F&H: These “attempts” clearly failed. How do we arrive at the present?
RM: In the 21st century there is a new wind is blowing: instead of construction there is destruction. Instead of (re)building there is demolition. This is the immediate target of today’s revolutionaries. What I say is easily understood in the context of Communism. The Communist ideology has two sides: on one hand there is a (not good, but) positive notion about an equal society without classes. On the other hand, there is this destructive aspect that wants to destroy Christianity and its base, family, property, state, and religion itself, in order to achieve the previous idea. This nihilism is the essence of the new left. The failures of the 20th century, namely the utopian visions brought only death and wars, have completely killed the constructivist approach — chaos and demolitions remained, and they hope something new may be born from that.
F&H: Let’s talk a bit more about those dates. 1517. This year many people remember the Reformation that started 500 years ago. The Catholic Church has changed a lot in the 20thcentury and has started and is trying to maintain dialogue with the other Churches ever since. What do you think, is this process successful? What may be the future of the ecumenism?
RM: I don’t think it has a future. The root of the problem is that there is not a unified protestant belief system, whereas the Catholic Church has one which has not been changed for 2000 years. One of the essential characteristics of the Catholic faith is that it is permanent. The protestant reformation is the opposite. After Luther came Zwingli, then Calvin, after that the Anabaptists, and they were followed by thousands of groups since then. The history of the Protestantism is the history of changes. The French bishop, an excellent theologian, Bossuet already wrote a book with this title in the 17thcentury: The History of the variations of the protestant churches. Protestantism is similar to Islam in this respect. There is no unified Islam, either. There is no coherent teaching, there are only groups and religious trends. The only correct dialogue with protestants, just like with Orthodoxy or Islam, should be continued along the lines of the embodiment of unity, the papacy. With this we arrive to another crucial topic, that today’s crisis in the Church affects the centre of unity, the papacy.
F&H: What do you mean by the crisis of the papacy and the Church? Pope Francis seems to be a popular and open Church leader who, with the courage to use social media, can effectively communicate his message to the people.
RM: There is a crisis of faith and morals in the Church. A bishop who took part in the Synod on the Family told me that serious internal issues occurred during the meetings. Normally a situation like this should always be solved by the pope. He is the head, Christ’s earthly representative whose duty is to pronounce the last word in arguments and critical situations. But now, unfortunately, it seems that the papacy carries the symptoms of the aforementioned crisis, which, of course, has other, mainly historical reasons, as well.
RM: Although the Virgin Mother appeared at the beginning of the twentieth century, it has perhaps become even more clear today what she had spoken to three simple shepherd children. The core of the message was, if Russia was not going to be offered up to her Immaculate Heart, their false doctrines were going to spread out to the world that was followed by wars and persecution of the Church.
These false doctrines, though the Soviet Union collapsed, are even more raging in the world than ever, since the center of Marxism is dialectical materialism and relativism.
In this ideology, there is no stability and constancy, but evolution only. Nowadays, dictatorship of the proletariat has been replaced by the dictatorship of relativism. This is the present of western societies. So our task is to bring in the Christian counter-pole into this situation.