"What Sister Lucia said in those days is being fulfilled in these days of ours," said Cardinal Carlo Caffarra, one of the dubia signers who is the archbishop emeritus of Bologna and a former member of the Pontifical Council for the Family, in a Q&A after his presentation.
Caffarra made his comments at the fourth annual Rome Life Forum. After his presentation, Cardinal Raymond Burke, another dubia signer, called for the Catholic faithful to “work for the consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.”
Cardinal Caffarra, who is the founding president of the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and the Family, made his comments on the “final battle” in reference to a letter he wrote to Sister Lucia back in the early 1980s to ask for her prayers as he began his new undertaking of founding the institute. He never expected a reply.
But, to his surprise, Caffarra received a lengthy letter signed by Sister Lucia in which she spoke of the “final battle” that would come at the end of time.
The Fatima visionary wrote that the “final battle between the Lord and the kingdom of Satan will be about marriage and the family. Do not be afraid, (she added), because anyone who works for the sanctity of marriage and the family will always be fought and opposed in every way, because this is the decisive issue.” She then concluded: “However, Our Lady has already crushed his head.”
The letter is now in the archives of the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family.
The battle
Caffarra said in his presentation that there are two forces opposing one another in the battle. One is the “wounded Heart of the Crucified-Risen One” who calls all men to himself. The other is the “power of Satan, who does not want to be ousted from his kingdom.”
The Cardinal said that the area in which this battle takes place is the human heart.
“Jesus, the Revelation of the Father, exerts a strong attraction to Himself. Satan works against this, to neutralise the attractive force of the Crucified-Risen One. The force of truth which makes us free acts on the heart of man. It is the Satanic force of the lie which makes slaves of us,” he said.
The two forces of attraction give rise to two cultures, he said, a “culture of the truth and the culture of the lie.”
“There is a book in Holy Scripture, the last, the Apocalypse, which describes the final confrontation between the two kingdoms. In this book, the attraction of Christ takes the form of triumph over enemy powers commanded by Satan. It is a triumph which comes after lengthy combat. The first fruits of the victory are the martyrs,” he said.
Caffarra said that legalized abortion comes from the “culture of the lie” where the “crime” of murdering a human being is seen as a “good.”
Abortion is a “sacrilegious act,” he said, adding that it is the “profoundest negation of the truth of man.”.
“The reason why man should not shed the blood of man is that man is the image of God. Through man, God dwells in His creation. This creation is the temple of the Lord, because man inhabits it. To violate the intangibility of the human person is a sacrilegious act against the Sanctity of God. It is the Satanic attempt to generate an ‘anti-creation.’ By ennobling the killing of humans, Satan has laid the foundations for his ‘creation’: to remove from creation the image of God, to obscure his presence therein,” he said.
The Cardinal said Homosexual “marriage” also comes from the “culture of the lie” since it “denies entirely the truth of marriage” as it comes from the “mind of God the Creator.”
“The Divine Revelation has told us how God thinks of marriage: the lawful union of a man and woman, the source of life. In the mind of God, marriage has a permanent structure, based on the duality of the human mode of being: femininity and masculinity. Not two opposite poles, but the one with and for the other,” he said.
“The union between a man and woman, who become one flesh, is human cooperation in the creative act of God,” he added.
Satan, in pushing the lies of abortion and homosexuality, is attempting to destroy the two most important pillars of creation, the “human person” created in the image of God and the “conjugal union” between a man and woman.
“The axiological elevation of abortion to a subjective right is the demolition of the first pillar. The ennoblement of a homosexual relationship, when equated to marriage, is the destruction of the second pillar,” Caffarra said.
Satan’s ultimate goal is to “build an actual anti-creation,” an “alternative creation,” where God and every sign of his beauty and goodness have been erased.
“This is the ultimate and terrible challenge which Satan is hurling at God,” the Cardinal said.
To be a faithful follower of Christ in these times means to “testify...openly and publicly” to the truth of God’s creation with regard to the dignity of the human person and marriage.
“Someone who does not testify in this way is like a soldier who flees at the decisive moment in a battle. We are no longer witnesses, but deserters, if we do not speak openly and publicly,” he said.
Caffarra praised the pro-life March for Life events that happen around the world a “great testimony” to the truth of the worth of every person.
He likened Christians confronting sin to doctors combatting disease, telling his audience that just as with disease there can be no peace terms, the same follows for sin.
“It would be a terrible doctor who adopted an irenical (aimed at peace) attitude towards the disease,” he said. The meaning of Augustine’s dictum ‘Love the sinner, persecute the sin,’ he added, means to “hunt down the sin. Track it down in the hidden places of its lies, and condemn it, bringing to light its insubstantiality.”
Read Cardinal Caffarra's full talk here
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