Fatima and Akita

A Fateful Concurrence

Christopher A. Ferrara

REMNANT COLUMNIST, New Jersey

(Posted 06/10/09 www.RemnantNewspaper.com)  From May 2-6, 2009 I was privileged to be in Akita, Japan as a guest speaker for the Society of Saint Pius X.  The occasion was the annual pilgrimage to the site of the apparitions of Our Lady of Akita by Japanese traditionalist faithful under the Society’s care. The invitation came from Father Daniel Couture, the District Superior of SSPX’s District of Asia, which ministers not only to Japan, but also Korea, Hong Kong, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, New Caledonia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Vietnam and even (occasionally) Dubai.

With Father Couture was Father Thomas Onoda of the Society, who I believe is literally the only native-born Japanese traditionalist priest in the world today. His ordination, in fact, provoked significant news coverage by the East Asian media, which were alarmed by the subversive implications of a Japanese traditionalist cleric. The Asian forces of secularism also exhibit the Western world’s rather diabolical fear of priests in cassocks who offer Masses in Latin.       

Yet there are only about fifty traditionalist Catholics in all of Japan, and only 70,000 Catholics in total after centuries of persecution and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan’s most Catholic city, by President Harry Truman—who, by the way, was elevated to the rank of 33^rd degree Mason in Washington, D.C. on October 19, 1945, two months after the bombings.

Fathers Couture and Onoda are dynamic, utterly serious, yet perfectly joyful priests, who radiate powerful spirituality and missionary zeal.  I felt like a complete spiritual laggard in their presence, and in the presence of the Japanese traditionalists who were on pilgrimage to Akita. With good reason did Saint Francis Xavier pronounce his Japanese converts the most admirable Catholics he had ever seen.  The Japanese are a formidable people, bristling with intelligence and superior natural virtue, and when they acquire the supernatural virtues in addition to what God has given them on the natural level, they become—as I called the little group to their great amusement—Olympic athletes of the soul.

It must be said, however, that the transition of the Japanese people to city life (75% of the Japanese population is now urban) finds them subsisting in a kind of vast capitalist concentration camp, working for companies that own them body and soul. (You have to experience being crammed into a Japanese commuter train to believe it.) And now for the first time in its history Japan is experiencing a “generation gap” between the older generations and the shinjinrui—the “new breed” of under-30s in which disaffection, rebellion and violent crime are flourishing.

This trip reminded me of why (the Bishop Williamson affair aside) the mission of SSPX is crucial for ecclesial restoration in a world on the brink of an apocalypse. It was, after all, Pope Benedict XVI himself whose historic letter concerning his remission of the excommunications of the SSPX bishops conspicuously linked his observation that “in vast areas of the world the faith is in danger of dying out like a flame which no longer has fuel,” and his enumeration of SSPX’s “491 priests, 215 seminarians, 6 seminaries, 88 schools, 2 university-level institutes, 117 religious brothers, 164 religious sisters and thousands of lay faithful…”

A priest of the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter, who is no less militant and zealous for souls than my priestly hosts in Japan, acknowledged that virtually the whole world has become missionary territory again, that the Novus Ordo priesthood is dying out everywhere, and that in these terrifying circumstances the role to be played by the SSPX’s 491 priests is—and I quote— “huge.”

How right he is.  How precious indeed is every single traditionalist priest in the world today, no matter what order or society to which he belongs. And how vital it is that they all work together for the cause of restoration, for there is very little time left before we see the ultimate consequences predicted by Our Lady at both Fatima and Akita, which is rightly called “the Fatima of the East.”

At Akita I gave three talks on the linkage between Fatima and Akita, the latter being a series of apparitions of the Mother of God to Sister Agnes Sasagawa in 1973. The Akita apparitions were approved as authentic and worthy of belief by the diocesan Bishop, John Shojiro Ito, in 1984, following scientific verification of a miracle associated with the apparitions: the weeping of tears on 101 occasions and the shedding of blood by a wooden statue of the Virgin at the convent where Sister Agnes resided—before she was hounded from it in 1998 at the instigation of the new modernist bishop.  The 101 “lachyrmations” of the statue were witnessed four times by Bishop Ito himself and 98 times by Sister Agnes’s spiritual advisor, Father Thomas Aquinas Teiji Yasuda, S.V.D.

In my talks at Akita, based on my book The Secret Still Hidden, I reviewed the mass of evidence that makes it morally certain the Third Secret of Fatima involves a yet-to-be-published text in which the Blessed Virgin provides, as it were, the “sound track” of the vision of the “bishop in white” which the Vatican published on June 26, 2000 with the implication it represents the Third Secret in its entirety.

In the vision, a hobbling Pope is executed at the top of a hill outside a half-ruined city filled with cadavers. The commentary the Vatican published with the vision, to which both the former Cardinal Ratzinger and Archbishop Bertone, now the Cardinal Secretary of State, contributed, ludicrously suggested that the executed bishop was Pope John Paul II, who was not executed but only wounded, and who recovered in a hospital located in a city that is not in ruins—at least not yet—after which he was able to resume skiing in the Italian Alps.

In my book I show that the former Cardinal Ratzinger, who conferred face-to-face with Bishop Ito in Rome concerning the Akita apparitions, told Howard Dee, the former Philippines  Ambassador to the Vatican, that the Message of Fatima and the Message of Akita are “essentially the same.” In that case, one would expect to find in the Fatima message something “essentially the same” as the Akita message of October 13, 1973, the very anniversary of the Miracle of the Sun at Fatima:

As I told you, if men do not repent and better themselves, the Father will inflict a terrible punishment on all humanity. It will be punishment greater than the deluge, such as one will never have seen before. Fire will fall from the sky and will wipe out a great part of humanity, the good as well as the bad, sparing neither priests nor faithful. The survivors will find themselves so desolate that they will envy the dead. The only arms that will remain for you will be the Rosary and Sign left by My Son. Each day recite the prayers of the Rosary. With the Rosary, pray for the pope, the bishops, and the priests.

The work of the devil will infiltrate even the Church in such a way that one will see cardinals opposing cardinals, bishops against other bishops. The priests who venerate Me will be scorned and opposed by their conferees…churches and altars sacked, the Church will be full of those who accept compromise and the demon will press many priests and consecrated souls to leave the service of the Lord. The demon will be especially implacable against souls consecrated to God. The thought of the loss of so many souls is the cause of My sadness. If sins increase in number and gravity, there will be no longer pardon for them.

Since the parts of the Fatima Message we have seen so far contain no prophecy of this sort, but we do have a vision of a Pope being executed by soldiers outside a half-ruined city, it seems we are missing the words of Our Lady which explain why a future Pope comes to meet his end outside that half-ruined city, and what causes its ruin.  Does the scenario of the “vision of the bishop in white” have something to do with fire that “will fall from the sky and will wipe out a great part of humanity, the good as well as the bad, sparing neither priests nor faithful”? If the Message of Fatima and the Message of Akita are “essentially the same,” it seems that the only reasonable answer is yes.

In an address Pope Benedict gave at Bethlehem on May 13 2009, the anniversary of the first apparition at Fatima, the Pope declared: “You promised the three children of Fatima that ‘in the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph.’ May it be so!” That remark represents, to those who know, a stunning reversal of the “party line” of the Vatican Secretary of State that the triumph of the Immaculate Heart is already behind us, and consists of the “fall of communism” following the “consecration of Russia” in 1984—during  a ceremony which avoided any mention of Russia, lest the Russians be offended.  It also represents a reversal of the former Cardinal Ratzinger’s truly embarrassing claim, in the Vatican commentary of June 2000, that the triumph of the Immaculate Heart took place when Mary gave her “fiat” 2,000 years ago.

One thing which is clear from my visit to Akita is that the Society of Saint Pius X understands that the man who was Ratzinger is not quite the same man who is Pope today. Benedict XVI knows things he is not saying, and all the talk of a conciliar springtime is over.  The Pope knows of the fateful concurrence of Fatima and Akita, which would explain why he sent a note of gratitude to Antonio Socci for Socci’s own book (The Fourth Secret of Fatima) making the case that the Vatican has hidden the words of Our Lady pertaining to the Third Secret.

As I complete this story in haste on my way to assist Mike Matt and John Rao in leading the annual Remnant pilgrimage from Paris to Chartres, I urge my fellow Catholics to pray for the Consecration of Russia and to join SSPX’s Rosary crusade for that intention. With the reign of Obama, the cunning master Sophist, prefiguring the reign of the Lord of the World, only the Triumph the Immaculate Heart—not “rallies for the Republic”—can save this nation by bringing on the one development that will save the world at large, to quote Antonio Socci: “a radical and extraordinary change in the world, an overthrow of the mentality dominating modernity, probably following dramatic events for humanity.” God save the Pope.  God save America.  Our Lady of Fatima, intercede for us! Our Lady of Akita, intercede for us!