Chapter Eleven
SERIOUS CONSEQUENCES
While filled with questioning wonder at the slow unfolding of the manifestation of God's Love in the Hearts of Jesus and Mary, and of His invitation for us to place our own hearts into Their Flame of Love, are we not at the same time left in amazement at the consequences of failure to respond?
We are shocked at the sad sight of Louis XVI beheaded in the Place de la Concorde, leaving behind in the Bastille his final desperate vow to respond when it was too late. But even all the wars of the last two hundred years could hardly enable us even to grasp the magnitude of the consequences of that failure.
This book is based on the startling message given by Sister Lucia in 1993, and so far we have revealed only part of it -the part about the Fatima week and that the triumph is an "ongoing process."
But she also said that ALL THE WARS SINCE 1918 COULD HAVE BEEN PREVENTED.
How Could It Be?
Anatol Kaszczuk, the great Marian apostle of Poland, tells of his shock at the suffering and death in Warsaw during the German invasion. When over 200,000, had died he asked a priest in the confessional how God could permit such "global" atrocities. To his surprise, the priest said:
"To know the answer you must know the message of Fatima."
That was back in 1940 when most of the world had not heard anything about Fatima. The "great sign" given by God in 1938, although seen by millions, had been ignored.
The Great Sign
Do we know of any other times in History that God has gone to such great lengths to get our attention, to save us from ourselves?
It was in 1917 that Our Lady, after prophesying the second world war which would be "worse than the first," said that God would give a sign so that people would be warned.
She said:
"When you will see the night illumined by an unknown light you will know that it is the great sign that God is about to punish the world."
GREAT SIGN indeed! On the night of January 25, 1938, it seemed that half the world was on fire. A seminarian in Vienna recalls that it seemed the city and the country about was all in flames. When one of the seminary professors said it was probably the great sign of Fatima, and that a war was about to begin, no one asked: What does the Fatima message say we must DO to prevent it?
Consequences
It does not sum it up simply to say that many MILLIONS died. One would need to know HOW those millions died, and how much those who survived suffered-sometimes for the rest of their lives. And it would be necessary to reduce those millions to just one or two individuals, perhaps to one man starved to death in a prison like St. Maximilian Kolbe. Or would it be a woman with children walking out of the ruins of Nagasaki with all their skin burned off, slowly dying?
Perhaps we are tired of seeing war films and war documentaries. We are tired of hearing of the horrors. We no longer like to look at the sea of white crosses in the military cemeteries scattered all over Europe and in the Pacific. The horror was global and it ended in the greatest single horror of all: Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And it all-all could have been avoided. Our Lady had said:
"If my requests are heard..." And in the third day, She is still saying: "If my requests are heard...an era of peace will be granted to mankind."
Magnitude Difficult to Grasp
As I brought out in my book Too Late?, we do not have to go back to the horrors of the second world war, which engulfed most of the world. Consider just the scale of the killings in Rwanda and the Balkans, in both of which countries Our Lady had appeared ten years before the killings to remind the people of Her message.
In ratio to the population of the United States, in each of those countries the number killed would equal about twenty five MILLION.
It was at the very time Our Lady was reported to be giving messages in Rwanda and in the Balkans that the Bishop of Akita in Japan announced, on March 27, 1982, that Our Lady had come with a similar reminder for the entire world:
"Many people in this world afflict the Lord. If they do not repent and better themselves, the Father will inflict a terrible punishment on all humanity."
As in Rwanda, we are told specifically what the punishment will be. Instead of a river of blood it will be fire:
"It will be a punishment worse than the deluge, such as one will never have seen before. Fire will fall from the sky and will wipe out a great part of humanity... The survivors will find themselves so desolate that they will envy the dead."
"Will Envy the Dead"
If we ignore this message, the predicted punishment will now affect ALL humanity. And we have already had half a century to respond because, in the very words of the Bishop of Akita: "It is the message of Fatima."
But we have largely ignored the part of the message of Fatima which states that the alternative to our response will be the annihilation of entire nations. Perhaps the reason it is ignored is precisely because it is so terrible, so unthinkable.
To many, the most terrible part of the prophecy of Akita seems to be in those words: "The survivors will find themselves so desolate that they will envy the dead."
Indeed, this prophecy is so terrible that, even after nine years of inquiries, the local Bishop hesitated to publish it. He went to Rome for advice. Cardinal Ratzinger, custodian of the third secret of Fatima, reassured him that what Our Lady said at Akita was substantially the same as what She revealed in the secret of Fatima.
This was told to me personally by the bishop. Later, Cardinal Ratzinger confirmed it in an interview with the Honorable Howard Dee when the latter was leaving Rome after serving as the Philippine Ambassador to the Holy See. It was published in Dee's important book Mankind's Final Destiny.
We people of the third millennium, who have ignored the message of Fatima, are warned that if the requests of Our Lady continue to be ignored, "several entire nations will be annihilated." It will be by fire. And it will affect all humanity.
Will it be too late for us? Will we continue to ignore the alternative of fire engulfing the earth and wiping out "a great part of humanity?"
Yet, we know what we can do to prevent it!
Indeed, we do not tire of recalling that Our Lady said at Akita that SO FAR, She has been able to prevent it because of the response of a few! And she said:
"Pray very much the prayers of the Rosary. I alone am able still to save you from the calamities which approach. Those who place their confidence in me will be saved."
This and other books by John M. Haffert
God's
Final Effort | Too Late? | The Day I Didn't Die