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Inside the Fatima-Moscow Pilgrimage and its Quest For Russia’s Conversion 

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The small group of French pilgrims passed through the Estonian border town of Narva around Midsummer day, en route to Moscow, and carrying with them a statue of Our Lady of Fatima. Their journey had begun over a month earlier in the port city of Oskarshamn, Sweden, wound its way north to Stockholm, crossed the Baltic Sea into Finland, before descending into Estonia. 

Narva, Estonia

However, the pilgrimage itself started over three years ago in Fatima, Portugal, the site of the miraculous Marian apparitions to three little children: ten-year-old Lucia dos Santos and her cousins Francisco and Jacinta Marto.

Between May and October of 1917, the Virgin Mary appeared on multiple occasions to the children and shared with them a series of prophetic revelations. Among these, was the warning of a “more terrible war … during the pontificate of Pius XI” and an exhortation that, to prevent this, “Russia be consecrated to [the] Immaculate Heart” through prayer and penance. 

According to the written testimony of Sister Lucia, one of the Fatima children, Our Lady promised that if her wishes were fulfilled, Russia would be converted and there would be peace. “If not,” she warned, “then Russia will spread her errors throughout the world, bringing new wars and persecution of the Church.” Our Lady went on to prophesy that “in the end my Immaculate Heart will triumph” and “the Holy Father will consecrate Russia to me, and she will be converted, and the world will enjoy a period of peace.” 

Our Lady appeared again to Sister Lucia at her convent in Tuy, Spain in 1929 and requested that the Holy Father consecrate Russia to the Immaculate Heart in union with all the bishops of the world. 

The idea of carrying a statue of Our Lady of Fatima from Portugal to Moscow, on foot, as a means of contributing to the fulfillment of Mary’s words, was first conceived in 2012 by a member of a traditional priests’ society in France. The journey was first undertaken between 2017 and 2018 by a French pilgrim, Jean-Claude Bruel, who traveled alone from France to Moscow via Rome, in eight months, with no funds. 

The pilgrimage was then adopted by the Union of Christian European Nations (UNEC). 

 “The goal of the pilgrimage is to spread the message given by Our Blessed Mother to the children of Fatima, without adding to or interpreting her words,” explains Winfried Wuemerling, UNEC’s founder and director. “She wants Russia to be consecrated to her Immaculate Heart. And Russia will be converted. It’s not up to us. It’s the Virgin Mary’s plan.” 

Despite eight attempted consecrations over several decades by successive popes, none appeared to have satisfied the conditions laid out by Our Lady. Pope Pius XII’s broad reference in his 1952 apostolic letter Sacro Vergente, “to the “all the peoples of Russia,” neglected to specify the whole nation state and was not made in union with the worldwide Catholic episcopacy. In 1982 and again in 1984, when Pope John Paul II entrusted the world to the Immaculate Heart, he failed to mention Russia all together.

The Russo-Ukrainian War prompted Pope Francis to attempt a new  consecration, this time of Russia and Ukraine, on March 25, 2022 at the end of the Vatican’s annual penance service in St. Peter’s Basilica. It is said by Fatima scholars to have fulfilled the necessary elements as requested by the Blessed Virgin. Bishop Schneider also agrees with this analysis.

UNEC launched the first stage of the Fatima-Moscow pilgrimage in the early summer of 2021, having been forced to postpone the intended departure date due to the Covid pandemic. The first stage covered 1500 kilometers from Fatima to St. Compostela, and on to Lourdes. 

In 2022, another group of pilgrims embarked on the second stage of the journey, beginning in Lourdes and traversing France from the Pyrenees to Strasbourg, located on the German border. The following year, the group ventured north from Germany through Denmark and into Sweden. This year will be the final stage of the several thousand-kilometer journey, with an anticipated arrival date in Moscow at the end of July. 

Two pilgrims will have completed the entire journey. Some pilgrims have come for more than one of the stages; others have joined in for a few months or a few weeks. A driver transports the pilgrims’ personal belongings and scouts ahead each day for food and lodging. Typically, the travelers stay in hostels intended for pilgrims; sometimes they’re welcomed by local churches or families. The pilgrims each take turns carrying the statue, which stands approximately three feet tall and weighs over 22 pounds. 

“I had the privilege of being the first to carry the statue from [Lourdes],” explains Philippe Burguburu, a handyman who was involved in the preparations for the pilgrimage from an early date and helped devise a mechanism for carrying the statue. After experimenting with a custom-made stretcher, and then a two-wheeled cart, neither of which would have suited an extended journey, sometimes on unpaved roads, the best solution was to carry the statue on a bespoke platform strapped to the pilgrim’s back.

Photos by Александр Петросян, Санкт-Петербург

“The steep climb and my age meant that I was breathless and had to give up after barely a kilometer. It gets heavy fast!”

The sheer logistics of transporting the statue, the fatigue, the daily requirement to find food and shelter, the language barrier, and the pressure of living together as a group for weeks and sometimes months on end, are just some of the hardships that the pilgrims have had to endure along the road. 

“It’s a training in virtue,” says Patrick Bonnand, a retired engineer from Normandy, a father of eight and grandfather of soon to be 18 grandchildren. He has been a part of the Fatima-Moscow journey from the beginning, except for five days in 2022 to celebrate his son’s engagement, and another week this year for the funeral of his father.

For Thierry Dereux, 66, from Lille, it’s these sacrifices, offered as penance, along with the constant prayer throughout the four years of pilgrimage, that help bring about the necessary graces so that the conversion of Russia can be fulfilled.

Every morning, the pilgrims recite the entire Rosary together: joyful, sorrowful and glorious mysteries. They walk and pray along the road and offer miraculous medals to those they encounter along with a short explanation in French or English or Russian. So far, nearly 21,000 medals have been given out. They present passers-by with Rosary beads and pamphlets that explain the purpose of the pilgrimage. 

“Most of the time people receive [these gifts] with joy and gratitude,” says Mr. Dereux. 

Very few of those the pilgrims encounter are familiar with the Fatima message and Our Lady’s prophecies concerning Russia. “In Catholic churches yes and sometimes among Protestants but seldom among Orthodox Christians,” says Mr. Dereux. 

Mr. Bonnand has been amazed by the lack of understanding of the Fatima message and of devotion to Our Lady. “It’s worrying and sad.” 

Mr. Bruel, who undertook the pilgrimage solo between September 2017 and July 2018 put it this way: “Christians in the West no longer love the Blessed Virgin Mary, especially the priests.”

Although historically devoted to the Theotokos, the Mother of God, Christian Russia was subjugated by Marxism-Leninism during the Bolshevik coup d’état that was planned and orchestrated during the spring, summer and fall of 1917 – a period coinciding with the Fatima apparitions. Churchill labeled Lenin and his anarcho-seditious agents “unnatural spirits;” Alexander Kerensky, one-time head of the Provisional Government set up after the February Revolution, called them “a gang of madmen, scoundrels, and traitors.” 

A few years earlier, when the First World War had broken out, the empire of the Czars stood first among the champions of Christendom, as Churchill put it (notwithstanding the subsequent leadership of the beatified heir to the Holy Roman Imperial throne).[1] Despite the lamentable schism with Rome, Russia still joined the Holy Alliance against the Turks in the late 17th century, and beat back Napoleon in the 18th. Yet a Christian empire that took centuries to build up, crumbled in late February 1917 in a matter of three days. Czar Nicholas wrote in his abdication letter that “in the days of great struggle with a foreign foe, who has been endeavoring for three years to enslave our land, it has pleased God to send Russia another grievous trial.”

Russia, who in 1914 had been the “richest nation on earth” (according to then U. S. Ambassador to Russia David Rowland Francis), was a mere four years later delivered to her enemies, severed from her allies, despoiled of vast swaths of territory, and plunged into civil war and famine. Churchill described the demise as follows: “The Government which claimed to be the new Russia sprang from Revolution and was fed by Terror … [T]he old Russia had been dragged down, and in her place there ruled ‘the nameless’ beast’ so long foretold in Russian legend.”

Although Catholics generally understand Our Lady’s reference to the errors of Russia as implying Communism, Bolshevism was no Russian crime. For Lenin and his fellow internationalists, the defeat of czarist Russia served merely as a launchpad for proletarian revolution in the West.

Nor were most of the principal perpetrators and their behind-the-scenes abettors ethnic Russians. From Karl Marx, the patriarch of Communism, the Bolshevik leaders, the American financiers who contributed to the overthrow of the Czar, the German officials who subsidized and facilitated the Bolshevik coup, right down to the Lettish mercenary guards dispatched to carry out the nighttime slaughter of the imperial family at Ekaterinburg in July 1918, one hundred and six years ago this week, the whole affair had the air of a foreign invasion. 

Pope Pius XI, in his 1937 encyclical Divini Redemptoris, made a similar observation: 

[I]t is in no part of Our intention to condemn en masse the peoples of the Soviet Union. For them We cherish the warmest paternal affection. We are well aware that not a few of them groan beneath the yoke imposed on them by men who in very large part are strangers to the real interests of the country. …We blame only the system, with its authors and abettors who considered Russia the best-prepared field for experimenting with a plan elaborated on decades ago, and who from there continue to spread it from one end of the world to the other. 

Bolshevism soon permeated Eastern Europe and took root throughout Asia and Latin America.

“But for many decades now, it has also been spreading through the culture of western countries under the cover of democracy,” points out Mr. Dereux.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia effectively rid itself of the Communist parasite. However, culturally, politically, economically, and spiritually, the country and its people were greatly weakened. Putin certainly aspires to a return of Russian imperialism. But in the West, war hawks fear not only Russia’s geopolitical ambitions, but more significantly a resurrection of the old Russian empire and a return, along with the European continent, to its Christian past. 

Mr. Wuermeling has said that the Fatima-Moscow pilgrimage is not just a gesture towards the conversion of Russia; it’s very much aimed at the re-Christianization of Europe. “We must have full confidence in the Blessed Mother,” he insists.

Along the road, locals, especially Christians, have welcomed the pilgrims out of a sense of hospitality and a broad understanding that their message is one of spirituality, friendship and peace, even if they don’t grasp the specific goal.

One of the big surprises has been the support shown by Protestant Christians. Contrary to the cold reception the pilgrims expected in the Nordic countries, it was among the Protestant Scandinavians that they received the warmest welcome.

“It was as though the Blessed Virgin was returning to these countries where no public mission had been attempted for five hundred years,” explains Mr. Wuermeling. 

Meanwhile in Russia, he says, the statue of the Blessed Virgin has opened almost every door for the pilgrims. “It certainly appears as though she’s ‘at home’ here.” 

In the Admiralteysky district of St. Petersburg, on the banks of the Neva River, practically opposite the high school where Russian President Vladimir Putin graduated in 1970, the statue of Our Lady of Fatima had a surprising encounter with another icon of French Catholicism: a bronze sculpture of St. Joan of Arc. It was consecrated on October 13, 2023, the anniversary of the last of the Fatima apparitions, the publicly witnessed Miracle of the Sun.

Editor’s note: click here for more photos of this consecration.

The idea for the monument was originally conceived by historian and publisher, and Putin confidante, Victor Moskvin, created by French artist Boris Lejeune, and donated by the Association of Friends of Joan of Arc as a gesture of friendship towards Russia. On receiving the statue in Paris in 2020, Russian Ambassador to France, A. Y. Meschkov, emphasized that the patron saint of France is a symbol of national heroism: “Joan of Arc embodies the spirit of freedom, the struggle against enslavers, which has always been close to the Russian people.”

As for Our Lady of Fatima, the statue’s final resting place once it arrives in Moscow has not yet been determined. There were hopes in the early stages of the pilgrimage of arranging an official reception with local religious leaders and civil authorities. However, with the passage of time, communication barriers, and of course the war in Ukraine, contacts have dried up.

For the pilgrims, the ideal conclusion to their four-year journey would be to present the statue to Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Moscow-based Russian Orthodox Church and President Putin himself. Yet as always, they place their hope in Our Lady’s intercession and, of course, God’s perfect timing. As. Mr. Bonnand likes to say, “We shall see!”

Editor’s note: see also our Fatima Icon project which supports the building of the Shrine of Our Lady of Fatima in St. Petersburg.


[1] See the first pages of Churchill’s text The World Crisis Series: Volume V – the Unknown War.

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