Our Lady of Fatima told us that if Russia is not consecrated to Her Immaculate Heart, Russia's errors will spread throughout the world.
China is one of many nations who exemplify this.
China and Russia are getting very chummy this week.
The real question is what are "Russia's errors" that Our Lady about which Our Lady warned us?
Atheism, hatred of God, hatred of the Catholic Church, hatred of the Holy Mass, hatred of holy priests, hatred of the family, demonically - inspired totalitarianism.
To me the answer to the boldfaced question is paramount. Which "errors of Russia" exactly did she mean? Post Bolshevik Revolution, the assumption was that she was referring to Marxism or Communism. But Marxism and Communism were not invented in Russia: properly speaking, they were the errors of France, Germany, and England.
At the time when Our Lady spoke to the three seers at Fatima the Bolshevik takeover of Russia had not yet occurred. In fact, few people believed it would occur, including the future leaders of that revolution. Lenin, for example, was living in Switzerland writing pamphlets and Trotsky had just gotten back from New York City, where he had been the editor of a socialist newspaper. Both of those men thought that the communist revolution would break out first in Germany, and in fact, it almost did, as World War I came to an end. They also thought that Russia was too underdeveloped, and its people too religious and superstitious, to embrace atheistic Marxism.
I wonder if Mary could have been talking instead about the abolition of the historic European and Middle-Eastern monarchies as being the great error of Russia. During and immediately after World War I, almost every hereditary monarchy in Europe fell from power. The Prussian Hohenzollerns in Germany, Ludwig II in Bavaria, the Italian House of Savoy, the Spanish Bourbons, the Turkish-based Ottoman empire, and the Romanov dynasty of Russia, all collapsed either during the war or in the next few years after it.
The Russian Romanov dynasty headed by Czar Nicholas II was the first to go, replaced by a liberal democracy which only lasted for six months before the Bolshevik takeover. Our Lady's warning occurred during the period of the liberal democracy, not the Communist Revolution. The disintegration of the monarchies had a disastrous effect on European cultural life. Each monarchy had been attached to and supported an official religion. Church attendance and belief plummeted at the same time as the monarchies' disappearance. Industry and consumerism became the new paradigms and traditional farming areas and villages and small towns were abandoned as people flocked to the big cities. Previously held moral values evaporated just as quickly. These things occurred all over Europe, not just in Communist Russia.
The prevailing winds of Vatican II also blew against the notions of hereditary monarchies and established religions. Truly we see that error of Russia, the abolition of the monarchy, predominant in both the hierarchy and the laity of the Church at the time of the Council. No Vatican II document condemned communism by name, that's true, but neither did the Council embrace or recommend Communism. It did, however, embrace and even mandate the removal of established religion in Catholic countries and promoted democratic government.
I have never believed that hereditary monarchy is the only acceptable Catholic government, especially in countries that have never had one, like my own country for example, but the disastrous effects of the fall of the European monarchies after WWI cannot be denied. Their absence left a vacuum of power to be filled by Nazism, Fascism, and Stalinism. Waves of riots and revolutions swept through Europe, accompanied by genocide and ethnic cleansing, hunger, homelessness, corruption, and the worst pandemic in modern history, the Spanish flu. Eventually these tensions would cause a second world war, the worst we have ever known, and which in turn caused even more destruction of traditional values and ways of life.
This is just a theory I have, and of course Mary could have been referring to multiple errors. It's just that I'm fascinated by the interwar period and its effects on us today.