I am finishing work with a devout Greek Orthodox family, and was very impressed with their church calendar of having Wednesdays and Fridays as days of fasting. I wish our former disicplines would return…meatless Friday’s…and may be we have more fasting.
Christ said to do penance for the remission of our sins, or we likewise will perish.
The West is not the East.
The family and I see the theological differences, and frankly, we see them as more cultural than theological.
It is good not to follow apparitions.
But I did go to Fatima, because I was in Portugal to learn the language and then go overseas. My roommate lived near Leiria and the family wanted me to go to there.
Mary appeared at Fatima right before the Bolshevik revolutoin, May 13. That is the same day the Holy Father John Paul II was almost assassinated in 1982.
Mary told the children to pray the rosary every day,to pray for the conversion of Russia who would spread many errors in the world…errors that we can see today in American politics and class warfare, to do penance, to know that most people go to hell for the sins of the flesh than any other, to spend time before the Lord in the Blessed Sacrament. She warned that if people did not listen to her request, there would be a second war, worse that would be proceeded by a strange light in the sky.
Days before the Nazi invasion of Poland, an aurora borealis appeared over Europe. Communism was at work liquidating millions of its own people.
At the end of WWII, 7 or 8 German Jesuits had survived the atomic bomb in Japan. Over 200 scientists through the years examined them, and they had no trace of radiation. The two atomic bombs came between the Transfiguration of Our Lord to the Assumption of Mary, her glorious assumption into heaven.
It is said the devout Catholic Japanese who died by the bomb, were likewise gloriously taken to the Lord, so faithful for hundreds of years to the Catholic faith. They went underground for 200 years. They had a prophecy that they could finally come out when…a Catholic Church was built that had the name of Mary…the priest was celibate…this a Latin rite discipline…and that the church would be faithful to Rome. A few came to St. Marys to a Catholic priest faithful to Rome 200 years later.
The Latin rite Church was founded by St. Peter. St. Paul died in Rome. The Catholic faith is apostolic. The Orthodox Church is founded by 11 of the 12 apostles. St. Peter had previously stayed in Rome.
The Roman Catholic Church is not heretical but founded by Jesus Christ through the primacy of Peter. The Latin and Orthodox were one.
When I was coming into the Greek home a few nights later, I asked the woman I was replacing her take of the home, with all the icons of Theotokos, of Christ, and others of saints. Her simple reply was that she was a Christian and these people were Mary worshppers…
I said I was a Christian, a Catholic, we were like Orthodox and we have had these kinds of practices for 2000 years.
I am going to begin to renew Our Lady of F atima’s later requestion…that the First Five Saturday’s be consecutively attended at Mass as reparation to all that is false towards Mary.
