On heels of Russian “nationalist” Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s demand that the Duma of the Russian parliament “investigate” means of preventing the “expansion” of the Catholic Church in Russia, Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz declares he is “indignant,” according to a March 13, 2000 report by CWNews.com.2.

Kondrusiewicz told the Italian journal Avvenire that “the Catholic faithful are ‘seriously concerned,’ in reaction to accusations by the nationalist leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky that the Catholic Church is acting as an expansionist power in Russia.” Kondrusiewicz worried out loud that he “hoped the calls for such an investigation would prove to be based on ‘misunderstandings, caused by insufficient information,’ and not ‘the signal for the start of a political campaign’ against the Catholic Church.

Let me make a prediction here at Fatima.org: if the Catholic Church shows any real signs of winning over the Russian people there will be “a political campaign against the Church.” In fact, I will go further out on a limb and say that this campaign has already been planned and will be implemented in order to prevent the erection of Catholic dioceses and parishes. (The Church has only a few “pastoral points” and “apostolic administrations” in Russia now.) This assumes, of course, the continued failure to perform a consecration of Russia which actually mentions the place.

The evidence of a pre-existing plan to suppress any organic development of the Church in Russia is already apparent. On March 13, 2001 Zenit news agency reported that Father Stanislaw Opiela, secretary of the Catholic bishops' conference, has been refused a return entry visa into Russia for the third time. The Foreign Affairs Ministry in Moscow simply refuses to explain the denial, despite repeated requests for an explanation from Archbishop John Bukowski, apostolic nuncio in the Russian Federation, Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz and Father Opiela himself. Zenit notes that “according to Rome-based VID, a news agency of religious communities, the measure is a kind of blackmail by nationalist authorities because of the work done by Father Opiela in the reorganization of the bishops' conference.”

These developments in Russia are quickly dispelling the illusion created by the Fatima revisionists. One wonders how much longer they will try to maintain that illusion in the face of reality. And one wonders whether, in the end, any of them will have the decency to admit they were wrong.

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