EXPECT CHANGE: Pope Consecrates World

by Susan Fox

All lay in ruins. Every bright hope that God held for mankind seemed to be lost.

He had brought matter out of nothing, separated the water from the land, brought forth green life and put living creatures on the earth. God continued to create, making a Paradise --- a garden full of lush fruit trees, sweet animals, rushing water and one beautiful companion. All this was done for one man, 
whom He had made from the clay of the earth, touched with His breath, and marked with His living image. His name was Adam.

There was only one rule in that garden: Do not eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. 


Every day, Adam and God walked together in the garden in the cool of afternoon. They were the best of friends, sharing everything.  But on one inky black afternoon, overrun with snakes and self-doubt, Adam and Eve, his companion, knowingly ate the wrong fruit.  They forgot the gratitude they owed to God.

Now God went to the garden as usual, looking for them. “Where are you?” He called. But they were hiding. How that hurt. Now Paradise would unravel. The snake would crawl on his belly, the woman would labor in pain, and the man’s work would turn cruel.

But wait. What was that? God said something to the snake that didn’t make sense. “And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; 
he will crush your head, 
and you will strike his heel.” (Gen. 3:15)

And so God offered man a prophetic ray of hope. He promised a Woman and He promised a Son. Together, they would untie the knot that Adam and Eve had made with their sin.

On Sunday, Oct. 13, 2013, the anniversary of the last apparition of Our Lady at Fatima, Portugal, the ever-wonderful and controversial Pope Francis entrusted everyone in the world to this Woman, so that she in turn could entrust us to Her Seed, Our Lord Jesus Christ, with the result that the snake’s head (all resistance to God) would be crushed once and for all.

“Bring everyone under your protection and entrust everyone to your beloved Son, Our Lord Jesus,” the Pope implored the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Almost 2,000 years ago, Jesus Christ offered the first Marian Consecration as He hung upon the cross dying:  "When Jesus saw his mother, and the disciple whom he loved standing near, he said to his mother "Woman, behold your son!" Then he said to the disciple, "Behold your mother!" And from that hour the disciple took her to his own home." (John 19:26-27) Each Christian is asked to do the same thing – take Mary into your home.

 “It is a fact: Mary always brings us to Jesus,” the pope said on the vigil night before the consecration.

That was Our Lady’s purpose on Oct. 13, 1917, when she appeared to three Portuguese children and God made the sun dance for as many as 70,000 witnesses. In the sun, the children saw an image of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Before the apparition, it rained terribly and everyone was wet until the sun whirled in the sky and seemed to rush to the earth. Then everyone’s clothes were dried, the mud hardened and the puddles emptied, leaving the ground as if it had never rained. The people knelt and prayed.

Such a fervent response to a miracle recalled Elijah’s triumph over the prophets of the god Ba’al on Mount Carmel. The people of Israel had been dithering between the Lord God and the god Ba’al. The Prophet Elijah asked the people, “How long will you go limping with two different opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Ba’al, then follow him.”

So he set up a test with the 450 prophets of Ba’al: two altars, two dead bulls, one for Ba’al and one for God. They would ask their gods to consume the sacrifice without lighting a fire themselves. So the priests of Ba’al prayed, cutting themselves and began using many words morning to night. When nothing happened, Elijah teased them, asking, “Has your god gone aside? (to the bathroom) Is he sleeping?”

But the god Ba’al did not consume his sacrifice. So Elijah built a moat around his altar and filled it with water, then soaked the sacrifice as well. He prayed, “O Lord, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, let it be known this day that you are God in Israel, and that I am your servant, and that I have done all these things at your word.” Then he prayed that the people’s hearts would turn back to the one true God.  

“Then the fire of the Lord fell, and consumed the burnt offering, and the wood, and the stones, and the dust, and licked up the water that was in the trench.” (1Kings18:38)

Elijah’s prayer was answered. The priests of Ba’al were slaughtered, and the drought the people had been suffering was ended. It rained. We heard a crunching sound and found a dead snake on the ground.

The water evaporated suddenly at Mount Carmel just like it did on Oct. 13, 1917 in Fatima, Portugal. The two miracles are related. The world was given a choice at Mount Carmel, and the world was given a choice at Fatima in 1917. Unfortunately, we postponed our response in 1917. And the price was quite high.

The consecration of Russia requested by Our Lady of Fatima in 1917 was delayed almost 70 years. In 1984 with the participation of the willing bishops of the world, Pope John Paul II consecrated the world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. The Fatima visionary Sr. Lucia confirmed this consecration – unlike previous ones -- finally satisfied heaven’s 1917 request to consecrate Russia.

But Our Lady had warned that unless this consecration was done promptly, Russia would spread her errors around the world. Her errors – including abortion, euthanasia, contraception and its related gay marriage, loss of property rights, loss of religious freedom, mass murders -- have indeed spread all over the world. In the name of racial purity, Nazi Germany – with gays in all key positions in the military and homeland forces --killed 6 million Jews in World War II, but the total death toll was over 20 million from 1933 to 1945. Religious persecution played a prominent role in the deaths as well. Millions of Catholics died.

China adopted communism in 1949 and purged her population of property owners and business people, and tried to wipe out Catholicism. The Khmer Rouge in Cambodia killed an estimated 1.7 to 2.5 million from 1975-1979 on the same principle – get rid of the rich, get rid of teachers. Anyone with glasses was likely to be killed, so the killing fields were full of eyeglasses!  

The same thinking now infests the United States. Our current U.S. president is trying to whip up class envy and hatred for the rich while increasing the government-dependent population. He has imposed legislation on the people that will result in forced euthanasia. It’s called ironically, Obama “care.” So in the U.S. we are suffering a loss of religious freedom, and a loss of the right to private property as the cost of health care is dramatically rising thanks to the federal government. We adopted abortion in 1973, and since then have killed 56 million Americans, a holocaust far worse than what happened in Nazi Germany, but no one seems to understand that.

In more recent years, from the vantage point of a UN pro-life lobbyist, I watched those errors – abortion and contraception -- start to slide into to Ireland, Africa and Catholic South America. And Ireland has lost its religious freedom completely as Catholic hospitals now MUST provide abortion and contraception.

However, only five years after the pope consecrated the world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, the Iron Curtain did fall in 1989 – without any bloodshed. NO ONE ANTICIPATED THIS WOULD HAPPEN. The Cold War, which seemed so intractable for decades, ended. Communist governments collapsed in Central and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union was dissolved. And who’s to say that we didn’t avert a nuclear disaster in the making?

We should be dancing in the streets because Pope Francis said those few and momentous words on Oct. 13! Addressing the Woman of Genesis, he said, “Bring everyone under your protection and entrust everyone to your beloved Son, Our Lord Jesus!”

Instead, traditional Catholics are wondering whether he did a “real” consecration. “It didn’t sound like a consecration to me,” one Catholic posted on the National Catholic Register. Another said, “I agree that Pope Francis’ prayer … was clearly not a real consecration.  A nice gesture in commemoration of the anniversary, perhaps, but that appears to be all that was intended by it.”

“I’m sorry, but every prayer of “consecration” that I have seen and prayed for decades involves the total submission of oneself—including all our thoughts, deeds and possessions—to the divine Entity (God, Jesus or Mary) to be used by them as they wish.  In reading the “Consecration” prayer used by Pope Francis, it seems this is glaringly missing.  It is more of a prayer offering love and devotion as well as asking for guidance—not a true turning over of one’s heart, mind, body and soul,” another said, who was most familiar with the consecration prayer composed by St. Louis Marie de Montfort in the 17^th century.

Too bad Jesus wasn’t familiar with St. Louis Marie de Montfort’s consecration. He could have recited it on the cross. Instead, He just said seven words, four to his mother, “WOMAN, behold your son.” And three words to his disciple John, who stood in place of all mankind at the foot of the cross, “Behold your Mother.” Compared to Jesus, Pope Francis is a total blabbermouth.

“Bring everyone under your protection and entrust everyone to your beloved Son, Our Lord Jesus.” These words mean he gives every living human being to Jesus through Mary. I am glad to be handed over to Our Lord in such a manner. He didn’t need to say the rest of the prayer. Those words alone were adequate to consecrate the world. 

Now it is 2013 and the world lies again in ruins. God asks the people, “How long will you go limping with two different opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Ba’al, then follow him.”

Too many people have gone after the false god Ba’al – abortion, contraception, gay marriage, euthanasia, collectivism, and religious intolerance.

Stop dithering. Make a choice.