The subject that I loved most at School was History, but sadly it was served up to us like a dogs  dinner. One term we studied the Greco-Persian wars, then the Tudors, then the Norman Invasion, then the Civil war, then the Agricultural and Industrial revolutions, and so it would go on. 
 
It was no better, in fact it was worse, when I studied Church History. The Professor who taught us was writing a book on The reforms of Charlemagne, so we had   Charlemagne, every day for  three years.
 
I never knew what came before or after him although I was technically qualified to teach Church History. If this is how you study History, then  you will never learn from it,  and what then is the point of it?
 
History needs to be seen as a whole, as a continuum, as  development or arrested development, if you are going to learn from it.
 
That is why I  am going to look at History from its  beginning to its end, so we can learn why we are where we are now, and what must be done to change the terrible moral morass in which we find ourselves today.
 
Time and lack of competence prevent me from doing this for Secular History, or even for Church History, so I will confine myself to what is called Salvation History.
 
The History of God’s love for us  and our response, or lack of response to the only power on earth that can radically change us,  from who we are now, to the person we have been created to become.
 
Almost 4,000 years ago, Abraham proclaimed to His people, a covenant or agreement guaranteed by God’s unconditional love, that would finally make His descendants into  a great nation, even though  all too many would  betray Him.
 
After what were considered to be the golden days of Judaism, in and immediately after the reigns of King David and King Solomon, Jewish spirituality began to wane.
 
It was the vocation of the great prophets to remind the people, of God’s covenant with Abraham, of His unconditional love,  and of the great nation that they would become if they remained true to that covenant.
 
However, it seems that it was only a comparatively few who remained faithful. These few came to be called the Remnant. It was during the exile in Babylonia that the Remnant were purified, to deepen their faith on their return and to rebuild Jerusalem.
 
And as the centuries passed by, even the Remnant began to lose their way, as Jewish spirituality became little more than a formalism that emphasized the outer expression—rather than the inner reality—of what should have been their loving relationship with God.
 
It was then that another group could be seen emerging from within the Remnant at the time of the Maccabees. They,  wanted to remain true to the traditional spirituality that had first developed and grown out of their sojourn in the desert under the leadership of Moses.
 
This group came to be called the “Anawim,” or the “Poor of Yahweh.” Some members of that group are mentioned by name, for they appear in the Gospels. I am referring to such people as Our Lady’s cousin Elizabeth, and her husband, Zechariah: Their son, John the Baptist; Simeon and Anna; and, of course, St. Anne and St. Joachim; St. Joseph; Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea.
 
They were all characterized by a pure and simple biblical faith, born out of their inner humility, that made them realize their need of God and their need, therefore, to prepare for His coming in a pure and simple biblical spirituality. 
 
Their inner poverty had nothing to do with how much money they had. Instead, it was characterized by their inner spiritual poverty before God that, in the words of the beatitudes, enabled them “to know their need of God” in such a way that, in their need, they continually turned to Him in prayer.
 
St. Luke’s Gospel was written especially for the Anawim. That is why it has been regularly called, in turn, by Scripture scholars, “The Gospel of the Poor,” “The Gospel of Prayer,” “The Gospel of the Holy Spirit,” or “The Gospel of Our Lady.”
 
For in their all-enveloping experience of their need of God, the Poor of Yahweh regularly turned to prayer throughout their daily lives. It is this that enabled the Holy Spirit to become as active in them as He was in the life of Christ, their King. 
 
Finally, St. Luke’s Gospel is called “The Gospel of Our Lady” because it shows how, in becoming the most perfect exemplification of the Anawim, her perfect prayerful life enables her to become the Mother of Christ.
 
We, in our turn, must become mothers to Christ, as our prayer life enables Him to “make His Home in us,” as He Himself promised would become possible at the Last Supper: “Make your home in Me, and I will make my home in you.”
 
Let me now give you a brief summary of  what happened to authentic  Catholic Spirituality over subsequent centuries down to the malevolent moral malaise that prevails today, not only in the world in general but in the Church too.
 
Early Christian Spirituality was characterised by what I will call the Primacy of Love.  Firstly, the  pure simple and unconditional love of God now radiant and radio active in the Risen and Glorified Body of Jesus Christ, that was first poured out on the first Pentecost Day.
 
 Secondly the pure simple and unconditional love taught to the first Christians, the new “Poor of Yahweh.”    
 
It was they, who  in practising their profound prayer lives,  were enabled to receive this Unconditional and transforming love of God the Father, The Holy Spirit, who drew them up and into  the mystical body of their Risen Lord Jesus Christ ‘in whom they now lived and moved and had their being’.
 
It was this, all embracing and infectious Love, that enabled the first Christians to convert  an ancient pagan world into a Christian world   with such amazing speed.
 
Then suddenly, beginning in the fourth century everything was  arrested by a pernicious heresy  called Arianism that insisted that Christ was not God.
 
As this meant that Christ was now only seen as  a man, how could  God the Father use Christ’s divine nature as the channel, through which His human nature was transformed and transfigured.
 
It could therefore no longer become the means of communicating His pure  simple and unconditional life and love to other human beings, who were yearning for the promised redemption, the salvation, and the sanctification that can only be brought about by God’s love.
 
Almost 90% of Catholics originally succumbed to this travesty of the truth. Without the modern communications, that we take for granted, orthodoxy took time to reinstate, by endlessly repeating, Christ is God, Christ is God,  like the ever recurring beat of a drum.
 
With the gradual reinstatement of Orthodoxy however, a new understandable,  but unwelcome emphasis, began to prevail. It was an emphasis on The Divinity of Christ, but at the expense of His humanity, that was either forgotten or seriously played down.
 
For all but a saintly Remnant the ensuing ‘Dark Ages’ gave birth to a new spirituality that began to predominate. God was still in heaven, but the promised union with Him, that was once brought about by the action of the Holy Spirit sent by Our Risen and Divine  Lord, would now have to be  brought about by human endeavour.
 
A form of Christian Stoicism was born called semi-Pelagianism in which what had previously been done with the help of the Holy Spirit had to be done predominantly by the human Spirit alone, as least in practice.  
 
Thanks to other current ‘isms’ like Gnosticism, Manicheism, and Neo Platonism the human body  came to be seen as an obstacle to the desired union with God for which believers craved. It was this that gave rise to ferocious forms of asceticism  that Jesus Himself never taught in order to free the Human Spirit from its ‘imprisonment in the body’.
 
In this spirituality, self-chosen physical pain and suffering,  was often seen as the indispensable way to union with God. They wrongly believed that it was only when the body had been subjugated, by their own endeavour, that their true spiritual selves could be freed from the corruption of their  bodies  to be united with God.
 
It was with this misconception  that  a new and  alien form of ‘Christian Spirituality’ began and prevailed until the original Spirituality returned.
The return of the Christ-centred Spirituality  began, when after Jerusalem was taken by the Crusaders in 1099  myriad pilgrimages to the Holy Land ensued.
 
These pilgrimages enabled the pilgrims to see once again the importance of Christ’s human nature and divine nature in such a way    that it enabled the Spirituality of the early Church to return.
 
These pilgrims for instance, not only saw where Jesus was born, where He lived where He taught and where He died, but they saw where His Divine Nature enabled Him to work miracles, curing the deaf and the dumb, giving back sight to the blind, and even raising the dead back to life again.
 
But most of all they saw the empty tomb from which the Holy Spirit who abided in Him raised Him up on the first Easter Day and the place where, after He returned to Heaven He sent the Holy Spirit on the first Pentecost day.
 
Even though they might not have understood the word Hypostatic Union they knew without a shadow of a doubt that in Jesus Christ their Risen Lord, there were two natures; a divine nature and a human nature  in One Person.   The New Spirituality that soon began to prevail re-emphasised the human nature of Jesus.
 
It soon spread over the whole  of the Westen world  with a solid theological foundation thanks to St Bernard of Clairvaux and St Fransis of Assisi, the former  primarily for intellectuals, the latter primarily  for the laity.
Then to the recently founded Mendicant orders like the Dominicans, the Carmelites and the Augustinian friars, who spread this New Christ-centred Spirituality throughout Christendom.
 
The misconception about suffering and its place in Catholic Spirituality was highlighted by a revelation given to St Francis of Assisi moments before he received the Stigmata, two years before he died.
 
The very moment before St Francis was given the Stigmata, that would result in much personal suffering,  he received a divine revelation.
 
This revelation  made it clear that we are not united with God through suffering but only by love. This revelation was given, not so much for St Francis who already knew it, but for others, like us,  who have long since forgotten it.
 
Please notice that unlike some of those ancient ascetics, and their followers, the suffering that St Francis  asked for,  was so that he could show his love for Christ ever more fully, by participating in His supreme redemptive action and by making reparation for his own sins, and for the sins of the world.
 
It was the outward expression of his inner love for Christ that enveloped him. It was not the means that united him with Christ. That was a lifelong loving of Him, learnt in ongoing and ever deepening prayer, and the far more productive daily sacrifices that had to be made to persevere in that prayer.
 
Dramatic and self-chosen  sacrifices then, must  never be seen as the way to union  with God through Christ. This can only be achieved in the profound contemplative prayer where the same pure and simple unconditional love of God is leant, that is similar to the pure simple and unconditional love with which God loves us.
 
Unlike persons cannot be united until the same  sort of love that animates us is simultaneously generated to bring about the union that is mutually desired.
 
What has to be emphasised is, that  once a saint has been possessed by the all-enveloping and tangible love of God, through contemplative prayer, then they want to express their love of God  in heroic and dramatic ways that would most certainly lead arrogant beginners to spiritual suicide.
 
There is a crucial difference then, between the small continuous, but daily  sacrifices made  in prayer, that initially leads a person to come to  know and love God, and the far more courageous  and flamboyant sacrifices that can be read about  in the lives of the saints. 
 
These far more dramatic sacrifices are the  expressions of a sublime heart-felt love of God that  are  quite beyond the experience of a beginner.
 
They are pure gifts of God  that impels a person who is experientially enthralled by this sublime  love of God to embrace heroic sacrifices,  not just to express their love, but because they want to share, as best they can, in the Redemptive love of Christ, and further to make reparation  for themselves and for the whole of humankind.
 
The Spirituality of the Primacy of Love had returned and the profound contemplative prayer needed to receive this Love was once again seen as paramount, in the new Christ-centred Spirituality that would henceforth take centre stage in Catholic Spirituality, thanks to the Crusaders and the Theology of St Bernard.
 
The very raison d’etre of the new Mendicant Religious Orders was, in the words of St Thomas Aquinas, firstly to contemplate, and then to share the fruits of Contemplation with others. 
 
The terrible tragedy is, that four hundred years later, a heresy as pernicious as Arianism, but sadly hardly known today, destroyed  the rebirth  of the profound prayer-centred Catholic Spirituality that owed so much to St Bernard of Clairvaux,  St Francis of Assisi, and the Dominicans, the Carmelites and the Augustinians.
 
This heresy was called Quietism.
 
It was because of this heresy, that encouraged protestant ideas and led its adherents into serious sexual sins, as you can read in Monsignor Ronald Knox’s masterwork  ‘Enthusiasm’, that all forms of contemplative prayer were condemned.
Henceforth, the profound mystical contemplation and all forms of prayer that led to it, were quashed and only purely vocal prayer was seen as safe. 
 
The prayer that generated the pure simple and unconditional human loving that opens a person to receive the pure simple and unconditional Loving of God vanished.
 
Take love out of family life and the inevitable collapse is only a matter of time. Take love out of Catholic Spirituality and it’s collapse is only a matter of time too.
 
The cataclysmic decay and decline in Catholic Spirituality, that cries out for Divine Intervention in the twenty first century, is the result of deep, personal and contemplative prayer being taken out of  that Spirituality, thanks to Quietism and its ultimate consequence.
 
And, after disappearing from view for several centuries it has eventually  been replaced by the so-called socio-psychological spirituality introduced in the most recent forms of modernism.
 
What happened in the Catholic Church has long since happened in Protestantism. There was no place for Mystical Theology in their teaching only Moralism.
 
By Moralism I mean the moral teaching of the New Testament supplemented by the moral teaching of Stoicism that began to infiltrate into Christianity after the Renaissance.
 
This Moralism has of course also infiltrated into Catholic Spirituality, most particularly through the new congregations founded both before and after the Council of Trent.
 
After Quietism and thanks to the Enlightenment this Moralism took up a central position in both Catholic and Protestant teaching, and more specifically in their Spiritualities, and it all too quickly insinuated its way into the older orders who had once seen Contemplation as the only true preparation for Apostolic action.
 
Without the practice of the profound Mystical Theology, that was  lived in the Early Church, that returned after the reopening of the Holy Land, as we have seen,  nobody could be empowered to live the moral teaching of  Christ.
 
It is impossible to live it  without the same Holy Spirit who inspired Christ whilst He was on earth. As Christ Himself put it –‘Without me you will have no power to do anything’.
 
Without the same Holy Spirit who animated Jesus Christ, the first Christians and later faithful followers inspired by, and suffused with contemplative love, the  degeneration that leads to spiritual disaster, was only a matter of time.
 
That time has long since come, not just in Protestant and Catholic Churches,  but in the world that once looked to them for their moral compass, even though they were non-believers.
 
Even though there are still some believers, like the Poor of Yahweh, who waited for the first coming of Christ over two thousand years ago, there are not enough of them to reverse the moral degeneracy that is now all but universal.
 
Hopefully there will be sufficient of them to help lead the rebirth in faith after Christ’ s  intervention  in the near future, as Our Lady has promised.
 
But let me return for a moment to authentic Catholic Spirituality to see how, after the condemnation of Quietism, it deteriorated into less than a shadow of the God-given Spirituality first lived by Jesus Christ, before He introduced it into the Early Church through His Blessed mother and the twelve Apostles.
 
After its condemnation then, and the condemnation of  its founder, the Spanish priest Molinos, and his pseudo-mysticism Quietism, in 1687, the ancient and hallowed teaching on how to practise selfless, unconditional loving that opens a person to God’s unconditional loving—received in contemplative prayer—was extracted from authentic Catholic Traditional Spirituality.
 
It has left a gap that has not been filled by genuine contemplative prayer down to the present day. Hence our present moral malaise. True Catholic mystical theology was thrown out, like the baby with the bathwater. Even great mystical writers like St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila were considered suspect, and their works were relegated to the top shelves of clerical libraries to gather dust.
 
Without what St. Thomas Aquinas called the “fruits of contemplation”—namely, the infused virtues and the fruits and gifts of the Holy Spirit, who once infused Catholics with supernatural strength—Catholic moral spirituality has been in free fall for centuries. 
 
When the modern immoral zeitgeist began to blow more powerfully, actions that were considered sins before were not considered to be sins at all, until everything was turned upside down.
 
Vices were seen as virtues and what were once seen as virtues were seen as vices, as relativism prevailed everywhere.
 
Gradually, man has recreated God in his own image and likeness and endowed Him with such unconditional mercy that it did not matter what you did anyway, as long as you did it to satisfy what were once considered to be evil, unruly desires and needs, that  are now considered to be self-enhancing .
 
The gap left when contemplative loving was taken out of Catholic Spirituality, was filled by a plethora of devotional practices, myriad spiritual exercises, an unhealthy fascination with private revelations, and a belief that if only the outward expression of faith in the liturgy would coincide with their own aesthetic sensibilities, all would be well.
 
You will hardly find two Catholics alike today who share   the  same spirituality. All have their own favourite devotions, their own self-chosen spiritual exercises, their own devotion to this or that saint, their own emotional allegiance to this or that religious order or to their own best-loved liturgical practices. 
 
They are all mixed together in a unique spiritual cocktail that, like all cocktails, may enable them to feel good, but prevents them from living the only true perennial spirituality to which we must return without delay.
 
Many Catholics today like to call themselves the “remnant.” But sadly, like their Jewish predecessors, they are predominantly concerned with the outward expression rather than the inner reality of their faith. And their ideal Catholic Spirituality goes no further back than that of their parents and grandparent when they wrongly believe that all things were perfect in the best possible of all catholic worlds.
 
I was brought up in the nineteen forties and fifties, and I can assure you they are deceiving themselves.  Further to this, they are deeply divided within themselves, by a pick-and-mix form of spirituality that has therefore come to be called a cafeteria spirituality. 
 
None of the practices that I have referred to above, are necessarily bad, in themselves, far from it, but they are eccentric.
 
They are eccentric in the literal meaning of the word because they lead the faithful away from the  Catholic  God-given spirituality first practised by, and then given to us, by Jesus Christ Our Lord. 
 
The saints who should be our inspiration and our guides did not base their spirituality on that of previous saints, on the private and questionable revelations of dubious previous mystics, or on their own personal liturgical preferences.
 
Rather, they based their spirituality on coming to know and love Jesus Christ and living the spirituality that He bequeathed to the early Church. 
 
The main source of unity, for the modern remnant, seems to come, not so much from their deep union with Christ, the Head of the Church, but because they all abhor what has happened to the Church hierarchical, and most particularly to its leadership in Rome, which distracts them from living the inner spiritual lives that should be their main focus of attention. 
 
Endlessly scrutinizing the daily shock-horrors that come from Rome, the silence of the shepherds, their persecution of their priests, and perpetually pointing the finger at anyone other than themselves is the most common displacement activity that prevents the modern remnant from practising the personal Repentance, Prayer, and Sacrifice to which Our Lady called us at Fatima and at her other authentic appearances.
 
Authentic Traditional Catholic Spirituality has been given to us by God, so beware of all man-made spiritualities designed by counterfeit gurus, who cherry-pick quotations from the Scriptures and from Catholic tradition to prove their heresies.
 
But most of all, beware of modern deceivers who turn to the wisdom of the modern world to substitute Gospel wisdom for the wisdom of globalism in which mother earth, whom the Greeks called Gaia, is the new god. 
 
It is not so much that most of them  devoutly believe in the tenets of globalism, but rather, that this new secular religion, gives them total license to pursue their passions that they are trying to canonize as sacraments, equate with mystical experience, and then rewrite the Bible to justify themselves.
 
Karl Marx said that if you want to destroy an institution, simply soak it in sex, and that is what has happened to the Church, as I found out to my cost over 40 years ago. 
 
Let me quickly return to what is of real importance: namely, the true Catholic Spirituality that is Redemptive, Restorative, Sacrificial, and Contemplative which I must speak about  in more detail later.
 
If you cannot wait to practise it but do not know how to begin, then simply follow the recent teaching of Our Lady, who is the perfect embodiment of the “Poor of Yahweh” which is summed up in the three words that she used to call us all back to true Catholic Spirituality, first lived to perfection by her beloved son, Jesus: namely, to Repent, to Pray, and to Sacrifice. 
 
Unfortunately, all too many modern pilgrims are no more than Marian miracle-mongers, so busy seeking solace in sentimentality and spiritual sensationalism that they fail to see the message that they should be making the mainspring of their lives.
 
Those for whom Our Lady’s teaching does become the mainspring of their lives will gradually open themselves ever more fully to receive the Holy Spirit, who will not only show them what true Catholic Spirituality is, but who will give them the power—or more precisely the Love—to practice it to perfection as modern members of the ‘Anawim’, or ‘the Poor of Yahweh’. 
 
It is from this group alone, not from the protestations of a rowdy remnant who neither seem to know nor practise the spirituality given to us by Christ, that the return to our true Catholic Faith will come.
 
We will see in the new and dramatic Renaissance that Our Lady promised, and over which she will preside, a return to the Spirituality in which the Primacy of Love will once more prevail as it did in the Early Church and in the aftermath of the  Christo-centric Spirituality first theologically re-inaugurated by St Bernard.
 
However, those who do not prepare for these events, and prepare for them now, as Our Lady has asked us to do at her authentic modern appearances,   will not participate in what St John Henry Newman called ‘The New Spring’.
 
It is for this reason that I will now in the following podcasts and further videos begin to detail the full and practical details and implications  of her call to Repent, to Pray and to Sacrifice.
 
It is only by doing this that we will be able to help the Church, as we help ourself, to return to the Spirituality of the Primacy of Love that prevailed and predominated in the Early Church, so that what was done then for the ancient pagan world, can be done again for the modern pagan world. 
 
When interviewed in 1943 Sr Lucy said that despite the dramatic  miracles that took place at Fatima, to date, and  even at the highest level   in the Church, the message has been forgotten, if not purposely shelved,  and has not therefore been put into practice as our Lady asked.
 
As, despite further revelations, when the same message was delivered,  that message had been ignored, we are on the brink of the consequences of  our failure to do what has been asked of us.
 
What you will find in the podcast videos, blogs and books on this site, is the best practical way we can return to the Spirituality of the Primacy of love by practising the Repentance, the Prayer, and the Sacrifice through which our loving response to God’s love of us, is expressed.
 
Then, after the events that will bring in many millions of new converts into the Church,   I hope this spiritual teaching, which is nothing other than the teaching of Christ our King, will help them all to put into practice the Spirituality of the Primacy of Love over which Our Lady first  presided as Mother, at the dawn of Christianity.
 
This will enable her to preside once again, and in the same way, over the daily practice of this Christ -centred Spirituality  as its  founder Christ the King, returns to rule where His rule has for so long been rejected in the long spiritual ‘Winter of Our Discontent’.
 
 Let me end by once again quoting from St Teresa of Avila :-
“There is only one way to perfection and that is to pray; If anyone points in another direction then they are deceiving you.” And they are,  aren’t they?