And a khutbah on the same topic

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The date of this live broadcast, May 13th, 2022, was the 105th anniversary of the “Miracle of Fatima”—the topic of the khutbah I gave a few hours before the broadcast. To commemorate the occasion, two leading Catholic experts, Gary Giuffre and Dr. Peter Chojnowski, joined me for an interfaith discussion of the meaning of the most celebrated miracle of the modern age.

In this, the first hour of the live show, I interview Gary Giuffre, author of the forthcomingThe Plot Against the Pope and  Grave Reasons of State: The Atomic Bomb and the Eclipse of the True Vicar of Christ. Gary Giuffre is often credited as the foremost proponent of the Siri thesis that the Vatican was taken over by a freemasonic coup d’état in 1958. According to Giuffre, the conspirators threatened to annihilate Vatican City with a nuclear weapon if the papal conclave didn’t go their way. (One purpose and/or result of the coup may have been the suppression of the Third Secret of Fatima.)

A friend of Mel Gibson who contributed to editing the script of The Passion of the Christ, Giuffre is a former Air Force noncom officer, an industrial model maker and petrochemical plant designer, an illustrator for the US Air Force and NASA, a notable portrait artist, and something of a living legend among both conspiracy analysts and traditional Catholics.

The Miracle of Fatima and Its Message

Khutbah delivered Friday, May 13

Today is the 105th anniversary of the apparition at Fatima, Portugal. It happened on May 13 in the year 1917, in the middle of the great war, World War One. And the children who saw this apparition were quite young (ten years old and younger). There were three of them: a brother and a sister (Francisco and Jacinta Marto) who apparently died young, and the girl (Lúcia dos Santos) who grew up to become Sister Lucy after the miracle was accepted by the Catholic Church.  I’m going to talk a little bit about that apparition in the first khutbah, then discuss its significance, especially in terms of Islam and relationships between Christians and Muslims, in the second khutbah.

This apparition at Fatima was (deemed by Catholics) a miracle, what we call a karama in Islam. They’re generally miracles of the saints. A karama would be a miracle that comes to somebody that we would consider a wali Allah or a saint. And in Christianity it’s very similar. Both the Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church have their saints. And the difference, of course, is that in Islam we don’t have a bureaucracy like the Catholic Church that could stamp these miracles (as authentic) and tell us precisely which are real miracles, which aren’t, and which potential saints are actual saints and which ones aren’t.

So, the miracle: The three children saw a very bright light in the sky. And it kind of dissolved into the form of a woman. It reminds us a little bit of the descriptions of when the Angel Gabriel came to Prophet Muhammad when he was meditating in the cave on Mt. Hira, and this angelic figure stretched all the way to the far horizon and then became very close. And it was something that went beyond a simple physical description.

And that’s the case here as well. These children looked up in the sky and saw bright lights resolving into the figure of a a large female figure in the sky. And apparently this apparition happened not just that first time on May 13th, 1917, but it also happened five other times. So there were a total of six apparitions. And the last one was on October 13th of 1917.

These six apparitions were taken to be Our Lady, as they call her. The Catholics, of course, have a long tradition of venerating the Virgin Mary, sometimes called Mariolotry. I’m not sure if that’s a negative pejorative term for it. (It is. -ed.) I’m not really a very good scholar of Christianity. But in any case, they have a very strong religious feeling for the mother of Jesus, peace upon them, just as we do in Islam. Many of the Christians may not realize that we have a whole surah in the Qur’an about Mary that is named after Mary, surat Miriam. It’s very beautiful.

So anyway, so these children saw Our Lady, they said. And then she gave them the messages. And some of them became known as The Secrets of Fatima. And I believe there were three. And the third secret of Fatima, the final secret of Fatima, was one that they weren’t supposed to reveal (for many decades).

And eventually I guess they did (supposedly) reveal it. Sister Lucy was the last one who remained alive (after the death of the Martos). She became a nun, and then she became canonized as a saint, because this was officially stamped as a true miracle. Particularly on the final apparition on October 13, 1917, a huge number of people saw these bizarre phenomena going on in the sky. They didn’t all see the form of the woman giving information to the children, but they saw something really strange was going on with the lights in the sky. And this was witnessed by many thousands of people, including lots of atheists and secularists who didn’t recognize its religious significance. So anyway, Sister Lucy, then, because the other two children died young, became the custodian of the secrets of Fatima.

And the third secret in particular became a controversial item. It was rumored that this was a really terrible secret. The earlier messages had stated that “this war will end.” This was in the middle of World War One, 1917. So (the message said) the war is going to end if people pray. And they should pray to God through the intercession of this female holy figure, the Virgin Mary. Then the message also supposedly went on and talked about the future, about huge apocalyptic wars in the future. There would be another great war like the first one if people didn’t repent. And of course, there was World War Two.

And then the third secret (about a third Great War): Sister Lucy was supposed to reveal it by 1960. And she wanted to. There’s a controversy about what really happened. The full text of it was finally allegedly revealed by the Catholic Church in the year 2000. But there are still those who argue that that’s not the real thing or it’s not the full text, that there’s more. There’s a missing part of it. And that third secret supposedly included material that was so horrible (from the perspective at least of the church and the pope) that when the new pope learned of this secret, he broke down and cried and basically had to take a break from the world for three days just to cope with it. And then the third secret, as it was finally revealed in the year 2000, even though Sister Lucy wanted it revealed in 1960, turned out not to be something that one would really imagine being that devastating, or that would even need to be secret.

The (official version of the third secret includes) a vision of a great war and the pope and the other Catholic officials being killed and martyred. They believe that their religious icon, Jesus, who we Muslims call sayyidna Issa (our lord Jesus) was crucified, and they, of course, are very focused on that death by crucifixion. And so they intensely identify with this kind of martyrdom for the top people in the church.

So that’s what the church says is the third secret. But a lot of folks say there’s a lot more than that and that they’re still hiding something. There was something maybe more specific. And all of this was also tied into the consecration of Russia. Supposedly the Virgin told the children that Russia had to be consecrated, that terrible errors would be coming from Russia and it had to go back to God, and that to avoid these horrible wars and these punishments of humanity, Russia had to go back to God. Well, the opposite happened, right? In 1917, we had the Bolshevik Revolution. And so this anti-religious movement of communism, which was a form of idolatry or false religion, dominated Russia right up through 1990. And since then, interestingly enough, it seems that Russia may be coming back to God to a certain extent. In any case, it’s certainly not as rabidly anti-religious as it used to be. The Russian Orthodox Church is being reborn, and or at least being given a legitimate role in society again. And of course Islam is growing by leaps and bounds in Russia. In fact, half of the Russian army is made up of Muslims.

And so these are some of the issues raised by this vision, and some of the basic facts about the miracle at Fatima. In the second khutbah I’ll discuss its relevance—its possible relevance anyway, because only Allah knows—for Islam and for relations between Muslims and Christians.

(break)

Second Khutba: So it’s interesting that Fatima is the name of the town where this happened. Mary, the virgin mother of Jesus, peace upon them both, is the great female religious figure in Christianity and Islam. And Fatima is the second great female historical religious figure in Islam. Of course, the difference is that Mary lived before the revelation of Islam. But her role in the Christian revelation is somewhat comparable to the role of the Prophet Muhammad’s (saas) daughter Fatima in the Islamic revelation. That is, they were both historical personages and female and played important roles in the beginning of these revelations.

The Prophet Muhammad’s daughter, Fatima, was the mother of his surviving children who left progeny. So the sayyeds or the descendants of Prophet Muhammad, peace upon him, are all through her. And there was an issue about who was going to lead the community after the prophet (saas) passed away. And Fatima played a role in that. And those who believe that the correct, well-guided leadership in Islam should have been through the descendants of the prophet through Fatima are the Fatimids, or some today call them the Shia, or the ahl ul-bayt, the people of the House—because the people of the house of the Prophet, the descendants of the Prophet, peace upon him, are supposedly the people from whom these rightly guided leaders came, according to that school of thought.

So anyway, Fatima plays a huge role in the very beginning of the history of Islam. She and her husband Ali are key sources, leading interpreters, who were there and who discussed the meaning of the Qur’anic revelation with the prophet (saas).

So Fatima is really an important figure in Islam. And that name Fatima became the name of the town in Portugal. It got that name, of course, because the whole Iberian Peninsula was dominated by Muslims for six centuries. And Fatima became the place where this “revelation”—well, it’s not a revelation, because the word revelation in English is often a translation of “a prophetic message from God.” And so we’re not saying that these three children were prophets. Saints (awliya’) maybe.

But why the name Fatima? What is God trying to tell us by giving the Catholics and the Christians this message at a place named after the daughter of the prophet of Islam?

There’s no mention of Islam in the actual message carried by Our Lady of Fatima to these three children—which is interesting. It’s the middle of the great war, a great war that did in some ways involve the House of Islam. Because the Zionist-influenced imperialistic side of the West needed to steal the Holy Land, which had been Muslim-administered Holy Land virtually ever since Islam existed. And so World War One enabled the theft of Palestine, because the Ottoman caliphate would never have given up Palestine. It refused over and over. After the most extreme threats, the most extreme attempts to bribe the Ottoman authorities, they still refused to give up Palestine. So World War One had to be orchestrated, among other reasons, to enable the British to steal Palestine from the Muslims, the Ottoman Caliphate, and hand it on a silver platter to the Zionist movement.

And so that is partly what World War One was about. It was partly a Zionist-atheist Western war against Islam. And the victors did end up colonizing most of the Muslim world. Much of it already had been colonized, of course, but World War One made it vastly worse. So World War One was (among other things) a war against Islam. One would think that if you were a Christian who followed the traditional Christian belief that Islam is totally wrong and really bad, that maybe that would have showed up here, and Islam might have played the role of the bad guy in the Fatima messages. But no, it didn’t.

So who was playing the role of the bad guy? The anti-God forces. And who are the anti-God forces? Well, it sure looks like the Bolsheviks were one of them. So maybe the message to the Christians is saying “the Muslims are not your enemy. Your enemy is these forces, these anti-God forces.” And Islam is not only not anti-God, Islam is the most focused and intense pro-God religion you’ll ever find, right? So maybe the message is telling Muslims and Christians, “you’re both people of God.”

(And maybe it’s telling us:) There’s this huge threat coming. The end times are coming, and in the end times the Antichrist is coming. In Islam we call the Antichrist “Dajjal.” The term Antichrist is used in English by Christians. In this battle with the Antichrist—which is really what these great wars are about—Christians and Muslims are on the same side. I think that might be part of the significance of why Fatima is the place where this message to the Christians was delivered.

Another aspect of this is that we’re dealing with these key female religious figures. Our Lady of Fatima is calling people back to God through the office of this great religious figure, Mary, Mother of Jesus, peace upon them both. So why is that? Throughout much of the history of the worship of God in the Christian and Islamic traditions, there hasn’t been a whole lot of focus on the female, the feminine. Both religions, just like almost everything else in terms of social organization and cultural production, has tended to be dominated by men—not the informal cultural production, home-centered cultural production, etc.. Women, of course, have dominated that, and there have been female scholars and builders and other things and occasionally even military generals, which Fatima was, by the way, as was Joan of Arc. So we’re not saying that religion or anything else has ever been exclusively male. But it has been disproportionately male.

So maybe there’s something in the message of Fatima telling us to reorient our spirituality to embrace rahma, mercy. The first two tangible characteristics of God in Islam are ar-rahman ar-rahim, the all-merciful, all-compassionate (or the all-compassionate the all-caring). And rahma comes from motherly love or the womb.  The root of these words means womb, and it has to do with a kind of absolute love a mother feels for her children. So when we think of Allah or God, there’s just as much “feminine” rahma as the “masculine” side, ‘izza, power or glory or what have you. And I think the Muslims actually have been better at respecting this than Christians and Jews, since it’s so clear in Islam that God is what Christians call the Godhead, and not a human figure. We shouldn’t anthropomorphize and imagine God as being like a human. Those who do anthropomorphize God, Christians in particular, sometimes think of God as like a male patriarch: the father and the son are two of the three parts of the trinity, which in Islam we don’t accept. And in Unitarianism they don’t accept that either. So rebalancing spirituality towards the feminine might be part of this.

And finally, keep in mind that the archetypes of the divine feminine range on the spectrum from the beautiful absolute purity of Mary, the Virgin who is falsely accused of being unchaste—and in Islam we hear that the baby Jesus, peace upon him, spoke up from the cradle to defend his mother against these accusations—that absolute purity is one of the archetypal characteristics of Mary.

And then in terms of the archetypes of the feminine: The exact opposite, the archetype of utter and complete impurity, is the archetype of Kali, the Hindu goddess of death. And hey, it’s the Kali Yuga we’re living in, right? It’s the Kali Yuga, the End Times as seen by the Hindus (and by some Muslims like Rene Guenon, who studied these things and figured out that it’s relevant to all of us, not just the Hindus). The Kali Yuga is the age of Kali, the extremely impure woman. And there’s the the beast and the scarlet woman accompanying the beast of revelations in the Revelation of Saint John: the Scarlet Lady. So the extreme impurity side of the archetypal feminine is linked to the satanic forces of the Antichrist that are coming in the end times. And the solution is to find God through the archetype of Mary, the archetype of absolute purity. That purity is symbolized by the image of a virgin mother: a mother who is totally pure and undefiled sexually, yet who is the ultimate provider, caretaker and nurturer for her child.

So that might be telling us Muslims, and of course the Christians, to whom this message primarily came, that in the Kali Yuga, the end times, the age of Kali—the extremely impure, crazy female death archetype that devours her children and is the most extreme example of female impurity—that in that age we should be coming back to God through embracing the ideal of feminine purity and divine motherhood.

And then if we stop and look at today’s culture: No wonder they call it the Kali Yuga, right? Women today are not encouraged to be pure and chaste and to be self-sacrificing pure, chaste mothers, to say the least. The culture has gone as far as possible in the opposite direction. At least I hope it’s as far as possible.

We just had the rabid pro-abortion people bombing a political office here in Madison, Wisconsin. They’re so extremely concerned with their right to fornicate to their hearts’ content and then murder their babies while they’re still in the womb…I don’t want to get into all of the nuances of that particular issue. But it’s clear that the whole agenda of the so-called sexual revolution is tied to an agenda of forcing women into a male role: Forcing women to not be pure mothers, but to go to extremes of impurity. So that would be the zeitgeist of the End Times.

And so this call to unite Muslims and Christians around the image of the pure virgin mother that’s coming through the message of Fatima is something that I think Muslims generally haven’t noticed, because they don’t really pay much attention to the Catholic Church. But I think maybe some Christians, especially (traditional) Catholics, are starting to notice.

And so in the age of the Kali Yuga, symbolic of the rise of the Antichrist, Christians and Muslims together can venerate God and reach out to God and approach God by honoring and respecting the archetype of the divine feminine in general, and the absolutely pure and chaste mother archetype in particular. And they can also join together in anticipation of the second coming of the Messiah—Issa, Jesus, the one and only Messiah. Because just as so many Christians don’t realize that the Qur’an honors and reveres Mary and Jesus, peace upon them, they likewise don’t realize that in Islam we too are waiting for Jesus to come back, just like they are. We know that Jesus is the one and only true Messiah. And when Jesus returns, he’ll clear up the differences and we’ll see who was right about this detail or who was wrong about that detail. So all of us in the universal monotheistic traditions—whether Muslims, Christians, or even those Jews who’ve managed to step out of the downside of that tradition and embrace genuinely universal monotheism and not tribalistic monotheism—it’s time for those of us who worship God through these Middle Eastern monotheistic traditions to gather together and recognize that we’re in the final End Times struggle against the Antichrist and the forces of evil that are manifesting in this age of the Kali Yuga in so many terrible ways. And that message, whatever we choose to think about it—as Muslims we don’t have to accept it just because the Catholic Church accepts it—but whatever we think about its authenticity, we must recognize that this call to repent to God, at a time when people have gone wildly astray and are inviting God’s punishment, is a message that we, whether Muslim or Christian, can all agree on.