You all shared our great hope for the consecration of Russia by the Pope and the bishops on October 8, and you were all, I am sure, bitterly disappointed that it was not done. Clearly we have not prayed enough, we have not sanctified ourselves sufficiently, we have not consecrated ourselves sufficiently to the Immaculate Heart to win the grace of the consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart, the triumph of the Immaculate Heart and the time of peace. Not of course that our prayers were useless. They will certainly bring many graces on those who live united to the Blessed Virgin Mary, and will bring many souls under her mantle. However, be prepared to bear the evils of these times of so little Faith.

The Pope in fact performed an "Act of Entrustment to Mary Most Holy". You who might wonder what this novelty of "entrustment" is. It is a watered down version of consecration, especially designed not to offend protestants, who believe that to consecrate ourselves to anybody other than God is to detract in some way from the worship due to Christ. This is of course entire nonsense, since Mary’s soul is the purest and most perfectly consecrated to Almighty God, so that everything and everyone who is offered and consecrated to her immediately belongs to Her Divine Son. However, this strange, false ecumenical concern is apparently enough to bypass the requests of the Mother of God, and to substitute what Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone, Secretary for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, defines in this way: "Entrustment acknowledges our need for help from God and is a plea for Mary’s intercession for that aid".

Entirely different from this vague sense of our need for God’s help and for Mary’s prayer, is a consecration. A consecration of something sets it aside as sacred, cutting it off from everything profane, ordinary and secular, so that it can belong entirely to God, and become truly sacred. This is a duty not just for sacred objects such as altars and chalices, and not just for consecrated persons, such as priests and religious, but for every baptized soul. As Saint Louis Grignon de Montfort points out, consecration to the Blessed Virgin Mary (and the same can be said of her Immaculate Heart) is but the means to live the consecration of our baptism:

"All our perfection consists in being conformed, united and consecrated to Jesus Christ; and therefore the most perfect of all devotions is, without any doubt, that which the most perfectly conforms, unites and consecrates us to Jesus Christ. Now, Mary being the most conformed of all creatures to Jesus Christ, it follows that of all devotions, that which most consecrates and conforms the soul to Our Lord is devotion to His holy Mother, and that the more a soul is consecrated to Mary, the more it is consecrated to Jesus. Hence it comes to pass that the most perfect consecration to Jesus Christ is nothing else but a perfect and entire consecration of ourselves to the Blessed Virgin...or in other words, a perfect renewal of the vows and promises of holy Baptism." (True Devotion, Part II, I)

How tragic it is that men of the Church would put aside such a sacred treasure, in the name of secular humanism and of not offending non-Catholics. Not only was this entrustment not a consecration, but in addition it did not mention Russia. It was the new millennium that was entrusted, but without the separation from the spirit of the world that is essential to a consecration. Here is the most important part of the formula: "To you, Dawn of Salvation, we commit our journey through the new Millennium, so that with you as guide all people may know Christ, the light of the world, and its only Savior, who reigns with the Father and the Holy Spirit for ever and ever. Amen." It is a good time for us to remember that Russia will only convert if it is consecrated, separated from the world’s atheistic spirit of rebellion, and that we will only contribute to the Church as we ought if we are truly and totally consecrated to Jesus through Mary, as St. Louis Grignon de Montfort instructs us. Let us renew this consecration for the latter times, or if we have not yet done it, prepare ourselves for it.

You will recall that last month I commented on the declaration Dominus Jesus, which declaration has continued to bring about strong and opposing reactions, on account of the manifest contradictions inherent in it. A Vatican-sponsored day of Jewish-Christian Dialogue, due to take place on October 3, was canceled on September 21 when leaders of Rome’s Jewish community withdrew their participation on account of the publication of the declaration on "the unicity and salvific universality of Jesus Christ and the Church". The Geneva-based World Alliance of Reformed Churches, representing 215 different churches considered calling off its September 13-19 ecumenical dialogue with Rome and registered the following formal complaint:

"We have learned with a sense of dismay of the declaration made by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith this week, and would like to register this with you in the strongest terms possible. This declaration seems to go against the spirit of Vatican II, as we understand it,…When statements in that declaration seem to contradict commitment to ecumenical cooperation within the Christian family or even take us back to a pre-Vatican II spirit, we are concerned…"

Note that the concern is about an apparent return to the Catholic Church’s unchanging teaching that she alone has the truth, thus making ecumenism impossible. The important point is not that they are wrong, and that they do not fully understand it as I showed last month, but that they see that a return to pre-Vatican II ideas is the denial of ecumenism.

The Pope himself responded to these accusations by personally addressing the dialogue with the World Alliance of Reformed Churches and maintaining his (and the Church’s, he claims) commitment to ecumenism. It is in order to achieve unity that, he said: "the commitment of the Catholic Church to ecumenical dialogue is irrevocable". He here states very clearly that they did not understand the declaration, and that it did not really mean what it appeared to them to say, namely the reaffirmation of what Catholics always believed before Vatican II concerning the Church’s necessity for salvation, and that consequently it is not a threat to modern day ecumenism. And to heighten even further the confusion, the Pope himself declared on October 1, in his Angelus address, that he himself approved this declaration, and that he defends it.

How can he be in such obvious contradiction with himself? Because the "true" understanding of the text, that simple people seem to have missed out on, whether they be Protestants, Jews, or traditional Catholics, is that there is no longer any contradiction between ecumenism between equals and the Catholic Church’s traditional claim to alone have the truth and to be necessary for salvation. This is the key to the modernists’ nonsensical attempt to reconcile the Vatican II revolution with Catholic dogma. There is only one way to explain the fact that the liberal theologians fail to see the contradiction, and it is that they have changed the meaning of words such as the Church, such as truth, such as faith, such as unity, such as salvation. When all these words are understood in a subjectivist sense, it becomes perfectly possible to discuss them on an equal level, by which "our dialogue then becomes an examination of conscience, a call to conversion, in which both sides examine before God their responsibility to do all that they can to put behind them the conflicts of the past" (John Paul II’s September 18 address to the World Alliance of Reformed Churches). The fact that we subjectively believe in our church, our truth, our faith, our unity, our salvation, is in no way an obstacle to such exchanges. In this way a liberal can still be an ecumenist and believe in the deepest, most profound subjective subconsciousness of his soul that for him the Catholic Church is the one church and for him necessary for salvation, and that it is for him in the Catholic Church that the church of Jesus Christ subsists. Then all the contradictions disappear in the "clarity" of subjectivism.

Whilst confronted with this conflict of ideas, this spiritual confusion, let us keep our heads screwed on tight by the objective and complete sense of Catholic truth, of the visible Church, outside of which there is no salvation, of the assurance that the Catholic Faith and visible unity lack nothing, and are alone the means chosen by God. Let us follow the Blessed Virgin Mary, Queen of Martyrs and of All Saints to inspire in us her total consecration to the Most Holy Trinity, that being consecrated to Mary, we might find in her the objective and sure protection against all the uncertainty and confusion of the modern world.

Yours faithfully in the Immaculate Heart of Mary,