Christ Calls for the Conversion of—Not Collaboration With—the Marxist and Masonic Enemies of His Church 

Duly reported by now was the Vatican’s hosting of a Marxist-Christian dialogue in January, earlier this year. Pope Francis freely encouraged the interaction while, moreover, conspicuously neglecting to mention Christ, Christianity, or the fact that the Catholic Church has a long history of decided condemnation of Marxist Communism. Similar disconcerting dealings include Cardinal Francesco Coccopalmerio’s presiding over a Masonic conference in February in which he renewed requests for a “permanent dialogue” with Freemasonry. 

“Dialogue” is an important theme to Masons, as expressed by the Grand Master Gustavo Raffi upon Francis’ election: he celebrated the hope for “a Church of the people [which] may…dialogue with…Freemasonry…. This is the ‘white smoke’ that [Masons] are waiting for from the Church of our time.” Yet, like Communism, membership in Freemasonry remains forbidden due to irreconcilable differences with Church doctrine.

Papal condemnation of Marxism and Freemasonry, in fact, goes back to just after the founding of these movements, the mid-nineteenth and mid-eighteenth centuries, respectively. Membership in either is strictly forbidden by Mother Church, disallowing the reception of Holy Communion for affiliates (and full excommunication by some Church councils). Collaboration with Communists was warned against as recently as Pope Benedict XVI’s Deus Caritas Est, even on the level of charitable activity, in that Catholic charity must be centrally such rather than effectively supportive of other ideologies. And paradoxically, just late last year, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith reaffirmed the Church’s ban on Catholics joining Freemasonry.

In other words, one (still) may not deal with the Devil, nor ally with the Antichrist. Christ Himself warned of secret societies and called out Communists by name—notably, just prior to the publication of Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto—in approved private revelations occurring in mid-nineteenth century France, when and where their insidious machinations in large part debuted. These associations are definitively described by Our Lord as the “enemies of the Church and her Christ.”

According to the revelations, these movements are both an extreme offense to God and an allowed, merciful chastisement by Heaven, taking the form of “the malice of revolutionary men.” As with the ancient Israelites, God is permitting modern man to experience the natural consequences of embracing anti-God ideologies, breeding what He describes as “deep-rooted impiety and absolute incredulity.” Doubting or denying the immutable laws and truth of God, man seeks to replace them with his own contriving, desiring to make himself “like unto God.”

Psalm 81 describes the similar waywardness and punishment of the Israelites: “Thou [shall not] adore a strange god…. But my people heard not my voice…. So, I let them go according to the desires of their heart: they shall walk in their own inventions….” Yet today’s idolatrous “desires of the heart” surpass those of the Israelites; for in the revelations, Christ describes current times as “never having been exceeded in iniquity.” The Israelites fell into these sins due to weakness, but the “inventions” of the Marxists and Masons are anti-God, anti-Church, in principle, from their very inception. 

Theirs is an overt stamping upon the rights of God as outlined in the first three commandments. Marx is famously quoted as saying that “Communism begins at the outset with atheism.” Lenin stated, “Communism abolishes eternal truths, all religion, and morality.” And during the recent Vatican-Masonic dialogue, Stefano Bisi, Grand Master of the Grand Orient of Italy, specified that Freemasons need only believe in the “Great Architect of the Universe,” such that “absolute truths and walls…must be torn down.” 

Venerable Fulton Sheen aptly warned of a (resulting) “religion without the Cross, a liturgy without a world to come, a religion to destroy a religion, or a politics which is a religion—one that renders unto Caesar even the things that are God’s.” Grand Master Raffi apparently celebrates such a vision, stating, “Fraternity and dialogue are [Francis’] first concrete words: maybe in the new Church nothing will ever be like before.”

The Israelites knew that reparation was necessary to “turn God’s face back” to them, so to speak; to embrace God’s blessing and religion once again. And the remedy is the same today, as outlined in the revelations to initiate the Holy Face Devotion. Therein, Christ reveals no less than the greatest devotion to make reparation for the greatest crimes—those that are not “just” un-Christian but anti-Church.

Christ urgently commends the faithful, via reparation for these crimes, to make spiritual war on the enemies of the Church who plot to destroy Christian civilization by way of instilling heresy and apostacy. Various popes evidenced their concern of this threat: Leo XIII,  by composing the St. Michael prayer, as well as approving the Archconfraternity of the Holy Face immediately for the entire world within the year after his vison in which Satan challenged Christ that he could destroy His Church; Pius X, by warning of modernists who plotted to ruin the Church from within; and Paul VI, by stating that the “smoke of Satan had entered the Church,” likely referring to the anti-Communism documents of Vatican II not having been published and perhaps, additionally, the infiltration of Freemasonry. Christ revealed His Face as both the Face of God and the Face of the Church, or its doctrine, its injuries being renewed by current heretical blasphemies, its defacing barring recognition.

Reparation to the Holy Face is a means to draw men, all men, back to proper love of and reverence for Our Lord. In the Holy Face Devotion, devotees are called to make reparation for themselves but especially for their fellow brethren to console and adore the Godhead itself (versus aspects of Christ’s sacred humanity). There is the understanding that all that may be done on a human level is useless without first making the requisite reparation. Mankind is facing a spiritual battle, such that the remedy is spiritual armament, though for the purpose of the conversion, not death, of the enemy. 

The infiltration of Marxist and Masonic ideologies upon every facet of modern life—manifest as an inversion of God’s truth and morality in societal norms, education, government, and religion—has produced crimes against the rights of God so heinous as to require the merits and love of Christ Himself, residing in His wounded Countenance, to be offered to the Father by mankind in reparation. Man has realized a categorical difference in sin, such that his own merits and love are not sufficient; he must rely instead on the power of God as present in the wounded Face of Christ. This reparation becomes, therefore, an offering of God to God, mirroring the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar, of which the devotion is an extension.

Reparation to the Holy Face of Christ is consolation for God and mercy for man. It encompasses the great, two-part commandment: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind. [And] thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” (Mark 12:37-39). 

Like Veronica, who, for her merciful gesture of braving the soldiers to soothe Christ’s wounded Face, was rewarded by the imprint of His Countenance upon her veil, devotees’ acts of consolation to Christ’s Face, wounded anew by current blasphemies, are recompensed by Christ impressing His likeness upon their souls. Though these acts of the heart are designed to be selfless love of God and a means to draw mercy for the masses, great blessings are reserved for the devotees as well. Christ bestows the offering of His Face to the Father and the return flow of mercy, through Our Lady, as “the greatest source of grace second to the sacraments” and “the most beautiful work under the sun.”

Further revealing its significance in the spiritual unfolding of things, Our Lord forewarned that Satan would do everything in his power to stamp out the Work of Reparation, likely the reason that most readers may not have heard of the Holy Face devotion nor the young French Carmelite who was asked by Christ to initiate it, Sister Marie de Saint Pierre. Christ also disclosed that Satan abandons to his subordinates the charge of other classifications of sinners, but he keeps those of blasphemy to himself: “his flock of predilection.” Man, therefore, via the devotion, is to become, according to Christ, “a terror to hell.”

Let us then rise to the challenge!

An in-depth analysis of the Holy Face Devotion, its modern relevance, and its spirituality (complementary to that of St. Therese of Lisieux and the Carmelite mystical tradition) is written about in a new Sophia Institute publication, Unveiling the Sixth Station of the Cross: Reparation to the Holy Face, Mother of All Devotions, by Mary Jane Zuzolo, great-great-great niece of Sister Marie de Saint Pierre, the French Carmelite who received messages from Christ to initiate the Work of Reparation.