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The
Beatification of the Protomartyrs
“The
good will be martyred” In the sign of Fatima:
Our Lady of Fatima, 13 July 1917
It is the single greatest tragedy of modern times that the requests of Our Lady at Fatima have not been granted. This is a fact. To recognise it, we have to be freed from the mental paralysis which prevents us from even beginning to understand why this should have been, or continues to be so. Let us pause to reflect that: 630 missionaries were martyred in the 1990’s… Every day priests, religious and laity are being killed and persecuted out of hatred for the Catholic Faith in Indonesia, Sudan, India, China, North Korea, Algeria, Uganda, Rwanda and a number of other countries… That Russia, ten years after the ‘collapse of Communism’ is not converted to the One, True Church… That we do not have the true world peace promised by Our Lady… That we are not living through the Triumph of her Immaculate Heart… That we are living in the Age of Martyrs! Not only is the Age of Martyrs not over, but we can without exaggeration say that our age is the Age of Martyrs par excellence! Our age can in truth be called the Age of Martyrs with no prejudice to all the many bloody persecutions of the Church’s history. At a conference on the “Martyrs of Eastern Europe and Nazism” in Rome last year, Ukrainian Redemptorist Bishop Michael Hrynchyshyn made the arresting statement that in the 2000 years of the Church’s history, two thirds of all her martyrs had died in the 20th century. He estimated an approximate figure of 27 million out of an estimated total of 40 million. And the vast majority of these millions died in the sign of Fatima. They died, whether they realised or not, as witnesses to the truth of Our Lady’s warning that if her requests were not heeded, Russia would “spread her errors throughout the world, raising up wars and persecutions against the Church.” In particular, they realised by their holy deaths the truth of these words: “the good will be martyred”. Perhaps they thought, just as we think, that the Age of Martyrs was something which belonged to the distant past. On the eve of the great Communist persecutions in Russia, Spain, China, Vietnam, Korea and so many other countries, on the eve of the World War which Our Lady sought to avert and Russia to instrumentalise, on the eve of their martyrdoms, how many of the millions of New Martyrs thought that the Age of Martyrs belonged principally to the early Church? When Our Lady appeared on 13 May, 1917, she appeared on the ancient Feast of Sancta Maria ad Martyres, then still kept in the Patriarchate of Lisbon to commemorate the liberation of the Portuguese capital from the Moors. In the Universal Church it had long since been transferred to November 1 and its name changed to the Feast of All Saints, but in the diocese in which the three shepherd-children lived, Our Lady of the Martyrs was honoured on the very day on which she appeared to them in the Cova da Iria for the first time. The apparitions and message of Our Lady of Fatima, then, were in the sign of martyrdom, and the good were soon to be martyred in the sign of Fatima. It is a source of great joy to our community that the five Protomartyrs of the Redemptorist Congregation are to be beatified by the Pope in Lviv, Ukraine on 27 June the Feast of Our Mother of Perpetual Succour.Vichnaya Pamyat - Eternal Memory! But is even more of a consolation for us to see that the Blessed Nicholas Charnetsky and his Companions won their palms in the sign of Fatima, which is for us the orientation point for the whole Church in this dark hour. Symbolic of that darkness will be the meeting of the Pope in Kiev with ‘Patriarch Filaret’. When Archbishop Velychkovsky was arrested in 1969 for “organising secret theological courses in Ternopil” and “listening to Vatican radio” it was part of a campaign to mark the centenary of Lenin’s birth by “freeing the Soviet Union of Greek Catholics” at the instigation of the same (then) Metropolitan Filaret, a KGB agent and bishop of the Russian Orthodox Moscow Patriarchate. The iniquitous Patriarch Filaret was embraced by Pope John Paul II after the Assisi ecumenical meeting in 1986, and we can fear such an embrace shortly before the beatification of his nemesis! Just as the requests of Our Lady have not yet been heeded, so we know that the Age of Martyrs is not yet over. Precisely at this moment, when her words are scorned and her warnings consigned to history by the Vatican, does it seem clearer than ever that the consequences must not be slow in coming. In rereading the words of that part of the Third Secret of Fatima which we now have, we cannot share the self-assurance of the Vatican interpretation, that all described therein is either symbolic or belongs now to the past: “And we saw in an immense Light that is God, something similar to how people appear in a mirror when they pass in front of it, a Bishop dressed in white. We had the impression that it was the Holy Father. Other Bishops, Priests, men and women religious going up a steep mountain, at the top of which there was a big Cross of rough hewn trunks, as of a cork-tree with the bark. Before reaching there, the Holy Father passed through a big city half in ruins and half trembling. With halted step, afflicted with pain and sorrow, he prayed for the souls of the corpses he met on his way. Having reached the top of the mountain, on his knees at the foot of the big Cross he was killed by a group of soldiers who fired bullets and arrows at him, and in the same way there died one after another the other Bishops, Priests, men and women religious, and various lay people of different ranks and positions. Beneath the two arms of the Cross there were two Angels each with a crystal aspersorium in his hand, in which they gathered up the blood of the Martyrs, and with it sprinkled the souls that were making there way to God.” “They follow the example of the King of France in delaying the execution of My request and they will follow him into misfortune,” Our Lord told Sr Lucy in 1931. “The Holy Father will have much to suffer,” Our Lady said. From the Sovereign Pontiff to the humblest child of Holy Church, let us all beg the grace of final perseverance through the intercession of Blessed Nicholas Charnetsky and Companions. “In the end my Immaculate Heart will triumph”: Queen of Martyrs pray for us!
Archbishop Vasyl Velychkovsky, C.SS.R. Father Dominic Methodius Trcka, C.SS.R.
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