Thirteen chapters in three parts, plus a closing word and two appendices. Part I follows the warnings from Quito to Akita, Part II the year 1963, Part III the diagnosis and the way back. Below, the foreword and the introduction are reproduced in full as a free reading sample.
Foreword
There are sentences that work like a key, and Baudelaire’s word about the devil is one of them. If the greatest strategy of evil really consists in becoming invisible, then its greatest triumph must be sought not where evil rages openly, but where no one speaks of it anymore. A word on method follows: the book keeps approved apparitions, disputed texts, and unofficial rumors strictly apart.
Introduction
Exorcists keep records, and for centuries one rule held: the liberation of a possessed person took one or two days. Around 1963 that duration jumped to ten to twenty-four months; today practicing exorcists report that in recent years not a single person has been fully liberated. The explanation lies in a distinction few people know: the sacraments work ex opere operato — the sacramentals from the state of the acting Church.
Chapter1
In the Royal Convent of Quito, Mother Mariana receives apparitions from 1594 onward that speak hardly at all of her own epoch and almost entirely of ours: of a total corruption of customs “shortly after the middle of the 20th century,” and of the “Masonic sects” — more than a hundred years before the first Grand Lodge was founded. The message goes through the sacraments the way a physician examines the organs of a patient, and names the attack on the children with the coolness of a general-staff plan.
Chapter2
Two shepherd children who have known each other for two days see a weeping woman on a mountain in the French Alps — and hear no gentle devotion, but an indictment of the priests. Two years before the Communist Manifesto, the message announces that all civil governments will have “one and the same plan.” The chapter carefully separates the apparition approved in 1851 from the disputed long version of the secret published in 1879.
Chapter3
Some 70,000 people, scoffers and anticlerical journalists among them, witness on October 13, 1917 a miracle announced months in advance to the day and the hour. The chapter works through the three secrets — the vision of hell, the foretelling of the Second World War with its foresign, the Bishop in White — and lays open the three great controversies: has the third part been published in full, was Russia ever validly consecrated, and what is to be made of the rumors?
Chapter4
In a convent in northern Japan a wooden statue of Mary weeps 101 times — scientific analyses confirm human tear fluid, and television cameras later record it. The messages are the darkest of the whole series and at the same time the most precise concerning the Church herself: “cardinals opposing cardinals, bishops against bishops.” And in the middle of the bleakest announcement stands the brightest sentence in the book — about “the happy beginning of the complete restoration.”
Chapter5
An evening on the veranda at San Giovanni Rotondo, around 1963/64: asked when the triumph of the Immaculate Heart will come, the Capuchin with the stigmata recollects himself deeply — and answers with a single sentence and a gesture toward the children present. The arithmetic of that answer is of unsettling simplicity, and it places the whole question inside a lifespan that is still running.
Chapter6
Aggiornamento: the Council (1962–1965) rebuilt the Church across eight areas — from the liturgical reform through religious liberty and ecumenism to a new understanding of the Church herself. The chapter disputes neither its validity nor its intentions; it documents soberly what was changed and sets the balance sheet beside it: collapsing vocations, a schism still open today, a crisis of identity and authority. The real finding, however, lies deeper than the quarrel over Latin or the vernacular.
Chapter7
A single example explains everything: holy water. The old rite of 1614 exorcized salt and water; the new one asks in general terms for protection from all evil. Drawing on the word lists of liturgical scholarship, the chapter shows which Latin terms vanished from the official prayer of the Church, and works through four cases in detail — the St. Michael Prayer, the baptismal exorcism, the Confiteor, the solemn exorcism. It ends with the self-diagnosis of the very pope under whom the reform was carried through.
Chapter8
The darkest chapter of the book — and the one that marks its sources most explicitly as unproven. It documents the interview published only after Father Amorth’s death about a word of Padre Pio, Malachi Martin’s claims about a ceremony inside the Vatican in 1963, and a witness whose sworn account stayed unchanged for decades. Each strand comes with the counter-reckoning: what is documented, what is denied, what remains assertion?
Chapter9
On January 26, 1947, Fulton Sheen described on the radio a counter-church that would have “all the notes and characteristics of the Church, but in reverse and emptied of its divine content.” The formula is ancient: Diabolus simia Dei, the devil is the ape of God, because he is a creature and can bring forth nothing of his own. This chapter gives the book its name, binds all its strands together — and carries its consolation as well.
Chapter10
The real point of the book: the loss of faith touches not only those who left, but in its most insidious form those who stayed. Sixty years in which sin, hell, and judgment were no longer preached have produced a generation that, measured by the unchanged teaching, lives in grave sin without knowing it. At the end stands Abraham bargaining for ten righteous men — and not finding ten.
Chapter11
Ge-Hinnom, the valley outside Jerusalem where Israel sacrificed its children, gave hell its name: Gehenna. The chapter lays the cult of the Canaanites beside the estimates of the WHO and the Guttmacher Institute — roughly 73 million abortions a year — and asks whether only the masks have changed and not the substance. It closes with an express word to the mothers concerned: the indictment is aimed at the system, not at the individual woman.
Chapter12
Not a timetable, but an attempt to superimpose Quito, La Salette, Fatima, Akita, and the testimonies of Padre Pio: apostasy first, then chastisement in stages, then a sudden global event — and after it not the end of the world but some twenty-five good years. Three clues about the timing, and one principle that qualifies everything: the chastisement is conditional. Nineveh was spared because it did penance.
Chapter13
Whoever hears of catastrophes thinks of provisions and escape plans. The sources of this book think differently, and their logic is compelling: a spiritual judgment is met with spiritual preparation. Seven concrete points — a life confession, the daily Rosary, the five First Saturdays, worthy reception of the sacraments, the protected home, the life of the “apostles of the last times,” the catechesis of one’s own children — and a closing passage on why fear is not the posture of the Christian.
Conclusion
The balance drawn in a few sentences: not one great fall but a long forgetting; concepts that vanished from the world and finally from the books of the Church herself; old idols returning under new masks. And afterward — on this all the sources agree — not the end, but the spring, held fast to the one sentence this entire book holds on to.
Appendix I
The prayers in full: the St. Michael Prayer of Leo XIII, the Fatima Prayer said after each decade, the order of the First Saturdays of Reparation from Pontevedra 1925, and a short daily rule. Meant to be printed out and used every day.
Appendix II
A complete guide following the Ten Commandments, the precepts of the Church, the duties of one’s state in life, and the seven capital sins — with a prayer before the examination, an act of contrition, and the order of confession step by step. For everyone whom no one ever told what actually counts as sin.
There are sentences that work like a key. You read them, and suddenly a door opens onto a room you never knew existed. Baudelaire’s famous word about the devil is such a sentence. For if it is true — if the greatest strategy of evil really consists in becoming invisible — then one would have to look for its greatest triumph not where evil rages openly, but where no one speaks of it anymore.
And that is precisely the finding of our age: no one speaks of him anymore. Not in the schools, not in the media, not in politics — and, this is the truly shattering part, hardly even in the Church herself. The words sin, hell, judgment, and devil have vanished from the vocabulary of the Western world like the words of a dead language. Whoever still uses them is considered medieval, fanatical, no longer quite of this time.
This book takes a different view: the disappearance of these words is not a sign of progress but the symptom of a disease — and at the same time the most cunning victory the enemy of mankind has ever won. It is an attempt to assemble the scattered pieces of the puzzle: the astonishingly coherent messages of the approved Marian apparitions across centuries, the observations of the exorcists, the historical events surrounding the fateful year 1963, and the testimonies of men like Padre Pio and Father Gabriele Amorth.
What emerges is not a comfortable picture. But neither is it a hopeless one. For the same sources that foretold the decline also promise the restoration — and they name, with great clarity, the way there. This book seeks to do both: to open the eyes to the seriousness of the hour, and at the same time to show the clearly defined way out that Heaven itself has pointed.
A word about method: this book distinguishes carefully between ecclesiastically approved apparitions and messages, disputed texts (such as the long version of the secret of La Salette), and unofficial reports and rumors. Wherever a source is disputed, this is stated explicitly. The reader should be able to judge for himself — but he should judge on the basis of the facts, not on the basis of silence.
Let us begin not with a vision, not with a prophecy, but with a sober observation from practice — a statistic, if you will, from the most hidden field of work in the Catholic Church.
Exorcists keep records. They document their cases, they exchange notes with one another, they know how cases unfold. And for centuries an astonishingly stable rule of experience held: the liberation of a demonically possessed person took on average one to two days. The priest came, prayed the solemn exorcism of the Rituale Romanum, and the enemy yielded.
Then something strange happened. Around the year 1963 — and exorcists like Father Chad Ripperger point emphatically to this date — that duration jumped abruptly: from one or two days to ten to twenty-four months. And it did not stop there. From decade to decade the cases grew more protracted. Some suddenly dragged on for as long as eight years. Today, practicing exorcists report, things have reached the point where in recent years not a single person has been fully liberated from their demons.
One must let this finding sink in for a moment. The same prayers. The same Church. The same Christ in whose name the command is given. And yet: the enemy no longer yields.
How is that possible?
The answer Father Ripperger gives is theologically precise and shattering in its consequences. The sacraments — baptism, the Eucharist, confession — work ex opere operato: from the work performed itself. Their power does not depend on the holiness of the priest, nor on the state of the Church; Christ himself is the one acting. The sacramentals, however — and the exorcism belongs among them — work ex opere operantis Ecclesiae: from the working of the acting Church. Their power depends on the spiritual state of the Church as a whole, on the faith of the minister, on the disposition of the recipient.
The exorcism is thus something like a fever thermometer of the Church. When the Church is strong, holy, in the state of grace — the demons tremble before a single prayer. When the Church is weak, lukewarm, hollowed out from within — they laugh.
And the thermometer shows: since 1963 the spiritual vitality of the Church has been sinking without pause. The weaker the Church, the more power and influence the demons gain — not only over the possessed, but over families, societies, entire nations.
This places before us two questions, which this book seeks to answer in two parts:
First: Was this decline foreseen? Were there warnings? And if so — what do those same sources say about what is still to come?
Second: What exactly happened around the year 1963? What weakened the Church so much that her centuries-old weapons went blunt?
The answer to the first question leads us to four places: to a convent in Quito, to a mountain in the French Alps, to a shepherd village in Portugal, and to a convent in Japan. The answer to the second question leads us to Rome — into the years of the Second Vatican Council and into the darkest rumors of recent Church history.
Let us begin with the warnings. They reach further back than most suspect — more than four hundred years.