In private apparitions after the major ones, Fatima seer Jacinta Marto — said she was told a few things that should give modern society pause — rather urgently.
For example: “The sins of the world are very great.” “The sins that lead more souls to hell are the sins of the flesh.” “Fashions that will greatly offend Our Lord will appear. People who serve God should not follow fashions. The Church has no fashions. Our Lord is always the same.”
That was between 1917, when the apparitions started, and her death in 1920 — cusp of the “Roaring Twenties.”
“The spirit of the Roaring Twenties was marked by a general feeling of novelty associated with modernity and a break with traditions,” notes Wikipedia. “Everything seemed to be feasible through modern technology. New technologies, especially automobiles, moving pictures, and radio, brought ‘modernity’ to a large part of the population.”
Image result for jacinta fatimaA roaring culture, for sure. The silver screen. Valentino. Chaplin. Instant unprecedented wealth. Celebrities. Theater palaces. Even back then, provocative stars. A roaring economy. Flying freight planes!
But compared to our own day — very tame indeed!
Almost quaint.
Speakeasies?
Not much, next to current crack houses or “adult” nightclubs, advertised in billboards on major highways. We have on TV and the internet more evil today than what was accomplished in the tunnels of San Francisco opium dens (circa the early 1900s, just before the quake).
Noted a writer for the Brooklyn Rail: “1920s America, like Weimar, expressed wildness before capitalism’s cataclysmic collapse into depression and war.”
In apparitions to four girls in Heede, Germany, Our Blessed Mother, holding the Infant in one arm, a globe, with Cross, in the other, summed up the state of the world in 1937 when she said, “Girls, pray the Rosary in reparation for the sins of the world.” That was just before the rise of Hitler and a fantastically dark period during which not just millions of Jews but also millions of Ukrainians and others trapped in the Soviet Union would be executed under Communism. It was also just before the Great Sign predicted at Fatima, the sign heralding a greater war, a bigger “punishment” (to use the exact Fatima words).
How can anyone doubt that chastisement occurs!
In the U.S. were strong hurricanes and, after that “roar” of the Twenties, the Great Depression. It was claimed that years after the first apparitions (which the diocese authenticated), Jesus came with an “angel of justice.” Keep in mind: this was now after World War Two and the Holocaust. Apparently, the sinfulness of mankind continued. And would — for the rest of the century. Danger had begun to build up again. Said one alleged message (in 1945): “Humanity has not heard My Mother. The times are serious. The angels of justice are spread throughout the world. For those who do not have Grace it will be scary. What will happen will be terrible. Humanity is worse than before the Flood. The world lies in an obscure darkness. I want to save everyone. This generation deserves to be destroyed, but looking at what is right [with the world], I will leave, that My Mercy eventually triumphs.”
At LaSalette, had Our Lady not warned of the same, lamenting a world in which “people will think of nothing but amusement”?
After all this prosperity, fun, and wanderlust in the Twenties, there was the Wall Street crash; there was a monstrous global plague of influenza (killing Jacinta and her brother Francisco). It was also a time of ferocious hurucans: In 1926 Miami Beach, locus of amusements, nearly vanished from one direct hit from the Atlantic (some believed Miami was in such a location that one day it would vanish in a much greater disaster — that its very location was not feasible. FM radio! Technicolor! What had LaSalette said? “People will think of nothing but amusement.” Was the clock, reset after that hurricane, ticking again?
Source: Daily Spirit-Adapted from Where the Cross Stands
