Priest group now invoking language of Apocalypse to explain Church crisis
October 15, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) — On October 13, the anniversary of the Miracle of the Sun of Our Lady of Fatima, Communio veritatis, a group of German priests of the Archdiocese of Paderborn, published a statement that reflects their sense of the current Church crisis.
After quoting different passages of the Book of the Apocalypse that speak of the Church’s final battle with evil, the priests refer back to the history of Freemasonry and its works against the Catholic Church. They also draw a link to the Sankt Gallen Group and their work, “which then finally led to March 13, 2013.”
It is the Blessed Mother to whom they turn in the current Church crisis when they write: “At an appointed time, she will bring about, after this apocalyptic and decisive battle, the epochal triumph of her Immaculate Heart. We shall always preserve in us the word of the Queen of the Holy Rosary: ‘My Immaculate Heart will be your refuge and the way that will lead you to God!'”
This is not the first time in recent years that the theme of the Apocalypse has been brought to light by clergymen. For example, Cardinal Willem Eijk, when resisting the German bishops’ ideas (and plans) to give Holy Communion to some Protestant spouses of Catholics, wrote in 2018:
Observing that the bishops and, above all, the Successor of Peter fail to maintain and transmit faithfully and in unity the deposit of faith contained in Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture, I cannot help but think of Article 675 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church: “The Church’s ultimate trial: Before Christ’s second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers. The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth will unveil the ‘mystery of iniquity’ in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth.”
Archbishop Georg Gänswein, the private secretary of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI and the prefect of the Papal Household, subsequently picked up on Eijk’s statement. Referring to the grave clerical sex abuse crisis in the Church, this prelate said during the book presentation of Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option: “If the Church this time does not achieve a renewing of herself with God’s help, the whole project of our civilization is again at stake. For many, it already seems as if the Church of Jesus Christ could never recover from the catastrophe of her sin which right now seems nearly to swallow her.” Gänswein said more specifically: “In May, also the archbishop of Utrecht in the Netherlands, Cardinal Willem Jacobus Eijk, admitted that the current crisis reminds him of ‘the final trial in the Church,’ as the Catechism of the Catholic Church in paragraph 675 describes it.” Gänswein also explained that “in the same Catechism, it further says: ‘The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth will unveil the ‘mystery of iniquity.’”
Finally, the Swiss bishop Marian Eleganti, auxiliary bishop of Chur, also recently made a reference to the image of the Antichrist. In his statement of September 6, 2019, Eleganti speaks of the February 4 Abu Dhabi statement signed by Pope Francis, which states that the “diversity of religions” is “willed by God,” and he touches upon the matter of establishing a “kingdom of peace” without Christ, as it can be seen in this Abu Dhabi statement. The prelate then points out that a similar “egalitarian, relativistic, ecumenical kingdom of peace” is promised by the character of the “Antichrist” in Vladimir Soloviev’s 119-year-old apocalyptic tale.
Thus, the new statement of the Communio veritatis group can be seen in the larger context of an increasing number of clergymen who have a sense of grave crisis of faith in the Catholic Church.
As LifeSiteNews reported earlier, Communio veritatis was founded on February 22, 2018 in response to some grave errors concerning intercommunion taking place in their own diocese. They are growing in influence and have a growing network of German and international priests with whom they are in contact. They have also called upon Cardinal Reinhard Marx to resign as the president of the German Bishops’ Conference.
Please see here the full text of their new statement:
An Apocalyptic Message
Translation by LifeSite’s Dr. Maike Hickson
Translation by LifeSite’s Dr. Maike Hickson
“A great portent appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars” (Apoc. 12:1).
We contemplate the beauty of the Blessed Virgin of Fatima, the Mother of Mercy, the Queen of Heaven and of Earth. The great Miracle of the Sun on October 13, 1917 at the Cova da Iria has stressed the authenticity and historical dimension of the message which has spread from there to the Church and to all mankind. According to the Will of God, the heavenly Mother Mary appeared on the horizon of our time as a sign of salvation, in order to offer her Immaculate Heart as a secure refuge and to promise eternal salvation to those who sincerely and truly consecrate themselves to it.
She is the chosen woman who gleams in a bright light in the proto-evangelium and who crushes the head of the hellish serpent (see Gen. 3:15). The Most Blessed Virgin and Mother of God appears in Fatima as an announcement of the sure victory and promises the great triumph of Her Immaculate Heart in the apocalyptic and decisive battle against Satan.
Then “another portent appeared in heaven: a great red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, and seven diadems on his heads” (Apoc. 12:3). With the October Revolution, the adversary also appears in the same year, 1917, on the stage of world history. The fiery red dragon represents the atheistic Communism, which aims at destroying faith in God. In this battle, two animals come to the aid of the dragon.
“And I saw a beast rising out of the sea, having ten horns and seven heads; and on its horns were ten diadems, and on its heads were blasphemous names. And the beast that I saw was like a leopard, its feet were like a bear’s, and its mouth was like a lion’s mouth. And the dragon gave it his power and his throne and great authority (Apoc. 13:1–2). This black animal is Freemasonry. It hides itself in a shadowy way so that it can enter everywhere without being recognized. The aim of this black animal is that the people do not walk the path of Grace and of salvation as given by God. Freemasonry aims at blaspheming God and, in its fight against the Decalogue, opposes each Commandment with an anti-law, in order to bring people, with the help of their vices, to worship idols.
“Then I saw another beast that rose out of the earth; it had two horns like a lamb and it spoke like a dragon. It exercises all the authority of the first beast on its behalf, and it makes the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast” (Apoc. 13:11–12). The animal which is similar to a lamb is the ecclesial Freemasonry which has entered the inside of the Church — especially its hierarchy. Its goal is to overcome the Catholic Church from within. It wants — and also even attains it for a short time — to create an idol — a false christ and a false church.
In 1917, Saint Maximilian Kolbe witnessed the march of the Freemasons on St. Peter's Square in Rome, on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the foundation [of Freemasonry]. The Apostle of the Immaculata read their express plan on one of their banners: “Satan has to reign in the Vatican, the Pope will be his slave!” Twenty years earlier, this very goal had also been approved by the Grand Lodge Grand Orient from Paris at the Congress of Freemasons in Basel: “We will penetrate into the heart of the papal court, from which no one can chase us away anymore, until we have broken the reign of the Pope.”
Bishop Dr. Rudolf Graber dealt with this hostile strategy in his book Athanasius and the Church of Our Time [1973]. He quotes, on page 85 of his work, the so-called “Alta Vendita,” the Freemasonic plan for the subversion of the Church. In it it says: “What we demand, what we look for and have to await — just as the Jews await their Messiah — is a Pope according to our needs […] We do not doubt our reaching this highest goal of our efforts.”
Furthermore, Bishop Dr. Graber refers (on p. 38) to the book L’évangile de l’Esprit-Saint, Jean traduit et commenté by Abbé Melinge, in which the program of the enemy at the beginning of the 20th century has been described, among others, as follows: “The substitution of the Roman papacy with a ‘pluri-confessional’ pontificate, which is capable of adapting to a universal (polyvalent) ecumenism.” The enemy wanted to attain this by way of an infiltrating long march through the hierarchy, as Manfred Adler reveals it in his book The Anti-Christian Revolution of Freemasonry: “Here, however, it is important to see that all these destructive thoughts are secretly aiming at one unified goal, that is to say, to create the Counter-Church or the ‘New’ Church” (p. 71).
On the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the apparitions in Fatima, Pope Paul VI obviously referred in a speech on October 13, 1977 to the Third Secret [of Fatima] that was known to him: “The tail of the devil is functioning in the disintegration of the Catholic world. The darkness of Satan has entered and spread throughout the Catholic Church even to its summit. Apostasy, the loss of the faith, is spreading throughout the world and into the highest levels within the Church.” Also Cardinal Ciappi, theologian of the Papal Household from 1955 until 1989, confirmed in a letter to Professor Baumgartner: “In the Third Secret it is predicted, among other things, that the great apostasy in the Church will begin at the top.”
Pope John Paul I at the time received a list of the names of Freemasons in the Vatican, which was published by the journalist Mino Pecorelli, a former member of the Secret Lodge “Propaganda Due” (P2). Shortly before his completely unexpected death, the pontifex was determined to take action against this subversion (see Manfred Adler, The Freemasons and the Vatican, p. 16 seq.).
The dimension of this battle becomes especially clear in a speech by Pope John Paul II, on November 2, 1980: “We are now living in a time, in which one feels and experiences a radical confrontation spreading everywhere [...] belief and unbelief, the Gospel versus the anti-Gospel, the Church and the anti-Church, God and Anti-God, if we may say so.”
How prophetic these words sound in light of the assassination attempt against him on May 13, 1981, the anniversary of the first apparition in Fatima. The time of the attack at 17:17 is a clear reference to the year when Freemasonry was founded. The assassination attempt in Rome obviously aimed at its known goal — namely, to remove the foundation of the Church as instituted by God, in order to replace it with another [foundation] — that is to say, with one’s own “leadership.”
In our days, one took notice of the Sankt Gallen Mafia, which was made public by Cardinal Danneels (a member) himself when presenting his own biography. Here, the goal and the agitations of the conspirators were pointed out publicly, which then finally led to March 13, 2013. Their agenda was explicitly related to the strong opposition against Pope Benedict XVI and to the implementation of their own favorite candidate, with the help of organized networks. On May 11, 2010, during his pilgrimage to Fatima, the pontiff explained in a prophetic manner, speaking in light of the Third Secret [of Fatima] and touching upon his suffering and the suffering of the entire Mystical Body of Christ: “Thus I would say that also here, beyond the great vision of the suffering of the Pope [...], there are realities shown that pertain to the future of the Church and that will gradually unfold and show themselves.”
Against the background of these statements, we look up, with the utmost trust, to our beloved Mother Mary, the Virgin of Fatima and Mediatrix of All Graces. She is the conqueress in all the battles of God, the Queen of the Heavenly Hosts, and the “Supplicant Omnipotence” before the Throne of the Most High. At an appointed time, she will bring about, after this apocalyptic and decisive battle, the epochal triumph of her Immaculate Heart. We shall always preserve in us the word of the Queen of the Holy Rosary: “My Immaculate Heart will be your refuge and the way that will lead you to God!”
Paderborn, 13 October 2019
Priestly Group Communio veritatis