ELEISON COMMENTS DCCCXII (February 4, 2023) : RUSSIA CONVERTING ?
Russia is very much in the news because of the war in the Ukraine still raging in the New Year, and
Russia is getting from our vile media a uniformly bad press. This is no doubt partly deserved because
Communist Russia (1917-1991) did indeed, in the words of Our Lady of Fatima, “spread its errors all
over the world.” However, there is certainly more to the enormous land of Russia than meets the eye.
Winston Churchill (1874-1965) was a brilliant politician but he was baffled by Russia, calling it “a riddle
wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”. On the contrary Our Lady of Fatima called for the Catholic
Pope and bishops to Consecrate Russia to Her Immaculate Heart, and then “a period of peace would be
given to the world.” But why Russia ? Why not much more Catholic countries like Italy or France ?
Surely the key to Russia is that it is a deeply religious people, known for centuries after its conversion to
Christianity in 988 as “Holy Russia”, with a corresponding capacity for great good, or great evil. Here is
what may have baffled a modern materialist like Churchill. Thus too Russians have called Moscow the
“Third Rome”, suggesting it is the successor of Rome itself and then of Byzantine Constantinople, as
though Moscow has a central part to play in Christianising the world. A famous Russian adviser of
President Putin, Alexander Dugin, speaks clearly of the war in Ukraine as though Russia is fighting to
stop the New World Order from dechristianising mankind. Putin himself has often been defending what
are natural and Christian values against the immoral perversions of the rotten West, thereby cutting the
figure of a real statesman amidst the puppets who posture today as leaders of the Western nations.
It has happened before in history that Russia acted to save Europe from the demons of liberalism. By
1812 Napoleon had set up the French Revolution in many countries of Europe, and in that year he put
together a huge army of 600,000 men to invade Russia and bring it also within his ambition for a new
world order, yet to be born. The Russian winter is usually credited with Napoleon’s defeat, but it was
Russians who by their patriotism and courage at the battle of Borodino inflicted a body blow on the
invading army. In 1814 Tsar Alexander I was in Paris with his soldiers to make peace with France and to put together the “Holy Alliance” to help Europe to keep the Revolution at bay. Even in 1941 Stalin re-opened churches in Soviet Russia to enable the people’s religion and patriotism, not their Communism, to do most of the hard fighting necessary to crush Nazism for the temporary benefit of the entire world.
A famous Russian novelist, Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881), puts into the mouth of a character in his
novel entitled “The Demons” or “The Possessed” (1871) an astonishing vision of the future madness and
conversion of “beloved Russia”. The character is an old and silly liberal, but as delirium and death close
in on him, he has moments of sheer insight into the future – he sees Russia being filled with devils (like
the man in the Gospel (Mk.V, 1-20) possessed by a legion of devils, and then being freed of them all and
sitting quietly at the feet of Our Lord. Was not Dostoevsky foreseeing Russia possessed by the madness of
Communism and then finally freed by tomorrow’s Consecration to the Immaculate Heart of Mary ? —
A great number of ideas keep coming into my mind now. You see, that’s exactly like our Russia, those
devils that come out of the sick man and enter into the swine. They are all the sores, all the foul
contagions, all the impurities, all the devils great and small that have multiplied in that great invalid, our
beloved Russia, in the course of ages and ages […] But a great idea and a great Will will encompass it
from on high, as with that lunatic possessed of devils … and all those devils will come forth, all the
impurity, all the rottenness that was putrefying on the surface … and they will beg of themselves to enter
into swine; and indeed maybe they have entered into them already! They are we, we and those … young
revolutionaries … and I perhaps at the head of them, and we shall cast ourselves down, possessed and
raving, from the rocks into the sea, and we shall all be drowned—and a good thing too, for that is all we
are fit for. But the sick man will be healed and ‘will sit at the feet of Jesus,’ and all will look upon him
with astonishment…. but now it excites me very much…. (“Demons”, Pt. III,
Ch.7.2)
Kyrie eleison
To the Immaculate Heart of Mary we all must pray
For Holy Russia its saving role to play.