Some in the West have begun arguing that the errors of Russia referred to at Fatima are simply woke culture. Their assumption is that Russia is on the path to recovery and conversion and is now a guide, even “salvation”, for the decadent West. But this directly contradicts the message of Our Lady at Fatima, that if her requests were not heeded Russia would get much worse, not better, before the conversion of the world and Russia itself.
To so misrepresent Fatima as to depict Moscow’s current strategy and spread of error as saving the West is to nullify one of the most important warnings of Our Lady, that Russia will spread error, not truth. The message of Fatima concerning the future was not given to satisfy idle curiosity but to warn Christians of a danger, and show them the way through it.
To distort this message into support of Russian actions and its supporters in the West is to put Christians at greater risk of being taken in by these errors than if they had never heard of Fatima. The evidence is that not a few patriots and nationalists, and Catholics too, are falling for this. Populist parties across Europe and the Americas are openly dealing with Russia and its ideologies. J. Vance and his “Dark Enlightenment” sponsors are an alarming example of this.
The official political ideology in Moscow has synthesised the errors of the West into an all-inclusive mix. This meshes with every ideology, and every religion or lack of religion. The one thing that it cannot work with is a Christianity that refuses to be part of this pantheon; the Catholic Church will never be there. Even the supremely weak Catholic leadership of today rankles with Moscow because of what it represents in spite of itself.
The failure to comply with Fatima’s requests unequivocally has led to effects that are more striking now than ever before. The consequence of this failure, “Russia shall spread her errors throughout the world”, applies now. These errors are not principally woke culture. The Soviets could never have conquered half of Europe if Russia had been a woke society, and Russia’s, North Korea’s and China’s governments have no
intention of being one now. Faced with demographic collapse, all these regimes desperately need the birthrate to rise to make their regimes stronger and able to wage war.
Social conservatism isn’t all it’s made out to be
This has nothing to do with Christian morality. After 1917, the Bolshevik regime in Moscow immediately legalised abortion, prostitution and homosexuality, and abolished the legal status of the family. After a few short years, rampant social dissolution led to a Stalinist reaction to all these things and the beginning of the familiar dowdy Soviet society. It might look like an improvement on woke culture to us, but this was not, and is not, the conversion of Russia nor anything approaching it: 6,000 priests were murdered during the Spanish civil war under the influence of “socially conservative” agents sent by Moscow. Yet these heartless killers would have hated “woke” values.
Old style Sovietism was unattractive in the West because of its implacable atheism and uniformity. But what about a mix that accommodates every religion, and “patriotic” and anti-woke attitudes as well as old-fashioned bolshevism, holding itself up as the answer to liberalism? This is now Moscow’s official policy, read out in detail by Vladimir Putin at his Valdai address last year. Many conservatives are falling for it in Europe. Donald Trump’s foreign policy is largely based on it. The attractive error is the dangerous one. Fatima was prescient, and referred to the present time like no other.
Religion in Russia’s system today is at the service of civil society as in pagan antiquity. Religions that don’t fit the bill are excluded; every Catholic church in the Ukrainian areas occupied during the current war has been forced to close. Russia recognises four religions: Russian Orthodoxy, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism. Their leadership is controlled by the state and dissidents are culled. One must not question the pantheon.
Would this version of the “West” be an improvement on the present one? More importantly, what possible future is there for the Catholic Church, which always preferred persecution to being allotted an honourable niche in the Roman pantheon?
Sovintern and other Errors
It is well known that Russia seeks influence among nationalistic, populist parties in the West. The famous loan of several million to Marine Le Pen at the last presidential election was one case among many. It is important to realise that Moscow’s intervention in the politics of the West is not disinterested support for patriotism everywhere, but a calculated strategy to support and influence dissent, from whatever quarter it may come. Moscow supports the AfD in Germany, even though that party wants to put the Hitlerian past in a better light. But it gives itself the right to abolish an entire nation, Ukraine, in the name of a war of “denazification” in 2026. This action can easily be repeated elsewhere.
Russia’s Socialist party, A Just Russia (with 17 members in the Duma and 400,000 members), has closely supported Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev’s political careers. A Just Russia was expelled from the Socialist International (led by Spanish PM Pedro Sanchez) for supporting the invasion of Ukraine.
In April this year, however, it started a new socialist international in Moscow, Sovintern. Its founding meeting received a message of goodwill from Vladimir Putin. It groups together 30 communist/socialist parties from around the world, including the Sandinistas of Nicaragua, the Cuban regime, Evo Morales’ neo-pagan socialists from Bolivia, the Nepalese Communist Party, the Communist Party of Italy, the Kenyan Communist party and many others. The meeting called for collaboration with the Chinese Communist Party against the West.
Does this mean Russia is turning “Marxist” again, or never stopped being Communist? Not quite. It’s just an expression of Putin’s ideological synthesis. At Valdai, he spoke of the glories of the Russian imperialist AND Bolshevik past (and of the French revolution). Sovintern socialists are more in the style of Leonid Brezhnev than the contemporary West’s wokeists. But ought Catholics feel more comfortable in the presence of communists wearing suits rather than nose rings? Most unwise; “socially conservative”, suited KGB operatives tortured Catholics in many countries (while ignoring controlled, pliant religions). Communist regimes supported the drugs revolution and militant groups like the Black Panthers a couple of generations ago.
Another idea being spread by Russia is occultism. Several Russian authors with an enthusiastic audience in the West, especially Alexander Dugin, are prominent in this. Dugin recently published an interview between himself and Nick Land (the well- known satanist) where Land defends his communications with the diabolical. The Russian philosopher was in full agreement. Dugin is a good example of the multiplicity of Russia’s errors, because he has been able to espouse, often in the same article or interview: Hegelianism, fascism, “Russian Orthodoxy”, opposition to “antichrist” (identified with Russian’s political enemies), satanism and occultism, nationalism, and “Eurasianism”.
“Eurasianism” allows ideologues in Moscow to ally themselves with mutually contradictory forces like Islam, the Chinese Communist Party, paganism, Buddhism and Russian Orthodoxy, because they all represent the fictional civilisation of the “Eurasian continent”. The ideological base for this is the “perennialism” or “Traditionalism” of the freemason turned Sufi-Muslim, Rene Guenon. Guenon was an occultist and kabbalist who preached the worth of all traditions against Western “modernity”, insisting on the “truth” of all religions.
Russia’s reassertion of Enlightenment error
This specifically “Russian” mix of errors is not an invention of the 2020s. It was contrived in the late nineteenth century. Russian authors like Dostoevsky, Soloviev and Khomiakov all began with an ideological core of Hegelianism and Kantianism, topped off with Schelling. They eventually added a veneer of Russian tradition because that is what nineteenth-century German philosophy demanded: that these false ideologies be expressed through the idiom of each country’s “tradition”, which might be “Russian Orthodoxy”, but could just as well be Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, or agnosticism, depending on circumstances. None of these authors were orthodox (or “Orthodox”) Christians. They adopted the nineteenth-century German ideological
critique of the West. At the heart of this critique was the rejection of all absolute truth and an attitude of complete scepticism. The only truth for these ideologues is society and politics.
Dostoevsky defined Russia’s “task” as the unification of all the errors of the modern West: “the Russian idea will perhaps be the synthesis of all those ideas that Europe is developing stubbornly and steadfastly in its separate nationalities”; he wanted to reconcile the ideological parties to the Enlightenment’s struggle of false ideas. The notion of reconciling falsehoods to arrive at a (temporary) “truth” is Hegelian, of course.
Dostoevsky preached: “Russian socialism… the establishment of an oecumenical Church on earth… universal brotherly fellowship in the name of Christ… Not in communism, not in mechanical forms… [but] they shall be finally saved through the universal communism in the name of Christ”. 1
Dostoevsky is a favourite author among many western Christians. They might not be aware that he never refers to Christ as God, and that he only once explained his idea of God: “the full synthesis of all being, contemplating itself in multiplicity, in analysis”, 2 which is pantheism at best.
Dostoevsky was fundamentally a religious sceptic who hated Catholicism because of its defence of unalterable religious truth, which made the Church the “antichrist” for him. Speaking through Prince Myshkin in his novel, The Idiot, he declares, “Romanism… preaches a disfigured, distorted Christ – it preaches Anti-Christ”. In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky has the “Grand Inquisitor” (representing the Church) say to Christ: “Thou hast no right to add anything to what Thou hadst said of old.” 3
This is where Dostoevsky defends notions dear to religious syncretists and modernists of all kinds, the opposition of “love” to religious dogma, and the idea that revelation can be added to; that the Catholic Church is wrong to be the guardian of the truth and resist “the Third Testament” of “Sophia” and its future “adding” to “revelation”. This is a buzz idea among Tombergian occultists meddling in Catholic tradition too.
Khomiakov was a Russian modernist of the nineteenth century who combined his core of false German philosophy with occultism and syncretism. He openly preached the “Third Testament” which was going to arrive “soon”. A re-edition of his work was prefaced enthusiastically by Yves Congar.
The “expert” in the “Sophian age” of occultism was Vladimir Soloviev. His idea of an occultist universal Church led by the Pope has fooled not a few in the West. Whether he was actually a member of the Church or remained in it is a moot question; what is certain is that his ideas were not Catholic. Rather than go into them here, it is enough to read (high church modernist) Robert Lazu Kmita’s glowing account of Soloviev’s mad, heretical notions. 4 While getting “wisdom” from an old Kabbala at the British Museum, Soloviev had a vision of the “divine Sophia”, according to Kmita.
Actually, it was worse than this. Soloviev thought that the “divine Sophia” and an ex- girlfriend of his were one and the same. He spent to rest of his life in a fruitless mystical search for her. His speculative writings are a mix of kabbalism, Gnosticism and modern philosophy from the West. Wanting to include the Catholic Church in this evil mix is not a sign of the conversion of Russia; it’s one of its errors.
This nineteenth Russian synthesis of errors that preceded Fatima, and which has now been given official recognition in Moscow and is the template for its “engagement” with other countries, is a far more “Russian” expression of error than Soviet Marxism. Sovietism was lifted from central Europe and imposed on the country by the revolution. The Russian synthesis of errors is also far more attractive to Westerners looking for an alternative to liberalism. There is something in this mix to cater for everyone’s taste.
Only the Catholic Church is unwelcome here, or tolerated as long as it stays in its ritual corner and does not disturb the pantheon. As the West grows more disinterested in the errors of the Enlightenment, Russia, by dressing them up in traditional costumes brings them back to give the Enlightenment one last chance. Now is the time for Catholic teaching to reassert itself, and not let itself be added to the synthesis of all errors.
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, Diary, p. 1029. ↩︎
- Dostoevsky, notebook (1864) in Scanlan, Dostoevsky, p. 49. ↩︎
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, Book V, Chapter V. ↩︎
- Kmita, Robert Lazu, Vladimir Solovyov: The Mystical Origins of Sophianism ↩︎
by Vinicius. Vinicius is a Melbourne-based historian-researcher focussing on early modernity as the Christian Western alternative to ideological, Enlightenment modernity.
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