Our Lady is the Destroyer of all heresies. St. Pius X called Modernism 'the compendium of all heresies'. The roots of Modernism are in agnostic philosophy - an agnosticism supported by the Copernican assertion that the Church was wrong about her geocentric cosmology. If the Church was wrong about so fundamental and foundational a matter, she cannot be trusted with the far weightier matters of faith and morals. This was the conclusion of the Church's enemies (and too many of her own sons) when Galileo Galilee advanced the idea of a mobile earth spinning diurnally and orbiting the sun. Yet our Lady of Fatima gave us a miraculous sign to demonstrate once and for all that the Church was not wrong to condemn heliocentrism, but that she had faithfully handed down what she received from the Holy Fathers.
For those unfamiliar with the controversy, it concerns the Church's biblical cosmology. Theologian Paula Haigh (+2015) explains
The medieval world possessed such a sound foundation in its Geocentric Cosmology. Cosmology, which defines the Structure of the Universe and the fixed centrality of earth, is the necessary essential of the entire body of knowledge we know as the Natural Order. It is this natural order upon which Grace builds the entire edifice of the Supernatural Order of Divine Grace - producing the Elect and those beacons of light for us, the Saints. Any historian who omits in-depth consideration of the relations between the natural sciences and theology, will not give us true or reliable history. It was first Copernicus - and then his popularizer, Galileo, who first cut the umbilical cord binding the natural sciences to Theology - by way of Holy Scripture. Without the guidance of the theologians of the Church, the natural sciences were bound to go astray, and so they did. The end result is precisely what the encyclical Pascendi describes as the subjugation of faith to science - a science falsely so called, (1 Tim. 6:20). This is a crime of the greatest magnitude - the synthesis of all heresies - overturning in men's minds the very hierarchy of reality.
The Church put the
full weight of her magisterial authority behind the condemnation of heliocentrism as formal heresy. The Church was right. There isn't and there
never was any proof for heliocentrism. The miracle of the sun at Fatima was our
Lady's way of demonstrating that the defeat of Modernism will only be
achieved by recovering the Church's full and plenary power for proclaiming the
complete record of revelation to a world that had been plunged into philosophical futility and meaninglessness. For, if the earth were some insignificant planet cast into a random corner of the universe drifting aimlessly towards oblivion as the modern philosophers postulate, what good was religion? On October 13th, 1917 the sun danced; not
the earth, not the cosmos. 70,000 people saw it, to include many atheists. Our
Lady is the Destroyer of All Heresies, and the miracle of the sun is a great
sign for us to believe as the Church had always taught - that we occupy a privileged place in the very center of the cosmos in which God became man in her virginal womb.
In Psalm 18, the sun is depicted as an athlete running the way "from the end of heaven, and his circuit even to the end thereof" to illustrate the movement of the sun around the earth. This Psalm clearly tells the
reader that the 'language' spoken by the heavens is (a) universal; and (b)
understood by all. The plain evidence of the phenomena is that the sun circles
the earth daily. No one has ever observed the earth circling the sun or
spinning on an axis. As if to emphasize how irrefutable and infallible this
phenomena is, the Psalmist then discourses about the perfection of the Law of the
Lord. The entire Psalm moves in perfect motion through four themes:
(1) The heavens declare the glory of God.
(2) The sun circles the earth.
(3) The Law
of the Lord is perfect.
(4) Whoever
keeps the just judgments of the Lord will be kept from sin.
Lest we think this is a simplistic and primitive way of exegeting the divine Word, let us take a Doctor of the Church, St. Robert Bellarmine for our guide:
"Second. I say that, as you know, the Council [of Trent] prohibits expounding the Scriptures contrary to the common agreement of the holy Fathers. And if Your Reverence would read not only the Fathers but also the commentaries of modern writers on Genesis, Psalms, Ecclesiastes and Josue, you would find that all agree in explaining literally (ad litteram) that the sun is in the heavens and moves swiftly around the earth, and that the earth is far from the heavens and stands immobile in the center of the universe. Now consider whether in all prudence the Church could encourage giving to Scripture a sense contrary to the holy Fathers and all the Latin and Greek commentators." (Letter to Foscarini, 1615)
Vatican I (1869-1870) infallibly confirmed the teaching of Trent:
Now since the decree on the interpretation of holy scripture, profitably made by the council of Trent, with the intention of constraining rash speculation, has been wrongly interpreted by some, we renew that decree and declare its meaning to be as follows: that in matters of faith and morals, belonging as they do to the establishing of christian doctrine, that meaning of holy scripture must be held to be the true one, which holy mother church held and holds, since it is her right to judge of the true meaning and interpretation of holy scripture. In consequence, it is not permissible for anyone to interpret holy scripture in a sense contrary to this, or indeed against the unanimous consent of the fathers. (emphasis mine)
The philosophy condemned by Pope St. Pius X in the 1907 encyclical Pascendi gregis (On the Doctrines of the Modernists) is agnosticism, the belief that man could not know for certain whether there is a God, and that His will is likewise unknowable (this is condemned at Vatican I, ch. i, 3). St. Pius X counted among the chief of the doctrines of the Modernists the vile and antibiblical idea of evolution. The evolution championed by Teilhard de Chardin which has wounded the faith of the Church so deeply to this very day presumes upon the Church's loss of authority in supposedly interpreting the first chapters of Genesis incorrectly. If the earth was not created on the first day and the sun, moon and stars on the fourth as lights and signs for the times and seasons to benefit man, which the Church had always taught, then the Church was wrong about the foundational passages of Sacred Scripture. If she was wrong about this, then surely she could be in error about the cosmos being created in six days. Thus the way for Modernism is paved, not by true science, nor by sound philosophy, but by a demonically animated skepticism: "...hath God said...?" (Genesis 3,1)
This wound was inflicted upon the Church not by Darwin, but by Nicholas Copernicus, who, like Teilhard was a priest who rejected the testimony of the Holy Fathers infallibly confirmed by the Council of Trent. In summary, there is no Darwin and no Teilhard without the monstrous error of heliocentrism, which three Popes rightly condemned as a formal heresy for its opposition to the Patristic consensus.
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| Our Lady of Guadalupe |
No wonder then that of all the signs at her queenly disposal she, the Seat of Wisdom, chooses the dance of the sun at Fatima. This sign unambiguously indicates the movement of the sun, just as the miracle requested by Josue in the Old Testament (cf. Josue 10,13). Perhaps through this sign our Heavenly Queen is showing mankind that all the errors of Russia which were then as now flooding the world could be staunched by her Immaculate Heart; that she who is Mediatrix of all graces could obtain for the Church that glorious defeat of the compendium of all heresies, Modernism. As St. Pius X recognized her in his encyclical on Modernism as the Destroyer of All Heresies, the Blessed Virgin Mary restores that wisdom which had been so long abandoned and rejected by men under the delusion of the heliocentric cosmos which rendered the Church's interpretation of the Word of God to be wrong. If this sign is received in good faith from our Lady of Fatima, the shame of 'persecuting science' with 'faulty biblical exegesis' would be remedied and the Church vindicated in her treatment of the entire Galileo affair, which at present time serves as an embarrassment and a humiliation.
There is no heresy of Modernism without the doctrine of evolution infecting the human element of the Catholic Church. There are no evolutionary toxins wounding sacred doctrine without the stigma of wrongly interpreting Genesis. And that stigma was first applied not by the adepts of Darwin, but of Copernicus.
Our Lady is showing us at Fatima that the way back to orthodoxy (and true militancy) is to recover the correct philosophical moorings that the Fathers of the Church handed down to us, which is to say, the earth is stable at the center of the cosmos, and is the theater of redemption in which God became man in the Virgin's womb.