FATIMA FOR TODAY
The Urgent Marian Message of Hope
By Father Andrew Apostoli, C.F.R.
Ignatius, 2010
300 pages, $19.95
To order: ignatius.com
(800) 651-1531
What could be more timely than another strong reminder about our Blessed Mother’s direction on how to save our souls?
After all, our times seem to be marked by more wars, uprisings, natural disasters and relentless attacks on morality, the family and life itself.
Fatima for Today: The Urgent Marian Message of Hope provides that reminder, The author, Father Andrew Apostoli, is a foremost authority on the Fatima apparitions and message.
“No doubt Our Lady is protecting us from many spiritual assaults that are not as obvious as the atomic bomb, but nevertheless real,” writes Father Apostoli. “She is likewise preparing her spiritual sons and daughters for the struggles that will ultimately lead to the triumph of her Immaculate Heart. In earthly warfare, the general of the army is in charge. In spiritual warfare, Jesus is in charge. But he has chosen to direct some of us through his mother. … The general decides what will work to accomplish a victory, and what will not. The general must also determine which weapons will be most effective. Hasn’t Our Lady done something like this for us at Fatima? ... She told us that the most effective weapon, after the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, is the Rosary.”
This book takes us through the apparitions to the three little seers of the Angel of Peace that preceded our Blessed Mother’s appearances, Our Lady’s apparitions from May to October, then her appearances again to Sister Lucia in Spain from 1925-30. More importantly, it explains their significance then and their urgency for us today, since so many have still not honored Our Lady’s requests.
Praying the Rosary for peace, offering prayers and sacrifices, linking Eucharistic and Marian devotion, describing what the evils of communism have wrought, looking at the lives of the three children — all take on a new urgency for our times.
Father Apostoli addresses the controversy about the consecration of Russia that Our Lady requested of the Pope — and questions about the Third Secret of Fatima. No other source I know of answers every possible objection so thoroughly and so clearly with no detail or fact ignored or unexplained. It’s likely you’ve never encountered some of these facts elsewhere, like the role in the consecration played by the 20th-century mystic Blessed Alexandrina de Costa.
Finally, to help us respond to the message easily, Father Apostoli includes an appendix with the five simple Fatima prayers and another explaining the reasons, necessity and way to fulfill the so sorely neglected request of Our Lady and her Son for the Five First Saturdays devotion.
If ever there was a flawless work on Fatima, this is it. Read and re-read, this book should propel us to pick up our rosaries, make even the tiniest sacrifices in our lives an offering and heed the requests of Our Lady of Fatima to hasten her promise: “In the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph.”
Register staff writer Joseph Pronechen is based in Trumbull, Connecticut.
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Let us not forget that in The Vision of Tuy, The Holy Spirit resides between The Father and The Son thus confirming The Filioque and the fact that The Holy Spirit is The Love Between The Father and The Son and thus proceeds from The Father and The Son.
“I Pray that they will be One, Father…” - Christ at The Last Supper
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