discuss the third Fatima secret, which he had prematurely opened, he decided to shelve the contents and call a council instead. Although we do not know the actual date of Doomsday, we know that it took place in 1959, thanks to Cardinal Bea who told his friend and colleague Fr. Malachi Martin about it immediately after he left the meeting. The meeting had been called to decide whether or not to do what Our Lady had told the pope to do. According to Fr. Malachi, Cardinal Bea said, “Those fools have just condemned millions of people to death.” In hindsight, he would realize that far greater damage was done.

Our Lord, the head of the Church, did not ask His mother, the Mother of the Church, to deliver His message to the pope for him to decide whether or not to proclaim it to the world in 1960 but to do it.

Let us be clear about this: the Church herself has declared that Our Lady’s appearances at Fatima were authentic and that her message was authentic too. The message came from the head of the Church, through His Mother to His Vicar on earth, and His Vicar decided to disobey Him, with the diabolical consequences that we can now see for ourselves. These consequences could have been avoided because the most important part of the message of Our Lady was that the whole Church should have been called to repentance, prayer, and sacrifice in 1960.  

If he had called an ecumenical council to decide how best this could be implemented in every diocese and every parish in the world, then we would not be in the dire spiritual straits in which we find ourselves today, nor would we be in fear of the consequences that Our Lady promised would afflict those who would not heed her message. In 1959, it would seem that these consequences were only conditional; now it would seem they are inevitable. Indeed, they have long since begun—and in the highest places in the Church. 

Let me review the historical events that led up to the terrible moral malaise that, without realizing it, the Church found herself in on the eve of the Second Vatican Council, although they became more pronounced after the Council.  

The Modernism that was born at the Renaissance—whose creed began with the words, “I believe in Man”—did not of course exclude God at first but paid homage to the masterwork of God’s creation, who would shortly come of age at the Enlightenment and finally rise above himself to rule where God ruled before. But the decline of the God-centered spirituality that prevailed before the Renaissance and the rise of the man-centered spirituality that began to prevail after the Renaissance received a decisive “shot in the arm” after the condemnation of Quietism, as I have shown in previous articles. It was then that the deep prayer—called contemplation—that leads to union with God was extracted from Catholic Spirituality for all but a remnant. 

Long before a person can tangibly experience God’s love, something has to happen within prayer that is the key to everything. That something is that we must be weaned from the cupboard love that has infected us from the very beginning of the spiritual life. Far from experiencing spiritual delights at the outset of prayer, a beginner has to experience darkness, dryness, and aridity, not to mention battalions of distractions and temptations that make the believer think they are on the wrong path. It has been the teaching of Catholic Spirituality from the beginning that it is in continually turning away from distractions and temptations that a person is making acts of love that eventually lead to a habit of selfless loving. 

The mystic St. Angela of Foligno calls this loving “divine loving” because it is the same sort of selfless, unconditional loving with which Christ loves us—and it is the only form of loving that, when learned in years rather than months, can unite us with Christ. Then—in, with, and through Him—we can contemplate God the Father and receive in return what St. Thomas Aquinas calls the fruits of contemplation—namely, the infused theological, cardinal, and moral virtues and the gifts of the Holy Spirit—to share with others.

After the Second Vatican Council, the self-centered, man-centered spirituality that had preceded the Council went viral. This was the result of an entirely new and diabolical movement that began among a small but ever-expanding group of Catholic intellectuals. In the 1930s, many Catholic intellectuals, like their non-Catholic peers, flirted with left-wing ideologies as the only bulwark against the fascism that was rising in Europe. In the secular world, many left-wing intellectuals not only repudiated the secular culture in which they had grown up but they became traitors and defected to an alien culture. A similar thing happened in the Church, where many left-wing intellectuals not only repudiated the spiritual culture in which they had grown up but became traitors and defected to an alien culture too.    

Among them were Catholic theologians who found their way to the Vatican Council as periti, or experts, to advise their bishops. This was the perfect opportunity for a sizeable group of them to come together under the leadership of Archbishop Hélder Câmara and pledge to lead the Church into a new future in which Marxist principles developed in South America were to be adopted. What came to be called liberation theology was also being adopted by the Jesuits under the leadership of Fr. Arrupe at their chapter held in Rome during the Council in 1963, as you can read in Fr. Malachi Martin’s book The Jesuits. 

In the seventy years that followed the Council, the ideas contained in liberation theology gradually began to develop into something little short of Satanic, as they have progressively become porous to evil. Like a pernicious and poisonous fungus that grows underground, these ideas and the corrupt idealists who spawned them finally surfaced under the papacy of Pope Francis, who has surrounded himself with a sycophantic oligarchy who have now enthroned their new god—an unpurified, unstable, unruly, and unredeemed Moloch called Man. 

Just as previous theocentric religions gave to God what they thought He wanted—like the physical offerings made in the Temple in the Old Testament, or the offering of oneself in the New Testament, in what Christ called the New Worship in Spirit and in Truth—the new, postmodern, self-ridden Moloch is offered all they think that he wants. If their “Old God” has any part in this new religion, then it is only as little more than an outward sign of unity. He has become rather like the British Monarchy, a sign of national unity, surrounded by all the pomp and circumstance that can be mustered, to keep the plebs together and on side. But the Monarch has no power whatsoever over the people, nor do the people have any real relationship with him other than that of a sort of imaginative emotional obeisance.

The power that comes from the new postmodern religion that now rules from Rome is held by a new Moloch, which is man himself. His high priests not only determine what he wants and needs but interpret for us mere underlings what he considers to be right or wrong in a new man-made morality. This new morality is always relative to what man’s unredeemed, self-centered selfishness wants. That is why this new moralism is called relativism. It is what man decrees not what the God of so-called rigidity once decreed; and it is sought by what is called discernment. 

A group of Catholic boys in the youth club were using a Ouija board as a means of enabling the Holy Spirit to answer their questions. They were astounded at the answers they received, until I blindfolded them and those answers turned to gibberish. A similar self-deception takes place in the discernment process, which always seems to deify decisions that were decided by at least one “big brother” or “big sister” before the process began. A perfunctory prayer to the Holy Spirit before the process proceeds and a feeling of peace at the end of the process is used to deceive the unwary and the naïve into believing that the resulting decisions have been sanctioned, if not positively inspired, by God. 

So God help those who think otherwise! For the truth is not a dainty dish to set before the most dangerous animals on earth, particularly if they have religious or political pretentions. They prefer ambrosia to eat and nectar to drink and have little stomach for humble pie. If you feed it to them often enough and in large enough portions, they can become very cross; and when they become very cross, they can crucify. 

In the Catholic Church, major decisions at any level were traditionally made not after a perfunctory prayer just before the process begins but after serious debate and discussion informed by the infused virtue of wisdom received after years of the deep personal prayer of those seeking the divine truth; that has no place in the “pseudo religiosity” of the new order. St. Thomas Aquinas insists that true wisdom that comes from the Holy Spirit is one of the infused virtues, which are the fruits of the mystical contemplation that has long since been outlawed by those who see discernment as the guaranteed way that Synodalitists seek and find God’s will. 

For years now, hardly noticed by the faithful, the present regime has been closing down contemplative religious houses and pouring scorn on all forms of contemplative prayer apart from what they call “contemplation in action”—that, in fact, means action without contemplation. It is this sort of purely human action that is closed to the Holy Spirit which has been responsible for flooding the Church with an unprecedented tsunami of sexual depravity, to which the highest authorities turn a blind eye. Marx, their mentor, once said that if you want to destroy an institution, first saturate it with sex. 

The only hope for the Church is to return immediately to imitate the Christ who was the inspiration of my youth, who still inspires me and all who turn to Him—to receive the only Love that can change us and the world that He has chosen to redeem through us.