We are living in a time when we face on a daily basis the threat of terrorist acts by Muslims, senseless crimes of violence and brutality, growing possibilities of nuclear disasters. Many persons are overcome by an unnerving fear of what may happen next. It seems that evil has overwhelmed the entire world. We see the empty Churches and monasteries throughout Western Europe and a diminishing faith in the one true Religion among Catholics young and old. Inter-confessionalism and religious indifferentism are installed in the Church, supported by the highest religious authorities. Yes, even the Pope.!!
To Jesus through Mary Where can we find hope in this dispiriting scenario? What can we do to nourish hope of a glorious restoration in the Church that we love, and that at times seems that we lost? There is one means for certain that Our Lady has given us for times of crisis, heresy and apostasy. We can pray the Rosary constantly and taste its sweet fruits. When we pray the Rosary daily, Our Lady pours abundant grace on our souls, pulls us from despair, instills us with the spirit of the fight, and protects us from the heresies of our day. This is how she acted in the past, and how she continues to safeguard us today.
At crucial moments in the History of the Church, Our Lady gave a solution: pray the Rosary daily.
We arrive at the dawn of the 20th century. The perilous errors of Marx, Darwin and Freud were finding acceptance not only in the world, but also in poisoned parcels of the Church. In 1917, with the WEstern world immersed in World War and Communism soon to install itself in Russia, Our Lady appeared at Fatima to three shepherd children with a command to pray the Rosary daily, a warning of a coming chastisement if man did not convert, and the promise of an eventual victory.
"Pray the Rosary" - the command of Our Lady at Fatima
One of the most important ways to effect the conversion of sinners in these times of approaching turmoil, she told the children, was to pray the Rosary. Each of the six times she appeared at Fatima, she told the children to pray the Rosary daily. It was, once again, a way she gave the faithful to counter the errors of the times.
Years later in 1957, the last remaining Fatima seer Sister Lucia again stressed the importance of the Rosary in a private interview with a confidante, Fr. Augustin Fuentes [see interview here]. She told him the Devil was prepared to engage in a decisive battle against the Holy Virgin, and that God was giving two last remedies to the world – the Holy Rosary and devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. She said:
“In these latter times in which we live, the Most Holy Virgin has given a new efficacy to the recitation of the Rosary. She has given this efficacy to such an extent that there is no problem, no matter how difficult it is, whether temporal or above all spiritual, in the personal life of each one of us, of our families, of the families of the world or of the religious communities, or even of the life of peoples and nations, that cannot be solved by the Rosary.
“There is no problem I tell you, no matter how difficult it is, that we cannot resolve by the prayer of the Holy Rosary. With the Holy Rosary we will save ourselves. We will sanctify ourselves. We will console Our Lord and obtain the salvation of many souls.”
It was just a few years before the opening of the disastrous Council Vatican II when she spoke these words. Perhaps that is why Our Lady gave as a remedy the Rosary - and not the Mass, which would be changed almost beyond recognition. Perhaps, also, Sister Lucy realized that the Secret she was charged by Our Lady with revealing in 1960 was going to be “suppressed,” and Progressivism, which encompassed the ensemble of heresies, would take over within the very walls of the Church herself.
Once again, in face of manifold errors and heresies, Our Lady sent her message: Pray the Rosary daily. Don’t give up this holy practice. Indeed, wherever there are individuals, families, pockets of persons praying the Rosary, Our Lady enters and finds a way to bring them to the truth. She does not abandon her children. Sooner or later they will be called to understand the problems in the Church, fight against the error, and not give up in sadness or despair.
