Maximin Giraud and Melanie Calvat.

O FOOLISH world, will you ever pay attention? Will you ever wake up? Today is the Feast of Our Lady of La Salette, who appeared to two shepherd children on September 19, 1846 on a mountain near Grenoble in France. This is from Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira’s essay on the meaning of the apparition to the two shepherds, who in their photos radiate that same innocence and profundity seen on the faces of the children of Fatima:

There have been three major apparitions of Our Lady in the last 150 years: La Salette, Lourdes and Fatima. In all of them the Church accepted the authenticity of the apparitions and endorsed them by making special feasts to commemorate them. In each of those three apparitions Our Lady left a secret.

In all of them, Our Lady manifested herself as profoundly sad because of the state of mankind, and predicted an enormous chastisement that would come at a chosen moment. Therefore, in the last 150 years Our Lady has adopted a position very similar to that of counter-revolutionaries.

You all know members of the High and Low Clergy as well as Catholic lay people who are very happy, who think that everything is going very well. If you tell these people that a chastisement is being prepared for mankind, they respond that it is absurd. They affirm that Religion is experiencing an extraordinary progress.

Next to such persons, we look gloomy and sad. We play the role of the pessimistic hypochondriacs who do not fit into the joyful, carefree atmosphere of our days, which always disseminates an optimistic and positive opinion about everything.

Our role is a hard one, because it is always hard to foresee and announce chastisements for a mankind turned toward enjoying life. It is not surprising that very few people are willing to believe and follow our political and religious perspectives regarding events, which demonstrates the ever greater victory of the Revolution. They do not want to hear about the great chastisement that God is preparing. Since Our Lady herself brought three major messages that were not accepted, it is not surprising that our apostolate also is not well received.

This is characteristic of all epochs that take the wrong path. When people hear someone saying that they are going astray, they do not listen. For this reason, the great chastisements come. If the people would listen, they would convert and the chastisement would be averted. It is precisely because they do not open their souls to the message that the catastrophe becomes inevitable. The fact that they do not believe in Our Lady’s messages is the proof that those messages will be fulfilled.

— Comments —

Henry McCulloch writes:

Professor Corrêa de Oliveira wrote that at La Salette, Lourdes and Fatima Our Lady promised chastisements if Her commands were not fulfilled.  Are those chastisements not already underway?

The apostasy of the West is almost complete, and it now appears that the Pope himself is fully at home in the ruins.  How, then, can the Church be a bulwark against the catastrophes Modernism has unleashed in the world when she almost entirely Modernist herself?  In this the Church ignores not only Our Lady’s commands but also the many and clear warnings of Pope St. Pius X.  In consequence, seeing precious little faithfulness from those who should be leading the faithful, the faithful fall away, to be seduced by materialism and consumer “goods.”

The rudderless West is allowing itself to be flooded by incompatible, and often hostile, immigrants who threaten to outnumber the confused natives, with consequences almost impossible to imagine.  Maybe that’s why so few people seem to worry about them…  And the West’s “leaders,” including princes of the Church, not only fail to stop this invasion, they actively assist it.

The clueless West allows stupid leaders with no sense of their nations’ interests to blunder along almost to the point of war with a slowly recovering Russia, the very nation whose consecration Our Lady asked of the Pope — a command no Pope has yet obeyed.  There is no reason whatever for Western nations to fight Russia, and many reasons to ally with her against the real threats to Western civilization.  But Western civilization, especially the Christianity that made it possible, means little or nothing to those leaders.

Africa is increasingly scourged by a deadly and pandemic disease — and at least one of those foolish leaders in the West, Barack Hussein Obama, is heedless of the risk of importing it to his own country through sending thousands of U.S. soldiers into the infected countries.  If Ebola is loosed on the world, the Spanish Flu of 1918 will seem like an outbreak of sniffles in comparison.

Throughout the lands Moslems have long ruled, and increasingly — thanks again to those same imbecilic (or are they possessed?) Western leaders — in all the lands of the West, Islam, the deadliest and most persistent foe Christianity has ever faced, is aggressively, defiantly and violently resurgent.  Yet all those who are supposed to defend the West can say is that the violence, which is of Islam’s very essence, is a perversion of a “religion of peace.”  Many seem content to see the Christian lands the Moslems have never yet succeeded in conquering become Islamic through anomie.  Those consequences are very possible to imagine.  Maybe that’s why so few people want to think about them…

In the East, a China that has always been Godless is now the dominant power.  The Russia that should be the primary deterrent against an expansive China in the Far East is still debilitated after decades under Communism — and remains unconsecrated.  A rootless, internally weakening, United States is too in hock to the Communist Chinese to be an effective counterweight.  What does the future really look like for the most populous part of the world, and for its less populous neighbors?  Again, we’d rather not think about it…

One could cite more.  But that’s enough for me.  Our Lady is right, of course.  And so was Professor Corrêa de Oliveira.  The Chastisement is no longer something to wonder about.  It has begun.  While Catholics know how it will end, who can say what awaits between today’s troubles and that end?

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