The wars that are bloodying the world
By Roberto de Mattei | 6 November 2024
Over the past century — after the two world conflicts of 1914-1918 and 1939-1945 — wars, revolutions and social upheavals of all kinds have accompanied the history of humanity, confirming the dramatic scenario that Our Lady foretold in Fatima in 1917 if the world were to continue offending God with its sins.
Pope Francis has spoken repeatedly of a “piecemeal world war” in describing this global turbulence, but it cannot be denied that, between the Russian aggression against Ukraine on 22 February 2022 and that of Hamas against Israel on 7 October 2023, the flames of a new conflagration have flared up violently and are engulfing the eastern borders of Europe, from the Baltic to the Red Sea. Onward from there, in the Far East, communist China casts its threatening shadow on the international horizon. It is natural that Europe should turn its gaze westward towards the United States, which appears to be the only world power capable of offering it military protection. Yet, until the inauguration of Joe Biden’s successor in the White House, in January 2025, America is living in a situation of extreme weakness. Moreover, between the two candidates for the presidency, Harris and Trump, and above all between their voters, a polarisation has been created that raises the possibility of severe tensions within the American colossus.
The insistent calls for peace made by Pope Francis are destined to fall on deaf ears as long as nothing is done to remove the causes of international disorder, so clearly indicated in the message of Fatima on 13 July 1917: war and all the catastrophes connected to it are a consequence of the sins of men. This is why God “is about to punish the world for its crimes, by means of war, famine and persecutions of the Church and of the Holy Father”.
But even without such a pressing divine warning, every man, by the light of his reason alone, can come to understand the existence of a punishment that looms over humanity. One of the greatest works of antiquity is Plutarch’s essay De sera numinis vindicta (“On the Delays of the Divine Vengeance”), reissued in the nineteenth century by Count Joseph de Maistre. Beginning precisely from the natural truth of a God Who repays all in Heaven and on earth, the philosopher from Chaeronea addresses the problem of the slowness with which God seems to punish the wicked. Plutarch explains how human justice knows only how to punish, while God seeks to lead souls back to repentance and grants a reprieve, sometimes a long one, to allow them to correct themselves. God is not afraid that, with the passage of time, the guilty may escape Him. Besides, he adds, if punishment immediately and infallibly followed guilt, there would no longer be either vice or virtue, because one would abstain from evil as one abstains from casting oneself into the fire. “Quite different is the law that regulates the life of souls: punishment is delayed because God is good, but it is certain because God is just.”
All peoples, all civilisations have believed that wars and natural disasters like famine and epidemics are a consequence of the sins of men. But of the three calamities that God uses to punish men, the worst, according to Father Eusebio Nieremberg (1595–1658), is war, both because the other two follow it and because war brings with it greater punishments and, which is worse, also leads to greater offences, unleashing the violence of the human passions more than epidemics and famines do.1
Two and a half years after the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the Wall Street Journal estimates the dead and wounded at one million, while tens of thousands have fallen victim to the war in the Middle East. But are these the real wars that are bloodying the world today?
There is weeping over the fate of the children buried under the bombs in Gaza, but not a tear is shed over the greatest genocide of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, which is abortion: millions of children are dismembered, crushed in their mothers’ wombs, and all this is asserted as a “civil right”. How can one deny the existence of a ferocious and worldwide war against the right to life of these innocent little human beings? And how can one deny that this war involves heads of state — such as French president Macron, who would like to introduce abortion into the European constitution, and Belgian prime minister Alexander De Croo, who would like to prevent the pope from speaking out on this very serious moral issue? Are not they too “hitmen”, like the doctors who practice murder in the operating room?
The spectre of nuclear war terrifies the man in the street, who recalls the chilling images of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but today there is a war underway against the family with effects, on the spiritual and moral level, more devastating than those of a nuclear massacre. This war has been carefully planned and has levelled whole families, gutting paternal authority, spreading the radioactive poison of anarchy and pansexualism, pulverising social bonds. If the effects of this moral revolution could be made visible, we would understand how vast are the craters that swallow up the family, and how grave the lesions that morally plague men, women and children today.
And what about the war from without against the Church and Christian civilisation, and the even more serious one that is taking place within it? What was the once-glorious Western Christendom now seems a pile of rubble around which vultures circle and jackals prowl. Is this not the city in ruins spoken of in the Third Secret of Fatima, when it describes the pope going up a mountain, where he will meet with his death, but “before reaching there, the Holy Father passed through a big city half in ruins and, half trembling with halting step, afflicted with pain and sorrow, he prayed for the souls of the corpses he met on his way”?
In the city in ruins, a disfigured cathedral recalls the past splendour. It is crumbling but still pulsating with life, the supernatural life of the Blessed Sacrament that does not cease to produce its effects — the opposite of the enemies’ destructive ones — while a few warriors defend the stones and memories of the city, confident in a victory that now only Heaven can give.
This victory will not only bring Christianity back to a new splendour, but will save the world from chaos, restoring meaning to life, renewing the family, the Church and all society. Only God can do this, but Our Lady is capable of obtaining this grace for the world.
- Father Eusebio Nieremberg, Tempo ed eternità. Norme di sapienza cristiana (LICE, Turin, 1933) p 310. ↩︎