Roman Catholic Maryology: Mary in Roman Catholicism, part 21 - “The Fatima Crusader”

The Fatima Crusader asserts:

Heaven wants the Message of Our Lady of Fatima to be central to our world view.
Anything that happens in the Church or in the world, we will judge as good or bad, adequate or inadequate, on the basis of whether it is in conformity with Our Lady’s words at Fatima or not.1

At a glance:
We began this section with a quote in order to make a striking point, the dangerous extremes to which the hyper-Marian devotion believers go. The Fatima Crusader is both an organization and the name of the magazine that they publish. They are one of the more extreme groups who promote devotion to Mary, whom they (and the Popes) call Our Heavenly Mother.2
For this reason we devote this article to them specifically, because they are so outrageous in their claims and so false in their teachings. Here we let them speak for themselves and comment on their teachings to show how unreasonable and un-Biblical these groups must become in order to push Marian devotion.

The above is a shameful corruption of a bumper sticker that reads “No Jesus, No Peace—Know Jesus, Know Peace.” The reason that Jesus has been ignored is that groups that exalt Mary believe that it is she who will bring world peace, in direct violation of Biblical doctrine.

Associate Professor of theology Alan Schreck notes that in a homily at Fatima on May 13, 1982 Pope Paul II stated

The Church has always taught and continues to proclaim that God’s revelation was brought to completion in Jesus Christ, who is the fullness of that revelation, and that ‘no new public revelation is to be expected before the glorious manifestation of the Lord’ (Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, no. 4). The Church elevates and judges private revelation by the criterion of conformity with that single public revelation…
^{If the church has accepted the message of Fatima, it is above all because that message contains a truth and a call whose basic content is the truth} and call of the gospel itself…The message of Fatima is, in its nucleus, a call to conversion and repentance, as in the Gospel.3

Our Lady of Fatima “did not teach any new doctrine, nor any modernized understanding of doctrine that would cause us to reinterpret Catholic teaching any way differently from the way it has been taught for 2,000 years.”4

On July 13, 1917, Our Lady of Fatima gave the three children a terrifying vision of Hell…[Sister Lucy recalls] ‘The vision only lasted for a moment, thanks to Our good heavenly Mother who, at the first apparition had promised to take us to Heaven. Without that, I think, we would have died of fear.’
Our Lady then said to them: ‘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.’…On May 13, 1917, Lucy asked Our Lady about two friends of hers that had died recently…’ Is Maria das Neves in Heaven?…‘Yes, she is’…And Amelia?…‘she will be in Purgatory until the end of the world’…This statement of Our Lady also flies in the face of the false Protestant creeds which reject Purgatory. Just by that one statement, ‘she will be in Purgatory until the end of time,’ Our Lady is telling Protestants that ‘your Protestant doctrine which rejects Purgatory is false.5

Nowhere in the whole Bible does anyone have a vision of hell. An apparition that passes itself off as Mary nearly scares three little children to death by showing them what is supposed to be hell. After giving these children the fright of their lives this apparition takes advantage of their weakness and gives them a pure heretical teaching that God wishes to establish devotion to Mary’s Immaculate Heart in the world. This is true spiritual warfare, a vicious attack and one that the Catholic Church should be deeply ashamed of approving.

^{Note also that the apparition states that God wishes to save the poor sinners in hell. This goes blatantly against both the Bible and Roman Catholic doctrine. God wants to save us from ever going to hell and not save us once we have already gone there by our choice to reject salvation}.
Moreover, the Fatima Crusader takes this opportunity to attack Protestantism. In fact we learn that “in the Message of Fatima [the apparition] reinforced the traditional papal teaching that there is only one true Church, outside of which there is no salvation.”6

“Our Lady is emphasizing those very points that DIVIDE Catholics from Protestants, and that DIVIDE Catholics from every other religion on the face of the earth…those who do not believe these truths, and especially those people who refuse to give Her the honor that is due Her, are guilty of the crime of blasphemy.”7

“whether it is the doctrine of Purgatory, whether it is the doctrine of the Holy Eucharist, whether it is the doctrine of confession, whether it is the defined doctrine that there is only one true Church, outside of which there is no salvation, Vatican I taught that the meaning of these doctrines can never change. And we see that Our Lady was completely faithful to this.”8

“the notion that Catholics and non-Catholics can work together to build some sort of new ‘civilization of love’ was actually condemned by Pope St. Pius X when he condemned the Sillon movement in France in 1910.”9

Apparently, the truth of a doctrine is no longer a matter of history or its appearance in Scripture, but it is now based on the words of an apparition. Are we to believe a creature just because it appears as a beautiful and luminous being? I could say that I am the President of the USA but I am not, and if I speak as the President and preach Communism, then it is certain that I am an imposter. These apparitions claim to be Mary, but how do we know? No one knows what Mary looked like and these apparitions are teaching blatantly false doctrines, it is obvious that it is not Mary the mother of Jesus.

Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light” (2nd Corinthians 11:14).

“^{Our Lady was telling us through this miracle [of the sun], that we must never, ever, take our eyes off of Fatima, never take our eyes off of Her Message, never allow ourselves to be distracted from Her Message in any way whatsoever}….we must never take our eyes off of Fatima, never take our eyes off of Our Lady’s, and never allow ourselves to be distracted from Her in any way whatsoever….everything that Our Lady did at Fatima shows us that we must base our entire world view on the Message of Fatima and on nothing else that would conflict with it in any way.”10
If we are to never take our eyes off of Mary that means that we are not to have our eyes on Jesus.
Please note that we are encouraged to judge the message of Fatima not by comparing it to the Word of God but by relying on a miraculous signs. The Bible is very clear about miraculous signs, they are not always of God. Jesus said,

Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’ (Matthew 7:21-23).

God warned His people the Jews:

If a prophet, or one who foretells by dreams, appears among you and announces to you a miraculous sign or wonder, and if the sign or wonder of which he has spoken takes place, and he says, ‘Let us follow other gods’ (gods you have not known) 'and let us worship them,’ you must not listen to the words of that prophet or dreamer.
The LORD your God is testing you to find out whether you love him with all your heart and with all your soul. It is the LORD your God you must follow, and him you must serve (Deuteronomy 13:1-4).

Thus, at Fatima we might have very impressive miracles, but we also have all sorts of purely heretical teachings that encourage us to do with Mary that which is plain old worship. Consider this quote,

We know from the Message [of Fatima] that the salvation of the world, the conversion of Russia, world peace, depends ultimately on mankind fulfilling God’s desire of the establishing in the world devotion to Her Immaculate Heart. Our Lady’s centrality and importance is re-emphasized at Fatima.11

We are not to build our world-view on the words of an apparition:

…thou hast known the holy scriptures, which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus. All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: That the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works (2nd Timothy 3:15-17).

“what makes the Fatima Message eminently trustworthy is that Our Lady at Fatima displayed a profound reverence for the consistent, unchanging teaching of the Church throughout the centuries. When Our Lady came to Fatima, She did not give us a new understanding of Catholic teaching that would differ from the consistent teaching of the centuries. St. Paul said, ‘But though we, or an angel from Heaven, preach a gospel to you besides that which we have preached to you, let him be anathema.’ (Gal. 1:8)”12
^{While it may be true that the Fatima apparition did not teach anything new as far as Roman Catholic doctrine is concerned, the apparition did give vast amounts of teachings that are blatantly un-Biblical}. It is hard to believe that Paul’s warning would be sited with such comfort, when it is a warning pointed straight at the teachings of Fatima and The Fatima Crusader.

“Regarding Abbot Marmion’s (1858-1923) work, Pope Benedict XV said, ‘read it, it is the pure doctrine of the Church.’ Abbot Marmion, in his books, points out that for Our Lord to become truly a member of our human race, a Son of Adam, a ‘Son of Man’, He was absolutely dependent on Our Blessed Mother saying, ‘yes’ to the angel who asked Her if She would consent to be the Mother of the God-Man, Jesus Christ…
born of a daughter of Adam and Eve, and this ‘daughter’ was the spotless and immaculate ever-virgin Mary. She was absolutely essential. God was dependant on Our Lady so that Our Lord Jesus Christ could truly call Himself the ‘Son of Man’. And as Abbot Marmion points out, it seems that the title ‘Son of Man’ is the description of Himself that Our Lord held dearest to His Heart when He was on earth. Abbot explains that Our Lord used the term ‘Son of Man’ in reference to Himself more than any other title. And likewise, the Message of Fatima helps us to remember our dependence on Our Lady.13

Proponents of Marian devotion often argue that God was, as it were, at her mercy and not able to make a move without her free will yes. From here many will make the comment that Mary gave us Jesus rather than “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son” (John 3:16).
We also have a sad attempt to force Son of Man to be a title which points to Mary, Jesus’ humanity. This completely ignores the fact that the title Son of Man was understood to be a messianic title long before the time of Jesus.

Encyclopedia Judaica 15:159-160:

The eschatological figure commonly identified with the Messiah occurs in chapter 7 of the Book of Daniel…^{Daniel based himself upon a more ancient tradition according to which the title son of man was a designation of a special eschatological figure. This idea existed possibly by the third century B.C.E.; the designation ‘man’ for messiah already occurs in the Greek translation of the Pentateuch of this period}…The son of man has a superhuman, heavenly sublimity. He is the cosmic judge at the end of time; seated upon the throne of God, he will judge the whole human race with the aid of the heavenly hosts, consigning the just to blessedness and sinner to the pit of hell; and he will execute the sentence he passes. Frequently he is identified with the Messiah…
in the Dead Sea Scrolls there were also other messianic concepts, the concept of son of man is also reflected in them. The eschatological figure occurring in the Thanksgiving Scroll (3, 5-18) resembles or is identical with the son of man of other Jewish literature. In one of the fragments from the Dead Sea Scrolls Melchizedek figures as the judge at the end of time. In company with angels from on High he will judge man and the wicked spirits of Belia′al. Thus the son of man could be even identified with the biblical Melchizedek according to a mythical understanding…
Thus it seems that the concept preceded the final identification of the son of man with the Messiah, which became common at the end of the Second Temple period. It was so applied in the time of Jesus, who used to speak of the son of man as the heavenly judge, and it seems that finally he identified himself with this sublime figure.

“Jacinta, Francisco and Lucy of Fatima were favored with three separate apparitions of…the ‘Angel of the Eucharist.’…the children were prostrate, reciting the prayer of reparation taught to them by the ‘Angel of Peace’ that preceding spring. Lucy writes: ‘I do not know how many times we repeated that prayer when we saw shinning above us an unknown light.”14
The angel that appeared prostrated himself and repeated a 76 word prayer three times. Here we have an angel teaching repetitive prayer. If this was an angel of God he would know what Jesus taught on this subject and would have obeyed:

And when you pray, do not keep on babbling [or, use not vain repetitions] like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him (Matthew 6:7-8).

“On December 10, 1925, when Lucy was an 18-year-old Postulant in Pontevedra, Our Lady and the Child Jesus appeared to her. Our Lord said, ‘Have compassion on the Heart of your Most Holy Mother, covered with thorns, with which ungrateful men pierce it at every moment, and there is no one to make an Act of Reparation to remove them.’ The Child Jesus is concerned about these sins against His Mother.15
One sure way to know that this was a deceptive false vision is that there is no such thing as a child or infant Jesus. Jesus was a child for as long as it took Him to grow out of childhood, Jesus grew to be a 33-year-old man and when He died and when He resurrected He appeared as a grown man of 33 years of age.
To claim that Jesus appeared as a child is a way to get the attention off of Him and to put it on Mary who as his mother, is the nurturer, the one with authority, the provider and the protector.

^{“She told us that world peace will come only by obeying Her request of the consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary…the Rosary is the specific prayer given by Our Lady as a condition for peace.”}16
They also advertise, “On October 16, 2002 the Holy Father declared next year (the 25th year of his pontificate) as the Year of the Most Holy Rosary. Please follow his directive and help us collect: 25 Million Rosaries to Attain World Peace and Stop Terrorism. My promise to pray the number of Five Decade Rosaries as indicated on other side [of the paper on which they advertised this], to attain world peace and put an end to terrorism through the Consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary by the Pope together with the bishops in the manner requested by Our Lady of Fatima.”
Wrong again, it is Jesus’ return to Earth that will bring about world peace, not the consecration of a country neither to a false goddess nor by an un-Biblical repetitive prayer.

Finally, we note Fr. Gruner’s guilt trip, “the apostasy within the Catholic Church is a chastisement…a punishment for the laity and priests for not obeying Our Lady personally, that is, by many of us NOT praying the Rosary, NOT wearing the Scapular, NOT being devoted to Our Lady.”17
What is this saying? You are being punished for not partaking in various non-Biblical practices. But in reality the Lord rewards us for not partaking in various non-Biblical practices.

1. 1. John Vennari, “A World View Based on Fatima, This edited transcript of a speech given at the Fatima: World Peace 2000 conference, October 1999 helps us better understand the real background to the full Fatima Secret,” The Fatima Crusader, Summer 2000, Issue 64 (Published by the National Committee for the National Pilgrim Virgin of Canada), p. 113
2. 2. From a letter titled Friday 3:05 P.M. written by Fr. Gruner in Sep. 2001. In this letter he quotes Pope Paul II as saying, “Can the Mother (the Blessed Virgin Mary)…remain silent when She sees the very basis of Her children’s salvation (the Catholic Faith) undermined? No She cannot remain silent.” Apparently we are not saved by Jesus Christ our Savior but by a hierarchical religious system. The letter does not indicated if it was the Pope or Fr. Gruner who made the statements placed in the parenthesis
3. 3. Alan Schreck; Associate Professor of theology at the Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio, Catholic and Christian, An Explanation of Commonly Misunderstood Catholic Beliefs (Ann Arbor, MI.: Servant Books, 1984), Nihil Obstat: Monsignor Joseph P. Malara-Censor Librorum. Imprimatur: Most Reverend Albert H. Ottenweller-Bishop of Steubenville, pp. 185-186 quoting Pope John Paul II, homily at Fatima, Portugal, May 13, 1982
4. 4. John Vennari, p. 113
5. 5. John Vennari, pp. 103-105
6. 6. John Vennari, p. 103
7. 7. John Vennari, pp. 103, 107-108 italics and bold in original
8. 8. John Vennari, p. 111
9. 9. John Vennari, p. 99
10. 10. John Vennari, pp. 16-17 & 114
11. 11. John Vennari, p. 101
12. 12. John Vennari, p. 17
13. 13. John Vennari, pp. 101-102
14. 14. John Vennari, p. 105-106
15. 15. John Vennari, p. 108
16. 16. John Vennari, p. 113
17. 17. Fr. Nicholas Gruner, S.T.L., S.T.D. (Cand.), “The Hour of Chastisement,” The Fatima Crusader, Special Issue-Autumn 2002, Issue 71 (Published by the National Committee for the National Pilgrim Virgin of Canada), p. 35