Michael Hesemann is a German journalist and author. In 2010, the Wall Street Journal described him as “a religious historian who helps the Vatican date relics”. He is German representative of the Pave the Way Foundation (PTWF) for which he did research at the Vatican archives in 2010. He co-founded Deutschland pro Papa, a conservative Catholic initiative which claims to represent the “silent majority of Rome-loyal Catholics”. In 2013, he compiled an exhibition on the Turin Shroud for the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, touring through Germany and Austria as of 2015. Together with Georg Ratzinger, Hesemann co-authored “My brother, the Pope”. In 2014, he claimed to have located 2000 pages of documents on the Armenian genocide in the Vatican Archives. For this, in October 2016, he received an honorary doctorate of the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia.
We interviewed Michael Hesemann.
Mr. Hesemann, the international committee “Uniti con Gesù Eucaristia per le mani santissime di Maria” organized a conference on October 5th to ask: kneelers in the churches, communion on the tongue, distribution of the Eucharist only for consecrated persons and Corpus Domini on Thursday. What is your opinion?
“It is wonderful that Catholics remember that the Holy Eucharist is the center, the heart and the Archimedean point of our faith. The momentary crisis of the Church is, first of all, a crisis of the faith and also a crisis of the dogma. Modernism preaches a compromise with the materialistic, naturalistic, anthropocentric world view, which basically is the ideology of Freemasonry, often idealized as “philosophy of the age of reason” or “enlightenment”, which indeed was an age of darkening of the faith. It promoted atheism or at least deism, the belief in a God which retired after the creation of the Universe and never interferes into human history, so that it is up to man to create “heaven on Earth”, as it was promised by ideologies such as socialism, communism or national socialism, who indeed created hell on Earth and brought death and suffering over millions of humans. Christianity is the opposite of anthropocentrism and naturalism: its belief is theocentric and supernatural. Our God is not dead or has retired but is a living God, a God that became man and lived among us, which reveals Himself in the signs of the times, who promised us to remain with us until the end of the world and keeps this very promise. He is alive and among us, present in every tabernacle of the world, and we are able to communicate with him in the most intimate manner, yes, to receive Him in form of the Holy Communion, the Blessed Sacrament. The transsubstantiaton, the transformation of bread and wine into the true body and blood of Christ, is the biggest miracle of all times and it happens not just coincidentially, but thousands of times every hour of the day in hundreds and thousands of Churches worldwide, in every single Holy Mass celebrated on Earth in front of millions of witnesses, just because a priests speaks the formula of consecration. This is what the Church teaches and it is true. It is proven by at least 140 recognized, well-documented Eucharistic miracles during all ages in all parts of the world. Just in the last three decades, we had five well-documented incidents in Betania/Venezuela, Buenos Aires, Tixtla/Mexico, Sokolka und Legnica/Poland where a consecrated host turned into a human heart muscle in the state of agony, what forces us to reconsider our faith in the Blessed Sacrament and to recognize that the dogma of the transsubstantiation is not a theological hypothesis or pious allegory, but the plain truth. Christ is present in the Holy Eucharist! Shall we treat Him, when we encounter him in the Holy Communion, with disrespect? Or with love and devotion? I don’t consider it respectful when we receive Him like a cookie on a children’s birthday party. He is our creator, he is our Lord and Saviour. How can we express our respect, our love and our devotion better than on knees, how can be demonstrate that we are not worthy to receive Him, that we do so just by His Mercy, better than by receiving Him on the tongue, placed there by the hands of a priest? A renewed Eucharistic devotion can and will heal the Church, because it reminds us always of His presence: This is His Church, not that of Man!”.
Mr. Hesemann, soon there will be Synod on the Amazon. Which positive and negative aspects do you aspect from this initiative?
“A Chinese proverb says: It is difficult to prophecy, especially the future. But what I observe at least here in Germany is that the Amazon is misused. A regional problem is misused by those who have their own agenda for the future of the Church, who want an anthropocentric, desacralized, worldly Church. A Church without celibacy and holiness, a Church with married and female priests, a Church which does not care about the laws of God and embraces or even blesses sinful acts. This would be a total and complete protestantization of the Church. We would not be Catholic any longer. Well, if you study the situation of the Protestant Church in Germany, the country of the reformation, you will find that their churches are empty, they have even greater problems to recruit pastors than we have (although they have married pastors, female pastors, even homosexual pastors) and just face theological bankruptcy by teaching a Faith without a supernatural aspect, often even deny the divinity of Christ and bow to the Zeitgeist, the errors of our times; their new “gospel” is liberalism, ecologism and socialism, they behave like being the “spiritual department” of the leftist Green Party. This certainly is not a role model for the Catholic Church. Indeed, we should learn from their mistakes and follow the advice of one of the greatest and wisest Popes in history, Benedict XVI., who taught a “desecularization” (Entweltlichung) of the Church. When he met 2 million young Catholics at the World Youth Day in Cologne 2005, he won their heart by bringing them the greatest gift of all: an encounter with the living God during a Eucharistic adoration. The Church of the future will be a Church of adoration – or it will not be! We need saintly priests, not worldly priests. Both, in the Amazon region as well as here in Europe!”.
Mr. Hesemann, you have met Pope Benedict XVI and you have written ” the first pope”. What impression did you have of the pope emeritus ?
I had the honour to meet our beloved “Papa emerito” on several occasions since 2013, the last time in January of this year, and each time I am more impressed by the brilliant mind and deep spirituality of this wonderful, humble, fragile Man in this nineties. He lives in the constant consciousness that heaven is waiting for him, in an inner harmony with God. We should have listened to him when he was Pope, since he knew exactly what is needed to heal the Church. In him, God sent us a prophet. But, once again, we ignored him and now we suffer from the consequences. One day, he will be declared Teacher of the Church. But now we still have the chance to listen to him. We should study his brilliant writings, listen to his speeches and homilies and learn from them to see and experience the presence of God on Earth!
Mr. Hesemann what is your impression of pope Francis?
“He is the Pope of the people, the Parish priest of the Global village, a man of action, of charity, of love and tenderness; in many instances he lives what Pope Benedict teaches. Still they are completely different characters: Here the great teacher, the brilliant theologian, the man of prayer and contemplation, there the prophet of simplicity, of mercy, of compassion. Both are important and I am convinced that God always “rounds up” one pontificate by the next Pope. This does not mean that I agree with all of his theological advisors. But I see him as a man with a good heart, a simple, profound piety and a great love and devotion to Our Lady, the Blessed Virgin Mary”.
Mr. Hesemann, what are the main black legends about catholicism that are still known/spread?
“I wrote a whole book about them, “Contra la Chiesa”, so I am not able to list them all in just a short interview. So many misconceptions about the early Church, but also about the Crusades, the Holy Inquisition or also about the role of the Church in the 20th Century. I am very grateful to Pope Francis that he opens the Vatican Archives on the Pontificate of Pius XII next March so that the world will see how bravely this saintly Pope fought against the Nazis and tried to save as many of their victims, first of all Jews, during World War 2. In my last book, “The Pope and the Holocaust”, I show that he not only bravely spoke out against the Nazi Terror but also saved more than 970.000 Jews, mostly by 44 diplomatic interventions to cancel or at least postpone deportations in Hitlers vassal states, countries such as Vichy France, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Croatia and Bulgaria. The Vatican also convinced Mussolini to spare the Italian Jews from deportation; only when the Nazis occupied Italy in September 1943, the Holocaust reached your homeland and even Rome. But once again, the Pope convinced the German town commander, General Stahel, to urge Himmler to stop the arrests so that 6400 of the 8000 Roman Jews were saved – nearly 5000 of them in monasteries, houses of the Church or in the Vatican itself!”
Mr. Hesemann you have written about Hitler. Can you tell us something about Nazi occultism ?
“Pius XII was convinced that Hitler was possessed and controlled by demonic forces, he even performed a distant exorcism on his picture. And indeed if you study the origins of the Nazi party and ideology, you find elements of occultism. The Deutsche Arbeiter Partei (DAP) was founded by Rudolf von Sebottendorff, a Freemason who studied occultism in Turkey and Egypt, as the political wing of the “Thule Lodge” in Munich. Several high-ranking members were associated with masonic, anthroposophical or theosophical groups and “orders” who all used the Swastika as a symbol of their aspirations, to create a new, “Aryan”, syncretistic religion, a Gnosis of the Blood, which was called “positive Christianity” by Hitler. He was presented as a kind of Saviour who was supposed to “correct where Christ failed”, namely in his “revolution against Judaism”. Hitler had a remarkable library with hundreds of books on occult subjects, which he flew out from Berlin in April 1945, and which was discovered by the American Forces afterwards”.
Mr. Hesemann Fatima is a topic that occurs a lot in your books. What do you think about the apparitions and the secret?
“Fatima was the most significant divine interference into human history since the time of the Apostles, as Pius XII. believed. in 1917, the most crucial year of the 20th century, in a country where freemasonry had persecuted the Church and planned a complete dechristianization, Our Lady interfered and changed it all. With the great Miracle of the Sun, the authenticity of the apparitions was undeniable, even to the masonic press. This caused a revolution; only a few month later, the masonic government was replaced. The consecration of the nation to the Immaculate Heart of Mary saved it from all the turmoils of the next decades, the Spanish Civil War, Communism and Fascism, or the destructions and persecutions of World War 2. The three shepherd children were illiterate and uneducated simple country kids, but they received the most profound prophetic message, outlining the events of the coming decades: The rise and fall of communism, World War 2, the persecution of the Church, the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II, the conversion of Russia. More than that, through them, Our Lady delivered the Pope the key to change the fatal course of events: When Pius XII on 30 October 1942 consecrated the World to the Immaculate Heart of Our Lady, within a week the defeat of the Nazis begun with the battle of El-Alamein, followed by the battle of Stalingrad a few weeks later. Before, Hitler had won each major battle, after he lost one after the other. When John Paul II. repeated the consecration, now with all bishops of the Catholic World in March 1984, it was the beginning of the end of communism. For 1985, the Soviet Union had planned an invasion into West Europe, but a major explosion on 13 May 1984 destroyed a great part of their weaponry. Their leader Chernenko, a hardliner, died and was replaced by Michail Gorbatschow, the man of Glasnost and Perestroika. Within five years the wall which divided Europe felt, within seven years the Sowjet Union collapsed. SInce 1992, we are experiencing the greatest miracles of our times, the conversion of Russia, which continues until this day. Just in the last 6 years, 5000 new Churches were built in Russia and each year between 5000 and 7000 new priests are consecrated. All this was predicted and promised by Our Lady of Fatima. Yes, indeed, Fatima was the most relevant supernatural event of our times!”.
MATTEO ORLANDO