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Some photographs of the Rosary Prayer Event in Poland yesterday, 10/7...
At Warsaw's Theater Square
People walk through a forest near Poland’s border with the Czech Republic.
Praying on the banks of the Bug River between Poland and Belarus.
On the Baltic shore in Gdansk.
In a rural churchyard.
Marco Tosatti began his blogpost today with these two paragraphs:
We have just witnessed the spectacle of faith demonstrated by hundreds of thousands of Poles – and other Christians around the world – who recited the rosary yesterday in hundreds of churches across Poland and in designated assembly points along landlocked Poland’s borders with other nations.
Perhaps I am not the only one who is stunned that such an impressive [if not unprecedented] event was not even referred to in the words of the reigning pope at the Angelus today in St. Peter’s Square. Yes, he greeted the people of Poland but on the occasion of Pope’s Day celebrated today in Poland in honor of John Paul II, [What he said was part of a sentence: “I affectionately greet all you pilgrims… in particular, the faithful from Australia, France and Slovakia, but also those from Poland who are spiritually united with their compatriots who celebrate Pope’s Day today”] but not a word about the appeal for peace and resisting the Islamization of Europe that the rosary-praying Poles manifested yesterday. A distraction???...
If I do not pass on the rest of the post for now, it is because I think he rashly interpreted that the Closing Concert for the Fatima Centenary celebrations at the Shrine in Fatima on Oct. 13 is all there is to the events that day in Fatima, and that the Shrine was marking the day with the concert instead of the Rosary.
I checked the website of the shrine and I find that on Oct. 13, the usual daily routine of liturgical events do take place from midnight onward – masses, rosaries, Eucharistic adoration, processions, confessions alternating throughout the day. The closing concert closes the Sacred Music Cycle that was one of the cultural events in the Shrine’s centennial celebrations.
But here is Antonio Socci on the Polish Rosary Event and related matters…
In Poland, God, country and family
(as well as monetary sovereignty)
have led to an economic miracle
Israel is another one – an example of people who love
their identity and freedom, and fight to defend them at all costs
Translated from
October 8, 2017
The New York Times wrote up the event right away, rather exceptionally. But in the Italian papers today, I could not find a single line on the Rosary Prayer Event in Poland yesterday – other than on Libero, where I write this column. It is a collective silence which amounts to self-censorship on the part of the Italian mainstream media.
But most scandalous of all is the total omission of reporting in Avvenire, newspaper of the Italian bishops, and in all the Vatican and ‘para-Vatican’ media. A sign that Bergoglio is furious with a nation that sent a million of its faithful towards its borders [with seven countries and the southern Baltic Sea]] to pray the Rosary in commemoration of the Christian victor at Lepanto against the Muslim Turkish invasion in 1571 and to commemorate the centenary of Our Lady’s message at Fatima.
One simply has to meditate on the Gospel today [in the Ordinary Form] in which Jesus severely admonishes the faithless vineyard workers who appropriated the vineyard of God. A most harsh admonition to ecclesiastics. [Compare the final verses of Jesus’s parable with what Bergoglio attributes to him in his Angelus today – and it is the exact opposite.]
Yesterday, in Poland, about a million faithful flocked to the borders of their land to recite together an immense rosary of the people.
In Karol Wojtyla’s country, borders are still considered important. Too many Poles have died to defend their country’s borders. For the Polish people, the words ‘homeland’ and ‘national identity’ ( and therefore ‘national interests’) are not considered blasphemous [or politically incorrect] as they have become here in Italy. And these words orient the decisions made by the independent Polish governments.
Lepanto and Fatima
The Rosary at the Borders was a great popular prayer event within the spiritual, cultural and physical borders of the nation. The spiritual frontier is the battle against evil, heeding the exhortation to conversion of Our Lady of Fatima in this centenary year of her apparitions in Portugal.
Indeed, the initiative resonates with the centennial celebration because it was at Fatima where Our Lady prophesied the Russian Revolution and the Second World War which ended up grinding Poland between two successive totalitarianisms (Nazism and Communism).
The great Polish Pope John Paul II was particularly bound to Our Lady of Fatima, and together with his compatriots, he had an enormous role in the peaceful and bloodless collapse of Communism in all of Eastern Europe.
The other anniversary celebrated by the Polish Rosary was that of October 7, 1571 – the Battle of Lepanto fought in the Mediterranean off Greece, in which an outnumbered Catholic fleet defeated an Ottoman Turkish armada and kept Islam off the continent of Europe.
Pope St. Pius V, who had organized the naval coalition of the Christian states of Western Europe, proclaimed Oct. 7 the Feast of Our Lady Of Victories, later renamed Our Lady of the Rosary. It is to her intercession that the Church attributes the salvation of Europe.
One century later, the Ottoman armies would try again by land, arriving as far as Vienna. And on that occasion, again with outnumbered men, a ragtag Christian army led by the Polish King Jan Sobieski defeated the Muslims and once again saved Europe from Islamization.
A great Christian people
That is why the borders at which the Polish people prayed yesterday define the cultural and Christian identity of their nation, but they are also physical borders that protect the integrity and sovereignty of the Polish state.
It is worth remembering that in the European Union, Poland is one of the few nations resisting de-sovereignization by the EU technocracy in Brussels. Just as it has been resisting the migrationist ideology which would fill up Europe with Muslims.
The fact that the Poles give primacy to national identity and national interests has brought positive results, and Poland, compared to Italy, now has a 3.9 percent annual increase in GDP (something we can only dream about in Italy), a public debt-to-GDP ratio of 54.4% (where Italy’s is 132%), and unemployment down to its lowest since the collapse of Communism.
Perhaps it is not accidental that Poland has not converted its currency to the euro, retaining its zloty, and her economic prosperity is rightly bound to her monetary sovereignty.
Thus Poland can afford to have a very active demographic policy to increase the national birthrate, and has even brought down compulsory retirement age to 60 for women and 65 for men.
It has therefore demonstrated that the senseless policies of the EU which aim at demolishing nation-states and turning into a huge welfare state do have a winning alternative. Poland is nor under the diktat of Brussels.
Trump in Warsaw
Not surprisingly, Donald Trump on his visit to whose visit to Warsaw on July 6, 2017, quickly found himself in harmony with the Polish people, with a very significant speech that impressed his hosts greatly, in defense of the right to life and liberty and in defense of Western civilization.
The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive. Do we have enough confidence in our values to defend them at any cost? Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders? Do we have the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who wish to subvert and destroy it?... Our struggle for the West does not begin in the battlefield, but in or our minds and hearts, in our will and spirit….
Our freedom, our civilization and our survival depends on our ties in history, culture and memory… And so, together, let us all fight as the Poles have done: for family, for freedom, for country and for God.
But Poland is not the only case. There are other countries who have shown that identity, patriotism, the defense of national interests and the values of Western civilization are also the levers that allow for avoiding decline, impoverishment and demographic collapse.
The Israeli miracle
Giulio Meotti, in his splendid book La fine dell’Europe. Nuove moschee e chiese abbandonate (The end of Europe: New mosques and abandoned churches) (Cantagalli), tells us the story of Israel. (Not accidentally, Israel, like Poland, is unpopular in Europe.)
Meotti writes of ‘the miracle of Israel’ and describes its record:
In 30years, its gross domestic product has increased 900%; fiscal pressure has come down to 32 from 45%; US aid, whichused to account for 10% of GNP, is now down to 1%; exports have risen by 860%. Thirty years ago, Israel did not have any independent source of energy, but today 36% comes from its own resources; and while 30 years ago, there was no desalinated water, today 40% of water consumption comes from desalination plants.”
He adds that the natural death rate in Israel is the second lowest in the West, and that a Wall Street Journal study has ranked Israel the second most educated country in the world (which says enough about its educational system). Life expectancy at 82 years is the highest in Western Asia, and Israel ranks among the first 10 countries in the world by health standards.
All this in a nation that since its birth 70 years ago has been constrained to live in a climate of perpetual war, totally armored, and has been paying a high price not just economically but in terms of lives to remain a free and democratic country, the only one in the Middle East.
Here is the rest of Marco Tosatti's blogpost today:
Following the Polish example, an appeal for
a nationwide Rosary event in Italy on Oct. 13
Translated from
Oct. 8, 2017
...Meanwhile, we are nearing October 13 and the hundredth anniversary of The Virgin Mary’s last apparition to the three shepherd children of Fatima which was marked by the ‘miracle of the sun’. This will be celebrated around the world in Catholic churches and marian shrines. Of course, it would be expected that the day would be marked by praying the rosary – a prayer offered to the Virgin over the course of centuries.
In Italy, the Associazione Italiana Accompanatori Santuari Mariani is leading the initiative. AIASM, following Mary’s repeated exhortations, inspired further by the Polish example, and considering the Rosary as the most powerful initiative for peace says that
“In Italy, too, a wall of faithful will be praying the Rosary at 5:30 pm on October 13”. a the most powerful initiative for peace.
In all the country, every man and woman of goodwill is enjoined to go to their parish church and/or create prayer groups with the same intention as our Polish brethren: To ask Our Lady to save Italy and Europe from Islamist nihilism and the rejection of the Christian faith. The rosary will start at 5:30, but fasting (with only bread and water) is urged for the whole day. Those who may not be able to fast should remember there are other ways to make a sacrifice.
[I wish the organizers of the event had hooked up with those who have been organizing the super-successful Family Day rallies in Italy to maximize the potential of their initiative.
But the Marian shrine itself in Fatima, Portugal, has chosen to close the centenary celebration not with the Rosary but with a musical concert and a sound-and-light production.
[Tosatti is right in that the concert on Oct. 13 will be the closing concert of the Sacred Music Cycle of the Centennial Celebrations, but I went to the website of the Fatima shrine and searched for the Oct. 13, 2017 timetable and came up with this – which appears to be the typical daily prayer celebrations at the shrine.
00:00 - 02:00
Eucharistic Adoration, in the Basilica of Most Holy Trinity
02:00 - 03:15
Way of the Cross, in the Prayer Area
03:30 - 04:15
Marian Celebration, in the Chapel of the Apparitions
04:30 - 05:30
Mass, in Portuguese, in the Chapel of the Apparitions
05:30 - 07:00
Eucharistic adoration and Lauds, in the Chapel of the Apparitions
07:00 - 07:30
Eucharistic Procession, in the Prayer Area
07:00 - 19:30
Confessions, in the Chapel of Reconciliation
09:00 - 09:45
Rosary, in the Chapel of the Apparitions
10:00 - 13:00
Mass, in the Prayer Area
15:00 - 16:15
Mass, in Portuguese, in the Chapel of the Death of Jesus
016:30 - 17:45
Mass, in Portuguese, in the Chapel of the Death of Jesus
17:30 - 18:30
Communal prayer, in the Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament
18:30 - 19:30
Mass, in Portuguese, in the Chapel of the Death of Jesus
21:30 - 22:15
Rosary, in the Chapel of the Apparitions
22:15 - 22:45
Candlelight Procession, in the Prayer Area
However, the closing concert is scheduled for 18:30-20:30 which overlaps with a Communal Prayer but continues without having to overlap the Portuguese Mass at 21:30.
The concert will mark the world premiere of two specially commissioned works by James MacMillan and Eurico Carrapatoso.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 09/10/2017 02:56] |