Fatima was “a
power greater than nature”
Part Three:
Growing forgetful of God
“The War [WWI] is going to end: but if people
do not cease offending God,
a worse one
will break out …”.
Fatima 1917
“The
failings of human consciousness, deprived of its divine dimension,
have
been a determining factor in all the major crimes of this [20th] century.
The
first of these was World War I, and much of our
present
predicament can be traced back to it”.
Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn
The view that
world wars arise from sin and ingratitude towards God was collaborated by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn when he stated (in 1983): “… if I were called upon to identify briefly the principal
trait of the entire twentieth century, here too, I would be unable to find
anything more precise and pithy than to repeat once again: Men have forgotten
God”.
According to Solzhenitsyn:
Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a
number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters
that had befallen Russia: "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has
happened."
Since then I
have spent well-nigh fifty years working on the history of our Revolution; in
the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal
testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the
effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked
today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous
Revolution that swallowed up some sixty million of our people, I could not put
it more accurately than to repeat: Men have forgotten God; that's why all this
has happened.
What is more,
the events of the Russian Revolution can only be understood now, at the end of
the century, against the background of what has since occurred in the rest of
the world. What emerges here is a process of universal significance. And if I
were called upon to identify briefly the principal trait of the entire
twentieth century, here too, I would be unable to find anything more precise
and pithy than to repeat once again: Men have forgotten God.
The failings
of human consciousness, deprived of its divine dimension, have been a
determining factor in all the major crimes of this century. The first of these
was World War I, and much of our present predicament can be traced back to it.
It was a war (the
memory of which seems to be fading) when Europe, bursting with health and
abundance, fell into a rage of self-mutilation which could not but sap its
strength for a century or more, and perhaps forever.
The only
possible explanation for this war is a mental eclipse among the leaders of
Europe due to their lost awareness of a Supreme Power above them. Only a
godless embitterment could have moved ostensibly Christian states to employ
poison gas, a weapon so obviously beyond the limits of humanity.
Source: This is an excerpt
from Solzhenitsyn's 1983 Speech, "Men Have Forgotten God" in
which he expands his theme to include the Second World War and the Mutual
Assured Destruction Doctrine of the Cold War.
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