FATIMA

OUR LADY OF FATIMA
BAR

Prophecy and Punishment
by Gerry Matatics

An edited transcript of a Speech
In my ten minutes I'd like to connect the dots, biblically speaking, between several of the themes that have already been raised by all the speakers who preceded me, especially the themes of prophecy and punishment.

As Chris Ferrara mentioned, imagine a man who was told that his arm would be broken next week, his leg would be broken in two weeks.

A Natural Problem

I heard about a certain hospital, where in the intensive care unit there was a particular bed; and whatever patients were assigned to that bed always died on Sunday morning at eleven o'clock, regardless of their medical condition, regardless if they had cancer, or a heart condition or what have you.

This enormously puzzled all the doctors and some of them even thought that it had something to do with the supernatural. And no one could solve the mystery as to why the deaths occurred around eleven on Sundays, in this particular bed.

So, a worldwide team of experts was assembled to investigate the cause of the incidents, and the next Sunday morning, a few minutes before eleven all the doctors, scientists and paranormal investigators were nervously waiting outside the ward to see for themselves what this terrible phenomenon was, that was at the root of this chain of disasters.

Some of them were holding Crucifixes, some holy water, some relics, prayer books and other holy objects to ward off any evil spirits involved. And just when the clock struck eleven, Goober Klutzman, the janitor hired part time by the hospital custodial service to work each Sunday; entered the ICU and unplugged the life support system so he could plug in his vacuum cleaner.

Ours is a Supernatural Problem

We have exactly the opposite situation in our day; because what we have, which we're here to focus on in this conference, is a supernatural problem for which people are seeking a natural solution; it's just the opposite.

The supernatural problem is because Our Lady has made a demand that is not being met-----stubbornly; sinfully; not being met-----and people are scampering about and scrabbling, hither; thither and yon to come up with some natural solution to heal the world's woes.

This is the error of naturalism. It is the error that Catholics-----of all people, Catholics-----have fallen into in our day; including apparently virtually all of our leaders. By the way; on the error of naturalism, and the organized forces that promote naturalism (the idea that all things can be solved at a natural level), I strongly recommend writings that I know all of these speakers would recommend, and have recommended in previous talks, and those are the works of Father Denis Fahey.

When recent occupants of the See of Saint Peter can speak of the United Nations as the world's last hope for peace, we know that naturalism has triumphed over the structures of the Church-----not over the Church, not over the embattled remnant that by God's grace holds fast to the Faith of our Fathers and to the classic Catholic beliefs but over the structures of the Church, there has been the triumph of this error, that we can solve this by natural means, by seemingly natural means.

And of this error of naturalism, the people of Israel of the Old Testament are a classic example; that's why I believe there's a connection-----as Father Fahey draws out-----between them and even the woes of recent times.

The Old Testament closes on this note. I want to bring this before you, and I want you to think about this passage-----the last prophet who prophesied in the Old Testament is the prophet Malachi, or Malachias. And in the last paragraph of his book, the last three verses read as follows. This is Malachi speaking, filled with the Holy Ghost, prophesying from God, and he says: "Remember the law of Moses, My servant (this is God speaking through Malachi), which I commanded him in Horeb for all Israel with the various statutes and judgments thereof. Behold I will send you Elias, the prophet, before the corning of the great and dreadful day of the Lord. And he will turn the hearts of the fathers to the children and the hearts of the children to their fathers, or else I will come and strike the land (or the Earth)". The Hebrew word can be translated either way; locally or globally-----"the land (or the Earth) with a curse."
Those are the words ringing in the ears of the people of the Old Covenant as the New Covenant Scriptures open up, as the Gospels begin. And this is a verse that is relevant for us as well, as we stand on the verge, I believe, of the second coming of Our Lord.

The Law and the Prophets

Let me just explain why: There is a marriage in the Bible between the law and the prophets, that's why the phrase "the law and the prophets," summarizes the entire scope of God's Old Covenant revelation. God gives us a law and in that law He builds in certain consequences: positive consesquences, what we call blessings, for obedience of the law; and then negative consequences or curses if we disobey God's law, if we violate His covenant.

Read on your own Leviticus, Chapter 26 and Deuteronomy Chapter 28, which are two classic catalogues of these blessings and these curses. And when God, therefore, gives us a law He sends prophets when we begin to stray from the law, when we begin to break the covenant.

He sends His prophets to remind us of the law, to reinforce the law. In fact to enforce His covenant. Prophets are first and foremost, in the Bible, not predictors of the future, they are that, but they are God's prosecuting attorneys, to read the riot act, to remind us of the clauses of His covenant. And God sends all manner of prophets.

The quintessential prophet, after Moses in the Old Testament, is Elias (Elijah). And God sent him to the farthest section of Israel, the ten northern tribes, when they broke away after Solomon died. Roboam did something very fool-ish in the southern kingdom and Jeroboam led the northern tribes into adultery.

Chastisements Promised and Sent

God therefore sends them Elias, and he reminds them of the laws of Moses that they are breaking. And they don't listen to him, and finally they are destroyed by the Assyrians and scattered in 722 B.C.

God sent them storms, He sent them earthquakes, He sent them famines, He sent invading armies, He sent them everything He had promised He would send them, in these catalogues of curses that were predicted centuries before that in the laws of Moses-----in the constitution, in the five books of Moses, the Pentateuch-----and they didn't listen. And so God sends these things. He heaps them upon their heads. Now here, in this passage, God says to the Jews as they come back from the Babylonian exile, here in Malachias, that He would send them a prophet like Elias to again turn their strained hearts back to their fathers or He would strike their land with a curse. And that person who fulfilled His commandment before the first coming of the Lord was Saint John the Baptist, or Saint John the Baptizer.

In the Spirit and Power of Elias

Saint John the Baptizer was sent to come in the spirit and in the power of Elias. The Archangel Gabriel told his father, Zacharias, that he would come that way. Our Lord, in Matthew Chapter 11, indicated that Saint John the Baptist was a fulfillment of that prophecy. And again, the Jews in Our Lord's day did not listen to this warning to "repent for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand." And so God struck the land with a curse in 70 AD.-----the temple was destroyed, the priesthood was annihilated, the people were scattered to the ends of the earth, under God's disciplinary action.

God, in the Bible, always works in what I call paradigms: clearly established models, certain established patterns of Divine behavior that are repeated again and again. I have a whole tape set called "The Paradise Paradigm", which shows that everything in Genesis 1-3 is repeated, replicated, again and again.

Because God works this way; we can expect a repeat of the same phenomenon before the second coming of Christ, someone who will come in the spirit and power of Elias. And that is what Our Lady of Fatima is.

Elias Like Our Lady of Fatima

I will develop this thought in my talk on Sunday; I'm going to give you biblical proof you can share with all your non-Catholic friends for everything we believe about Our Lady; so that we can show that our devotion to Her, and our obedience to Her, makes us Bible-believing Christians, and those who reject Her message are not Bible-believing Christians. Because there is a parallel, between Elias and Our Lady; that is why Our Lady in Her Assumption, was caught up to Heaven m dramatic fashion, at the end of Her life, as Elias was caught up m the chariot of fire at the end of his.

I want to leave you with this thought, and that is, Our Lady came to Fatima, m 1917, specifically like Elias, to call Catholics who were already straying (as Pope Saint Pius X pointed out) from the true path, already falling into paths of modernism, heresy; indifferentism, the Americanism that our country has been exporting to the Catholic world and all over the world. She came to call us back to the Faith of our Fathers.

That is Her message: that we must believe as our Fathers in the Faith believed, that we must pray as they prayed.

Return to the Faith of Our Fathers

We can't even pray the Rosary now; The vast majority of Catholics in our day are praying a Rosary that has been changed, by the insertion of five novel mysteries not given by Our Lady to Saint Dominic and not part of the tradition of the Rosary; That throws us off kilter. By the way; when you pray the Rosary in its classical model, you pray exactly 153 Hail Mary's: Three for Faith, Hope and Charity, and 150 because there are ten Hail Mary's for each of the 15 decades.

That 153 number is very significant biblically; In John Chapter 21, it's the number of fish the Apostles caught in the Sea of Galilee. It's also the exact number of days between Our Lady's first appearance in 1917, on May 13, to Her last appearance October 13. That's 153 days! Pull out a calendar and count for yourself And that symbolic sacred number has been tampered with. We must turn back to the Faith of our Fathers, or God will strike the Earth with a curse,
with this great Divine judgment that hangs over us.

We must convert as many people as possible to the Catholic Faith. We must show them the biblical foundations of our Catholic Faith. We all need to be doing this type of thing.

We Must Recover Supernatural Wisdom

That is what Our Lady is calling us to. She is calling us to recover the wisdom that has been given our fathers, which we have lost in the last 100 or so years. Even the wisdom of the world is being degraded in our day. The wisdom of the world isn't even up to snuff. Political wisdom, conventional scientific wisdom, it's just all falling to pieces.

It doesn't matter, ultimately, as Jim Condit said, who we elect. It doesn't matter, ultimately, what laws we pass. It doesn't matter, ultimately, what educational reforms we bring about, what economic reforms we bring about. All those things are necessary and good, but if all of those things are done in ignorance, in neglect of the ultimate solution, then all we're doing is being naturalistic Catholics who will come under the wrath and the curse of God.

We must make sure the supernatural solution is finally in place before we do our naturally virtuous things in the areas of politics, economics and education. And that is what our leaders are not doing, they are not listening to Our Lady;
wiser than an owl, She is the Seat of Wisdom, the sede sapientiae. And She cries out in Proverbs Chapter 8: "Hear Me, you kings, you princes of the world. Hear Me. I call out to men and the sons of men."

Those Who Hate Fatima Love Death

Read Proverbs Chapter 8 on your own. It closes with this verse, verse 36: "All those that love Me, that seek Me, will find Me. But those that hate Me love death."

Those that hate the Fatima Message, those who have no time for Our Lady; love death. And they will bring death upon the structures of the Church (as they have already done in so many ways), upon our nations, upon our children and our children's children, unless we heed Our Lady's call as the new Elias, come before the second coming of Her Son to prepare the way of the Lord.

Taken from the Autumn 2004 Special Issue of THE FATIMA CRUSADER.

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