2017: Year of Anniversaries

Pondering the year ahead…

2017: Year of Anniversaries

Another year has passed. It is now 2017 Anno Domini. The reason we live in this time period of history and not in any other is a matter of Divine Providence. In His perfect omniscience and omnibenevolence, the Triune God, “who will have all men to be saved, and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim 2:4), has placed us in the world at this time and no other because, despite how it may seem at times, this is the period of world history that is most conducive to the eternal salvation of our very own particular soul.

The year 2017 is a year of significant anniversaries, many of them ominous. This new year marks:

• 500 years since the Protestant Reformation (Oct. 31, 1517)
• 300 years since the founding of modern Freemasonry, archenemy of the Catholic Church (June 24, 1717)
• 100 years since the Communist Revolution in Russia (Mar. 8 – Nov. 8, 1917)
• 100 years since Mgr. Eugenio Pacelli (the future Pope Pius XII) was consecrated a bishop (May 13, 1917)
• 100 years since Our Lady appeared to the shepherd children at Fatima, Portugal (May 13 – Oct. 13, 1917)
• 100 years since the publication of the Code of Canon Law (May 27, 1917)

Enough has been said about the Protestant Revolution in the past year; there is no need to repeat it. The Novus Ordo Sect is overjoyed at the 500-year anniversary, and this says all you need to know. As for the Catholic Church: The Council of Trent and the Tridentine Catechism definitively refuted the errors of the so-called Reformers and ushered in the period of the Catholic Counter-Reformation.

Although the origins of the Freemasons can be traced back to the late Middle Ages, and ultimately into ancient paganism and even the fall of Lucifer itself, June 24, 1717 marks the founding of the first national Masonic grand lodge, the Grand Lodge of London and Westminster, also known as “Lodge No. 1”. This is generally accepted as the founding date of “speculative Masonry”, which is Masonry as we know it today.

Without going into detail here, we recall that Freemasonry is the declared enemy of organized religion, especially of Catholicism, which Masonry has made its aim to wipe off the face of the earth:

The opposition of all the branches of Freemasonry … to the Catholic Church is essential and ineradicable, for it is the opposition of naturalism to the Supernatural Life of the Mystical Body of Christ and to the organisation of society based on the infinite dignity of that Life. In other words, it is the opposition of Anti-Christ to Christ.

(Mgr. George E. Dillon, Grand Orient Freemasonry Unmasked [Palmdale, CA: Christian Book Club of America, 1999], p. 19; reprint of original 1950 edition.)

On December 8, 1869, the International Congress of Freemasons imposed it as a duty on all its members to do all in their power to wipe out Catholicity from the face of the earth. Cremation was proposed as a suitable means to this end, since it was calculated to gradually undermine the faith of the people in “the resurrection of the body and life everlasting.”

(Fr. John Laux, Catholic Morality [New York, NY: Benziger Brothers, 1934], p. 106)

We have a divine guarantee that the Masonic plot will ultimately fail and the true Church will be victorious, but this does not mean that Freemasonry will not pull countless souls into hell for all eternity in the meantime. For more information about the Catholic condemnation of Freemasonry, please see our following posts:

• Freemasons and the Conciliar Church by John K. Weiskittel
• Papal Condemnations of Freemasonry
• Papal Warnings of Masonic and other Plots against Catholicism
• Pope Pius IX, Allocution Multiplices Inter Machinationes (1865)
• Was Pope Pius IX ever a Freemason? First Rebuttal to Tradition in Action
• Was Pope Pius IX ever a Freemason? Second Rebuttal to Tradition in Action

The doctrines of Freemasonry — especially their Naturalism, Indifferentism, and false ideas of liberty — are very prevalent throughout the Western world today and especially in the Vatican, where “Pope” Francis is the Chief Mason, if not formally, certainly in terms of what he believes and teaches. (We have dubbed his beliefs the false “Gospel of Man”.)

Little will need to be said about the horrific and bloody Communist Revolution in Russia in 1917, led by the Bolshevik Marxists of Vladimir Lenin. Communism has brought untold evils upon the world, massacred tens of millions of people, and replaced God with the state. Communism is the ultimate antithesis to the Catholic confessional state. At the height of the Cold War, when “Pope” John XXIII, the founder of the Vatican II Sect, convened the revolutionary Second Vatican Council in 1962, he made a pact with the Russian Orthodox not to condemn Communism in exchange for getting Orthodox representatives to attend the council as observers.

“Pope” Francis’ closeness to Communism and Communists is well known, and he even happily accepted a blasphemous hammer-and-sickle “crucifix” when visiting Bolivia in 2015, which he then blasphemously dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary. In 1963, shortly before his death, John XXIII published the “papal encyclical” Pacem in Terris, a document with Communist and Masonic overtones (see Fr. Luigi Villa, John XXIII “Beatified” Too? and Franco Bellegrandi, Nikita Roncalli). Furthermore, we note with curiosity that when in 1948 Mgr. Fulton Sheen warned of a coming “counter-church” that would ape the Catholic Church to deceive the masses, he identified it with Communism. That the Masons today publicly support “Pope” Francis should go without saying.

Of course, 2017 is also the 100th anniversary of the apparitions at Fatima in Portugal. During the latter half of World War I, the Mother of God appeared for a total of six times between May 13 and October 13, 1917, to warn the world of God’s coming chastisement if men did not stop sinning, and to call the three shepherd children — Francisco and Jacinta Marto and Lucia dos Santos — to extraordinary penances for the conversion of sinners and in reparation of sin to appease the wrath of Almighty God. Our Lady promised world peace if her requests were heeded, and terrible divine punishment in case they were not.

Regardless of historical events that are now a matter of the past and can therefore no longer be changed, the Fatima Message has enduring validity even down to our own day, and devotion to Our Lady remains critical.

From time to time, various attempts are made by semi-traditionalists and conservative Novus Ordos to keep people attached to the Vatican II antipopes by appealing to Fatima prophecy that they believe is as yet unfulfilled. Most recently, Rorate Caeli trotted out the old canard, once hyped up by spinmeister Christopher Ferrara, that “Pope” Benedict XVI had indicated some dramatic fulfillment of prophecy was still to come when he said during a homily in 2010 that “the prophetic mission of Fatima” was not yet complete. We had already demonstrated from Benedict’s own clarification in his interview book Light of the World that this was not a cryptic reference to anything extraordinary — he was merely saying that since there are still evil, suffering, and danger in the world, there must still continue to be a conversion of hearts through faith, hope, love, and repentance. Since, however, such boring facts tend to get in the way of those who want to promote the Vatican II Sect and its false popes as endorsed by Our Lady of Fatima, we anticipate that a number of semi-trads will repeat the Ratzinger quote about the incomplete “prophetic mission” ad nauseam again this year, and no doubt the Ratzinger/Third-Secret controversy will once again flare up as well.

Like his predecessors, “Pope” Francis, too, of course, feigns a devotion to Our Lady of Fatima every so often (as he does also with St. Pius X), and he has promised to travel to Fatima this year for the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the apparitions. However, a sobering reality check on Francis and Fatima shows very quickly that nothing positive will come from this, despite what we can expect the late “Fr.” Nicholas Gruner’s Fatima Center, perhaps as one final hurrah, will want its followers to hope for.

May 13, 1917, however, is not only the day Our Lady first appeared to the shepherd children at Fatima. It is also the day the future Pope Pius XII, Mgr. Eugenio Pacelli, was consecrated a bishop by Pope Benedict XV. The Holy Father had just appointed Mgr. Pacelli as Apostolic Nuncio to Germany and wanted the new nuncio to begin his work as soon as possible. For this reason, the consecration was carried out quickly. It turned out that Pacelli was consecrated “at the very hour” that Our Lady’s first apparition took place, by the very Pope whom Jacinta would miraculously see in a vision “in a very large house” as “kneeling before a little table, weeping, with his head between his hands” (see Walter H. Peters, The Life of Benedict XV [Milwaukee, WI: Bruce Publishing, 1959], pp. 141,217).

Pope Pius XII was truly the “Fatima Pope”: Not only was he made a bishop on the same day and hour of the first Fatima apparition; in 1944 he introduced the feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary to the universal Roman calendar (August 22), he consecrated Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary in 1952 (although not in union with all the bishops of the world) in his Apostolic Letter Sacro Vergente Anno, and he personally witnessed a repeat of the miracle of the sun (which had originally taken place on October 13, 1917, in Fatima) in the Vatican Gardens, not once or twice, but as many as four times, in late October and early November 1950.

There is yet another 100th anniversary in 2017, and that is the promulgation of the Pio-Benedictine Code of Canon Law. On Pentecost Sunday, May 27, 1917, Pope Benedict XV published the Apostolic Constitution Providentissima Mater, which implemented the first systematic arrangement of ecclesiastical law for the entire Latin church. A solemn ceremony for the promulgation of the Code took place on June 28 of the same year. The complex work of the codification of church law had been begun by Pope St. Pius X in 1904, and it took 13 years to complete. Benedict XV, recognizing himself to have been in large part the inheritor of the work of Pius X, gave all the credit to his sainted predecessor (see Peters, The Life of Benedict XV, pp. 202-203). The Code of Canon Law went into effect a year later, on Pentecost 1918. It is available online in Latin here.

The year 2017 could be quite turbulent, but we shall not be moved (cf. Ps 61:7; Mt 24:6; Jn 14:1). Let us pray that through the intercession of Our Lady of Fatima, the year of our Lord two-thousand and seventeen will bring us many graces, obtain for the world true and lasting peace, be a defeat for heresy and vice, and finally bring to an end the wicked Novus Ordo Sect and allow the true Catholic Church once again to flourish.

Firmly believing that the God who can turn stones into the children of Abraham (see Mt 3:9) and, through His infinite grace and mercy, can transform the world’s greatest crime into the Redemption of mankind (cf. Acts 3:13-19; Heb 9:15), let us offer prayer without ceasing that Almighty God will grant us once again a true Pope and the full restoration of Holy Mother Church.

Our Lady of Fatima, make intercession for us.

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