Rabbi Yeshua told us, “But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only” (Mt 24:36). He added, “Watch therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. But know this, that if the householder had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have watched and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore you also must be ready; for the Son of man is coming at an hour you do not expect” Mt 24:42–44. He added: “Watch therefore—for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or in the morning lest he come suddenly and find you asleep” Mk 13:35–36. “And what I say to you I say to all: Watch” Mk 13:37.
The Jews who heard Rabbi Yeshua recognized his allusion. The Temple guards had to be awake and alert at all times. The priest superintending the arrangements might at any moment come suddenly, knock on the door, and demand entrance. The Mishna Tamid 1:2C-E tells us, “And at what time does the superintendent come by? Not all times are the same. Sometimes he comes at cockcrow, or near then, earlier or later.” When the captain of the Temple guards made his rounds during the night, each guard had to rise and salute him. If a guard was found sleeping the captain would set his clothing on fire. “Blessed is he who is awake, keeping his garments that he may not go naked and be seen exposed!” Rev 16:15.
Satan had been using our darkened intellects and weakened wills to set our souls on fire during all of salvation history Jn 8:44. Suddenly however, in the day of Rabbi Yeshua, he stirred into a frenzy of action, even inciting the Sanhedrin to crucify Rabbi Yeshua. As the twentieth century dawned, Satan was preparing to incite the crucifixion of the Jewish nation and the Catholic Church. “For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places” Eph 6:12.
The Light
God is the source of all light. “God created man in his own image.” Gen 1:27, § 1701. Our mission in this life is to reflect God’s superbrilliant glory back to him and to one another. We Catholics walk as an army reflecting Rabbi Yeshua’s glory on our journey to the Cross, and beyond to the Resurrection. Rabbi Yeshua leads us as head of the whole Church, followed by His executive officer Pope Benedict XVI, Vicarius Christi for the Church Militant, with his Vatican staff officers. Following the pope are Rabbi Yeshua‘s senior officers the ordinary and auxiliary bishops, His junior officers the priests and deacons, and his armorers Eph 6:11 the religious who spend their lives in prayer. Following all of them in union with the Holy Father, consuming our rations Mt 26:26, living bread Jn 6:51, real food and drink, we march across Rabbi Yeshua‘s vineyard carrying our banners the Gloria and the Credo, and reading our field manual Dominus Iesus. The Holy Spirit brings us companions for the journey.
The Catholic faith is a received faith, once delivered to the saints Jude 3. We do not make it up as we go along. Holy Mother Church above all reflects God’s shining glory back to him and to us all. Second Exodus depends primarily for its sources on the Church, particularly her Sacred Scriptures and her Catechism of the Catholic Church. We also find reflections of God’s glory in Dr. Lawrence Feingold’s The Mystery of Israel and the Church, in Karl Keating’s Catholic Answers, in Father Hardon’s Eternal Life, and Cardinal Burke’s writings everywhere but especially on the Marian Catechist site. There are many other excellent Catholic sites.
In our time, the moral darkness is so deep that human efforts can no longer overcome it. Only the light shining brighter than the sun from the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, reflected in men’s hearts, can overcome it. We reflect God’s glory as Rabbi Yeshua taught us: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets” Mt 22:37-40, § 2055.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches: § 671 “Christians pray, above all in the Eucharist, to hasten Rabbi Yeshua’s return by saying to him: Maranatha! ‘Our Lord, come!’” 1 Cor 16:22. At the same time, § 674 “The glorious Messiah’s coming is suspended at every moment of history until his recognition by all Israel” Rom 11:26. Second Exodus encourages everyone to view the interview of (then-Archbishop) Cardinal Burke recorded on August 5, 2010, all five videos.
The time is now. If something is not done soon, within a very few decades there will be no living memory of the time when most Catholics went to church every Sunday dressed in their Sunday best, when Christian morality prevailed, when most children were born into stable two-parent families. As living memory of those days flickers and goes dark, they will seem more and more like New York City in the 1800s when horses walked the streets of Manhattan, a time in antiquity to which we will not return.
Years 1884 to 1950
October 13, 1884
On October 13, 1884, after celebrating Mass in the Vatican Chapel, Pope Leo XIII stopped at the foot of the altar and stood absolutely still for several minutes. He then told cardinals that he had heard Satan declare, “I can destroy your Church,” and Rabbi Yeshua’s calm reply, “You can? Then do so.” Satan said, “I need more time and more power.” Rabbi Yeshua replied, “How much time? How much power?” Satan said, “Seventy-five to one hundred years, and a greater power over those who will give themselves to my service.” Rabbi Yeshua said, “You have the time, you have the power. Do with them what you will.”
A reliable account of Pope Leo XIII’s vision.
Pope Leo XIII’s vision suggests to Second Exodus that the time of the ingrafting is approaching. It recalls Zechariah’s fifth vision, with its golden lampstand and two olive trees Zech 4:2–3 giving God’s prophecy, “Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, says the LORD of hosts” Zech 4:6. The ingrafting of the Jews, Rabbi Yeshua’s bekhor, into the Catholic Church must occur before the Second Coming § 674. The “two witnesses” Rev 11:3, said to be Enoch Gen 5:24 and Elijah 2 Kings 2:11, symbolically the two olive trees and two candlesticks, Rev 11:4, would introduce the Jewish nation to Rabbi Yeshua so the Second Coming Mt 25:31–46 could take place, § 677 “not by a historic triumph of the Church through a progressive ascendancy, but only by God’s victory over the final unleashing of evil, which will cause his Bride to come down from heaven.”
October 13, 1917
Satan began preparing for his century of enhanced power in Moscow with an attack on a Catholic parish church. The Blessed Virgin Mary responded in Rome with the papal ordination of a bishop who would one day become a great pope, and in Fátima, Portugal, with a great miracle. All three occurred on the same day: October 13, 1917.
Moscow
Archbishop Sheen relates that, with the Russian Revolution imminent, Marie Alexandrovich, a young Russian woman, was teaching religion to a group of two hundred children in the Church of the Iberian Virgin. Suddenly, men on horses entered through the front door and went down the center aisle all the way to the Communion rail. They destroyed the icons, the sanctuary, and even the altar. Then they attacked the children, killing many of them. Marie Alexandrovich ran out the door screaming. Seeing Lenin, whom she knew, she rushed to him and told him what had occurred. Lenin replied: “I know it. I sent them.”
Rome
Church bells rang all through the city to herald the consecration of a new bishop. In the Sistine Chapel, Pope Benedict XV consecrated Msgr. Eugenio Pacelli as a bishop and on the same day elevated him to archbishop. Archbishop Pacelli traveled to Munich, where he had been assigned as the papal nuncio. Lenin’s communist revolutionaries, who were highly organized in Munich, published a list of 325 men whom they intended to kill. One of them was Archbishop Pacelli.
The commander of the southern communist army, a man named Siler, personally went with an aide to Archbishop Pacelli‘s residence to shoot him. Siler hid behind a curtain, waiting to hear the archbishop’s footsteps. When Archbishop Pacelli approached the curtain, Siler raised his gun to shoot him, but the gun struck the archbishop’s pectoral cross and fell to the floor. Archbishop Pacelli picked up the gun, handed it back to Siler, and said, “Here is your gun. Kill me if you wish. I am only interested in the souls of my people.” Siler and the aide went back to their camp. They did not understand why they had not been able to kill him, but they knew this: Archbishop Pacelli had leonine courage.
On March 2, 1939, Cardinal Pacelli was elected Pope Pius XII. He knew well that his consecration as bishop and archbishop had occurred on the very day of the final apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Fátima, and that the Blessed Virgin had saved his life in Munich. Very much aware that he would stand as Vicar of Christ against Satan’s thunder from Russia and Germany, Pius XII became a great Marian pontiff. On October 31, 1942, during the Fátima 25th anniversary celebrations, in a Portuguese-language radio broadcast, Pius XII solemnly consecrated the world to the Blessed Virgin’s Immaculate Heart. On September 15, 1951, he published his encyclical Ingruentium Malorum, promoting the Rosary. On July 7, 1952, he published his apostolic letter Carissimis Russiae Populis, consecrating in particular the Russian people to the Immaculate Heart. On September 8, 1953, he published his encyclical Fulgens Corona, proclaiming a Marian Year to commemorate the one-hundredth anniversary of Pope Pius IX apostolic constitution Ineffabilis Deus (which defined the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception on December 8, 1854). And on October 11, 1954, he published his encyclical Ad Caeli Reginam, proclaiming the Blessed Virgin Mary as Queen of Heaven.
Pope Pius XII gave the pectoral cross by which his life had been saved to Cardinal Spellman. In 1954, when Bishop Sheen told Cardinal Spellman that in a few hours he would tell his audience how Pius XII had been miraculously saved, Cardinal Spellman gave the pectoral cross to Bishop Sheen. Bishop Sheen wore it that evening as he told his audience how the Blessed Virgin protected Archbishop Pacelli.
See this extraordinary video! Our Lady of Fátima – Ven Bishop Fulton J. Sheen 22:23 And also Fátima.
Fatima
The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in The Message of Fatima, § 4, tells us: “Fatima is undoubtedly the most prophetic of modern apparitions.”
Father Mitch Pacwa with Father Andrew Apostoli 56:32
Sister Lucia revealed that during her Fátima apparition of July 13, 1917 the Blessed Virgin gave the three children a vision of hell:
Our Lady showed us a great sea of fire which seemed to be under the earth. Plunged in this fire were demons and souls in human form, like transparent burning embers, all blackened or burnished bronze, floating about in the conflagration, now raised into the air by the flames that issued from within themselves together with great clouds of smoke, now falling back on every side like sparks in a huge fire, without weight or equilibrium, and amid shrieks and groans of pain and despair, which horrified us and made us tremble with fear. The demons could be distinguished by their terrifying and repulsive likeness to frightful and unknown animals, all black and transparent. This vision lasted but an instant. How can we ever be grateful enough to our kind heavenly Mother, who had already prepared us by promising, in the first Apparition, to take us to heaven. Otherwise, I think we would have died of fear and terror.
Sr. Lucia reported, “We then looked up at Our Lady, who said to us so kindly and so sadly: ‘You have seen hell where the souls of poor sinners go. To save them, God wishes to establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart. If what I say to you is done, many souls will be saved and there will be peace. The war is going to end: but if people do not cease offending God, a worse one will break out during the Pontificate of Pope Pius XI. When you see a night illumined by an unknown light, know that this is the great sign given you by God that he is about to punish the world for its crimes, by means of war, famine, and persecutions of the Church and of the Holy Father. To prevent this, I shall come to ask for the consecration of Russia to my Immaculate Heart, and the Communion of reparation on the First Saturdays. If my requests are heeded, Russia will be converted, and there will be peace; if not, she will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church. The good will be martyred; the Holy Father will have much to suffer; various nations will be annihilated. In the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph. The Holy Father will consecrate Russia to me, and she shall be converted, and a period of peace will be granted to the world.’”
This prophecy that a worse war would begin in the reign of Pope Pius XI was visibly supernatural. On July 13, 1917 no one on earth knew who would be the next Pope or what name he would choose. Achille Ratti was then still a priest, a student of Hebrew, head of the Vatican Library, and an expert mountain climber. On February 6, 1922, he was elected the 259th Pope, chose the name Pius XI, and reigned until February 10, 1939. The “night illumined by an unknown light” was January 25, 1938, when a remarkable display of aurora borealis was visible across Europe from about 9:00 pm to about 2:00 am, God’s great sign of coming war. On March 12, 1938, during the reign of Pius XI, Hitler began World War II by occupying Austria.
Sr. Lucia later lamented: “Some people, even the most devout, refuse to speak to the children about Hell, in case it would frighten them. Yet God did not hesitate to show Hell to three children, one of whom was only six years old, knowing well that they would be horrified to the point of … withering away with fear.”
The vision certainly scared little Jacinta and Francisco. “Jacinta took this matter of making sacrifices for the conversion of sinners so much to heart, that she never let a single opportunity escape her.” “Jacinta’s thirst for making sacrifices seemed insatiable.” Francisco told Sr. Lucia, “Didn’t you notice how sad our Lady was that last month when she said that people must not offend our Lord any more for He is already much offended? I would like to console our Lord, and after that, convert sinners so that they won’t offend Him any more.” Francisco loved to spend his time “in the church, close to the Hidden Jesus.” The Blessed Virgin affirmed that both Jacinta and Francisco would go to heaven.
During the Blessed Virgin’s Fátima apparition on July 13, 1917, Lucia had asked her “What do you want of me.” The Blessed Virgin answered gently, “I want you to come here on the 13th of the next month, to continue to pray the Rosary every day in honor of our Lady of the Rosary.”
During the apparition of August 19, 1917 (postponed from August 13) our Blessed Mother told the children that diabolical forces would be released in our time and enter into the very life of the Church.
Fatima Foretold Diabolical Forces: Cardinal Burke 32:09
On October 13, 1917, thirty-three years to the day after Pope Leo XIII’s vision, the Blessed Virgin, “Clothed in the simple brown robes of Mount Carmel,” told the three children, “I am the Lady of the Rosary,” indicating the prayer by which we can best appeal for her help. Immediately after that, she confirmed the authenticity of the vision with the miracle of the sun. It had been pouring rain all morning, and everything was soaked. Suddenly the sun burst through the dark clouds. It began to spin and zigzag in the sky, and then fell swiftly toward the earth. All of the 70,000 people in and around the Cova da Iria, then an open field in a rural area of Portugal, became terrified and fell to their knees in prayer, convinced that they would die within minutes. Then the sun returned to its normal place in the sky. Even the Portuguese newspapers reported the miracle with awe.
So That All May Believe, the Miracle of the Sun
Our Lady of Fátima – Ven. Bishop Fulton J. Sheen 22:23
Russia
“Even my bosom friend in whom I trusted, who ate of my bread, has lifted his heel against me” Ps 41:9. Two thousand years ago Rabbi Yeshua was betrayed from within His own circle. In our own time Holy Mother Church is being betrayed from within by many of her own bishops, and many of the priests they have ordained.
The Russian Revolution
Russia under the Czars was populated mostly by Russian Orthodox Christians but there were also some Catholics. In Moscow, St. Petersburg and other major cities the church bells rang constantly on Sunday mornings. Most Russians then were joyfully devout, but some were “whitewashed tombs,” Mt 23:27 beautiful in outward appearance but interiorly unclean. Many of these cooperated in severe persecutions of Jews. Others, in their enthusiasm for Russian nationalism, put Russia nearly on a par with Rabbi Yeshua himself. Catholics, their brothers in Christ, were disdainfully called “the Polish religion.” Neither did the Catholics treat the Russian Orthodox Christians as their brothers in the apostolic succession. In their pride, they forgot Rabbi Yeshua’s clear teaching: “And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand” Mk 3:25.
The Bolsheviks initially promised separation of church and state in Russia. There would be no national church, so that all churches could flourish. But, in 1919, as Lenin was consolidating the Russian Revolution, he followed his order to destroy the Church of the Iberian Virgin with an order to destroy all Russian houses of worship. He saw the Catholic Church as the great bulwark against state power and wanted it annihilated. During the ensuing years, 1,491 Catholic churches were closed or reduced to rubble. All Church property was seized, and all priests arrested. In all, tens of millions of Catholic and Orthodox Christians were killed.
By 1926 the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) had been consolidated, combining Russia with a series of satellite nations. And in all of its vast territory there was not one single Catholic bishop! Since only a bishop can ordain in the Sacrament of Holy Orders, the Vatican recognized an imperative need to reconstitute the Catholic Church in Russia. In that same year, Msgr. Michel d’Herbigny, a French Jesuit, was chosen for a mission to go secretly to Russia to ordain three new bishops. Since a priest cannot ordain, Pope Pius XI sent Msgr. Michel d’Herbigny to Berlin to be secretly ordained a bishop by Archbishop Eugenio Pacelli, the papal nuncio for Germany and future Pope Pius XII who had shown such leonine courage nine years earlier. After his ordination, Msgr. d’Herbigny, as he still called himself, entered Russia by train. There he met with an old friend, Father Pie Eugene Neveu. D’Herbigny explained that he was now a secret bishop with Vatican orders to covertly ordain Neveu as Bishop of Moscow.
The Holy See, realizing that more would be needed, created Russicum College in Rome, specifically to train Catholic Byzantine Rite priests for future secret missions to Russia. Initially, eleven Russicum priests were sent to Russia. However, Stalin’s secret police discovered them. Two were shot, two died, and the remaining seven were sent to the Solovki gulag. In 1933, Bishop Neveu secretly sent Pope Pius XI pictures of the priests suffering in the gulag. Again Stalin’s secret police became aware of this. In the very year Hitler came to power in Germany with his war against the Jews, Stalin saw the clandestine entry of these few innocent priests not as simple missionary work but as an act of war by the Catholic Church. If the Catholic Church would send eleven priests into the USSR, the USSR would send eleven hundred into the Catholic Church. Most or even all were homosexual. Stalin believed they would retain their motivation to destroy the Church because of its teaching on homosexual behavior: Lev 18:22, Lev 20:13; Rom 1:26–27, 32; 1 Cor 6:9–10; Jude 7.
Russia Will Spread Her Errors
Bella Dodd’s Testimony
Bella Dodd, a leader of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) during the 1930s who subsequently returned to the Catholic faith, testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee during the 1950s concerning Communist infiltration of agents into the Catholic Church. She also detailed these activities in her book, School of Darkness. Christian Order, a British Catholic magazine obedient to the Pope and conservative in outlook, published this in November 2000: “Ex-Communist and celebrated convert Douglas Hyde revealed long ago that in the 1930s the Communist leadership issued a worldwide directive about infiltrating the Catholic Church. While in the early 1950s, Mrs. Bella Dodd was also providing detailed explanations of the Communist subversion of the Church. Speaking as a former high ranking official of the American Communist Party, Mrs. Dodd said: “In the 1930s we put eleven hundred men into the priesthood in order to destroy the Church from within.”
The idea was for these men to be ordained and progress to positions of influence and authority as Monsignors and Bishops. A dozen years before Vatican II she stated: “Right now they are in the highest places in the Church” — where they were working to bring about change in order to weaken the Church’s effectiveness against Communism. She also said that these changes would be so drastic that, “You will not recognize the Catholic Church.”
Alice von Hildebrand’s Testimony
Alice von Hildebrand wrote The Soul of a Lion as a biography of her late husband Dietrich von Hildebrand, whom Pope Pius XII called “the twentieth-century Doctor of the Church.” She wrote in Latin Mass magazine, Summer 2001, summarized in Rorate Caeli:
There have been two books published in Italy in recent years that confirm what my husband had been suspecting for some time; namely, that there has been a systematic infiltration of the Church by diabolical enemies for much of this century. My husband was a very sanguine man and optimistic by nature. During the last ten years of his life, however, I witnessed him many times in moments of great sorrow, and frequently repeating, ‘They have desecrated the Holy Bride of Christ.’ He was referring to the ‘abomination of desolation’ of which the prophet Daniel speaks.
She added,
I can only tell you what I know. It is a matter of public record, for instance, that Bella Dodd, the ex-Communist who reconverted to the Church, openly spoke of the Communist Party’s deliberate infiltration of agents into the seminaries. She told my husband and me that when she was an active party member, she had dealt with no fewer than four cardinals within the Vatican “who were working for us.”
“This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?” Jn 6:60. Many Catholics who have not read Bella Dodd’s School of Darkness or the transcripts of her voluminous testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee during the 1950s find it hard to believe that the Communist Party could infiltrate 1,100 men into the seminaries to serve as moles who would quietly rise through the ranks to senior positions where they would try to destroy the Church. Mrs. Dodd’s predictions of the 1950s, when few Catholics would have predicted the explosive events of the late 1960s and the 1970s, were startlingly accurate, evidence that the infiltration actually occurred. A monk who attended Mrs. Dodd’s Fordham University lecture was quoted in the Christian Order article: “I listened to that woman for four hours and she had my hair standing on end. Everything she said has been fulfilled to the letter.… She explained that of all the world’s religions, the Catholic Church was the only one feared by the Communists, for it was its only effective opponent.”
Can it Be True?
Can it be true? The International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL) was founded in 1964. Brian McGuire described it as “a tiny body of self-appointed members that have exercised an iron grip over the English translation of the liturgy for the past 30 years.” Father Stephen Somerville, a priest in the Archdiocese of Toronto, wrote in the Adoremus Bulletin: “We found subtle ways of changing the words and dignifying these changes with decent, hopeful, positive expressions.… It was a revolution … we were literally changing the faith of the Catholic Church because we were changing the way it prays.”
Can it be true? On December 31, 1930, Pope Pius XI published Casti Connubii, which taught that contraception is intrinsically evil. “Since, therefore, the conjugal act is destined primarily by nature for the begetting of children, those who in exercising it deliberately frustrate its natural power and purpose sin against nature and commit a deed which is shameful and intrinsically vicious.” It was accepted universally within the Church. On July 25, 1968, Pope Paul VI published Humanae Vitae, which re-stated: “The Church, … teaches that each and every marital act must of necessity retain its intrinsic relationship to the procreation of human life.” But, this time, Father Charles Curran, then a moral theologian at the Catholic University of America, wrote a statement of dissent which was signed by more than six hundred theologians, priests, and academics and widely published. It was a whirlwind that tore through the Church, setting bishop against bishop, priest against priest, layman against layman. It was a wound that continues in the Church today.
Years 1950 to 2000
Pope Paul VI
Pope Paul VI had seen the demonic in full fury the day after he published his encyclical Humanae Vitae in 1968. On November 15, 1972, during his General Audience address Deliver Us From Evil, he declared:
“What are the greatest needs of the Church today? Do not let our answer surprise you as being over-simple or even superstitious and unreal: One of the greatest needs is defense from that evil which is the Devil.”
“Evil is not merely a lack of something, but an effective agent, a living, spiritual being, perverted and perverting, a terrible reality, mysterious and frightening. So we know that this dark and disturbing spirit really exists, and that he still acts with treacherous cunning. He is the secret enemy that sows errors and misfortunes in human history.”
“This question of the Devil and the influence he can exert on individual persons as well as our communities, whole societies or events, is a very important chapter of Catholic doctrine which is given little attention today, though it should be studied again.”
Karol Cardinal Wojtyla
In 1976, two years before he became St. John Paul II, Karol Cardinal Wojtyla, then the Archbishop of Kraków in Poland, visited the United States on the occasion of the Eucharistic Congress held that year in Philadelphia. It was a part of the national bicentennial celebration of the Declaration of Independence. His parting talk included this passage:
We are now standing in the face of the greatest historical confrontation humanity has gone through. I do not think that wide circles of American society or wide circles of the Christian community realize this fully. We are now facing the final confrontation between the Church and the anti-Church, of the Gospel versus the anti-Gospel. This confrontation lies within the plans of divine providence; it is a trial which the whole Church, and the Polish Church in particular, must take up.
We must be prepared to undergo great trials in the not-too-distant future; trials that will require us to be ready to give up even our lives, and a total gift of self to Christ and for Christ. Through your prayers and mine, it is possible to alleviate this tribulation, but it is no longer possible to avert it. … How many times has the renewal of the Church been brought about in blood! It will not be different this time.
The Polish Church in particular? Cardinal Wojtyla knew his Polish history, and Israel’s history. During the past thousand years Poland has been a predominantly Catholic land. In the time of the Crusades, Jews from all over Europe fled there. For the next eight centuries, when other European countries persecuted or expelled Jews from their lands, they fled to Poland, Israel-in-Exile, during that time the world‘s largest Jewish community and foremost center of Jewish learning and culture.
“Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man has nowhere to lay his head” Mt 8:20. Poland and Israel share with the Son of God that their survival rests on God, not on territory. Poland as a sovereign land had gone in and out of existence several times during the past thousand years. In 1795 Russia and Prussia partitioned it, erasing its national existence and submerging its language and culture for 123 years until 1918, the year after Fátima, when the Treaty of Versailles restored it. Then in 1939 Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union again took Poland out of existence, dividing it between them until 1945, staining its land with rivers of Polish and Jewish blood. Yet Poland, always deeply Catholic, by God’s grace survived as a faithful people, a land, and a culture. Israel’s national existence had been erased even longer, from 63 BC to AD 1948, yet God also preserved it as a faithful people, a land, and a culture. But Cardinal Wojtyla’s gravamen was the final confrontation between the Church and the Anti-Church.
It did not take long for the prophecy to see its first fulfillment. An anti-communist Polish pope together with the anti-communist Ronald Reagan represented a grave threat to the USSR. Attempts were made to assassinate both. On March 13, 1981 John Hinkley Jr. shot and nearly killed President Reagan. On May 13, 1981, Mehmet Ali Ağca, a Bulgarian sharpshooter, shot and very nearly killed the Holy Father. God intervened. Both survived, the USSR did not.
The Final Battle
The Cardinal Caffarra Interview
In our time Sister Lucia of Fatima gave a written prophecy to Carlo Cardinal Caffarra. In a 2008 interview Cardinal Caffarra said:
The final battle between the Lord and the reign of Satan will be about marriage and the family.
Don’t be afraid, she added, because anyone who works for the sanctity of marriage and the family will always be fought and opposed in every way, because this is the decisive issue.
However, Our Lady has already crushed its head.
This prophecy, like all prophecies, is § 67 private revelation.
Cardinal Caffarra added,
Talking also to John Paul II, you felt too that this was the crux, as it touches the very pillar of creation, the truth of the relationship between man and woman among the generations. If the founding pillar is touched the entire building collapses and we see this now, because we are at this point and we know it. And I’m moved when I read the best biographies of Padre Pio, on how this man was so attentive to the sanctity of marriage and the sanctity of the spouses, even with justifiable rigor on occasion.
St. John Paul II entrusted the same Cardinal Caffarra with responsibility to start the Pontifical Institute for the Studies on Marriage and the Family at the Catholic University of America. St. John Paul II also gave us his classic Theology of the Body, a series of 129 General Audiences 1979-1984. Sr. Lucia‘s private revelation has obviously been approved at the Church‘s highest level.
1P5 also reports on the Cardinal Caffarra interview, also highlighting that the final battle will be about marriage and the family. God sees us passing from one generation to the next as links in a chain. The links are held together by marriage and the family, bearing, raising, and teaching children “the faith once delivered to the saints.” Jude 3. As long as marriage and the family are intact, the chain, the Church, will remain strong. Once a link breaks, it becomes much more difficult to repair, but it can still be done, with the older generation teaching the young children. If two links break, only God can repair the chain. We are now two links out; in the 1960s many Catholics stopped teaching the Faith to their children.
Satan’s Attack on Holy Matrimony
We have seen the pillars that have upheld our families fall, one at a time. Fornication. Contraception. Abortion. Euthanasia. Now, in our own time, Satan has struck directly at the heart of Holy Matrimony in the Same Sex Court Case. Most public schools are already teaching falsely that marriage can be whatever two consenting adults wish it to be.
Guide for the Catholic Family in These Days of Turmoil – Fr. John Hardon, SJ 57:07
Fr. John Hardon, SJ – Family Crisis 1:22:23
Cardinal Burke
Cardinal Burke urges genuine Catholic education. Patrick Reilly’s article, Cardinal Burke Urges Genuine Catholic Education to Renew Culture, October 28, 2015, says, “Good parents and good citizens,” said Cardinal Burke, “must be attentive to the curriculum which schools are following and to the life in the schools, in order to assure that our children are being formed in the human and Christian virtues and are not being deformed by indoctrination …Today, for example, we sadly find the need to speak about ‘traditional marriage,’ as if there were another kind of marriage.”
Cardinal Burke quotes from Gravissimum Educationis § 3, “As it is the parents who have given life to their children, on them lies the gravest obligation of educating their family. They must therefore be recognized as being primarily and principally responsible for their education.”
Second Exodus believes it has now become urgent that Catholic families home school their children, so that each mother can teach her children what the Catholic Church teaches about the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony as well as the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist and all the rest of the de fide Church teaching. They need to see the vision of Holy Matrimony open to whoever enters into married life. Of course, a Catholic mother who believes her children could get better formation at a first-class Catholic education at a Newman-approved school is free to make that decision. Our highest mission is preparing our sons and daughters for heaven.
The Marian Apparitions
These prophecies, too are § 67 private revelations, also approved by the Church.
Our Lady of Good Success
1P5 says: Venerable Mother Mariana de Jesus Torres of Quito, Ecuador, reported a vision first approved in 1611:
Thus I make it known to you that from the end of the 19th century and shortly after the middle of the 20th century … the passions will erupt and there will be a total corruption of morals … As for the Sacrament of Matrimony, which symbolizes the union of Christ with his Church, it will be attacked and deeply profaned. Freemasonry, which will then be in power, will enact iniquitous laws with the aim of doing away with this Sacrament, making it easy for everyone to live in sin and encouraging procreation of illegitimate children born without the blessing of the Church … In this supreme moment of need for the Church, the one who should speak will fall silent.
Akita
1P5 also quotes from Sister Agnes Katsuko Sasagawa of Akita-Shi, Japan, describing a series of apparitions first approved in 1984.
The work of the devil will infiltrate even into the Church in such a way that one will see cardinals opposing cardinals, bishops against bishops. The priests who venerate me will be scorned and opposed by their confreres…churches and altars sacked; the Church will be full of those who accept compromises and the demon will press many priests and consecrated souls to leave the service of the Lord.
The Church, the World and the Final Battle
Sister Lucia‘s prophecy is already reflected in the world. Holy Mother Church courageously fought the spirit of our age with Humanae Vitae, which reaffirmed the Church’s two thousand year old teaching against contraception. But “the pill,” introduced in the 1960s, triggered a tidal wave of illicit sexual activity that spread over most of the earth. The Catholic Church Alone has continued to stand firm in her teaching, often reflecting in her heart, ““Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so men persecuted the prophets who were before you” Mt 5:11–12.
The Catholic Church Alone has held fast against the sexual revolution. Every other major institution has succumbed. The sola Scriptura denominations widely support the sexual revolution. The public schools, colleges and universities, news media, and most other formative institutions overwhelmingly support it. The Supreme Court’s Same Sex Court Case has gone farther off the cliff than America’s other institutions.
The Barque of Peter has sailed across the centuries, often in rough waters, for two thousand years, as always an infallible Church run by fallible men Mk 4:37–38. On that long journey sometimes she has had to be a willow, bending in a fierce wind so that her roots remain secure. During the 1970s cultural accommodation became popular. The pastor today stands in the sanctuary and looks at his flock. If he strongly condemns contraception and fornication, especially among his young parishioners, he worries that come next Sunday his pews and his collection plate will both be empty. He can’t in conscience approve of them so, too often, he quietly decides to offer homilies on that day’s Scripture readings. But, even as a willow, Holy Mother Church has been successful. Her firm authority, a rock in a stormy sea, even with widespread accommodation, shows that she has not been intimidated. “The gates of hell shall not prevail against it” Mt 16:18.
Pope Paul VI‘s Humanae Vitae (HV) began, “The transmission of human life is a most serious role in which married people collaborate freely and responsibly with God the Creator. It has always been a source of great joy to them, even though it sometimes entails many difficulties and hardships.” We are God’s image and likeness Gen 1:26–27. Alice von Hildebrand writes of the sacredness of the female body, for in it, God creates human life. Pope Paul VI warned, HV § 17
A man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection.
Too many Catholics disregarded it, and now we hear of a “campus rape culture” and “war on women.” Catholics who could not see the difference between a church and a social club dropped out. That generation is now aging, and a younger generation more interested in Rabbi Yeshua’s radical transformation is starting to stream into the Church. Home Schooling is increasing. It will take a while, but Holy Mother Church thinks in centuries. Rabbi Yeshua is using this interval to let his Church § 677 “follow her Lord in his death and Resurrection.”
There is Not Much Time
In the 1990s, during a dinner at which Father Hardon was present with St. Teresa of Calcutta and one or two others, the conversation was lively until someone mentioned the signs of the times. Suddenly, St. Teresa looked at everyone present so intently that all fell silent. Her face became serious and her voice intense. She said: “You must get the Faith out to the people. There is not much time.” Everyone remained silent as she repeated, “Do you hear me? There is not much time!”
St. Teresa’s prophecy is being fulfilled before our eyes. During a 2013 interview Cardinal Burke answered a crucial question:
Don Fier: Things seem to be declining at an accelerating rate in our country. For example, it is shocking how quickly things happened in Minnesota. A year ago it seemed almost certain that a November ballot referendum would constitutionally define marriage as the union of one man and one woman. Despite a heroic effort by Archbishop John Nienstedt and many other Church leaders, it failed. Just four months later a law was enacted making Minnesota the 12th state to legalize so-called same-sex marriage. How did we get to this point? Aside from prayer and fasting, what can the faithful do?
Cardinal Burke: First of all, I would underline the need for much prayer and fasting. The alarming rapidity of the realization of the homosexual agenda ought to awaken all of us and frighten us with regard to the future of our nation. This is a work of deceit, a lie about the most fundamental aspect of our human nature, our human sexuality, which after life itself defines us. There is only one place these types of lies come from, namely Satan. It is a diabolical situation which is aimed at destroying individuals, families, and eventually our nation.
How did we get to this point? The fact that these kinds of “arrangements” are made legal is a manifestation of a culture of death, of an anti-life and anti-family culture which has existed in our nation now for some time. We as Catholics have not properly combatted it because we have not been taught our Catholic Faith, especially in the depth needed to address these grave evils of our time. This is a failure of catechesis both of children and young people that has been going on for fifty years. It is being addressed, but it needs much more radical attention. I can say this because I was the bishop of two different dioceses.
After fifty years of this, we have many adult voters who support politicians with immoral positions because they do not know their Catholic Faith and its teaching with regard to same-sex attraction and the inherent disorder of sexual relations between two persons of the same sex. Therefore, they are not able to defend the Catholic Faith in this matter.
What has also contributed greatly to the situation is an exaltation of the virtue of tolerance which is falsely seen as the virtue which governs all other virtues. In other words, we should tolerate other people in their immoral actions to the extent that we seem also to accept the moral wrong. Tolerance is a virtue, but it is certainly not the principal virtue; the principal virtue is charity. Charity means speaking the truth, especially the truth about human life and human sexuality. While we love the individual, we desire only the best for one who suffers from an inclination to engage in sexual relations with a person of the same sex. We must abhor the actions themselves because they are contrary to nature itself as God has created us.
The virtue of charity leads us to be kind and understanding to the individual, but also to be firm and steadfast in opposing the evil itself. This confusion is widespread. I have encountered it many times myself as a priest and bishop. It is something we simply need to address. There is far too much silence — people do not want to talk about it because the topic is not “politically correct.” But we cannot be silent any longer or we will find ourselves in a situation that will be very difficult to reverse.
Scott Hahn: The Hour is Coming 1:07:24
