The Final Battle

By TOM TAKASH

In an interview in 2017, a few months before he died, retired Carlo Caffarra revealed that in 1983 he had received a handwritten note from Sr. Lucia, the lone survivor of the three children to whom Our Lady of Fatima had appeared on multiple occasions in 1917. Its message addressed grave issues regarding marriage and family. It was appropriate that Sr. Lucia would address the note to him since at that time, the cardinal was president of the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family. (He held that position from 1981 to 1995. His last official position was archbishop of Bologna, Italy, from 2003 until 2015.)
In that note Sr. Lucia told the cardinal of a specific revelation from our Lady regarding a final battle with the forces of evil. Sr. Lucia said to the cardinal, “Father, a time will come when the decisive battle between the kingdom of Christ and Satan will be over marriage and family. And those who will work for the good of the family will experience persecution and tribulation. But do not be afraid, because our Lady has already crushed his head.”
The cardinal said that he believed that these prophetic words are being fulfilled in today’s world. But, did the world listen to him back in 2017, and as the prophecy is unfolding, are we listening to him now?
Many times throughout history, especially during the horrible wars in the twentieth century, people worried about and predicted that we were then in the end times. The Holocaust and the violent wars of Hitler’s Germany combined with the Communists’ bloody takeover of Eastern Europe and much of Asia were surely the signs that we were told to expect. God’s final victory had to be soon. Yet, in spite of those horrors, the end did not come, and soon complacency settled in.
Some even contend that, all thing considered, the world is actually not as bad as it was back then. And, if we close our eyes and listen to the “woke” community, we may believe this and be blinded by their “messages of hope.” If we buy into the false freedoms that they proclaim, and if we believe in free love, recreational drugs, abolishing gas stoves and private cars, restricting human population and eliminating meat from our diets, we will have the keys to the planet’s survival; we will be duped into submission. We will be robots marching lockstep on a sterile planet, untouched by a loving God.
But, if we are willing to remove our blinders and look closely at today’s world, we can see that there is a slow but steady increase in evil worldwide, striking at marriage and the family everywhere. Continual attacks on these institutions are unmatched by any wickedness since Adam and Eve were banned from Paradise. If we are willing to see the truth, we have to acknowledge that the final battle to preserve marriage and family appears to have begun. Satan’s efforts to destroy God’s plan is in full force. Underestimating his power has already caused the ruin of countless marriages, the ridicule of family life, and an unprecedented hatred of our unborn.
Does anyone doubt that the institution of marriage has undergone a profound change? And what about family? Today, is it still considered to be the world’s basic social unit? Unfortunately, neither marriage, nor family seem to have the same meaning that they had just a short time ago. Today, the world is experiencing a distinct change from the past. A sharp turn has been made from the things of God and a turn toward “self-fulfillment” and Satan, and not just here and there, but throughout our “civilized” world. Marriage and family have, almost overnight, become burdensome and outdated!
Has there ever been a time in the past when so many have embraced the “singles scene” and rejected family and God’s command to increase and multiply? Marriage between a man and a woman committed to each other before God has largely been replaced by couples cohabiting and shunning the blessings of children.
And, if a couple does consider the vocation of marriage today, the thought of entering into a marriage and being open to having children before the age of 30 is considered a terrible economic decision. Suffice to add that after marriage, the desire to hope for a large family is also looked upon as too expensive and in bad taste. When has there ever been a time in the past when so many throughout the world have turned from the protection of children to the almost hatred of children and to the burden they allegedly place on “our plans for the future”?
Was there ever a time when so many have praised same-sex relationships and when so many have actually accepted the notion of marriage between people of the same sex, a foolish concept never before considered by civilizations anywhere on Earth, but now considered wholesome. Men speak of their “husbands” and women speak of their “wives.” Same-sex couples legally adopt children, and adoption agencies are threatened for refusing to arrange adoptions for them.
Never mind that common sense tells us that a child raised in such an environment will be faced with serious challenges that will adversely affect his or her entire life.
Has there ever been a time when the murder of the unborn and newly born has been hailed as an absolute right? It is frightening to even think that now the pro-abortion crowd doesn’t even try and defend killing our young with excuses, such as “they are doing so to protect the life of the mother.” No, now it’s just a right, pure and simple. If she doesn’t want a child, let her kill it, even if she decides to kill it after she gives birth! Forget the slogan, “My body, my choice.” It’s not necessary anymore. Let’s replace it with, “Who cares.”
And when were those who respect the right to life of the unborn been called extremists for defending life? With straight faces these fanatics do call “right-to-lifers” extremists. And, whenever in the past did a politician who self-identifies as a “pro-choice Christian” feel justified in twisting Bible quotes to justify rejecting a law designed to try and save the life of a baby born alive after a failed abortion?
First-time House of Representative member Hillary Scholten, a Democrat representing Grand Rapids, Mich., does just that. She claims that guided by passages from the Bible she voted against the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act. Her logic, if one can use that word to describe her justification, was from Jer. 1:5 in which God states, “I knew you before I formed you and placed you in your mother’s womb.” And this is how she uses Jeremiah to arrive at her stated reason for her vote to let babies die, and I quote: “It doesn’t say the government’s womb or the speaker’s womb. It says the mother’s womb. I believe life is precious, but I reject the idea that if I embrace the sanctity of life, I also must be forced to invite the federal government in to regulate it.”
Excuse me, Cong. Scholten, but do you really expect us to believe that you believe life is precious, that you embrace the sanctity of life? Are we supposed to unravel your jumbled explanation and say, “Wow, I never knew what Jeremiah was getting at, until you broke the code.”
And, Grand Rapids, I hope you hear her, too. You just elected the first Democrat to represent you since the 1970s, and this is how you were rewarded.
But Cong. Scholten wasn’t the only Democrat to vote to allow babies to die after a failed abortion. Over 200 of her fellow Democrats voted as she did. Maybe they have discovered their own unique ways of interpreting the Bible. Perhaps, they have decided, as she has, that the Bible can mean whatever they need it to mean just so it justifies their agenda.
Still not convinced that today’s world is rejecting true marriage and family, and that the final battle could be here? Well, I hope that Satan’s latest ugly attack on life will convince you. He never sleeps, and he has outdone himself recently. Most of us are aware of the bizarre efforts to change the bodies of males and females through gruesome surgeries and chemical interventions, so that in spite of their DNA, they can pretend to be of the opposite sex.
But a whole new medical approach is being proposed at the University of Pittsburgh. A transgender woman, Alicyn Simpson, who works at University Pittsburgh Medical Center’s Children’s Hospital Gender Program, is promoting, what she says research has shown to be possible, a transplant program that would take vaginal parts and uteruses from live willing transgender men (women who pretend to be men) who no longer want or need them, and place them in transgender women (men who pretend to be women), who she says long for those body parts.
She contends that many of these “women” have expressed the desire to experience a menstrual cycle, become pregnant and have children of their own. She maintains that they could now carry their pretend lives even further, attempting to destroy what’s left of their natural selves by turning themselves into monsters that can create children.
Under Satan’s direction, today’s Doctor Frankensteins may attempt to mimic God and His miracle of childbirth, but: “Make no mistake: God is not mocked, for a person will reap only what he sows” (Gal. 6:7). We can be assured that those who would attempt to distort and counterfeit the sacred gift of human conception and birth will inevitably reach a point where Jesus will say, “No more.” At that point His Mother, and the Mother of all God’s children, born and unborn, the “New Eve” will, with the “New Adam,” Her Son, Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, as prophesied, destroy Satan’s power forever.