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<a href="https://www.lifesitenews.com/news" target="_blank">News</a>
<h1>Coronavirus is ‘the killer of globalization’ and a ‘scourge’ from God: Roberto de Mattei</h1><span style="background-color:rgb(255,242,204)"><b>
</b></span><div><span style="background-color:rgb(255,242,204)"><b>VIDEO: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMEgnB1xIuA&feature=emb_logo" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMEgnB1xIuA&feature=emb_logo</a></b></span></div><div><br></div><div>“How can we not see in what the coronavirus is producing a symbolic consequence of the self-destruction of the Church?” </div>
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<span>Sun Mar 15, 2020 - 9:13 am EST</span></div><div><span><a href="https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/coronavirus-is-the-killer-of-globalization-and-a-scourge-from-god-roberto-de-mattei" target="_blank">https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/coronavirus-is-the-killer-of-globalization-and-a-scourge-from-god-roberto-de-mattei</a></span>
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Prof. Roberto de Mattei <span>Jim Hale / LifeSiteNews</span><div style="text-align:center;margin:auto">
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<p dir="ltr"><span>ITALY, March 14, 2020 (</span><a href="https://www.lifesitenews.com" target="_blank">LifeSiteNews</a>)
<b><span style="background-color:rgb(208,224,227)"> ― Coronavirus is both the “killer of globalization” and a “scourge from
God” says Catholic historian and author Dr. Roberto de Mattei. </span></b></p>
<p><span>The celebrated intellectual recently released a video-recorded
lecture about the political, historical, and theological implications of
the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic sweeping the world. De Mattei has now
recorded “New Scenarios in the Coronavirus Era: Is Coronavirus a Divine
Punishment” in English, and it can be seen below. </span></p>
<p><span>“I will not speak about this theme from a medical or scientific
point of view as I do not have this competence,” De Mattei warns his
listeners. (Full lecture transcribed below.) </span><span></span><br></p></div></div></div>
<p dir="ltr"><b><span>New scenarios in the Coronavirus era.</span> <span>Is Coronavirus a divine punishment?</span> </b></p>
<p dir="ltr"><b><span>Political, historical and theological considerations</span> </b></p>
<p dir="ltr"><i><span>By Roberto De Mattei</span></i></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>March 12, 2020</span> </p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>The theme of my conversation is: </span>The new
scenarios in Italy and in Europe during and after the Coronavirus
crisis. I will not speak about this theme from a medical or scientific
point of view as I do not have this competence. I will instead consider
the argument from three other points of view: the point of view of a
scholar of the political and social sciences; the point of view of a
historian; and the point of view of a philosopher of history. </p>
<p dir="ltr"><b><span>As a scholar of the social sciences</span> </b></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>The political and social sciences study human
behavior in its social, political and geopolitical context. From this
point of view I am not inquiring into the origins of the Coronavirus and
its nature, but rather the social consequences that are happening and
will happen. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>An epidemic is the diffusion on the national or world
scale (in this case it is called a pandemic) of an infective illness
that afflicts a large number of individuals of a determined population
in a very brief span of time. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>The Coronavirus, which has been renamed Covid-19, is
an infective illness that began to spread through the world from China.
Italy is the Western nation that is now apparently the most afflicted by
it. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>Why is Italy under quarantine today? Because, as the
most attentive observers have understood from the very beginning, the
problem of the Coronavirus is not its fatality rate but the rapidity
with which the contagion spreads among the population. Everyone agrees
that the illness in itself is not terribly lethal. A sick person who
contracts the Coronavirus and is assisted by specialized health care
personnel in well-equipped health care facilities can heal. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>But if, because of the rapid spread of the contagion,
which can potentially strike millions of people simultaneously, the
number of sick people rapidly increases, there will not be enough health
care facilities and personnel: the sick will die because they are
deprived of the necessary care. In order to cure grave cases it is
necessary to have the support of intensive care in order to ventilate
the lungs. If this support is lacking, the patients die. If the number
of those who are sick increases, health care structures are not capable
of offering intensive care to everyone and an ever greater number of
patients will succumb to the disease. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>Epidemiological projections are inexorable and they justify the precautions being taken. </span>“If
uncontrolled, the Coronavirus could strike the entire Italian
population, but let’s say that in the end only 30% become infected, that
would be about 20 million people. Let’s say that out of these –
reducing the rate – 10% go into crisis, meaning that without intensive
care they will succumb to the disease. This would mean that 2 million
people die directly, plus all of those who will die indirectly as a
result of the collapse of the health care system and the social and
economic order.”1 </p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>The collapse of the health care system in turn would
have other consequences. The first is the collapse of the nation’s
productive system. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>Economic crises usually arise from the lack of either
supply or demand. But if those who want to consume must remain at home
and the stores are closed and those who are capable of selling goods do
not succeed in getting their product to their clients because logistical
operations, the transport of goods, and points of sale like stores
enter into crisis, the supply chain collapses. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>The central banks would not be capable of saving such
a situation: “The crisis after the Coronavirus does not have a monetary
solution” writes Maurizio Ricci in </span>La Repubblica on February 28.
Stefano Feltri in turn observes: “The typical Keynesian recipes –
creating jobs and artificial demand with public money – are not
practical when the workers do not leave their homes, trucks do not
circulate, stadiums are closed and people do not schedule vacations or
work trips because they are sick at home or afraid of the contagion.
Aside from avoiding liquidity crises for businesses by suspending tax
payments and interest payments to banks, the political system is
powerless. A government decree is not enough to reorganize the supply
chain.”2 </p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>The expression “perfect storm” was coined several years ago by the economist </span>Nouriel
Roubini to indicate a mix of financial conditions that are such that it
leads to a collapse of the market. “There will be a global recession
due to Coronavirus”, Roubini declares, adding: “This crisis will spill
over and result in a disaster.”3 </p>
<p dir="ltr"><span> Roubinis’s forecasts have been confirmed by the drop
in the price of oil after the failure of OPEC to agree with Saudi
Arabia, which has decided to increase its production and cut prices in
defiance of Russia, and are probably destined to be further confirmed as
events unfold. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>The weak point of globalization is interconnection, the talisman word of our time, from the economy to religion. Pope Francis’ </span>Querida
Amazonia is a hymn to interconnection. But today the global system is
fragile precisely because it is so interconnected. And the system of
distribution of products is one of the chains of this economic
interconnection. </p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>It is not a problem of the markets but of real
economy. Not only finance but also industry, commerce, and agriculture,
that is to say the pillars of the economy of a nation, can all collapse
if the system of production and distribution enters into a crisis. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>But there is another point that begins to be
glimpsed: there is not only the collapse of the health system; there is
not only a possible crack in the economy; but there can also be a
collapse of the state and public authority – in a word, social anarchy.
The riots in Italian prisons indicate a trend in this direction. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>Epidemics have psychological consequences because of
the panic that they can provoke. Between the end of the nineteenth
century and the beginning of the twentieth century social psychology was
born as a science. One of its first exponents was Gustave Le Bon, the
author of a famous book entitled </span>Psychologie des foules [Psychology of crowds] (1895). </p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>Analyzing collective behavior, Le Bon explains how in
a crowd the individual undergoes a psychological change by which
feelings and passions are transmitted from one individual to another “by
contagion” like that which happens with infectious diseases. The modern
</span>theory of contagion, which was inspired by Le Bon, explains how,
protected by the anonymity of a crowd, the most calm individual can
become aggressive, acting at the suggestion of others or in imitation of
them. Panic is one of those feelings that is spread by social
contagion, as happened during the French Revolution in the period that
was called the “Great fear” 4. </p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>If a health crisis is compounded by an economic
crisis, an uncontrolled wave of panic can trigger the violent impulses
of the crowd. The state is then replaced by tribes and gangs, especially
in the outskirts of large urban centers. The social war, has been
theorized by the </span>São Paulo Forum, a conference of Latin American
ultra-leftist organizations, is practiced in Latin America, from Bolivia
to Chile, from Venezuela to Ecuador, and may soon expand to Europe. </p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>Someone might observe that this process corresponds
to the project of the globalist lobbies, the “masters of chaos” as
Professor Renato Cristin defines them in his excellent book. But if this
is true, it is also true that what emerges defeated from this crisis is
the utopia of globalization, presented as the great road destined to
lead to the unification of the human race. Globalization actually
destroys space and pulverizes distances: today the key to escaping the
epidemic is social distance, the isolation of the individual. The
quarantine is diametrically opposed to the “open society” hoped for by
George Soros. The conception of man as a relationship, typical of a
certain school of philosophical personalism, declines. </span> </p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>Pope Francis, after the failure of </span>Querida
Amazonia, focused heavily on the conference dedicated to the “global
compact” schedules at the Vatican for this coming May 14. This
conference however has been rescheduled and has become more distant, not
only in time but in its ideological presuppositions. The Coronavirus
brings us back to reality. It is not the end of borders that was
announced after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Instead, it is the end of
the world without borders, the end of the “global village.” It is not
the triumph of the new world order: it is the triumph of the new world
disorder. The political and social scenario is that of a society that is
disintegrating and decomposing. Is it all organized? It’s possible. But
history is not a deterministic succession of events. The master of
history is God, not the masters of chaos. The killer of globalization is
a global virus called the Coronavirus. </p>
<p dir="ltr"><b><span>As historian</span> </b></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>At this point the historian will step in to replace
the political observer, seeking to see things from the perspective of a
greater chronological distance. Epidemics have accompanied the history
of humanity from the very beginning all the way to the twentieth
century, and they are always intertwined with two other scourges: wars
and economic crises. The last great epidemic, the Spanish influenza in
the 1920s, was closely connected to the First World War and the Great
Depression that began in 1929, also known as “the Great Crash,” an
economic and financial crisis that convulsed the economic world at the
end of the Twenties, with grave repercussions that extended throughout
the 1930s. These events were followed by the Second World War. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>Laura Spinnay is an English scientific journalist who has written a book called </span>Pale
Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World.5 Her book
informs us that between 1918 and 1920 the virus which began in Spain
infected approximately 500 million people, including even inhabitants of
remote islands of the Pacific Ocean and of the glacial Arctic Sea,
causing the deaths of 50-100 million individuals, ten times more than
the First World War. </p>
<p dir="ltr"><span> World War I contributed to the flu’s virulence,
helping the virus spread throughout the globe. Spinnay writes: “It is
difficult to imagine a mechanism of contagion more effective than the
mobilization of enormous quantities of troops in the height of the
autumn wave, who then reached the four corners of the planet where they
were greeted by festive crowds. In essence, what the Spanish flu taught
us is that another influenza pandemic is inevitable, but whether it will
cause ten million or one hundred million victims depends only on what
the world will be like in which it spreads.”</span>6 </p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>In the interconnected world of globalization, the
ease with which contagion can spread is certainly greater than it was a
century ago. Who can deny it? </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>But the historian’s perspective goes even further
back in time. The twentieth century was the most terrible century of
history, but there was another terrible century, “The Calamitous
Fourteenth Century,” as Barbara Tuchman calls it in her book </span>A Distant Mirror.7 </p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>I would like to focus on this historical period that
marked the end of the Medieval era and the beginning of the Modern era. I
do so basing myself on historical works that are not Catholic but
serious and objective in their research. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>The Rogations are processions convoked by the Church
in order to implore the help of Heaven against calamities. The Rogations
contain the prayer “</span>A fame, peste et bello libera nos, Domine:” –
from famine, plague, and war, deliver us, O Lord. As the historian
Robert Lopez writes, the liturgical invocation present in the Rogation
ceremonies “unfolded with all of its drama over the course of the
fourteenth century.”8 “Between the tenth and twelfth centuries,” Lopez
observes, “none of the great scourges that mow down humanity seem to
have raged in any great measure; neither pestilence, of which there is
no mention during this period, nor famine, nor war, which had a greatly
reduced number of victims. Moreover, the expanse of agriculture was
widened by a slow softening of the climate. We have proof of this in the
retreat of the glaciers in the mountains and of the icebergs in the
northern seas, in the extension of wine growing into regions like
England where today it is no longer practical, and in the abundance of
water in regions of the Sahara that were later reconquered by the
desert.”9 </p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>The picture of the fourteenth century was much, much
different, as natural catastrophes combined with serious religious and
political upheavals. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>The fourteenth century was a century of deep
religious crisis: it opened in 1303 with the famous “slap” of Anagni
against Boniface VIII, one of the greatest humiliations of the papacy in
history; it saw the transference of the papacy for seventy years to the
city of Avignon in France (1308-1378); and it ended with forty years of
the Western Schism from 1378 to 1417, in which Catholic Europe was
divided between two and then three popes. A century later, in 1517, the
Protestant Revolution lacerated the unity of the faith of Christianity. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>If the thirteenth century was a period of peace in
Europe, the fourteenth century was an era of permanent war. We need only
think of the “Hundred Years’ War” between France and England
(1339-1452) and of the assault of the Turks against the Byzantine Empire
with the conquest of Adrianople (1362). </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>In this century Europe experienced an economic crisis
due to climatic changes caused, not by man, but by glaciation. The
climate of the Middle Ages had been mild and sweet, like its customs.
But the fourteenth century experienced an abrupt harshening of climatic
conditions. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>The rains and floods of the spring of 1315 led to a
general famine that assailed all of Europe, above all the northern
regions, causing the death of millions of people. The famine spread
everywhere. The elderly voluntarily refused food in the hope of enabling
the young to survive and historians of the time write of many cases of
cannibalism. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>One of the principal consequences of the famines was
agricultural destructuring. In this period there were great movement of
agricultural depopulation characterized by flight from the land and the
abandonment of villages; the forest invaded fields and vineyards. As a
result of the abandonment of the fields there was a strong reduction of
soil productivity and a depletion of livestock. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>If bad weather causes famine, the subsequent
weakening of the body of entire populations causes disease. The
historians Ruggero Romano and Alberto Tenenti show how in the fourteenth
century the recurring cycle of famines and epidemics intensified.</span>10
The last great plague had erupted between 747 and 750; almost six
hundred years later it reappeared, striking four times in the space of a
decade. </p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>The plague came from the Orient and arrived in
Constantinople in the autumn of 1347. Over the next three years it
infected all of Europe, all the way to Scandinavia and Poland. It was
the black plague, of which Boccaccio speaks in the </span>Decameron.
Italy lost about half of its inhabitants. Agnolo di Tura, the chronicler
of Siena, lamented that no one could be found to bury the dead, and
that he had to bury his five sons with his own hands. Giovanni Villani,
the chronicler of Florence, was struck by the plague in such a sudden
way that his chronicle ends abruptly in the middle of a sentence. </p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>The European population that had surpassed 70 million
inhabitants at the beginning of the 1300s was reduced by a century of
wars, epidemics, and famines to 40 million; it shrank by more than one
third. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>The famines, plague, and wars of the fourteenth
century were interpreted by the Christian people as signs of God’s
chastisement. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>Saint Bernardine of Siena (1380-1444) admonished: </span>Tria
sunt flagella quibus dominus castigat.11 There are three scourges with
which God chastises: war, plague, and famine. Saint Bernardine belongs
to a number of saints like Catherine of Siena, Bridget of Sweden,
Vincent Ferrer, Louis Marie Grignon de Montfort, who warned how
throughout history natural disasters have always accompanied the
infidelities and apostasy of nations. It happened at the end of the
Christian Middle Ages, and it seems to be happening today. Saints like
Bernardine of Siena did not attribute these events to the work of evil
agents but to the sins of men, which are even more grave if they are
collective sins and still more grave if tolerated or promoted by the
rulers of the peoples and by those who govern the Church. </p>
<p dir="ltr"><b><span>As a philosopher of history</span> </b></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>These considerations introduce us to the third point
in which I will consider the events not as a sociologist or historian
but as a philosopher of history. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>Theology and the philosophy of history are fields of
intellectual speculation that apply the principles of theology and
philosophy to historical events. The theologian of history is like an
eagle that judges human affairs from the heights. Some of great
theologians of history were Saint Augustine (354-430), </span>Jacques
Bénigne Bossuet (1627-1704), who was called the eagle of Meaux, from the
name of the diocese where he was bishop, Count Joseph de Maistre
(1753-1821), the marquis Juan Donoso Cortés (1809-1853), the abbot of
Solesmes Dom Guéranger (1805-1875), professor Plinio Correa de Oliveira
(1908-1995), and may others. </p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>There is a Biblical expression that says: </span>Judicia
Dei abyssus multa (Ps 35:7): the judgments of God are a great abyss.
The theologian of history submits himself to these judgments and seeks
to understand the reason for them. </p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>Saint Gregory the Great, inviting us to investigate
the reasons for divine action, affirms: “Whoever does not discover the
reason for which God does things in the very works themselves, will find
in his own meanness and baseness sufficient cause to explain why his
investigations are in vain.”</span>12 </p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>Philosophy and modern theology under the influence
above all of Hegel, have replaced the judgments of God with the
judgments of history. The principle according to which the Church judges
history is reversed. It is not the Church that judges history but
history that judges the Church, because the Church, according to the </span>Nouvelle théologie, does not transcend history but is immanent, internal to itself. </p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>When Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini said in his final
interview that “The Church is 200 years behind” with respect to history,
he assumed history as the criterion of judgment for the Church. When
Pope Francis, in his Christmas greetings to the Roman Curia on December
21, 2019, made these words of Cardinal Martini his own, he is judging
the Church in the name of history, overturning what should be the
criterion of Catholic judgment. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>History in reality is a creature of God, like nature,
like all that exists, because nothing of what exists can exist apart
from God. All that happens in history is foreseen, regulated and ordered
by God for all eternity. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>Thus for the philosopher of history every discussion
can only begin with God and finish with God. God does not only exist;
God is concerned for his creatures, and he rewards or chastises rational
creatures according each one’s merits or faults. The Catechism of Saint
Pius X teaches: “God rewards the good and chastises the wicked because
he is infinite justice....” </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>Justice, theologians explain, is one of the infinite perfections of God.</span>13 The infinite mercy of God presupposed his infinite justice. </p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>Among Catholics the concept of justice, like the
concept of divine justice, is often removed. And yet the doctrine of the
Church teaches the existence of a particular judgment that follows the
death of every person, with the immediate reward or punishment of the
soul, and of a universal judgment in which all angels and all human
beings will be judged for their thoughts, words, actions, and
omissions. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>The theology of history tells us that God rewards and
punishes not only men but also collectivities and social groups:
families, nations, civilizations. But while men have their reward or
chastisement, sometimes on earth but always in heaven, nations, which do
not have an eternal life, are punished or rewarded only on earth. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>God is righteous and rewarding and gives to each what
is his due: he not only chastises individual persons but he also sends
tribulations to families, cities, and nations for the sins which they
commit. Earthquakes, famines, epidemics, wars, and revolutions have
always been considered as divine chastisements. As Father Pedro de
Ribadaneira (1527-1611) writes: “wars and plagues, droughts and famines,
fires and all other disastrous calamities are chastisement for the sins
of entire populations.”</span>14 </p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>On March 5 the bishop of an important diocese, whom I
will not name, declared: “One thing is certain: this virus was not sent
by God to punish sinful humanity. It is an effect of nature, treating
us as a stepmother. But God faces this phenomenon with us and probably
will make us understand, in the end, that humanity is one single
village.” </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>The Italian bishop does not renounce the myth of the
“single village” nor the religion of nature of the Pachamama and Greta
Thurnberg, even if for him the “Great Mother” can become “stepmother.”
But the bishop above all forcefully rejects the idea that the
Coronavirus epidemic or any other collective disaster can be a
punishment for humanity. The virus, the bishop believes, is only the
effect of nature. But who is it that has created, ordered, and guided
nature? God is the author of nature with its forces and its laws, and he
has the power to arrange the mechanism of the forces and laws of nature
in such a way as to produce a phenomenon according to the needs of his
justice or his mercy. God, who is the first cause above all of all that
exists, always makes use of secondary causes in order to effect his
plans. Whoever has a supernatural spirit does not stop at the
superficial level of things but seeks to understand the hidden design of
God that is at work beneath the apparently blind force of nature. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>The great sin of our time is the loss of faith by the
men of the Church: not of this or that man of the Church but of the men
of the Church in their collective whole, with few exceptions, thanks to
whom the Church does not lose her visibility. This sin produces
blindness of the mind and hardening of the heart: indifference to the
violation of the divine order of the universe. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>It is an indifference that hides hatred toward God.
How is it manifested? Not directly. These men of the Church are too
cowardly to directly challenge God; they prefer to express their hatred
towards those who dare to speak of God. Whoever dares to speak of the
chastisement of God gets stoned: a river of hatred flows against him. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>These men of the Church, while verbally professing to
believe in God, actually live immersed in practical atheism. They
despoil God of all his attributes, reducing him to pure “being” – that
is, to nothing. Everything that happens is for them the fruit of nature,
emancipated from its author, and only science, not the Church, is
capable of deciphering nature’s laws. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>Yet not only sound theology but the </span>sensus
fidei itself teaches that all physical and material evils that do not
come from the will of man depend on the will of God. Saint Alphonsus
Liguori writes: “Everything that happens here against our will, know
that it does not occur except by the will of God, as Saint Augustine
says.”15 </p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>On July 19 the Church’s liturgy recalls Saint Lupus
(or Saint Loup), bishop of Troyes (383-478). He was the brother of Saint
Vincent of Lerins and the brother-in-law of Saint Hilary of Arles,
belonging to a family of ancient senatorial nobility but above all of
great sanctity. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>During his lengthy episcopate (52 years), Gaul was
invaded by the Huns. Attila, at the head of an army of 400.000 men,
crossed the Rhine, devastating everything he found in his path. When he
arrived before the city of Troyes, the bishop Lupus, vested in
pontificals and following his clergy in procession, came to meet Attila
and asked him, “Who are you that you threaten this city?” And the
response came: “Don’t you know who I am? I am Attila, king of the Huns,
called the scourge of God.” To which Lupus replied: “Well then, be the
welcome scourge of God, because we merit divine scourges because of our
sins. But if it is possible, let your blows fall only on my person and
not on the entire city.” </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>The Huns entered the city of Troyes, but by divine
will they were blinded and crossed it without being aware of it and
without doing evil to anyone. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>The bishops today not only are not speaking about
divine scourges, but they are not even inviting the faithful to pray
that God will liberate them from the epidemic. There is a coherence in
this. Whoever prays, in fact, asks God to intervene in his life, and
thus in the things of the world, in order to be protected from evil and
to obtain spiritual and material goods. But why should God listen to our
prayers if he is disinterested in the universe created by Him? </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>If, on the contrary, God can, by means of miracles,
change the laws of nature, avoiding the sufferings and death of an
individual man, or great loss of life throughout an entire city, he can
also decree the punishment of a city or a people, because their
collective sins call down collective chastisements. Saint Charles
Borromeo said, “Because of our sins, God permitted the fire of the
plague to attack every part of Milan.”</span>16 And Saint Thomas Aquinas
explains: “When it is all the people who sin, vengeance must be made on
all the people, just as the Egyptians who persecuted the children of
Israel were submerged in the Red Sea, and as the inhabitants of Sodom
were struck down en masse, or a significant number of people must be
struck, such as happened in the chastisement inflicted for the adoration
of the golden calf.”17 </p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>On the eve of the second session of the First Vatican
Council, on January 6, 1870, Saint John Bosco had a vision in which it
was revealed to him that “war, plague, and famine are the scourges with
which the pride and malice of men will be struck down.” This is how the
Lord expressed himself: “You, O priests, why do you not run to weep
between the vestibule and the altar, begging for the end of the
scourges? Why do you not take up the shield of faith and go over the
roofs, in the houses, in the streets, in the piazzas, in every
inaccessible place, to carry the seed of my word. Do you not know that
this is the terrible two-edged sword that strikes down my enemies and
that breaks the wrath of God and men?”</span>18 </p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>The priests are silent, the bishops are silent, the Pope is silent. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>We are approaching Holy Week and Easter. And yet for
the first time in many centuries in Italy, the churches are closed,
Masses are suspended, and even Saint Peter’s Basilica is closed. The
Holy Week and Easter liturgies </span>urbe et orbi will not be drawing
pilgrims from all over the world. God, also punishes by “subtraction” as
Saint Bernardine of Siena says, and today it seems like he has removed
the churches, the Mother of all churches from the supreme Pastor, while
the Catholic people are groping confused in the dark, deprived of the
light of truth that should illuminate the world from Saint Peter’s
Basilica. How can we not see in what the Coronavirus is producing a
symbolic consequence of the self-destruction of the Church? </p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>Judicia Dei abyssus multa. </span>We ought to be
certain that what is happening does not prefigure the success of the
sons of darkness, but rather their defeat, because, as Father Carlo
Ambrogio Cattaneo, S.J., (1645-1705) explains, the number of sins,
whether of a man or of a people, is numbered.19 Venit dies iniquitate
praefinita says the prophet Ezekiel (21:2) – God is merciful but there
is a final sin that God does not tolerate and that provokes his
chastisement. </p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>Furthermore, according to a principle of the theology
of Christian history, the center of history is not the enemies of the
Church but the saints. </span>Omnia sustineo propter electos (2 Tim
2:10) says Saint Paul. History revolves around the elect of God. And
history depends on the impenetrable designs of Divine Providence. </p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>Throughout history there are those who oppose the law
of God, whether men, groups, or organized societies, both public and
secret, who work to destroy all that has been ordained by God. They are
able to obtain apparent successes, but they will always ultimately be
defeated. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>The scenario we have before us is apocalyptic, but Pius XII recalls that in the </span>Book
of Revelation (6:2) Saint John says, “did not behold only the ruins
caused by sin, war, famine, and death; he also saw in the first place
the victory of Christ. And indeed the path of the Church throughout the
centuries is a via crucis, but it is also always a march of triumph. The
Church of Christ, the man of faith and Christian love, are always those
who bring light, redemption and peace to a humanity without hope. Iesus
Christus heri et hodie, ipse et in saecula (Hebr. 13:8). Christ is your
guide, from victory to victory. Follow him.”20 </p>
<p dir="ltr"><span>At Fatima the Blessed Mother has revealed to us the
scenario of our time, and she assured us of her triumph. With the
humility of those who are aware that they can do nothing by their own
strength, but also with the confidence of those who know that everything
is possible with the help of God, we do not retreat, and we entrust
oursselves to Mary at the tragic hour of the events foretold by the
message of Fatima. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"> </p>
<p><i><span>Translated by Giuseppe Pellegrino </span><a href="https://twitter.com/pellegrino2020" target="_blank">@pellegrino2020</a></i></p>
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