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 The world is increasingly convulsed by a series of deepening crises that appear beyond the capacity of human beings to alleviate or solve. The evidence of social stress and moral decay is everywhere around us. In particular, the family, the wellspring and guarantor of civilization, is beset and beleaguered on all sides, caught in a rising tide of abortion, divorce, drug and alcohol abuse and inter-generational conflict. As we look around us, we see a world fast collapsing into violence, corruption and sin. Whether on the blood drenched "killing fields" of Lebanon or Bosnia or on the "mean streets" of New York or Los Angeles, the lives of millions of ordinary people remain in terrible (and growing) peril. Within the
Catholic community, there are additional causes for concern. Our increasingly
empty pews, confessionals, seminaries and convents are grim testimony to the
continuing crisis within our Holy Faith. In the vast majority of industrialized
nations, attendance at Mass has fallen into single digits (in Germany, for
example, less than five percent of all Catholics regularly attend
 Mass and the
numbers are not much better in North America). Since the close of the Second
Vatican Council in the early 1960s, the Church has witnessed its influence and
authority decline to a level not seen in more than 1800 years! Many theologians
and Fatima authorities now believe that this crisis within the Catholic Faith
is the subject of the still-unreleased Third Secret of
Fatima and contains Heaven's answer to the widespread chaos and confusion
within the Church.As we approach the new millenium, the God-given right of all human beings to life is under violent attack on all sides. Since the legalization of abortion in the United States, more than 30,000,000 children have been murdered in their own mother's wombs. Around the globe, this silent "slaughter of the innocents" continues to produce a holocaust of death unparalleled in human history. Current trends to legalize euthanasia and broaden the use of so-called "mercy killing" in the United States, Canada and throughout Europe are certain to result in the deaths of additional millions of elderly, infirm and/or otherwise "unwanted" human beings. Certainly, some
of the terrible problems confronting the world can (and should) be solved
within the family circle and by men and women of good will working within their
own spheres of influence. Nevertheless, many problems remain beyond the scope
of the ordinary individual. Government, far from providing solutions, is all
too often the source of the problem. So too, science and industry, once hailed
as the new "saviors" of mankind, have produced vast social and cultural
disolocations and given birth to technologies that threaten the lives and
well-being of billions of men, women and children. One does not have to be
"anti-science" to recoqnize that difficult delimmas like climactic change,
nuclear war and pollution threaten everyone.While some of the
problems we face today are the result of natural or historical processes, it is
increasingly clear that many others are the deliberate product of
forces opposed to
 the Christian Faith and consciously dedicated to the
destruction of our civilization's most treasured values and ideals. The rise of
Communism in the first half of the 20th Century engendered the widespread
glorification of materialism and atheism, establishing a new "religion of man"
without and opposed to God. Speaking at Fatima six months before the Bolshevik
Revolution, Our Lady warned that, if man did not stop offending God, He would
use Russia as His chosen "instrument" to punish the world. She further declared
that, if Her Fatima requests (especially for the
consecration of Russia) were not heeded, that
Russia would "spread her errors across the earth, raising up wars
and...annihilating various nations."And just as God's
Mother predicted, the "errors" of Russia -- materialism, militant atheism,
totalitarianism, abortion, euthanasia and genocide -- have spread across the
face of the earth, leaving mountains of corpses as the "fruits" by which "ye
shall know them" (Matthew 7:16). Dozens of nations and peoples have been
mercilessly exterminated in the name of philosophies and political parties
deriving from the same anti-God, anti-religious doctrine first
enshrined into law in Bolshevik Russia in 1917. Despite the much-heralded
"death of Communism," the 40,000 corpses lying in Chechnya today demonstrate
that Russia's "errors" continue to exact a relentless and bloody toll on the
world's people.
Our Lady's Plan for Peace       |