Posted on 12/10/2023 8:17:42 PM PST by ebb tide
Bishop Athanasius Schneider launched Friday a worldwide prayer campaign to “implore divine intervention for the crisis of the Church,” as the website of the Confraternity of Our Lady of Fatima announced. Bishop Schneider kindly sent LifeSite this information.
“In the face of the tremendous crisis now afflicting the Catholic Church,” Schneider and the international director of the confraternity, Christopher P. Wendt, write on their website, “the Confraternity of Our Lady of Fatima is launching a worldwide spiritual crusade consisting in the daily prayer of the Holy Rosary and practice of the Five First Saturdays, to implore, through the Immaculate Heart of Mary, God’s help and intervention, particularly for the Holy See in Rome.”
This spiritual response to the current crisis in the Church will begin on the first Saturday of January 2024 (January 6) and conclude on the first Saturday of December 2024 (December 7).
With this initiative, the auxiliary bishop of Astana, Kazakhstan, and a spiritual leader of orthodox Catholics throughout the world is putting emphasis on asking heaven’s help in a situation that seems unsolvable in human terms. In a frequently asked questions section of the website, the organizers explain why there is now the need for such a crusade:
It is evident because no one can deny that the crisis within the Catholic Church, especially also with the crisis of the Holy See in Rome, has reached unprecedented heights.
Here, we have no other means but to implore extraordinary divine help and divine intervention since the Church is not in our hands but in the hands of God ultimately.
With regard to the expression “spiritual crusade,” the website explains that, historically, crusades took place when “Christian soldiers went to free the Holy Land, the holy places where our Lord lived and died for us” that had been occupied by “unbelievers.”
In contradistinction, today’s crusade is a spiritual one which is “an effort of Christians to do a spiritual liberation of some places occupied by spiritual enemies of our faith.”
This is not a physical space that is occupied, but the Church herself: “This is the infiltration of unbelief, liberalism, and modernism within the life of the Catholic Church since the last decades which has arrived at some height in our day.”
Such a spiritual battle thus needs to be led with spiritual weapons, as the organizers explain: “In this crusade (spiritual crusade), we have no weapons, but we do have a spiritual weapon and this is the Holy Rosary. Our chief commander is not a soldier or an officer, it is Our Lady. We have chosen Her as the spiritual commander of this spiritual crusade.”
Priests and individuals are invited to take active roles in organizing the local crusade activities, and other organizations are invited to contact the Confraternity of Our Lady to join this crusade and promote it.
“We need founders and leaders of Catholic organizations to form an alliance with the Confraternity for the crusade to be truly global,” the authors write, adding that they “want every Catholic to have a chance to join in this Crusade to ask God to intervene.” People are invited to reach out to the confraternity and set up meetings “to discuss the possibility of an alliance.”
“This is the aim: that we, united together all over the world with deep faith and trust (supernatural trust) in the divine help and obeying the call of Our Lady of Fatima to religiously practice the First Five Saturdays and pray the Rosary as an efficacious means, which God has given us for our time,” the confraternity explains, concluding that “this gives us trust, hope, and the belief that the Lord will help His Church and that His Church is in His hands with Our Lady. She is the Mother of the Church.”
Furthermore, the website also gives an explanation on how to practice the First Five Saturday devotion as requested by Our Lady of Fatima herself as the remedy for the sufferings of our time:
The practice of the First Five Saturdays consists in the following: on the first Saturday of five consecutive months, to receive the sacrament of Confession and Holy Communion, pray the Rosary, and meditate for fifteen minutes on at least one of the fifteen mysteries of the Rosary, with the intention of making reparation for the sins against the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
This is not a physical space that is occupied, but the Church herself: “This is the infiltration of unbelief, liberalism, and modernism within the life of the Catholic Church since the last decades which has arrived at some height in our day.”
Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for us.
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