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“If
I have found favor in thy sight, oh king, give me my people for which I
request.”
—Book of Esther 7:23.
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While it’s important we recognize the modernist heresy’s most
terrible symptoms in order to diagnose, resist, and treat the disease, the great truth
is that Our Lady of Fatima gave us the only solution so that the human
element of the divine Church is cured of it.
As explained in my column series (“Secrets of the
Catholic City,” published in Catholic Family News, July 2016): “…the word ‘request’
does not properly translate the Portuguese expression ‘pedido,’ which conveys
the command of a superior authority. Thus, when Our Lady of Fatima made her ‘requests,’
she was in truth giving commands to the Catholic Church, which is her right and
privilege as its Queen and Mother.”
Specifically: The Mother of God gave five commands to all of
the Church Militant and one to the Pope and, through him, to the bishops. We
lay people can turn the tide by first and always obeying those five commands to
the Church Militant.
For the entire Church Militant, the Virgin’s
specific “requests,” while simple, give us frequent opportunities to practice
the virtues each of us, as individuals, need most:
1) The daily Rosary, 2) daily duty as true
penance, 3) sacrifice for the conversion of sinners, 4) the Five First
Saturdays devotion, and 5) the necessity of wearing, with proper blessing and
intention, the Brown Scapular (the Scapular of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel), which
Our Lady held out during the Miracle of the Sun.
As for the Pope (and, with him, the bishops), Our
Lady of Fatima has waited almost 100 years for a reigning Pope to heed her ‘requests’
to establish worldwide devotion to the Immaculate Heart of
Mary by one act (with two parts):
• Papal promulgation of the Five First Saturdays
of Reparation for the five major blasphemies committed against the Virgin’s
Immaculate Heart.
• The solemn and public collegial consecration of
Russia (and Russia alone) to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
Like her Old Testament figure-type, Queen Esther
who was the “hidden” mediatrix of her people and who commanded them to pray and
fast before she interceded with the king, Our Queen and Mother Mary
makes these requests of her people even as she already intercedes for us before
the throne of the Lord our God.
May we, like the elect of the Old Testament, heed
the true Esther—Our Lady of Fatima—and do as she “requests.”
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