A little primer about Russia and Fatima (part 1)

The apparitions of the Virgin Mary at Fatima, Portugal, in 1917 are well-known for her prophecy about Russia - the second of the so-called three secrets of Fatima. As the centennial of this most famous spiritual revelation of the modern Church approaches, I will use this blog to explain the continuation of the events that were foretold by the great Mother of God not only at Fatima, but in a series of her later appearances over the course of the last century.

A lot of historic background is needed, and I can't help but break this whole exposition up into parts, but I'll try to be as to the point as possible.

Part 1: Russia as the eastern half of Christianity

For starters, why Russia? Well, in 1917 Russia became the first communist country, and because of her sheer size and centrality to global geopolitics - each of the other five major power regions (Western Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, East Asia, and North America) have frontiers on the Russian world - communism quickly spread out from her and became a global force.

But even more importantly, in the context of religious history and God's plan for human salvation, modern Russia represents the eastern half of the Christian faith, the Russian Orthodox Church having been by far the largest and most influential Eastern and/or Oriental Orthodox communion since the end of the middle ages. Under Czarist rule from the late medieval period onward, Moscow prided itself as the "third Rome" (Constantinople having been the second), with the Czar himself the successor to the great emperor Constantine via a divine mandate bestowed upon him by the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, which in turn traces its ancestry to the Apostolic succession of Saint Andrew via Byzantium (later Constantinople and now Istanbul) through Kievan Rus'.

So the nation of Russia - and in a wider sense, the earlier Czarist Russian empire which over the course of its last dynasty, the Romanovs (1613-1917), controlled at one point or another a total area exceeding even the USSR - is practically a proxy for eastern, i.e. Orthodox or Greek rite Christianity. Western Christianity, of course, is rooted in the Latin rite See of Saint Peter (Rome and the Vatican), and includes not only the flagship Roman Catholic Church but also all the breakaways that branched out from it in the Protestant Reformation, whose own 500th anniversary will also come in 2017.

The crucial distinction between Western versus Eastern Christianity is that whereas in the West, spiritual authority saw a steady separation from political authority at the conclusion of the middle ages, in the East - and Russia particularly - it continued to exhibit a strong unity.

In the West, the Protestant Reformation and maritime migration of Europeans to the New World (the Americas) gave birth to strongly codified (that is, law- and rule-based) individual freedom and liberty - most critically private property rights - that promoted the decoupling (to various degrees) of religion from government. By contrast, in the East, Czarist Russia remained an essentially feudal system, with the spiritual power of the Church offering a divine mandate to rule to the sovereign dynasty and its supporting elite caste of landowning aristocrats, who practically owned the masses of ordinary peasants working the soil as their own property (serfdom).

This primitive edifice of the Russian state grew increasingly brittle as Europe as a whole progressed deeper into the modern era of the great revolutions: socioeconomically, the industrial revolution; socio-politically, the American and French revolutions. The freeing of the serfs in 1861 by liberal-minded Czar Alexander II unleashed an upsurge of social consciousness among ordinary Russians at just the moment when the intellectual forces of Russian society were acquiring the means to pressure for more threatening changes and reforms to the Czarist autocracy in much the same way that western and central European intelligentsia had already done since the French revolution and Napoleonic period.

Alexander II's tragic assassination in 1881 triggered a fierce reactionary retrenchment against political and social reform by his son, Alexander III. When Alexander III's own son, Nicholas II, ascended to the throne in 1894, he inherited the last major European power without even a semblance of representative rule, i.e. a parliament or constitution that, if managed well, would bolster the monarchy. But there wasn't enough urgency to liberalize in that manner yet: Russia was still at an early stage of industrialization compared to her western and central European peers, and at the turn of the 20th century it seemed as if she really just needed a better educated, technocratic central bureaucracy to close much of the gap with the West. With better infrastructure like the new Trans-Siberian railroad and a national telephone/telegraph system, the Czarist regime seemed to have a good shot at harnessing modernity to prolong or even strengthen its unelected rule.

Unfortunately, it was the ruling class itself that failed: young Nicholas II turned out to be too timid to deal with popular and intellectual currents clamoring for a greater voice for the masses, and the aristocracy - already mired in a long moral and spiritual decline - became increasingly lethargic and even decadent, with the result that the millennial bedrock of Czarist rule - the great divine mandate from the holy Orthodox Church - progressively weakened and crumbled from within.

Since it was all but unthinkable to alter its age-old essence, the Czarist regime could only resort to further military adventurism in both Europe and Asia - facilitated by its new infrastructure - to shore up its tottering legitimacy. So long as it did a fairly good job defending and promoting Orthodox civilization in the international arena, it could still claim to speak for its masses of still-destitute and illiterate peasants. This, however, would end up being its ultimate undoing.

Part 2 of this series will delineate the contours of the cataclysmic collapse of Russian Orthodox civilization - and of eastern Christianity - that occurred in 1917 with the Russian revolution.