Letter #31, 2024, Wednesday, September 18: Medjugorje

    I arrived in the village of Medjugorje today.

    Medjugorje is the rocky village in Bosnia-Hercegovina where it is said that six children began, in 1981, to see the Virgin Mary daily, and where three of the six are said to have continued to see her daily up to the present day — now for 43 years.

    I am scheduled to meet with one of those three tomorrow.

    Also — significantly — the Vatican itself tomorrow will, rather unexpectedly, hold a press conference on “the spiritual experience of Medjugorje” — after more than 43 years.

    Here is the announcement of that press conference (link):

    Notice of Press Conference, 17.09.2024

    On Thursday 19 September 2024, at 11.30, at the Holy See Press Office, Sala San Pio X, Via dell’Ospedale 1, a press conference will be held on the spiritual experience of Medjugorje.

    The speakers will be:

    – His Eminence Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith;

    – The Reverend Msgr. Armando Matteo, secretary of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith;

    – Dr. Andrea Tornielli, editorial director of the Dicastery for Communication.

    The press conference will be live streamed in the original language on the Vatican News YouTube channel, at https://www.youtube.com/c/VaticanNews.

    ***

    Why such a press conference, suddenly, now?

    Could it have something to do with the looming threat of global war? Perhaps.

    Because, for 43 years, the apparitions of the Virgin have centered on the issue of the beauty of “peace” and the horror of the loss of peace — and at no time since 1981 has peace seemed more threatened than at the present, as two wars rage — in Ukraine and Russia, and in Israel, Gaza and now Lebanon — and as talk of using nuclear and other very powerful weapons, as it such use is likely, and not at all inconceivable, has become commonplace.

    Here is what one Medjugorje website says (link):

    Medjugorje – A Mission for Peace

    In June 1981, the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to six children in a small mountain village in Bosnia-Hercegovina named Medjugorje. Identified as the Queen of Peace, she came on a mission of Peace with a message for the world. “I have come to tell the world that God exists. He is the fullness of life, and to enjoy this fullness and peace, you must return to God.

    Since then, Our Lady has been appearing and giving messages to the world through these six visionaries, Marija, Vicka, Ivan, Mirjana, Jakov, and Ivanka. She has told them that God has sent Her to our world and that these years She is spending with us, are a time of Grace granted by God. She has come to guide us to Her Son, Jesus, and invites us to convert our lives back to God and to urgently pray for Peace with all our hearts. “Peace, peace, peace, and only peace. Peace must reign between man and God, and between all people!” She leads us by walking with us and guiding us step by step, message by message.

    ***

    Millions of pilgrims    

    An estimated 50 million pilgrims have come to this village since 1981 –an average of more than 1 million per year.

    And these 50 million have been given the “5 Stones or Weapons” which constitute the essence of the message of the Virgin Mary for bringing world peace — like Goliath, with his sling.

    Here are those “5 Stones” as described by Fr. Leon Pereira, OP, the official chaplain to the English-speaking pilgrims in Medjugorje (link):

    5 Stones or Weapons

    Our Lady wants to show us through Her messages the real face of Christianity and the path to peace. She says that we must realize that Satan is real and that he uses us for his own ends and purposes. His main purpose is destruction. Destruction of love, peace, faith, family, and life. Just as God gave David 5 stones with which to defeat Goliath, Our Lady is also giving us 5 Stones, or Weapons, that we can use to defeat Satan. They are:

  1. Daily Prayer (Of the Rosary)
  2. Fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays
  3. Holy Mass (Eucharist)
  4. Daily Reading of the Bible
  5. Monthly Confession

    These are some Reflections on these five weapons:

    Prayer – She asks us to Pray the Rosary: “Pray, pray, pray. Prayer is the basis of peace.”

    Prayer is the first stone: You must begin praying now so that you may be transformed and raise yourself up with others as well. Priests, parents, and everyone must pray. Prayer is a gift and a principal weapon given to the Church. The Church is neither an idea nor a political party; it is a family that prays, a family that loves. This is the reason Our Lady insists that prayer is needed to transform the world. Pray the Rosary —  How to Pray the Rosary

    Fasting – “Let the people perform strict fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays, except the sick”, and “The best fasting is on bread and water.”

    Fasting is the second stone: It can be fasting from cigarettes, from television, from an evil thought, from a negative project, and from food. Fasting demonstrates your capacity to love and affirms that you are important to everyone. Fasting is medicine and a sacrifice. With fasting, egoism is defeated. He who knows how to fast is capable of hearing his neighbor, of being available for others, and of understanding how to love the entire world. He who fasts sees himself and others truthfully and is aware of how to cleanse his inner self.

    Eucharist (Holy Mass) – “The Holy Mass is the climax of prayer.”

    The Eucharist is the third stone: In the Mass the Incarnation occurs, the transubstantiation of the bread and wine. This is also a sign of our transformation: from death, we are brought to life. The Mass transforms the Christian, transforms the Church because with the Mass Jesus is offered completely to the Church. The Mass is the origin of the Church, the Mystical Body. The Mass-Sacrifice renders the Church a holy family. In the Mass, one is born again if one’s own life is placed upon the altar as a sacrifice, in the manner of Jesus. We are the drop of water poured into the wine; the Church is united with the Blood of Jesus. Therefore, you must not just listen to the Holy Mass but live it. Without the Mass the Church does not exist; without it, the Church is an orphan.

    The Bible – Read the Holy Scripture every day: “You have forgotten the Holy Scripture.”

    The Bible is the fourth stone: It is not one of many books, it is the Christian’s flag. Deprived of the Bible, the Christian is no longer the same person. The Bible is born from the heart of the Lord; it is His Word. Therefore, it must remain first within the family. It must be set in a place of honor, and that place must be sacred for us. It must be the source of our prayer. The Bible illuminates the Christian’s walk amid doubt and conflicting ideologies today.

    Confession – Confession once a month: “In confession, many blessings are received”.

    Confession is the fifth stone. Our Lady requests us to make monthly visits to the sacrament of reconciliation. The purpose of Confession is not to recount one’s actions; it is not a psycho-analytical session. It is a sacrament and a source of peace with oneself in the meeting with the Lord. In Confession, we obtain the peace of the Lord so that we may transmit it to others. In confession, we open ourselves up before the Lord, asking Him to transform and renew our hearts. Confession is both a sacrament and a mystery.

    Together, these five stones that Our Lady has given us through her messages of Medjugorje are the weapons in the battle of good and evil and are the medicine that enables us to heal and find true inner peace.

    ***

    Journey to Medjugorje

    I flew yesterday to Split in Croatia, before coming to Medjugorje today.

    I wished to see the palace of the Roman Emperor Diocletian, where he chose to live in retirement for the 10 years after he left the imperial throne on May 1, 305 A.D. (link).

    It is Diocletian who is commonly believed to have ordered the last great persecution of the Christians, but scholars hold that it was actually his subordinate, Galerius, who “first induced him to turn persecutor” (link):

    Diocletian’s name is associated with the last and most terrible of all the ten persecutions of the early Church.

    Nevertheless it is a fact that the Christians enjoyed peace and prosperity during the greater portion of his reign. Eusebius, who lived at this time, describes in glowing terms “the glory and the liberty with which the doctrine of piety was honoured”, and he extols the clemency of the emperors towards the Christian governors whom they appointed, and towards the Christian members of their households. He tells us that the rulers of the Church “were courted and honoured with the greatest subserviency by all the rulers and governors”. He speaks of the vast multitudes that flocked to the religion of Christ, and of the spacious and splendid churches erected in the place of the humbler buildings of earlier days. At the same time he bewails the falling from ancient fervour “by reason of excessive liberty” (Church History VIII.1).

    Had Diocletian remained sole emperor, he would probably have allowed this toleration to continue undisturbed. It was his subordinate Galerius who first induced him to turn persecutor.

    The two rulers of the East, at a council held at Nicomedia in 302, resolved to suppress Christianity throughout the empire.

    The cathedral of Nicomedia was demolished (24 Feb., 303).

    An edict was issued “to tear down the churches to the foundations and to destroy the Sacred Scriptures by fire; and commanding also that those who were in honourable stations should be degraded if they persevered in their adherence to Christianity” (Eusebius, op. cit., VIII, ii).

    Three further edicts (303-304) marked successive stages in the severity of the persecution: the first ordering that the bishopspresbyters, and deacons should be imprisoned; the second that they should be tortured and compelled by every means to sacrifice; the third including the laity as well as the clergy.

    The atrocious cruelty with which these edicts were enforced, and the vast numbers of those who suffered for the Faith are attested by Eusebius and the Acts of the Martyrs. We read even of the massacre of the whole population of a town because they declared themselves Christians (Eusebius, loc. cit., xi, xii; Lactant., “Div. Instit.”, V, xi).

    The abdication of Diocletian (1 May, 305) and the subsequent partition of the empire brought relief to many provinces. In the East, however, where Galerius and Maximian held sway, the persecution continued to rage.

    Thus it will be seen that the so-called Diocletian persecution should be attributed to the influence of Galerius; it continued for seven years after Diocletian’s abdication.

    It was Diocletian who chose to split the Roman empire into two parts, east and west — a division that, fatefully, was to contribute centuries later to the schism between Latin and Greek Christianity, the Great Schism of 1054 A.D. — a schism that Pope John Paul II in our time sought to overcome.

    Here is a brief summary of that decision by Diocletian (link):

    He had scarcely come to power when he made an unexpected decision—to share the throne with a colleague of his choice.

    The empire was too great for one man to administer; nearly every week, either in Africa, or somewhere on the frontier that extended from Britain to the Persian Gulf, along the Rhine, the Danube, the Pontus Euxinus (Black Sea), and the Euphrates, he was forced to suppress a revolt or stop an invasion.

    Diocletian, who was more attracted to administration, required a man who was both a soldier and a faithful companion to take responsibility for military defense. In 286 he chose Maximian, an Illyrian, the son of a peasant from the area around Sirmium.

    A little later, though still keeping Rome as the official capital, he chose two other residences. Maximian, who was responsible for the West, was installed at Milan in northern Italy, in order to prevent German invasions. Diocletian established himself at Nicomedia, in western Anatolia and close to the Persian frontier, in order to keep watch on the East.

    Six years later, in 293, having taken the title of “Augustus” and given it to Maximian as well, he added two more colleagues: Galerius, a former herdsman, and Constantius I Chlorus, a Dardanian nobleman according to the legend of his house, but a rather rude countryman also.

    These additional collaborators were each given the title “Caesar” and attached to an Augustus, Constantius to Maximian (with a residence in Trier), and Galerius to Diocletian himself (with a residence in Sirmium).

    Thus, while the empire remained a patrimonium indivisum (undivided inheritance), it was nevertheless divided administratively: Diocletian, residing in Nicomedia, watched over ThraceAsia, and Egypt; Galerius, residing in Sirmium, watched over Illyria, the Danubian provinces, and Achaea; Maximian, residing in Milan, over ItalySicily, and Africa; and Constantius I Chlorus, residing in Trier, over GaulSpain, and Britain

    ***

    Meditating on these events of more than 1700 years ago, I left Split this morning and in the afternoon arrived in the village of Medjugorje, which will figure prominently on a Vatican press conference tomorrow.

    And before sleeping, I read with sadness the following article, from four days ago now, so already a bit out of date (!), which speaks of the “imminence” (meaning, in the very near future) of direct and therefore possibly total war between Russian and the United States.

    I have spent much of my life attempting by many travels and writings to forestall or to prevent such a tragic outcome, traveling many times to Russia, and to Ukraine, and to the Phanar in Istanbul, and by writing year after year of the need for both of our great countries, the United States and Russia, to repent publicly for many actions committed in both of our pasts, so as to lay a possible basis for working together, along with other nations, as allies, not enemies, to build a world of peace in the time to come. —RM

    The Imminent Russia-US War (link)

    By Christopher Caldwell

    September 13, 2024

    All week long, the Biden administration has been hinting that it would authorize Ukraine to strike deep inside Russian territory with US-made Army Tactical Missiles Systems, or ATACMS.

    These are computer-guided supersonic missiles with a range of up to 190 miles. They can’t reach Moscow, but they could hit the Russian cities of Kursk, Voronezh, and Rostov.

    Britain has already authorized Ukraine to use British-supplied Storm Shadow missiles to attack Russia.

    Secretary of State Tony Blinken traveled to Kiev in the company of British Foreign Secretary David Lammy to discuss the matter with Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky. Some kind of escalatory announcement was expected to accompany British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Friday visit to Washington.

    This development prompted Vladimir Putin to make a carefully worded statement to a TV interviewer Thursday: “If this decision is made, it will mean nothing less than the direct participation of NATO countries, the United States, the European countries, in the war in Ukraine. This changes the very nature of the conflict.”

    Starmer dismissed the remark. Putin, he said, can stop his war with Ukraine any time he wants.

    One could just as easily say that, any time they wanted, Starmer and Biden could stop risking Armageddon to meddle in the affairs of sovereign countries halfway around the world.

    The more troubling thing is that Starmer doesn’t seem to understand what Putin is saying.

    Because, although the point is somewhat complex and the reporting on the West’s intentions has been cloudy, Putin is right.

    Right about what? What is Putin complaining about?

    This ATACMS business seems like familiar ground.

    We have already armed the Ukrainians to the teeth.

    In Russian eyes, the American-initiated militarization of what had been a de facto buffer zone is what started the war in the first place.

    Although the Ukrainians have been doing a great deal of dying in this war, at several important junctures, they have seemed immaterial to a conflict that is really being fought by the United States.

    Since 2022, almost every time Ukraine has suffered a serious strategic reversal, it has been followed by a stunning peripeteia: Ukraine sinks the Russian navy’s flagship in the Black Sea, Ukraine blows up the Kerch bridge in Crimea, Ukraine damages Russia military airfields in Crimea, Ukraine invades Russia proper and destroys two strategic bridges over the river Seym with pinpoint strikes. The United States then congratulates its ally on its resourcefulness, and implies that it would be disgraceful to betray Ukraine now, when it is fighting with such pluck.

    It would be more accurate to put “Ukraine” in quotation marks.

    Leaving aside more mysterious high-tech operations, from drone attacks on top Russian officers unwise enough to carry their cell phones on the frontlines to the sabotage of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, these strikes have been done with precision-targeted missiles. And Ukraine doesn’t do precision. It cannot.

    When America decided to take Ukraine under its military wing a decade ago, the country had a lower per-capita income than Cuba, Jamaica, and Namibia, and defended its frontiers with oligarch-funded militias. It is true that Ukraine has since regained some of the missile-manufacturing capacity that it had during the Cold War, but the feats of precise destruction it has pulled off rely on imported technology.

    Senior Biden officials confirmed to Joshua Yaffa of The New Yorker that they do targeting for the Ukrainians—but with care. “There are lines we drew,” one said, “in order not to be perceived as being in a direct conflict with Russia.”

    Note the word “perceived.” It has served Russia, too, to pretend not to notice what is going on, in the interest of avoiding direct conflict with the United States.

    The resort to ATACMS would make such dissembling impossible. It’s a reckless crossing into flagrant war-making.

    To see why this is the case, you have to understand the way ATACMS work.

    What makes ATACMS lethal isn’t just their payload and speed, but their GPS targeting.

    The weapon uses a dedicated system that the United States controls, drawing on a constellation of satellites run by the US military that operate together in real time. The Biden administration has sought to reassure the public that Ukrainians will have to present the United States with a target list. That goes without saying; they can’t fire them without the Americans. An ATACMS strike isn’t just moral or material support for a friend, who may be in the right or may be in the wrong. It is a deadly, unambiguously American-authored act of war.

    In suggesting that this would be a rash escalation, Putin is putting things mildly.

    During last week’s presidential debate, Donald Trump’s warnings about the risk that World War III might start in Ukraine were lost in the flood of his own hyperbole—but he wasn’t wrong. Russia still has more nuclear warheads than any country on the planet, including the United States.

    Putin has sought to remind those killing his soldiers of this fact throughout the war.

    But intellectuals from one end of the Washington foreign-policy establishment to the other are feeling lucky. They have convinced themselves that Putin is “bluffing.”

    Maybe they are right. But a nuclear exchange isn’t the only bad outcome that could result from such a reckless military adventure.

    This is all happening at a dangerous time. Constitutionally, if Biden, as commander in chief, wants to start a war, he must ask Congress to declare it. That formality hasn’t been honored since the middle of the last century, of course. But the president has always at least had to explain his rationale in some way.

    Right now, the president is insufficiently compos mentis to do that. He has been deemed mentally incapable (by his own Justice Department’s special counsel) of standing trial in a mishandling-of-documents case and physically incapable (by his own party) of managing a presidential campaign—a challenge considerably less arduous than a military campaign.

    With the elected commander-in-chief absent from the scene, awkward questions arise. Who is his regent?

    Who in this administration is escalating the Russia-Ukraine war by drawing the United States closer to active participation in it?

    [End, Caldwell article]    

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