Cristian Derosa
For Catholics, the message of Our Lady in 1917, at Fatima, should at least provoke some perplexity, or deep hesitation and prudence, regarding the eventual support for a regime that killed at least 100 million people, persecuted Christians, and spread the atheistic ideology of communism across the four corners of the planet. However, if there are still doubts about the demonic nature of Putin’s regime, some reflections may be necessary.
For those who observe purely geopolitically, it may seem that the objective of present-day Russia is merely to destroy the United States, its archenemy since the Cold War. If this is true, in a sense, it is also true that the USA would be just the appetizer for the grand feast Russia prepares. As soon as it feeds on Western souls through its expansion, the occultist czarist regime will inevitably advance against the Catholic Church, the only obstacle still standing (albeit faltering) to global control by all agendas.
After promising the liberation of the world’s workers through Marxism, which resulted in enslavement and genocide, Russia now promises another liberation: that from Western globalism. A large number of conservatives have come to see themselves represented by this kind of conservative and traditional resistance against the materialism of the “culture of death” advancing upon nations. However, there are more reasons to see Russia as the true government of the Antichrist, despite its accusations against the West of being the “civilization of the Antichrist”.
In the view of Orthodox Christianity, after the schism between East and West, Rome lost the role of the center of Christianity, transferred to Constantinople. But with the fall of Constantinople into the hands of the Turks in 1453, this power would have passed to Moscow, the “Third Rome”. Western conservatives have “bought” this version of history, based on the ideological and geopolitical component that presents the invasion of Ukraine as a symbol of a conflict of continents, Russia and its allies against NATO expansionism. This narrative, which benefits by transforming Russia from aggressor to victim, strengthens all other justifying sub-narratives.
In an article for the Providence website, Matija Statham, a Croatian columnist on politics and religion, summarizes how these ideas have penetrated the Russian Orthodox imagination and reflect profoundly in the Kremlin’s current policy. But the spiritual foundation for the war in Ukraine, as well as for other Russian actions worldwide, may be even darker.
One of the key concepts for understanding the spiritual justification for the entire programmatic arrangement of current Russian ideology is Katechon, a biblical term that developed into a notion of political philosophy. Originally found in 2 Thessalonians 2:6–7, it deals with an eschatological reality according to which Christians should be prepared for the Day of the Lord. If the Antichrist is to be revealed before the Second Coming, special attention becomes necessary, not only to identify him but also to what restrains him. Before the revelation of the Antichrist, says St. Paul, there will be the removal of “something or someone that restrains him”, that is, prevents him from fully manifesting. Verse 6 uses the neuter gender, τὸ κατέχον; and verse 7, the masculine, ὁ κατέχων. This means that the Katechon is the force that will resist the Antichrist.
“(…) the mystery of lawlessness is already at work. But the one who restrains is to do so only for the present, until he is removed from the scene.
And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord (Jesus) will kill with the breath of his mouth and render powerless by the manifestation of his coming.” (2 Thessalonians 2:7-8)
In antiquity, some linked the Katechon to the Roman Empire and others to the Roman Church. There was much discussion on the subject among Christian scholars, but in the West, it lost strength. According to Statham, the interest in Katechon and its speculations found a home in the Russian clergy and intelligentsia of the 19th century and in the interwar period, in the so-called “conservative revolution”, a movement that had a strong influence on the recovery of ancestral traditions by Nazism, but also revealed names like Thomas Mann, Hugo Hoffmanstall, among others. The two strands in which Katechon was relevant are those that survive today almost exclusively in the ideas of Aleksandr Dugin, the Russian clergy, and the Kremlin’s justifications.
The term Katechon gained strength precisely in Nazism, through thinkers like Carl Schmitt, who in his work Nomos of the Earth, suggested the traditional historical importance of the idea of this force of the “catechontic restrainer” that allows for a Christianity centered in Rome and that “meant historical power to restrict the appearance of the Antichrist”. For Schmitt, the Katechon represents the dream of building the ancient State of the Roman Empire, with all its police and military powers to impose orthodox ethics. In his diary, posthumously published, the German thinker clearly says:
“I believe in the Katechon: it is, for me, the only possible way to understand Christian history and to consider it significant (…). The Katechon needs to be named for each epoch of the last 1948 years. The place has never been vacant; otherwise, we would no longer be present.”
Schmitt is one of the favorite and most cited thinkers by Dugin and his followers.
It happens that, from the secular Marxist point of view, the Katechon also has its importance and value as a social utopia. Marxists like Paolo Virno, in his book Multitude: Between Innovation and Denial. For Virno, who discusses the term under the light of Schmitt’s thought, Katechon is a concept of human integration, being that which prevents the mythical “war of all against all”, of Hobbes, as well as Western globalist totalitarianism. It is, for him, a force that although prevents and contains, does not eliminate any of these historical forces, only delaying their advance. More or less in line with Habermas’s concepts of informative action, Virno proposes the concept of katechon as “the human capacity to use language, which allows for the conception of the negation of something, and also allows for the conceptualization of something that can be different from what it is”.
In this sense, all the spiritual or traditional proposals suggested by Russia have their secular version, wisely exploited by allied movements of the Russian bloc in their dystopias. It would not be an exaggeration to suppose that the Russian synthesis of Eurasianism intends, or can generate, an evolution of globalism into broader terms and directly pointed towards Russian imperialism.
In 1990, Dugin published a book entitled Metaphysics of the Gospel: Orthodox Esotericism. In it, the Russian relates the Katechon concept to the historical role and mission of Russia in history, referring to it as the “Third Rome” and linking it to the traditional concept of “harmony” between Church and State, that is, in a new imperial religion. More recently, as the invasion of Ukraine began, Dugin wrote on his Facebook: “We are now in a war of spirits. Katechon vs. Antekeimenos [Beast of the Apocalypse]”.
Like Dugin, Patriarch Kirill, a former KGB agent and Putin’s colleague, also frequently cites the term or its variations to justify an eschatological role of Russia. Kirill said about the incursion into Ukraine that the war “has no physical meaning, but rather metaphysical”. Despite claims that Dugin’s direct influence over Putin is indeed limited, the same cannot be said of the patriarch.
Statham also recalls that Kirill said, in April 2022, that “Holy Scriptures mention a certain force that prevents the coming of the Antichrist into the world”. In this sense, it doesn’t matter how much Putin actually believes in these mystical narratives. What counts is that his actions perfectly agree as if he did believe.
Many naive Western conservatives have fallen for Putin’s image of Russia as a defender of what he himself calls “traditional values”. When they look at politics, media, culture, and dominant corporations of the modern West, they also see “total Satanism”. But while, at least at the declarative level, recognizing the problems that exist in the West, Putin is far from being the solution. Putin’s “traditional values” are not Christian traditional values, but rather values from some other tradition. Or, let’s take it a step further: if a kind of “culture of death” dominates in the West, Putin’s Russia only offers another kind of “culture of death”. What Western conservatives often forget is that Russian dominant politics is, in essence, as anti-Christian as Western politics, but in a different way. Their moralistic view, according to which the community they belong to has the right to dominate others, by any means, including the mass murder of innocents, does not reflect true Christianity but implies a kind of paganism different from current Western post-Christianity.
And that’s why, instead of the Second Letter to the Thessalonians, I believe the biblical quote that best describes the current situation is:
“How can Satan drive out Satan?” (Mark 3:23)
Under the light of the prophecies of Fatima, Russia is already preparing a set of forgeries, trying to reverse the idea of the “errors of Russia” into the “errors of the West”. In 2017, the Katehon website, by Dugin, announced the next “fall of the Roman Catholic Church” and the installation of the Russian Orthodox Church, or the Patriarchate of Moscow as the headquarters of the universal Christianity. The recurrence of allegations against the Catholic Church, under terms like pedophilia, homosexuality, initiated by the great globalist and anti-Christian media, now advances through the hands of prominent conservatives as a way to push out the large mass of Catholics to be co-opted by Russian orthodoxy.
Luis Dufaur interprets this as “the great imposture” and a great trick against Catholics.
“The propaganda trick distorts the prophecies of Fatima and La Salette, and confuses the Catholic Church with the homosexual-theological network that has infiltrated it since at least the Second Vatican Council. Thus, Moscow aims to deceive the Catholics disgusted with the nauseating ecclesiastical crisis in progress and tries to attract them to the area of influence of the Patriarchate of Moscow. Katehon’s propaganda claims to be ecumenical and pan-Christian. But it requires that Catholics renounce converting the Russian schismatics who tend, as in Ukraine, to abandon the errors and disorders of the Patriarchate of Moscow and adhere to Eastern Catholic rites”.
Through a harassment on conservative movements around the world, which relies on oligarchs’ money and the purchase of intellectuals and influencers, the Kremlin intends, among other things, to retell history, starting with the forgery of the messages of Fatima.
One of the main initiatives in this regard has been promoted by renowned traditionalists, linked to initiatory Islamic organizations, such as Charles Upton and his wife, Jennifer Doane Upton, who circulated with great popularity a three-part article entitled “Dante’s Prophecy on the Fall of the Roman Catholic Church”. With the questionable authority of a former Roman Catholic converted to Islamic Sufism, Charles Upton presents his wife’s text clarifying that she preferred the Eastern Fathers’ point of view to that of St. Augustine or St. Thomas Aquinas. He also clarifies that she especially used traditionalist names like René Guénon and Frithjof Schuon. Not surprisingly, the series of articles argues that Moscow is the “Third Rome” and the Russian Orthodox Church should save the Western Church corrupted by the Council Vatican II, by modernism and liberalism, not failing to resort to the prophecies of La Salette and Fatima to explain that “Rome will lose the faith”. They conclude, then, that the Orthodox religion is the true Christian religion and that one should be very careful in approaching the “apostate Rome”.
Upton, a Guénonian traditionalist, says he believes that “when the great schism between the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church occurred in 1054, the Western Church lost many of those who until then were the universal Christian tradition”. Obviously, from the gnostic point of view of the Primordial Tradition, this seems dramatic for Gnosticism.
But after reading Dante with Guénon’s eyes, Upton could only come to this conclusion. He began to gain fame in conservative circles mainly after prefacing Lee Penn’s book False Dawn, which denounces the demonic syncretisms of the New Age movement, but emphasizes only its Western facet, linked to the United Religions Initiative, without mentioning Guénon’s influence in spreading the Orientalist ideas that culminated in the syncretistic spiritualist movement of the West, against which he now presents himself as a providential antidote.
Curiously, however, the main arguments used to point out the apostasy of Rome by the Vatican are some novelties that relativize the Eucharistic meaning and the sacraments, such as communion for people in second marriages, among others, which brings closer or, at least, opens discussions on a topic that still divides the Western and Eastern Church.
Even the prelate Carlo Maria Viganò, a conservative and a fierce critic of Pope Francis and the innovations brought by the progressive clergy, lectured alongside the Russian ideologue at an event clearly in defense of Putin’s policies, which was understood by many as a veiled support or, at least, an attestation of ignorance about who was by his side. Innocent or not, participation in the event earned the prelate the nickname “Dugin for Catholics”, by a Polish magazine.
Cristian Derosa
Journalist, master in Journalism Fundamentals (UFSC), writer, and author of 5 books on social communication and journalism. Co-founder and editor of the Estudos Nacionais website since 2016.
