GLOBAL Rosary for Peace. That’s what Pope Leo XIV did on May 30 with the billion-strong Catholic Church. Broadcast worldwide from the Vatican, the Holy Father was to pray the Holy Rosary at the Vatican’s Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes, a replica of the cave in southern France where Mary appeared in 1858 that was built in Rome in 1902 as a gift to Pope Leo XIII, whose name the current pontiff took.
Many geopolitical analysts do not believe in God or prayers, but some may well look to Pope Leo’s meditative devotion on major events of God’s saving plan for humanity as a last hope for peace. After all, the world’s leaders and powers seem unwilling or unable to stall what some experts fear is an unstoppable global march toward war.
What are the forces and actions pushing the world toward planetwide and possibly nuclear conflict?
Most worrisome is the war between Ukraine and Russia, in which the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is deeply involved. The Western alliance not only arms the Ukrainians but also enables, through technology, satellite intelligence and secret troops, their increasingly destructive missile and drone strikes on strategic Russian sites, energy facilities, and civilian areas.
Gloves off in Moscow
After years of restraint despite Ukrainian attacks on assets crucial to deterring nuclear strikes — early warning radar, atomic bombers, a missile plant, and a presidential residence with a strategic forces control bunker — Moscow now looks set to hit NATO targets directly involved in Ukraine’s attacks deep into Russia. Further infuriating Russians is the recent Ukrainian drone attack on a university in the ethnic Russian region of Ukraine annexed by Moscow.
And the retaliation could be atomic, as President Vladimir Putin’s nuclear attack policy already warned in 2024. Moscow has alerted foreign embassies in Kyiv to leave before more attacks after recent hypersonic Oreshnik projectile strikes.
Sadly and perilously, Ukraine and certain Western European leaders appear bent on provoking massive and even nuclear retaliation in Europe in the desperate hope of dragging the United States into the four-year conflict that they are losing to Russia.
Turning to the Middle East, the US-Iran ceasefire and negotiations remain shaky with threats and sporadic attacks from both Washington and Tehran. And Israel’s hostilities with Iran and Tehran-backed groups Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon haven’t really stopped despite the ceasefires in those two areas.
And while the US and its Arab allies want to avoid all-out war in which Iran destroys petroleum, power and desalination plants, zeroing wealth and livability and stretching to years the current global energy crisis. But Israel could very well see advantage in its Muslim neighbors, from Saudi Arabia to Iran, impoverished and uninhabitable.
Meanwhile in Asia, President Donald Trump’s recent visit to China eased tensions after he pulled back his predecessor’s policies for a greater international role for Taiwan and a US defense commitment if China invades the island. But Putin’s visit soon after showed that Beijing and Moscow are even more strongly allied and fully backing Tehran. In sum, the faceoff between the West and the Eurasian bloc remains intense.
Part of that rivalry, some geopolitics observers say, is what they see as America’s moves to restrict Chinese access to oil and gas imports. That’s what these analysts see behind US actions to control Venezuela’s oil sector, to blockade the Strait of Hormuz, and to escalate military cooperation with Indonesia, which could very well control sea lanes linking the South China Sea to the Indian Ocean and the Middle East.
Add to that the looming deployment of anti-ship missile batteries in the Philippines from both America and Japan, further threatening Chinese shipping and ports. Thus, while armed conflict seems unlikely between America and China, economic and technological confrontation appears to be rising, fueled partly by naval deployment in key maritime choke points.
So now, even as US-China frictions over Taiwan have diminished, a global rivalry over sea lanes and energy supplies may now intensify. And one popular, outspoken professor even argues that Washington could drastically squeeze Gulf petroleum over the coming years, so the world must turn to US and Venezuelan oil and gas.
Warning from above
So, what’s the word on all this from the prophecy watchers? One Argentinian seer spoke of possible nuclear war after an assassination in the Baltic states — NATO members Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia — bordering northern Russia and said to be allowing Ukrainian covert operations.
The Virgin Mary is said to have warned recently that world war is coming, with humanity still unrepentant of its godless ways and woefully lacking in prayer. No surprise: nations recognizing no higher power than their own interests and ambitions are hugely capable of self-serving aggression with no regard for the world’s well-being.
As for prayer, if swaths of humanity are too focused on worldly concerns to even think about heaven, let alone seek grace and protection, would it surprise if God allows the deadly, disastrous consequences of human selfishness, depravity and destructiveness?
Messages from two Marian apparitions now come to mind. The 1917 warnings of Our Lady of Fatima on a hillside in Portugal called for papal consecration of Russia to her Immaculate Heart and the Five First Saturdays devotion to bring world peace. She was not heeded, and we had World War II. And there are Fatima scholars who believe a third global conflict was also prophesied without repentance.
Then, in the 1846 apparition in the hills of France by Our Lady of La Salette, who spoke of chastisement in the late 20th century. But she said if people repented and prayed, the terrible events may be delayed for a quarter-century up to the 2020s.
That seems to have happened with intensifying conflicts since 2000; three coronavirus contagions in 2003, 2014 and 2020; and worsening calamities, from earthquakes and eruptions to super typhoons and tsunamis. Now, past 2025, humanity is now on overtime, so to speak.
No wonder Pope Leo wants all the world to pray. Sadly and perilously, it doesn’t.
