Fatima is proof that God, Our Lady still care for Russia in the face of an ‘awful war’
OnePeterFive editor-in-chief Timothy Flanders joins me on today's episode of The John-Henry Westen Show.
History is often seen as a simple progression of events driven by a cast of characters that lead up to our own day. However, the Catholic perspective of history views it as the intervention of God in time, leading all back to Him.
My guest on today’s episode of The John-Henry Westen Show is Timothy Flanders, a convert to the faith from Eastern Orthodoxy, podcaster, and editor-in-chief at OnePeterFive. We discuss his book City of God vs. City of Man: The Battle of the Church from Antiquity to the Present, which seeks to “offer a framework to understand Christian culture,” his conversion to Catholicism from Orthodoxy and Protestantism, and Our Lady of Fatima.
Flanders converted to the Catholic faith shortly after Pope Francis ascended the Pontifical Throne. According to Flanders, despite the crises of the current pontificate, Catholicism “still surpasses Eastern Orthodoxy” for several reasons, especially because Catholicism allows for the resolution of dogmatic controversies.
According to Flanders, the difference between Orthodoxy and Catholicism in terms of such resolutions comes from the Orthodox view of authority. “In reality, what it comes down to is that in Eastern Orthodoxy, there are as many popes as there are priests, because every single priest that you go to in the Eastern Orthodox Church is your spiritual father,” he tells me.
Flanders also gives responses to potential Protestant objections to the Francis pontificate, explaining that Scripture can resolve any difficulty when read with the eyes of faith. Using Matthew 16 as an example, Flanders explains that when Peter confesses Christ to be the Messiah, he is acting in conformity with God. However, several verses later, when Christ calls Peter Satan, Christ is still in charge, but it is Peter that is emphasizing his own human capacity and power.
Discussing his book City of God vs. City of Man, Flanders, citing Catholic historian Christopher Dawson, explains that religion is the “pivot of history,” because it is religion that drives culture. According to Flanders, there are four elements of culture: the cultus, which is the liturgical worship or “a visual and audible representation of divine mysteries”; the tradition, which explains the meaning behind the cultus; the elders, which defend the tradition; and piety, which is the respect given to the elders.
When asked about the various cultural issues we face today, Flanders opines that we are living in an “anti-culture,” which acts as an inversion of culture, something he argues comes from liberal ideology. “With liberalism, with the American Revolution, the French Revolution, all these different liberal revolutions, what we have is first the cultus is removed from public society, and what is valued is a revolt against tradition and elders without piety,” Flanders explains. “So it’s a … complete repudiation of the very essence of what a basic culture is.”
Flanders contrasted the anti-culture with the ancient cultures of the past, telling me that pagans had the elements of culture he mentioned. He also explained that whenever Catholic missionaries would convert one of these cultures, they would “baptize” it and build a church over the old holy sites in an effort to “[cleanse the culture] of all its demonic content.”
“These new [anti-cultures] are not even … trying to restore even a pagan version of [culture],” Flanders contends. “Dietrich von Hildebrand, he … observes that what we have now is not even … as good as paganism. It’s a lot worse than paganism, because even the pagans had a sense of wonder. They had a sense of veneration to the divine.”
Later in the episode, Flanders and I discuss an icon of Our Lady of Fatima that was hanging over his shoulder throughout the interview. Flanders tells me that the icon was written by a Russian Orthodox Christian working in tandem with a Russian Catholic priest named Father Aleksandr Burgos, who is trying to establish a shrine to Her in St. Petersburg.
According to Flanders, the icon “incarnates the whole message of Fatima, because it is the Russian icon of Fatima.” “And so this is something that we promote for the sake of Fatima, but also for the sake of our brethren in our Ukrainian Catholic brethren, as well as our Russian Catholic brethren at a time of this is awful war [in Ukraine],” Flanders tells me.
“And so this is also an effort of … promoting peace against this awful conflict that our brethren are facing, and promoting the gospel to unite non-Catholics, especially the Russian Orthodox, with the Holy See.” He also explains that Our Lady’s apparition at Fatima is proof that God and Our Lady still cared for Russia at a time when the country was “descending into the greatest evil perhaps the world has ever known, in terms of totalitarian evil spreading and persecuting the Church.”
