A Compelling New Book Shows that "Russia's Darkness is Rising."

by Christopher A. Ferrara

        Fr. Gruner has been tireless in his promotion of the truth about Fatima and the truth about the consequences of the failure to consecrate Russia in the manner requested by the Queen of Heaven. Year after year since the supposed "consecration" of 1984 — which mentioned everything but Russia — Fr. Gruner has been warning that, far from converting, Russia has been headed toward the abyss.

        Now even the major secular media are catching on to the truth. On May 26, 2003 Canada’s National Post ran a blockbuster review by UPI reporter Martin Sieff of Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State, by David Satter, which The National Post calls "a vivid, impeccably researched and truly frightening new book…" The publisher, by the way, is no less than Yale University Press.

        Sieff notes Satter’s documentation of the reality that Russia, "one of the two major thermonuclear superpowers in the world, and the only one left with Multiple-Independently Targeted Re-entry Vehicles on its nuclear missiles remains unstable, unpredictable and is dangerously close to becoming a ruthless, predatory and unpredictable criminal state." Tellingly, Satter demonstrates that "something — in fact, a lot of things — went terribly wrong during the early 1990s transition of Russia from state communism to a supposed free market economy." That is, things went seriously wrong in Russia after the 1984 "consecration."

        The review further notes that "Without any stable legal structure governing the owning and trading of property and wealth or the regulation of business transactions in the decade after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Russian society became totally criminalized, not merely in its day-to-day dealings but in the widespread existential consciousness of its people…"

        Satter’s book takes the reader on a tour of what Sieff calls "the seven circles of this modern, all too physically real hell. He (Satter) explores the alleged role of Russia's Federal Security Service, the FSB, in the terror bombings of apartment buildings that killed hundreds of ordinary Russians in their sleep and provided the main pretext for the 1999 Chechnya war. He documents how the worst old Soviet-era traditions of excessive secrecy and xenophobic paranoia in the Russian Navy's high command doomed the surviving sailors of the mighty Oscar II class nuclear killer submarine Kursk when a faulty torpedo detonated during a test firing, sending its 118 crew members to their deaths at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean in August 2000…. He traces the gangster struggles for control of cities, banks, industrial complexes, even entire provinces each of which is larger than any other major European nation. And he vividly documents the casual violence that the protagonists in these — literal — wars take for granted, making Al Capone and his colleagues look like disciples of Mother Teresa by contrast."

        Today, says Sieff of the portrait painted by Satter: "a society of 145 million people stretching across almost one-seventh of the land surface of the planet remain mired in poverty, despair and a moral squalor even more devastating than their physical one. Russia's population continues to implode with soaring death rates and plummeting birth rates. The underlying reason for this, far more than the collapse of living standards in the 1990s was, Satter concludes, that most of those people had lost all hope. They now despaired of things ever getting better."

        Is this what the Vatican apparatus would have us believe is the "conversion" of Russia promised by the Mother of God?

        As Sieff puts it, Satter "plays Dante, taking his readers on a comprehensive tour of this thermonuclear-armed Inferno. Reading his relentlessly grim, implacably documented accounts is to be reminded of D.H. Lawrence's prescient vision on observing the crazed gaiety and brilliance of Weimar Germany in the 1920s. Beneath the surface dazzle, the great British writer noted, a huge chasm had opened up — moral and spiritual even more than economic and social. Superficial politics alone could not bridge it. From that gaping abyss emerged: Adolf Hitler. There is still time for Russia to stabilize and for those who wish her well to support the constructive forces for good within her. But most of the promise has been squandered, and the Hobbesian nightmare of a society of chaos, red in tooth and claw, remains the dominant reality today."

        Sieff concludes that "Western policy-makers would do well to study these pages" for the truth about Russia. But that same truth will, it seems, be lost on the anti-Fatima establishment which now controls the levers of power in the Vatican, and their neo-Catholic apologists among the rank and file clergy and laity, who think that "obedience" to Church authorities requires us to deny the evidence of our senses.

        Thank God, I say, that Fr. Nicholas Gruner is willing to soldier on despite the abuse being heaped upon him by the "learned" and the "respectable" establishmentarians of a Church in crisis — men who refuse to see the truth that even secular newsmen and authors can see. It is not too much to say that, perhaps someday, Fr. Gruner will be viewed as a prophet of his time. But as he would be the first to say, he is only repeating the Message of an infinitely greater prophet: the Virgin Mother of God at Fatima.