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"The revolution devours its children."  — Jacques Mallet du Pan

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December 30, 1983

Bridgeport, New York

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A December wind was coming off the ice of Oneida Lake and finding its way through the walls of the old house on Fisher's Bay. The devotion candle on the mantel kept bending in the drafts — blue at the base, orange in the middle, a thin white tip. Above the candle, under an old crucifix, the icons of Jesus and Mary looked down on the room.

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We knelt in a half-circle around the hearth — my father and mother, my sisters, and me — the living room dark except for the candle. Our voices rose and fell on the family Rosary, the Hail Marys coming out in the rhythm we had been saying them most nights that year. On the wall above us, the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary looked down from their frames with the same tired weight I could see on my parents' faces.

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I was ten. Kneeling in place was a trial at that age. My patience frayed most when my father, in his fervor, extended the end of the Rosary with a litany of saints.

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"St. Damien, pray for us…"

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"St. Hubert, pray for us…"

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"St. Philomena, pray for us…"

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His petition seemed endless. These were strangers to me, their stories unknown. My father said being Catholic was to enter into the Communion of Saints — that they were our advocates, our family. I understood it. It did not make the litany shorter.

When the final prayers faded, we scrambled up from our knees, a flurry of small bodies vying for the honor of blowing out the candle. The trembling flame on the mantel was the prize for every soul under eight.

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"Mom, can I blow it out?" Violet pleaded, as my father intoned the Sign of the Cross to seal the Rosary.

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"In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit."

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"Yes, dear," my mother said.

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"That's not fair! She asked before we were done!" Nellie protested, leaping up to puff out the flame before Violet could reach it.

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"Moooom!" Violet wailed.

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"Nellie, stop it." My mother's voice was sharp.

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"Do you all want to hear a story?" my father said.

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My heart sank. I wanted to get back to the hypnotic glow of my game of Mario Bros. And I still held a grudge from the last time my father had told a post-Rosary tale, three years before — the night he had spun the story of St. Nicholas only to reveal that there was no "Santa Claus" as we had known him. Reindeer, sleigh, elves — all a grand illusion. Christmas had not looked the same since.

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My sisters clapped eagerly.

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"Yes!" Marie chirped.

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"Yes!" Nellie echoed.

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My father had a gift for stories. In those moments, and when he talked about the Faith, he was fully present to us — not the Union Business Manager taking calls from out-of-work members late into the evening, but our father. To see him speaking about his faith with that kind of conviction inspired us.

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"Have you heard of Rasputin, the Mad Monk?" he began.

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"No," we answered in unison — me, Marie, Nelie, and Violet.

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"Today marks the anniversary of his death."

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"That's sad," Violet said, barely four.

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My father chuckled. "Not so sad, honey. Rasputin was an evil man. They called him the Mad Monk because he played a key role in the fall of the Russian Empire, which unleashed the evils that haunt us now."

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He struck a new match and relit the candle Nellie had just blown out. The glow climbed the wall.

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"Some say Rasputin wasn't mad at all — that he was possessed by demons, a pawn of Satan sowing chaos. The story begins about sixty years ago with Czar Nicholas and Empress Alexandra, Russia's royal family — the Romanovs. The Romanovs carried a curse from intermarriage. Royals used to marry their relatives to keep the bloodline pure, but that practice brought with it the plague of hemophilia."

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"Marrying family? Like brothers and sisters?" I asked, wrinkling my nose.

"Ewww," Marie added.

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"Not quite. Cousins wed cousins."

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"What is hemophilia, Dad?"

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"It's a blood disorder. If you get a cut, your body can't coagulate the blood. You can bleed to death."

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"Yuck." Nellie scrunched up her nose.

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"Their youngest child, Alexei, was the heir to his father's throne. He had the disease. His mother was so desperate to find him a cure she opened herself to any means of healing. She sent her advisors out across the country. That opened the door to Rasputin, who had a reputation as a mystic and a healer. When the Empress brought him to court, he managed to heal Alexei when no one else could."

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"If he was evil, how did he heal him?"

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"Well — devils are angels too. They are very powerful."

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"Rasputin used the healing to gain favor. The Empress thought he was sent by God and made him her confidant. When the Czar went off to fight in World War I, Rasputin's shadow grew. He used his influence to put his own allies into positions of authority. Rumors of his immoral life fueled resentment against the monarchy. The rumors spread like wildfire and damaged the reputation of the Czar."

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"Why?"

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"Because the war made life very hard. There weren't many jobs. People were starving. Russians were a pious people. When they heard this man was ruling Russia through the Empress, they lost confidence in their Emperor. The nobles saw him as a threat to the monarchy. He was unraveling Russia and empowering the Bolsheviks."

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My father's voice dropped. "Loyalists resolved to kill Rasputin. They invited him to dinner and laced his wine with enough cyanide to kill an elephant. To their amazement, he kept eating and drinking as though nothing was wrong. The poison didn't faze him. One of the conspirators grew impatient, pretended he had to go to the bathroom, got up, walked behind Rasputin, and shot him in the back. Rasputin got up and tried to flee. They shot him a dozen more times. He fell. The men gathered around, sure he was dead. Then, to their horror, he rose again and tried to flee again. They had to keep fighting to subdue him. He fought his way outside. Only outside did they finally overtake him. They tied him up, put him in a burlap sack, and threw him into an icy river."

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"The next morning the police found his body frozen on the shore. He had somehow escaped from the sack, crawled onto the bank, and finally died of the cold. The poison, the bullets, the beating — none of it had been enough."

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We sat still. The candle flickered in our eyes.

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"That's scary," Marie whispered.

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"I don't understand," I said. "Why didn't the poison or the bullets kill him?"

"Some say he was possessed," my father said. "The devil was animating him, using him to create chaos — so that the Russian people would accept the Bolshevik Revolution and topple the Czar."

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"What are Bolsheviks?" Marie asked.

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"They were Communists. They began the Russian Revolution that October. They were responsible for the tide of bloodshed that was unleashed on the world."

A chill came over me. We sat in silence for a long moment.

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"But that same October," my father went on, "God sent his Mother from heaven to counter this evil. In Fatima, Portugal, Our Lady appeared to three shepherd children and gave them the greatest miracle witnessed in modern times — the Miracle of the Sun. On October 13, 1917, while the Bolsheviks were rising, a hundred thousand people gathered in a rain-soaked field in Portugal because the three children had said the Lady was going to give them a sign. The clouds parted. The sun danced in the sky and seemed to plunge toward the earth. Everyone there fell to the ground, thinking it was the end of the world."

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"What was the miracle for?" I asked.

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"So that people would believe the message from heaven. The three secrets she told the children."

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"What secrets?"

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My father pointed to the window, where snowflakes were swirling in the lamplight. "Our Lady told the three shepherd children — (Sister) Lucia, Francisco, and Jacinta — that sins of the flesh were dragging souls to Hell, like those snowflakes falling. Unless the world converted, many more souls would fall. Lucia, the oldest, said they would have died of fright if the Lady had not first told them they would all go to heaven. Then Our Lady showed them a vision of Hell. Her second secret warned there would be a second great war if the world did not repent — and she warned that Russia would spread her errors."

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"What errors?"

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"Most people said it was Communism. The real error Russia spread was atheism. When God is removed from a country, every man becomes a god unto himself. That's why Communism has killed over a hundred million people and persecuted the Church."

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"And the third secret…" He paused. "It's half-known. The only thing we know for certain is what Sister Lucia wrote. The dogma of the faith will be preserved in Portugal — dot, dot, dot." He pointed at the air for each dot, marking the ellipsis in Lucia's writing. "She spoke of the faith enduring in Portugal. That's a hint at the crisis we are in now."

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"Why don't we know by now?"

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"Well, that's the million-dollar question. Our Lady ordered the Vatican to reveal it by 1960. But Pope John XXIII read it and said the message wasn't for our time."

"I don't understand why the Pope wouldn't reveal it."

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"At that time, many believed the Third Secret foretold a great apostasy that would come.  This was when Pope John XXIII was in the middle of planning Second Vatican Council.  They didn't want to believe it was true. The Church was infiltrated by Communists and Freemasons, and they used the Council to introduce heresy and bring about a great apostasy. That's why we pray the Rosary every night. That's why we go to the Latin Mass.

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Our Lady warned that the final battle between the Lord and the kingdom of Satan would be over marriage and the family. Those are the evils plaguing us now. She said a great tribulation would befall the world if the Pope and the bishops did not consecrate Russia to her Immaculate Heart as she had asked. Sister Lucia said the Pope would eventually do it, but late."

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"What's a tribulation?" I asked.

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"Something like nuclear war."

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"When will the Pope and the bishops do the Consecration?" I asked. I was hoping a remedy was right around the corner.

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"Time will tell. Time will tell."

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•  •  •

Later that night I lay in bed and tried to put my father's story out of my head. I could not. The word tribulation stayed. I thought about nuclear war. I stared into the dark of my bedroom, and the sounds of objects flying overhead outside — far away, above the house — pierced the silence of the night sky.

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Is that a nuclear missile? I thought.

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I could not tell the difference between an intercontinental ballistic missile and a jetliner carrying retired snowbirds fleeing the cold, gray Syracuse winter for their winter houses in Florida. My whole body was full of dread that at any moment one of those sounds would be a missile, and a missile would come down on our house, and then there would be hell on earth, and possibly an eternity in Hell after that. Ever since we had started going to the Latin Mass offered by the priests of the Society of St. Pius X, everything had seemed bleak to me — a departure from what I had known before.

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The TV film The Day After had aired a few weeks earlier. I had seen it. The pale, sickly people losing their hair from radiation sickness played over and over in the theater of my imagination, and the strangers' faces kept being replaced by the faces of my parents and my sisters.

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Radiation poisoning was an evil my young mind could grasp because I could see it. The real evil was more insidious, and I was too young to recognize it. My father had told us of Our Lady's warning — that Russia would spread her errors. Neither he nor I understood the breadth or depth of it. It would not be nuclear bombs and radiation that would tear apart my family and my world. It would not be radical ideology either. It would be fear. The thought of these tribulations filled me with dread. My only comfort that night was whispering Hail Marys to myself, one after another, until I fell asleep.