By Father Gruner (2011)

After graduating from McGill University in Montreal in 1964, I began making plans to travel to Europe. On hearing this, my grandfather, Dr. Michael Gruner, insisted that I must visit Aylesford where Our Lady of Mount Carmel appeared to St. Simon Stock with the Brown Scapular in 1251.  Now, my grandfather was a very gentle man, but in this case, he was particularly insistent. On November 15, 1964,  after working my passage across the sea on a Norwegian freighter, I landed in England. In early December, I decided to fulfill my promise to my grandfather to visit Aylesford. The property had been stolen by the English kings from the Carmelite Friars in 1549 and 400 years later, in 1949, the Friars bought it back. Once  there, I volunteered my services to help with the reconstruction. The building was rebuilt and reopened in July 1965 and solemnly blessed by Cardinal John Carmel Heenan.

Garabandal and the Fatima Priest

In March 1965, I visited Garabandal, Spain. I later returned there on June 18, 1965 and met various pilgrims from around the world. They were there at Garabandal during the appearance of St. Michael, who had given the last message of Garabandal to the world on behalf of Our Lady.

At Garabandal, I was handed literature about the Message of Fatima and among the things I remember seeing were the words of Our Lady on July 13, 1917. Those words have been impressed on my memory ever since. She made a very striking ultimatum to mankind:

“If My requests are granted, Russia will be converted and there will be peace. If My requests are not granted, Russia will spread her errors throughout the world, raising up wars and persecutions against the Church. The good will be martyred, the Holy Father will have much to suffer, various nations will be annihilated.”

It was strikingly clear to me then and ever since that there is no third alternative for mankind. Either enough of mankind accepts, believes and acts upon Our Lady’s requests and we have peace, prosperity and salvation; or – not enough obedience is given to Our Lady’s requests and we have destruction, enslavement, destitution and death. Many theologians and wise men of this world claim they, and others, don’t have to believe Our Lady of Fatima. They foolishly think their consciences are perfectly clear, yet they deny Her the obedience they owe Her. They feel good while they go about their business and ignore Our Lady of Fatima. It’s an illusion which they will pay for with the loss of their own lives and possibly even with the loss of their own souls. Worse still, their ignorance and stupidity will cause many other people to not obey. All because they do not know the full Message of Our Lady of Fatima.

Garabandal or Fatima?

In the meantime, I had been tentatively promoting the Garabandal apparitions but soon ran into the objection that it was not yet approved by the Church. On the other hand, Fatima has been approved by every Pope since 1930 and the Message of Our Lady offers world peace and such tremendously good things for mankind, if we would only obey. So I transferred my apostolic zeal to the Fatima Message.

The Thorns Among the Roses

In 1965, I entered the seminary and in 1976, I was ordained a priest.  In the meantime, in 1972, I helped bring the Pilgrim Virgin Statue blessed by Pope Paul VI at Fatima, to Canada. While I was in the seminary in Italy, about 1971, a priest who had special gifts, told me that my vocation as a priest was to promote devotion to Our Lady. When I met the same priest, about 1985 – I was already eight years into doing this work – he reminded me: “Didn’t I tell you that this is the work you are supposed to be doing?”

How I got into the work of this apostolate was a very unusual path. The Italian religious community that had sponsored my ordination as a diocesan priest had hopeful plans to expand their Italian outreach to the Englishspeaking world. At that time, their work was only in Italy. However, after I was a few months into the novitiate, it seemed clear to me that their zealous plan would not come to fruition. This concerned me as I did not know enough of the Italian dialect to properly hear confessions there and the local bishop had put severe restrictions on my ministry because I did not speak like a native Italian. Thus I sought to transfer my novitiate into an English- speaking community of the same religious order, but the American Provincial I went to, with the blessing of both my bishop and Italian community, stated basically the following:

“We will not accept you until after you finish your Italian novitiate and are not promising to accept you, even then.”

“The vote for Communion in the hand is coming up for the American bishops for the second or third time. If it goes through, will you obey the command to give Communion in the hand?”

My answer, of course, could be no other than ..

“No! I Will NOT Give Communion in the Hand.”

So my course was sealed as far as that religious community was concerned. I then sought from my bishop advice as to what to do next, since I could not continue in the Italian community, not knowing the local dialect where I would be stationed. In addition, since I was over in North America at the time, I sought various possible situations to potentially fulfill the canonical obligations I had as a Catholic priest in regards to who my religious superiors were. I knew I had a problem of conscience regarding the Protestant and Arian practice of Communion in the hand. This problem was putting obstacles before me, despite the fact that my right to refuse giving Communion in the hand was then, and is still, today, upheld by the law of the Church. Nevertheless, my options were restricted because most bishops do not understand, even to this day, that a Catholic priest cannot be forced under holy obedience to give Communion in the hand to the faithful. I have written to the Pope twice about this, as well as having printed articles about it in The Fatima Crusader.

The Silver Lining  in the Cloud

As a result of this forced “obedience” against God’s law, my alternatives were narrowed down to almost no alternative. At the same time, this Fatima Apostolate needed some help to continue its good work; so, in 1977, I became the Executive Director of what is now known as the Fatima Center. In the beginning, the work of the apostolate was primarily traveling extensively with the Pilgrim Virgin Statue  from city to city and town to town across thousands of miles in Canada and the United States, with a guard ian who would give talks on Fatima and hand out Fatima literature. In June 1978, I myself became the guardian to travel with the Statue, as well as organizing trips from our head office with the help of one secretary.

The First Issue of  The Fatima Crusader

It seemed a good idea to me to have a magazine to accompany my trips so we put out our first issue of The Fatima Crusader. It was 8 pages, black and white, and to save money, we collated it ourselves and there were no staples put in each copy. I felt I was going out on a limb financially when I borrowed about $1,000 to print, what to me, was a large run of 20,000 copies. Even today, I still feel like I am going out on a limb for each magazine. Oh how I wish it were only $1,000, but the cost to put out a Crusader today is $180,000 to $275,000 for each magazine and we print anywhere from 330,000 to 500,000 per issue, depending on various factors, including our credit line at the time. On my first trip with the Pilgrim Virgin Statue, I travelled from Ontario to British Columbia and back again. Those were long, long days. One of them went for 19 hours non-stop – from 7:00 a.m. until 2:00 a.m. the following day. In that one day I covered 200 miles, visited five different parishes, and heard confessions at the last chapel until 2:00 a.m. in the morning. I was staying at the rectory of the bishop in Prince Albert, which was one of the two dioceses in Canada at that time that forbade Communion in the hand. But even there in the Cathedral, the Rector, standing right beside the bishop, had the gall to give Communion in the hand. That bishop was one of a half dozen good bishops who were willing to incardinate me, leave my conscience intact with regard to  Communion in the hand, and permit me, with their blessings, to promote the Message of Our Lady of Fatima.

But the opposition to Fatima was fierce and very consistent over the years, even over the decades. One by one, the bishops who wanted to help me were pressured by the Papal Nuncio — or other persons put up to it by the Cardinal Secretary of State — to not incardinate me, for various spurious excuses. The underlying reason for their action was to stop the Fatima Message, in all its fullness, simplicity and beauty, from being heard and obeyed — because the Vatican Secretary of State had another plan, one that is against Our Lady’s plan. The Secretary of State’s plan, not surprisingly, dovetails into the Masonic plan for the New World Order and the One World Government.  To summarize, this was my dilemma — either help Our Lady or literally turn my back on the fully approved Fatima Message by not promoting it — but if I would not, and if no other priest would do it because of those same tactics and persecutions, then who would? Many tactics were used against me and against Fatima as I have brought readers up to date in the issues of The Fatima Crusader, but the end result was a campaign to make me look as if I am disobedient and not a priest in good standing. You see, to discredit the Fatima Message,
their “mission” was to try to discredit anyone who would dare to spread the true, full Fatima Message.

Back on those first Statue visits, I hadn’t yet begun to talk about the Third Secret or the Consecration of Russia.   I only gave an abbreviated version of Fatima, which summarized the requirements that lay people have to do in their own personal lives – the Rosary, the Five First Saturdays, the wearing of the Brown Scapular, and the keeping of God’s Commandments. Also, besides our new Fatima Crusader, I added some Fatima leaflets to give out as I travelled across the country. In the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, the Statue visits comprised the majority of our apostolate outreach at the time. But  by going across the country again a second time and visiting more dioceses, the opposition to the Message of Fatima grew more and more over time. Even telling people the basics — such as: to pray the Rosary and to keep the Commandments, that it is a sin to use contraceptives, that  they should be devoted to Our Lady – all this drew op position even without mentioning the Consecration of Russia or the Third Secret. As I was cut off more and more from visiting the parishes, I realized that we needed to get the Message out in more depth by means of our magazine and so I started focusing on The Fatima Crusader – printing more pages. You can see where  we went from 8 pages to 16 and then 32 in the earlier larger-sized magazines.

Read More :

Click to access cr100pg3.pdf

My Comment : Father Gruner, known also as the Fatima Priest and the World Champion of the Fatima Cause, the late founder and director of the greatest Fatima Marian Movement that many consider still today to be the most-influential and powerful Fatima movement in the Catholic Church, , any Fatimist own to him and to the Fatima Center a lot, myself included, 1 more evidence and what evidence, of the Continuation of Fatima in Garabandal, Father Gruner himself, a fruit of Garabandal, it was in Garabandal in 1965 that he was handed for the first time, literature about the Message of Fatima, he even tried to promote the Garabandal Apparitions but ran into the objection that it was not yet approved by the Church and ended with the Fatima message, that’s also Garabandal, the Lady of Carmel came back to Spain to reveal her Fatima 3rd Secret undisclosed in 1960 and the Novissimi (this explains why I am working myself on this secret for 8 years and my devotion to my mentor, the Fatima Priest) , Garabandal is not a fairly tale as indicated in some bad writting books, waiting for the Warning as a fireworks and so on,  below one of the video of the Fatima Priest  :

 

Pray for us Father, I should be back in Fatima and Garabandal soon.

 

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