The Consecration of Russia
or the Annihilation of Nations
and Enslavement of the World:
The Choice is Yours

by Father Nicholas Gruner, S.T.L., S.T.D. (Cand.)

In 1988 Our Lady’s Apostolate published a book called World Enslavement or Peace: It’s Up to the Pope. I wrote most of this book but in it you will find contributions by other authors as well. The book was sent out to all the English-speaking bishops of the world at that time. About 110 bishops die every year, so there may be some younger bishops or newer bishops who have not yet received it.

This book has also been translated into French, Spanish and Portuguese. It can also be read on our website, the Fatima Network: www.worldenslavementorpeace.com

The book’s title says it all. Shall we have world enslavement or peace? The choice really is up to the Pope.

If you study it, the Message of Fatima leaves us no alternative.

Against a Fact, There is No Argument

We can always, in our minds, invent other possibilities. But as St. Thomas tells us, “Against a fact there is no argument.” I have been studying and talking about the Message of Fatima for twenty-nine years now, and I have yet to find another solution to the fact of Fatima.

We can ignore the Message of Fatima. We can pretend it didn’t happen. We can pretend that the Message is something else, but we will only be deceiving ourselves. This deceit may make us feel good today, but it will not make us feel good tomorrow when we are enslaved or annihilated. Therefore, in essence, the only choice we have is ultimately to help bring about the Consecration.

How do we do that?

First of all, Our Lady of Fatima tells us to pray the Rosary every day. She tells us “only Our Lady of the Rosary can help you.”  So the first thing we must do is to remind ourselves that the Message is addressed to each one of us. Therefore, we have to live the Message ourselves. As it is true for me, so it is true also for you. Each of us has to live the Message ourselves.

As priests, and certainly even more so as bishops, we have more responsibility than just living the Message ourselves. We have also the responsibility of helping, to the extent that we can, to implement it. St. James says (4:17), “To him therefore who knoweth to do good, and doth it not, to him it is sin.  He who can do good and does not do it, does evil.”

God has given us all opportunities of various ways to do good, including using our positions of influence and authority. Therefore, God expects us to use that influence, use that authority, to the extent that we are able.

Must Sister Lucy be Obeyed?

Some people seem to face a dilemma with our insistence that the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Queen of Heaven and earth, the Mother of the Church, must be obeyed even by the Pope and bishops, even if they do not want to.

They ask if we are somehow pretending that Sister Lucy, who has now gone to her reward, is more important than the Pope? Or they ask us “must the Pope — or the bishops and the priests for that matter — obey Sister Lucy?”

Father Joseph de Sainte-Marie, a Carmelite priest and theologian who taught at the Teresianum in Rome, explained the distinction. He said that it is the role of the hierarchy to determine whether a message comes from God. St. Paul, in 1 Thessalonians 5:19-21, says, “Extinguish not the spirit. Despise not prophecies. But prove all things; hold fast that which is good.”

So the first thing is for the hierarchy to test the message. The hierarchy has done just that. After thirteen years of examination, after thousands of cures, after listening to all the opposing arguments, including some rather fantastic ones, the facts have been established, so much so that Pope John Paul II said that “the Message of Fatima imposes an obligation on the Church.”

A friend told me that a Cardinal said to him that Fatima has “all the credibility of a spaceship landing.” Well, I am afraid that the Cardinal is going to find out to his dismay that he is going to have to pay for saying things like that, or even thinking like that. However, I am not his judge, God is.

The fact remains however, that the last seven popes — that is, Pius XI, Pius XII, John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul II, even John Paul I, including the present Holy Father, Benedict XVI — have all endorsed Fatima.

Father de Sainte-Marie points out that once the hierarchy has determined that a message comes from God, it is then the duty of the same hierarchy, including the Pope, to obey not the visionary, not the messenger, but to obey God Himself. It is, therefore, the Pope’s duty, the bishops’ duty, the priests’ duty, and the duty of everyone, in fact, to obey Our Lady of Fatima.

I do not wish to say that someone is going to lose their soul for not doing so, but it is my belief that some people will. I cannot judge individual consciences, but in the objective moral order, to do what one has a duty to do — to save millions of lives and souls — is a serious matter.

I wrote on this subject in 1997. I sent out to every bishop — certainly all the English-speaking bishops — my opinion that in the objective moral order, the Pope and the bishops have a moral obligation, a grave obligation, to do the Consecration of Russia as Our Lady of Fatima commanded.  No one has refuted my arguments since I published those 10 years ago.

Will the Bishops Obey?

We know, through the teaching of St. Augustine, that God does not ask the impossible. There were people, such as Cardinal Casaroli and Cardinal Sodano, who advised Pope John Paul II that it was impossible to fulfill Our Lady’s command at the present time. Their argument was that the bishops would not obey if they were commanded.

First of all, with all due respect to both of those Cardinals, they were sadly misinformed. I have been working for Our Lady of Fatima for twenty-nine years now. I have been writing to the bishops for the last twenty-two years. I write to them quite frequently, normally once a month. My understanding from the correspondence I have received from these bishops is that there are very few, if any, of them who would disobey.

I am not the only one with that opinion. During our 1994 conference in Mexico, we had a bishop say the exact same thing from the podium. I can tell you that we have received letters from more than 2,000 different bishops. I can also say that there are fewer than five — some of whom are now dead — who would be militantly opposed to the Consecration of Russia.

It is theoretically possible, of course that the other 2,000 have just decided not to write me to say that they are opposed. However, I have yet to find any indication of that anywhere, directly or indirectly.

The real question is: does it really matter if some of the bishops will not obey? That issue has been discussed many times before by many other people. Even in the 1970’s, following Vatican II, theologians and canon lawyers pointed out that the Pope can command the entire Church, or each and every bishop, for the common good. This was dogmatically defined by the First Vatican Council. The Pope has that jurisdiction. He has that authority.

What Choice Does the Pope Have?

Certainly obedience to Our Lady of Fatima’s command is for the common good! Here we have a message coming from God, telling us that the whole world will be either enslaved or annihilated if Her requests are not obeyed.

The whole world will not be annihilated, because Our Lady says, “various nations will be annihilated”. But the part that is not annihilated will be enslaved. And the enslavement will certainly be to cruel militant atheists and militant Satanists.

Faced with the possibility of this terrible enslavement, versus the possibility of bringing peace to the world without having to undergo that, the choice is obvious. The Pope is bound under grave obligation to give the command to consecrate Russia.

The argument continues, what if a bishop objects and does not obey? That would spoil it for everybody. My answer is that I believe the Pope can give the order under penalty of dismissal from the office. Thus if one bishop did not obey his command, his disobedience would not count because he would no longer be a bishop in charge of a diocese. Thus there would be a moral unanimity and that is what Our Lady is looking for — the moral unanimity of all the bishops doing the Consecration.

Now it is possible that a bishop might be sick, or another bishop, certainly in China, might be in jail. There are, as we know, Catholic bishops in jail in Communist China and possibly other countries as well. Of course, God does not ask the impossible of them. They cannot solemnly consecrate Russia while they are imprisoned. And God is not expecting that.

However, the vast majority of Catholic bishops are not in jail, and the vast majority of the Catholic bishops are not sick. And so, certainly, that is what God and Our Lady are looking for, the moral unanimity of all those bishops who are able to join in this solemn act.

Why is it that God insists on this? Why could it not be something simpler?

First of all, I think that compared with all the sins that are weighing down humanity, this request of God is really very little.

Secondly, we have some examples from Scripture. For example, we have in the Bible the story in IV Kings, Chapter 5, of Naaman, a great general of the army of the king of Syria. Naaman was “a great man…and honourable…a valiant man and rich, but a leper.”  (5:1) Naaman had a Jewish servant girl who said that if her master would like to be cured of his illness, to be cleansed of his leprosy, all he had to do was go to Israel and ask the prophet, the man of God, Eliseus to cure him.

So Naaman went there with his retinue. Naaman was a general, a powerful man in Syria, and obviously not only powerful but fearsome to the king of Israel. So when the king was asked by Naaman to “give me the prophet and cure me of my leprosy,” the King rent his garment and said, “Am I God that I can cure leprosy?”

The king of Israel thought that Naaman was looking for an excuse to go to war. But Naaman was not spoiling for a fight. He was actually quite genuine. He wanted to be cured. But the King, thinking he was looking for an excuse to fight, rent his garments and said, “Am I God?”

The prophet, when he heard about this incident, sent his servant to the court of the king and said, “Let him come to me, and let him know that there is a prophet in Israel.” (5:8) So Naaman came to the prophet, but Eliseus did not go to meet Naaman. Rather he sent a messenger to say, “Go and wash seven times in the [river] Jordan, and thy flesh shall recover health, and thou shalt be clean.” (5:10)

At this point, Naaman became angry. Naaman said, “We have better rivers in Syria than this puny little Jordan. Why can’t I wash in them and be made clean?” But his counselors prevailed upon him and said to Naaman, “If the Prophet had bid thee do some great thing, surely thou shouldst have done it: how much rather what he now hath said to thee: Wash and thou shalt be clean?” (5:13)

What his counselors were saying to the great general was, why don’t you just try this and see what happens? And so Naaman relented! He went down to the river Jordan and bathed in the river seven times, as Eliseus had commanded. When he came out the seventh time, as Scripture tells us, his skin was “like the flesh of a little child, and he was made clean.” (5:14)

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the Pope had counselors around him who, instead of looking for reasons not to do as Our Lady commands, would give the same advice as Naaman’s counselors?

Holy Father, you have been praying for peace in the Middle East and that is a good thing. And you have promoted peace and understanding among various peoples, and that is also a good thing. Why not just do this Consecration, and you will have peace in the Middle East. Indeed, you will have peace in all parts of the world.

It is not that hard! But some people think because it is not that hard, it will not work. Some people think that effective medicine has to taste bad. It doesn’t!

No matter how hard we work, we cannot, through our own efforts, bring about world peace. If, for the next fifty years we all were put to work building pyramids like those of Egypt, and we had all the Catholics in the world building these pyramids, and working very hard, ten and twelve hours a day, it would still not be enough.

It is not through the merits of all our hard work that we will get this grace. It is through the merits and intercession of the Blessed Virgin. That is why God has made it so easy, so that everyone can see that it is not by our efforts but by the merits of Our Lady.

St. Louis de Montfort points out that the Blessed Virgin, by picking up one pin, merited more for Her soul than all the torments of St. Lawrence the Martyr. St. Lawrence is a great saint. He is commemorated in the Roman Liturgy. But Our Lady’s picking up one pin merited more than all St. Lawrence’s sufferings.

We should not let this great truth pass us by, just because it seems so simple. It is only through the merits of the Blessed Virgin, through Her intercession, that the world will have peace.

St. Alphonsus tells us it is a great thing if a man is good enough to merit his own salvation. Apparently it doesn’t happen very often. It is even a greater thing for a man or a woman to merit not only his or her own salvation but the salvation of others. That is what St. Alphonsus says the saints have done.

Devotion to the Blessed Virgin
Will Save Our Souls

It is the greatest thing of all for a mere human to merit enough to save the souls of all mankind and that only the Blessed Virgin Mary has done. So God wants Her to be honored, for Her own sake and for the love He has for Her, but also for our sake. God wants us to recognize how easy it is to save our souls by being devoted to the Blessed Virgin, by depending on Her merits and Her intercession.

That is what we learn from the prayer that the angel taught to Lucy, Francisco and Jacinta. “O Most Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, I adore You profoundly. And I offer up to You the Most Precious Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of the same Son Jesus Christ present in the tabernacles of the world, in reparation for the blasphemies, outrages, and indifferences by which He is offended. And I draw upon the infinite merits of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary that You might convert poor sinners.” 

We see in this prayer taught by the Angel in 1916, he taught Lucy, Francisco and Jacinta to pray it while prostrate before the Blessed Sacrament. This is the same prayer Lucy was praying in Tuy, in the convent, when the Blessed Trinity appeared before her, and when Our Lady announced in God’s name that “the moment has come in which God asks the Holy Father to make, in union with all the bishops of the world, the Consecration of Russia to My Immaculate Heart, promising to save it by this means.”

Certainly the moment had come in 1929, 77 years ago now, in which God asks — I would say orders — the Holy Father to make the Consecration of Russia. You will find this version of the June 13, 1929 vision on page 555 of Volume II of Frère Michel [The Whole Truth About Fatima, Volume II, The Secret and the Church]: “The moment has come in which God asks of the Holy Father to make, and to order that in union with him and at the same time, all the bishops of the world make the Consecration of Russia to My Immaculate Heart”.

We have some precedents for this. In the 1890s, Pope Leo XIII received a private revelation, if you wish to call it that, from a nun in Portugal, asking for the consecration of the world to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Pope Leo obeyed. Within four years of receiving this message he obeyed this command, even though there was no Miracle of the Sun, no public miracles of cures and conversions, the likes of which only Fatima has seen.

The Truth Behind the
“Russian” Revolution

The difference here is that God has been publicly insulted. God has been attacked by Russia, but not by Russia alone.

Pope Pius XI points out that the Russian Revolution was not Russian. It was imported from outside. It is a well known fact that the German High Command took Lenin, willingly, from exile in Switzerland back into Russia, in a sealed train. The Russian Revolution of 1917 would not have taken place without Lenin’s presence there.

The money that paid for the Russian revolution — 25 million, that is $25,000,000 — came from the United States! It was seized by the fledgling Royal Canadian Navy in one of the few notable things it did during World War I. The Canadian navy was founded in 1917, and the first thing they did was capturing Leon Trotsky off the coast of Halifax and put him in jail for several days, along with the 300 criminals who were with him.

These same people became the rulers of Russia, the same people you can read about in Father Fahey’s book, The Rulers of Russia Today. That book was written in 1938, so later editions dropped the word “Today” from the title; but the rulers profiled were the same men that were put in jail by the Canadian Navy in 1917, the same men who were bringing the millions that financed the so-called Russian revolution.

If we want world peace, we can try to negotiate with the successors to these criminals. We can place our trust in the politics of appeasement. Dr. Peter Chojnowski pointed out what happens with that kind of trust. He told us how the Communists treated the priest, sent by the Vatican on a mission to feed the starving people of the Soviet Union. They dragged him across the floor of the cell in which he was being held, then after torturing him in the ear, they killed him by shooting him in the head through what was left of his ear. That really happened, and it is symbolic of what will happen to the Pope and the bishops if they place their trust in these kinds of men.

It is hard to understand, when we try so hard to be good, how others could be so evil. It is hard to understand someone like Lenin who said, “I don’t care if three quarters of the world perishes, as long as the last quarter is Communist.” 

It is hard to understand someone like Robespierre, the blood-drenched leader of the French Revolution. After he was finally guillotined in 1794, notes were found among his papers to the effect that he wanted to execute 10,000,000 Frenchmen. That was his intention.

What kind of evil drives these people? Our Lord explains. Speaking to those who sought to crucify Him, He said: “You are of your father the devil, and the desires of your father you will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and he stood not in the truth; because truth is not in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father thereof.” (John 8:44)

The Politics of Appeasement
Will Not Bring Us Peace

You can’t negotiate with these people; yet you can contain them for a time. Even better you can convert them, but you have to use the weapon that Our Lady gives us. You have no other choice.

You may believe you have another choice. If you do, I hope you will not have much influence. Why? Because up to now, whoever has believed that has been able to get the Pope and the bishops to not obey Heaven’s command, and we are all paying the penalty for that.

Our Lord told Sister Lucy at Rianjo in August 1931, “Make it known to My ministers that given they follow the example of the King of France in delaying the execution of My command, they will follow him into misfortune.”

“My ministers” refers to the Pope, the bishops and the priests of the Catholic Church. After saying what will happen to them if they do not obey, Our Lord ends on a note of hope. “It is never too late,” He says, “to have recourse to Jesus and Mary.”

We Must Keep Insisting That
the Consecration Be Done

Over the years, we have sent more than 5,000,000 petitions to the Holy Father. I have talked to one of the canons of St. Peter’s who told me he did the count himself. He told me that they were quite impressed that in a short period of time about 400,000 petitions had come in. It was the talk of the bureaucracy inside the Vatican.

Among these many petitions, they found one or two names that had been repeated. Perhaps some people had sent more than one petition card, not in an effort to deceive anyone but in the same spirit that I repeat myself again and again as I call for obedience to Our Lady’s command. Anyway, noting the occasional duplicate, the people doing the counting took the number, divided it by two and said “Okay, there are 200,000 petitions.”  Still, by the canon’s own admission, it was a very impressive number.

Because We Must Do More, We Need
the Fatima Movement of Priests

Even so, it apparently was not enough. That is why we need to have a Fatima Movement of Priests. We need priests to be better informed, to understand that there is no other choice. We need priests to take the necessary decisions based on that understanding, always within the law of God, always within the law of the Church, always according to the teachings of the saints.

The saints themselves tell us that we must follow the law of God, even the highest among us. In Galatians 2:11-21 we see St. Paul resisting St. Peter to his face when Peter was in error.  St. Peter did not actually speak a heresy. All he did was act in such a way as to give rise to the impression that a heretical belief was true. And St. Paul rebuked Peter “because he was to be blamed.” (Galatians 2:11)

Some scholars have said that Peter and Paul were acting this out to make a point. No. It’s what Scripture says, and St. Thomas tells us Paul was right and Peter shows it by his virtue in accepting the correction.

This is a very important example for us today, for it shows that someone who is of lesser rank, but who is speaking the truth, can and must assert that truth, even to those of higher rank, in this case the first pope. The truth is of higher value than saving the face of the Pope.

Some people have said to me, “Who do you think you are to correct the Pope?”  There are thousands of things or perhaps tens of thousands or millions of things I do not know. However, after twenty-nine years spent studying the Message of Fatima, I should know something about it.

Someone may say, “I believe it,” “I don’t believe it,” “Yes,” “No.” We can play a game of who’s going to have the last word. But as far as evidence, facts and argumentation are concerned, I have yet to find someone to ask me a question on the necessity of the proper consecration of Russia for which I cannot find an answer.

I would ask the best theologians who oppose the Consecration to allow me at least to be heard and to answer their arguments in a “public” forum. By public I do not necessarily mean in front of the whole world, but public enough that we can go back and look up the books, public enough that the debate is played by the rules. And I ask them to attack the message — if they can — not the messenger.

Meanwhile, the rest of us who do not need any more proof need not wait. We do not need permission to pray the Rosary. We do not need permission to tell others to pray the Rosary. We do not need permission to tell others that, in our opinion, the world is in a bad state.

Let me give you one example of how the rules of international relations established for three and a half centuries are being breached today.

In 1648 the Peace of Westphalia instituted the notion of sovereignty, which essentially meant that rulers, or sovereigns, would recognize no internal equals within their territory, and no external superiors. Westphalia led to the establishment of modern rules of international diplomacy.

At Westphalia, it was agreed that one nation could not attack another unless there was positive proof that the other nation intended to, or had already declared war against them, or constituted a threat to international peace. That principle has been upheld for over 350 years, until it was broken by the United States, by attacking Iraq on flimsy evidence.

Now, it seems, if I can say “I think so-and-so is going to attack me, so I am going to kill him first,” that’s a formula for killing each other.

If the burden of the proof is on the accused — the nation being attacked — and not the accuser, then there is no civilization left. This is especially so when you have weapons that can kill millions, and nations not only threatening to use them, but actually using them.

This is the state of the world today. We have reached and surpassed a level not seen before, ever, in the history of mankind. We now have the doctrine of total war, which, surprisingly, people accept with little or no question. Even good Catholics, who otherwise have not lost their minds, seem to think total war is perfectly acceptable.

And we have the means to carry that out, the means to wage total war. And to justify it, apparently all we have to do is find an excuse — a perceived threat with little or no evidence — to stage an attack.

Do not look to the United States to save you. And certainly don’t look to Russia! Mr. Putin admittedly admires Stalin, and he admittedly admires Frederic Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the KGB. You will not find a solution there either.

You have just heard Cornelia Ferreira’s talk on why we cannot depend on the United Nations to deliver us. I assure you, there is much more proof than what she was able to put into an hour-long talk.

We will be delivered by the Blessed Virgin, or we won’t be delivered at all. There is no other solution.

We could talk about geopolitics for a week, and still not finish presenting all the evidence to prove that there is not much reason for hope in mankind. In fact, Scripture says, “He who hopes in man sins against God.” We should trust man to an extent, but not trust men’s plans against God, when God says, “This is the way and nothing else will work.”

What Can We Do?

So what can we do? Well, certainly, we can pray the Rosary. We can wear the Brown Scapular. We can tell others to do the same. It seems so very simple. You might think it cannot be that simple, but it is.

“[T]he heart of the king is in the hand of the Lord.” (Proverbs 21:1) That is, God can convert; God can change the thinking and the intentions of anybody. Be he a king, be he a Pope, be he a prime minister or a dictator, God can change his heart. The heart of a king is in the hand of God.

What does God want? He doesn’t need money. He doesn’t need sacrifices.  God says, “If I was hungry I wouldn’t tell you; I would take something to eat Myself.”  God doesn’t want anything from us except for one thing. That one thing He wants from us is our hearts. We must give our hearts freely. We must give our obedience freely. He wants us to give it joyfully.

In creating us, respecting us and ordering our relationship to Him that is the one thing that God wants from us — our hearts. That is why He lays down a condition which He is not going to change. We must give our hearts to Him!

I don’t know if you have ever had to bargain with anybody, but if you kept on changing your final position — we call it “the bottom line” today — you wouldn’t be showing much respect for the other party. God has set down these terms; they are not going to change.

We have examples in the Old Testament of people trying to bargain with God. People said, “I don’t want to do this; it’s too difficult. So what if I offer you that?”  We cannot bargain with God on the Consecration of Russia — God has told us it is not negotiable.

However, in this matter of the Consecration of Russia, there are those in the Church hierarchy who want to bargain with God.  “Let’s consecrate the world,” they say.  “It won’t be so embarrassing. It won’t be so against our human policy of ostpolitik.”

Ostpolitik was implemented by Cardinal Casaroli and the men around him. They said, “Let us bargain with the Russians; they are reasonable men.”  Of course many Russians are reasonable, but the Communist rulers of Russia are chosen for the purpose of bringing about the reign of the Antichrist through their military might, to put it in a nutshell. They are not reasonable men. We cannot bargain with them.

We Need the Conversion of Russia,
of Rome, of the World

In the preface to World Enslavement or Peace, Father Paul Kramer points out the satanic verses that Karl Marx wrote. In those verses Marx admits he is not an atheist; and furthermore, he boasts he is a Satanist! Marx said of himself that from his grave and from hell, he would hurl down curses on mankind. What you have in Marxism is a satanic rule with a thin veneer of saying, “we are doing this for the poor.” This pretense of concern for the poor has been proven over and over again to be a monstrous lie.

People like Marx don’t just change overnight. I can tell you that if you find a man who has a policy which he believes is right, he will not let go of it easily.

A bishop once said to me, “If you were ever elected Pope, I know the first thing you would do is consecrate Russia.”  I replied, “Your Excellency that is right.” So if somebody has maintained a policy and repeatedly stated what he thinks needs to be done, you can count on him to do exactly that, given the chance.

Take, for example, a company such as General Motors. If some man in that organization rises in a board meeting and says that what is needed to turn the fortunes of the company around is more marketing and advertising, and you put him in a position of running the company, that is what he is going to do.

Similarly, if you have the Communist regime that says: “We want to rule the world. No matter what we say, that is what we want to do. We want to rule the world and put Communism everywhere,” these people just do not all of a sudden, with no conversion, stop believing and stop trying to do that.

St. Augustine points out that conversion is a grace. The grace of conversion is a greater miracle than the creation of the world! Why is this so?

When the world was created, it was created out of nothing. There was nothing and then God said, “Let there be light.”  God created light, God created us, God created everything out of nothing. But note, because there was nothing, there was no resistance to God’s will.

It’s different with a sinner. A sinner, before he converts, resists God’s will.  “No, I am going to do it my way,” he says. “No, I am not sorry for that. I am going to keep on doing what I want to do.” And so the sinner resists God’s will.

Thus, the first law of motion is not just in physics. It applies also to the act of conversion.  If there is no resistance, when you start something in motion, it keeps on going in the same direction unless and until enough resistance is built up to stop it from going any further.

It is the same in human life. If there is no resistance, you keep going down the same path. Unless something gets in the way, you keep going in the same direction.

The only person who causes conversion is God. So if there is not a religious conversion in Russia, the rest is all smoke and mirrors.

In fact, although you don’t have to believe this, certain Russian military people said that this strategic deception — the so-called collapse of Communism — was all part of the plan. They said it in the 1930s and they said it again in the 1980s.

The only way we are going to be delivered from the reign of Antichrist in our time will be through the Consecration of Russia, by which that nation will be converted. The Blessed Virgin tells us the devil is in the mood for waging a final battle, a decisive battle, one which produces a total victory of one over the other.

The devil himself knows, from God’s prediction (Genesis 3:15), that he will lose. But, Scripture tells us, “Iniquity hath lied to itself” (Psalms 26:12). The devil, in his great pride, thinks he can win. Therefore, we are caught up in the middle of this great battle.

The answer is so simple that I get accused of repeating myself. I am sorry for that, but there it is. It is that simple and yet it is that profound. The Pope and the bishops must consecrate Russia solemnly, publicly at the same time.

Sister Lucy said: “…many times, the Most Holy Virgin told my cousins Francisco and Jacinta, as well as myself, that many nations will disappear from the face of the earth. She said that Russia will be the instrument of chastisement chosen by Heaven to punish the whole world (for its sins) if we do not beforehand obtain the conversion of that poor nation.”

However, we must remember, the only way to get the conversion of Russia is “by this means”, that is, the Consecration of Russia by the Pope and the Catholic bishops as requested by Our Lady of Fatima. Until, and only until that is done, Russia will continue to spread its errors and eventually dominate and chastise the world by its military might and influence.

Why does God ask for the Consecration of Russia? I am sure there are reasons that I do not know, but one I do know is to assert that the spiritual authority is more important than the temporal authority.

The bull Unam Sanctam taught dogmatically that all authority comes from God. God gives supreme spiritual authority to the Pope and temporal authority to civil rulers. But the civil authority is less than the spiritual authority.

The Consecration of Russia will demonstrate the truth of Unam Sanctam. When Russia is consecrated to Our Lady’s Immaculate Heart, we will have peace, and it will come from the spiritual authority being exercised according to God’s will.

The world will see that they are delivered by God, through the action of the Pope and bishops. This will enhance the position and the dignity of the Pope and the bishops, not just in the estimation of Catholics but in the eyes of the whole world. Even more, the world will see the importance of the Blessed Virgin Mary and Her intercession.

Those who survive what is coming in the next few years will see the fulfillment of the prophecy of Isaiah. The first words of the Council’s document Lumen Gentium comes from Isaiah 2:3-4:  “Come and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord...and he will teach us his ways and we will walk in his paths... And he shall judge the Gentiles, and rebuke many people: and they shall turn their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into sickles: nation shall not lift up sword against nation; neither shall they be exercised any more to war.”

The light of the Gentiles is Christ. The Lord’s mountain is the Catholic Church. All the nations will come flooding into the Church after this Consecration.

This prophecy is not only in Scripture, but also in the Message of Fatima, when Our Lady says: “In the end, My Immaculate Heart will triumph. The Holy Father will consecrate Russia to Me, Russia will be converted and a period of peace will be given to mankind.” 

Mankind cannot live in peace unless and until it recognizes Christ. I am not talking about only a number of individuals. I am talking about mankind in general.

I am sure that some of you know of the Muslim law — Shariah Law — which they want to impose on whole civilizations. That law is against Christian law.

Similarly, secular humanists seek to impose their law, which says that you cannot give Jesus Christ the highest honor. You can honor Him privately; you can honor Him on your own as long as it doesn’t interfere with their program of relegating Christ to just one of many options.

Our Lord will not accept anything less than being recognized as King of kings and Lord of lords. If we give our first love, our first allegiance, to anything or anyone less than Him, then He will consider it a betrayal. The Lord will consider that you are not on His side. “He that is not with Me is against Me.” (Matthew 12:30)

With the Consecration of Russia, not only will Russia be converted, but the whole world will be converted. This way all the world’s peoples will accept the Gospel, because they will see for themselves.

This can only happen through the intercession of the Blessed Virgin. All our good works, whatever they might be, however good they might be, are too little, just like those of the Spanish missionaries in Guadalupe, who, although they were good and holy men, for ten years could convert only a handful of natives.

However, over the next ten years, through the intercession and the merits of Our Lady, nine million were converted! In the first ten years of the missionaries’ work, zero; in the next ten years, nine million. The difference was the merits and intercession of Our Lady and She received the credit, as God wanted.

It is the same for the whole world. God wants the whole world to recognize that it is through Our Lady that we finally have peace.

In the conversion of Mexico, the people certainly also recognized the role of the bishops and priests.  After all, the graces of Baptism and the other sacraments come through the hands of the priests and bishops.  We must remember that Jesus taught us to seek first the Kingdom of God and all things will be added unto you.

God has laid down the plan. It is for us to accept it and do what we can to implement it.

Make Heaven’s Peace Plan
Known to Others

What can we do to implement it? As I’ve already said it, the first thing to do is to live the Fatima Message ourselves. The second thing we must do is to make it known to others.

How can we make it known to others? One way is to have prayer groups. Some of you already have them. You have holy hours, hours spent before the Blessed Sacrament. You can do this on a regular basis, once a month, once a week or even once a day.

You can pass out literature. It has taken Our Lady’s Apostolate a long time to get to the point where we could make this literature, and make a conference like this, possible. But now we can make available to you perhaps the widest and best selection of Fatima literature you can find anywhere.

You may find literature, other than our own, telling the whole Fatima Message. If so, you can use that too. We have no monopoly on the Message, but if you have no other source, we certainly have literature for you.

Thanks to the help of our supporters and benefactors, we send out millions of pieces of literature every year, around the world, in various languages. So to the extent that God blesses our efforts, you can draw upon our resources to help pass the Message on.

Some Principles of
the Fatima Movement of Priests

Important as living and spreading the Fatima Message certainly are, the first thing we must do is set down some principles by which we should live.

To begin with, the Fatima Movement of Priests is not an organization. You don’t belong to my company, or my club, or my order. First, you belong to the Blessed Virgin. You consecrate yourself to Her Immaculate Heart. Maybe many of you, or all of you, have done that already. Now I am asking you to consecrate yourselves again, but with the focus that, since Our Lady is sad because no one pays attention to Her Message, I, at least — each one of us can say this — will do my part to pay attention to Her Message.

I will reflect upon it. I will think about it. I will tell others about it. I will try to get others to pay attention as well. In this way Our Lady won’t be quite so sad because some of the good are now paying attention to Her Message.

The second principle by which we must be guided is that we must realize that we must hold fast to Catholic dogma. The devil’s attack is on Catholic dogma.

Now, it is not enough to have Catholic dogma. It may seem to you that dogmatic theologians, perhaps myself included, might be kind of cold or hard to get along with. But dogma is important because it gives you a mental structure, a framework, to help you see everything else clearly.

That structure, that framework is solid. Why? Because dogmatic definitions are infallible. We say that word without even thinking about it, but “infallible” means something cannot fail. So the definitions of Catholic dogma cannot fail. Kingdoms can come and go, ideas can come and go, fads can come and go, but Catholic dogma will not fail. Therefore, our Fatima Movement of Priests, and our own thinking will be on a solid foundation because it is founded on Catholic dogma.

Our Lady tells us that the dogma of Faith will be preserved in Portugal. The Church is still hiding the rest of the words of Our Lady in the Third Secret from us, but we can pretty well know their meaning. The clear implication is that it — dogma — will not be held onto in other parts of the world. So we can at least be an oasis, an island where Catholic dogma is preserved and held onto. And we can teach others to do the same.

Third, we should also then prioritize Fatima in the light of other truths. We should not think of it as a private revelation. It is not merely or simply a private revelation. As Bishop Rudolf Graber, of Regensburg, Germany, pointed out, it is a public, prophetic revelation. The Fatima Message has been attested to by a very public miracle before 70,000 witnesses.

I believe that the prophecy of the Fatima Third Secret may also be contained in Sacred Scripture. That is my opinion. I can’t prove that to you.  If you want, you can read my short essay on it. I have addressed this issue time and again (see “The Church’s Obligation to Believe and Obey Our Lady of Fatima”, in The Fatima Crusader, Issue No. 74; and on the web at www.fatimacrusader.com/cr74/cr74pg32.asp).

On one occasion I discussed this with a Professor of Theology in the Marianum in Rome. When he said Fatima is just a private revelation, I replied: “Hold it, Father. Can you prove to me that Our Lady’s appearance at Fatima is not predicted in Scripture, in Apocalypse 12:1?”  He said, “No, I can’t.”  “Well,” I said, “then you cannot just say that it is a private revelation, because it might be the fulfillment of that Biblical prophecy.”

St. Thomas points out that every fact in the Bible must be believed with divine and Catholic Faith. If you know as a theologian that David had seventy sons — not sixty-nine, not seventy-one — then you must believe that fact with divine and Catholic Faith, even though that fact doesn’t seem the most significant thing.

If that is true of David’s seventy sons, it is also true of Biblical prophecy. And so, if this prophecy is being realized before our eyes and we recognize it, then we have to hold on to it with divine and Catholic Faith. 

That professor never said again that Fatima was just a private revelation.

Fatima — A Message for Our Time

There is much more to the Message of Fatima than meets the eye. As I have said, I had been working on this from 1977 to 1984 before I realized I had misunderstood something I had been repeating many times from the Fatima Message word for word, literally.

There is so much wealth in this Message that I still discover new things about Fatima. I may not be the fastest person, but I am not the slowest either. Yet there is so much there. The Fatima Message is so profound, so deep.

So we should realize that Fatima is a prophetic message for our time. Father Paul Kramer has studied prophecies from the 1600s and earlier, right up to the present, and all of them point to this present time. Fatima is the message that explains our time like no other. And Fatima gives a solution to the troubles of our time. There is no other solution and Fatima tells us so.

Those of you who play chess or have thought about the strategy of chess know that the game is a model for warfare. We Catholics are in a terribly threatened position.  We are surrounded by enemies. Whether you think of the Protestants of the 1500s and 1600s murdering Catholics simply because they are Catholics, or the Masons doing the same, or Communists doing the same, the Church is faced with enemies today who want to kill individual Catholics and wipe out the whole Catholic Church.

The prophet Daniel tells us that in the reign of the Antichrist, “the continual sacrifice shall be taken away, and the abomination unto desolation shall be set up.” (Daniel 12:11) You will find this elsewhere as well. St. Alphonsus writes about this. The Mass will be forbidden. And so all of us priests have an interest in retarding the coming of the Antichrist.

The only way to retard it, to stop it, is by the Consecration of Russia being done in time. So we must do all we can to bring this about.

When I started publishing The Fatima Crusader in 1978, someone said to me, “Will you have enough material to publish the second or third issue?”  Well, I haven’t run out of material now for eighty issues! The magazine has doubled, quadrupled and again quadrupled its size, and we still are having difficulty putting all the good material on Fatima into one issue.

So there are plenty of ideas about what you can do to promote the Fatima Message and the Consecration of Russia. If you do not understand them all today, do not say “I don’t see them today; therefore, I cannot do anything.” No. Do what you can, even if it is just one thing.

Think about a train. The first light the engine driver sees turns green. Now if that train is going across India, or going across Canada, the driver does not see the green light at the end of the destination. He only sees the first one turn green. When he sees that green light, he goes forward. Then he gets to the next light, and when it turns green he goes forward some more, and so forth. That is what we are called upon to do — go forward today with the decision that we will do all we can, within our power, within the duties of our state in life, to promote the Message of Fatima.

First of all, let us live the Message of Fatima ourselves. Secondly, let us make others aware of it. Thirdly, let us not be deterred by false argumentation, or appeals to human respect, or under the appearance of humility, by saying, “I am not that important,”  or  “I am not that smart,” or “I am not this,” or “I don’t have the money,” or “I don’t have whatever, so I won’t do anything.”

Instead, let us say, “I must be obedient. I must be respectful.”  No one can command you not to speak about Fatima. No one, not even the Pope, has that authority.

The authority the Pope and the bishops have is to promote the Gospel, but the authority given to them comes from Jesus Christ. He has authorized no one to stop the spread of the Gospel. The Fatima Message imposes an obligation, as Pope John Paul II said, so not even the Pope can stop the Fatima Message from being spread.

I have been asked how it is that on the one hand I talk about certain people in the Church, even in the Vatican, opposing Fatima and yet I insist upon membership in the Church.

As I have pointed out many times, all authority comes from God. And all human authority has limitations. This has been defined, not only in Canon Law, but also in dogmatic theology.

And so, very simply, we use the authority that God gives us. Within the limits of my ability and my capacity — to speak, to write, to publish — I promote the Fatima Message. It is a good thing to spread this message. Against such a message, there is no law, no God-given authority by which it can be stopped.

I don’t usurp a bishop’s authority. I don’t barge into some cathedral and say I am going to speak on the Message of Fatima because God told me to. I don’t pretend to do anything like that. But there are plenty of other ways to get the Message out.

There are some people who would say this conference is not authorized. This has been said of every one of our conferences up to this one. (Interestingly enough, no such statement has been made in public about this conference, apparently, although I have heard there are some statements circulating in private, which say so.) In 1992 they said the same thing. Surprisingly enough, in Fatima they actually reversed themselves, although this reversal was never published. In Mexico in 1994, they stated again, “this conference is not authorized”.

To say that this or any of our conferences is “not authorized” is, strictly speaking, false. The 1983 Code of Canon Law — in Canons 208-223, but particularly 212, 214, 215, and 216 — says that Catholic lay people and priests can meet and talk together. It is actually part of the natural law that Catholics can meet and talk with each other. The fact is, and Canon Law states it, we can hold congresses and we don’t need the permission of any “higher authority”.

So to say that “it hasn’t been authorized” is, if you want to be charitable, telling a half-truth. We didn’t seek any authorization, because we do not need it. The law of the Church gives it to us in the first place. In fact, God Himself gives it to us!

Nothing is More Important, More Pressing,
More Urgent than the Message of Fatima

Paragraph 37 of the Constitution of the Church also tells us that “the faithful have the right and sometimes even the duty” — that phrase “the right and even the duty” is in Canon Law as well — to bring matters to the attention of their pastors. And they have that duty especially if they have some expertise on the subject.

I happen to have some expertise on the Message of Fatima, and I can tell you that there is nothing more pressing for the good of the Church, for the good of humanity even in the temporal order, or for the salvation of souls — nothing more pressing in the whole world — than that the Pope obey, and command the bishops to obey, the command to consecrate Russia in a solemn and public act. There is nothing more pressing.

So we certainly have the right and even the duty to do that, to tell our sacred pastors — the bishops, the Cardinals and the Pope himself — of Our Lady’s urgent message.

I have only found a few people who will address this issue fairly and squarely. I have found those who claim to want to dialogue, who claim to want to examine all sides; but when it comes to the Fatima Message, what they really want is to shut it down.

They say Father Gruner is a bad person, because he insists on Fatima, as if somehow or other silencing me would make the Fatima Message go away.

The Message of Fatima will not go away! I could die in an instant or tomorrow, but as Our Lord said when the children cried out “Hosanna to the Son of David” on the first Palm Sunday — He was told by the Pharisees to tell them to be quiet — Jesus replied  “If they were quiet, the very stones would cry out.”

The Message of Fatima is from God. And whether I am silenced, killed, or die, or whether all of us together have the same thing happen to us, the Message of Fatima will not be buried. It will be realized. The unfortunate thing for us is, if we have not done our part to make it happen, then we will have a lot to pay for.

Summary of the Five Principles
of the Fatima Movement of Priests

We will publish a booklet on the Fatima Movement of Priests explaining these principles.

1. The Fatima Movement of Priests will be, first of all and above all, spiritual. It will be personal to ourselves.

Our purpose is to pray and offer sacrifices in reparation. As well, we will propagate the Fatima Message and defend the Message, intellectually and theologically. The Fatima Movement of Priests will be based on the Fatima Message, in total adherence to all the dogmas of the Faith as infallibly designed, so the Message will be both dogmatic and spiritual.

2. The second principle guiding the Fatima Movement of Priests will be to believe and preach without hesitation the ordinary universal teaching of the Church that Mary is the Mediatrix of all Graces. The dogmatic basis of the Fatima Message is that all graces come through Mary.

3. The third principle is a firm belief in and a total commitment to the Fatima Message in its entirety. I mean not just the Rosary and the Scapular, although if promoting those is all you feel you can do, because you don’t see how you can resist persecution, then certainly it is a great thing to do. But the Movement itself will promote not just one or two aspects of the Message but the full Fatima Message.

4. The fourth principle of this movement is that the Pope and the bishops must obey Our Lady, as they are commanded to by God Himself. We believe that the consequences of not obeying are the execution of the Pope and bishops. So we must let that be known as part of the Fatima Message.

5. Finally, the fifth principle would be to learn the Fatima Message more thoroughly, by reading about it and studying it, and then of course living it to the fullest extent you can. This includes doing what you can to defend the message and its messengers from unwarranted attacks.

Those would be the principles of the Fatima Movement of Priests which I am proposing to you now. These ideas, this movement, are not based on any locution I have had. I have not had any locution. I have not had any apparition commanding this. I have never seen the Blessed Virgin, so I am not basing my appeal on any such things.

I am not criticizing others who have locutions or visions, or saying their locutions or visions are not true. I am simply saying that the basis of this movement is not that.

My appeal to join the Fatima Movement of Priests is based solely on what the Catholic Church has always taught and what the Message of Fatima always says.

If we can work together to persuade the Holy Father to do what Our Lady has commanded, Russia and the world will be converted and Her Immaculate Heart will triumph.

There are three stages to this triumph of Our Lady. The first stage is that the Holy Father will consecrate Russia. We are still in the first stage. The second and third stages will happen much more quickly.

We have waited 77 years — from 1929 to 2006 — for the first stage. When the second stage takes place, it will not be overnight but it will not be ten years either. Russia will be converted relatively soon after the Consecration. And then will come another short stage — perhaps a little bit longer — for the world to convert and have peace.

Now let me summarize the Fatima Movement of Priests for you.

Part of the movement is to gather priests and faithful in small groups every month to pray, to join together for the support of prayer, of companionship, of devotion to Our Lady and encouragement of each other.

This movement will be above all, spiritual. That is, it will be, first of all, faithful and loyal to the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary — but not first of all to some other mere human, but to Jesus and Mary.

We will seek, above all, the salvation of our own souls and all the souls that are dedicated to Jesus and Mary, all the souls entrusted by charity, justice and friendship to our care, the Pope and all the Catholic bishops and priests and religious, by our prayers and sacrifices for them.

We will persevere until the full, open and complete triumph of Our Lady’s Immaculate Heart.

There are some who would tell us that the Consecration took place in 1984. I can tell you, and I am sure you already know it, that Her triumph — the conversion of Russia to the Catholic Faith — is not seen. 23 years after the supposed consecration, we have more war, death and destruction than in 1984. Where is the peace?! The Blessed Virgin has not yet been given the credit for Her triumph of peace and conversion because there is none!

Some bishops here have acknowledged, “I never consecrated Russia in 1984.”  Pope John Paul II himself acknowledged, “I never did it.”  He said, “We did all that we could in our human possibilities.”  He asked Our Lady to bless “those people for whom You Yourself are awaiting our act of consecration and entrusting.”

So we have to persevere until the full, open and complete Triumph of the Immaculate Heart. We must not be deterred by specious arguments or abuse of authority, temporal or spiritual. We must counter false arguments to the extent we can. And if you can’t counter them, please write to us and we will give you the answers.

Our goal and our work are to seek the Triumph of Our Lady’s Immaculate Heart in and around us as well as around the whole world. In ourselves, first of all, we seek our own sanctification by our sacrifices, by our reparation, by our faithfulness to our Catholic Faith and our daily duties.

Around us, we lead by our example and our words: by going to monthly prayer meetings and reparation cenacles; by our prayers; by learning; by answering false teachings; by defending the truth of Fatima; by telling the truth of Fatima to all.

In the whole world, each of us, wherever we live and whoever we are, can do our little bit. By building a “one-person Fatima center” around ourselves, and getting others to do the same, we will pass on the Message of Fatima to the whole world.

We must not expect the Blessed Virgin and Our Lord to do everything. They expect us to do something. Compared to the immense benefits which will be given to all mankind, this little act — the Pope and the bishops, for ten minutes on one Sunday or a Feast day, all at the same time, saying a prayer of Consecration to the Immaculate Heart — is a little thing. Each and every one of us must do something, no matter how little, to bring it about.

We must not say, “Well, Our Lady is going to win anyway, so I don’t have to do anything.”  That is not the answer. That is a cop-out!

If we are not doing the good we could do, St. James tells us we do evil for not doing it. “To him therefore who knoweth to do good, and doth it not, to him it is sin.” (James 4:17)

We must do everything we do for the love of the Sacred Heart and the Immaculate Heart, and of course also with charity for our fellow man.

We must stand up to the onslaught of evil, whether it’s by the State or from ideas around us, or in the seminary or elsewhere. We must make the truth known, depending on the Immaculate Heart of Mary to protect us and help us.

We must keep, live and promote an ever-greater devotion to the Eucharist, which also is called for in the Message of Fatima.

I urge all bishops and priests to join the Fatima Movement of Priests. You don’t have to tell me. Simply tell the Blessed Virgin. If you want to get our literature and mailings on this subject, please let us know and we will be happy to send them to you. God bless you.