"Conversion of Russia" Update

The Patron "Saint" of Long-Range Bombers?

by Christopher A. Ferrara

        It would be hilarious if it were not so tragic: according to a report by the AFP news service (September 26, 2005), Alexei II, the patriarch of the Kremlin-controlled Russian Orthodox Church, has "canonized" an 18^th Century Russian admiral, Fyodor Ushakov, as "the patron saint of nuclear-armed, long-distance Russian bombers." The Admiral was an almost mythical Russian hero in the wars against Turkey and Napoleon Bonaparte.

        As AFP reports, "Russian Patriarch Alexei II, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, carried a reliquary and an icon of the admiral, who was canonised in 2004, into the Moscow chapel of the Russian Air Force's 37th Air Army in Moscow, Russia's RIA Novosti news agency said Monday."

        Alexei declared that "I am sure he will become your intermediary as you fulfil your responsible duties to the fatherland in the long-range air force." So, according to Alexei, "Saint" Fyodor will intercede before God whenever Vladimir ("the Practicing Christian") Putin launches a nuclear bombing run in the name of his neo-Stalinist dictatorship. How creepy is that?

        AFP notes that Fyodor was not very popular among the upper echelons of his own navy, and that "Tsar Alexander I forced Ushakov to retire to Tambov province south-east of Moscow in 1807, where he died in 1817 aged 73." But of course the Tsars were overthrown by the Bolshevik revolution, with Tsar Nicholas II and his entire family being shot and hacked to death with bayonets by the revolutionaries. So it would seem that Fyodor is the perfect "saint" for the "Practicing Christian’s" neo-Stalinist Russia.

        AFP also notes that "Ushakov's canonisation as a saint in 2004 follows a strong tradition in Russia of close relations between the Orthodox Church and the state, which was revived after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union." In other words, the Russian Orthodox Church is an arm of the Kremlin, even to the extent of providing "patron saints" for the "Practicing Christian’s" long-range nuclear bombers.

        How much longer will this travesty go on before the perpetrators of the Big Lie — that Russia was "consecrated" to the Immaculate Heart of Mary in 1984 — admit that no such consecration occurred? When will they stop suggesting that "conversion" only meant a revival of Russian Orthodoxy (which hasn’t happened anyway), or Russia’s supposed "turning away from war"?

        One would think that the spectacle of the Russian Orthodox Church providing a "patron saint" for Russia’s nuclear bombers would explode both of those myths at once. But we must remember that we are dealing with people who are heavily invested in the lie they have been peddling to the Catholic faithful for the past 21 years. We can only expect the perpetrators of the Big Lie on Fatima to continue to offer the same response to the evidence that is mounting against them: deny, deny, deny.