WASHINGTON, D.C., October 19, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) – There is an intense spiritual battle occurring in America right now and Catholics need to make use of “the weapons God has given us” to fight evil attacks on life and family, an EWTN host and speaker told the national rosary rally earlier this month.
Recounting many of the Blessed Virgin Mary’s apparitions – appearances the Catholic Church has approved as legitimate and “worthy of devotion” – Doug Barry, Founder and President of RADIX – Battle Ready and co-host of EWTN’s Life on the Rock, exhorted those gathered on Capitol Hill to follow Mary’s repeated advice to pray the rosary to help mitigate evil.
“We are living in a time of persecution,” said Barry. “We are seeing evil in ways we’ve never seen it before” such as through the Center for Medical Progress videos and the Supreme Court’s decision redefining marriage. Furthermore, statistics about the practice of Catholicism in the West are dim, with the majority of baptized Catholics not attending weekly Mass.
Catholics can help restore the culture by praying the rosary daily, Barry said, and priests can motivate Catholic men by preaching “something to chew on” rather than “the next flavor of cupcake.”
Men “need a fight,” he said. “We need to be told it’s a fight and we need to be told what weapons to pick up and what direction to go.”
Priests are the “spiritual officers of the battle” who come out of seminary “like [they’re] coming out of West Point,” Barry continued. “We need [Church] leadership to look at us in the pews and say, ‘things are no longer business as usual.’”
“Our Blessed Mother has come to us [in]…six major apparitions in the last hundred years, all approved by the Church, and every single time she warns us of the consequences of not responding to her call” to pray, Barry said.
In an apparition in Akita, Japan in the 1970s, Our Lady said, “‘If man does not repent, fire will fall from the sky and a multitude of the world will be annihilated,’” Barry recounted. “‘It will be so devastating,’ she goes on to say, ‘that those who are living will envy those who are dead.’”
“She never for a moment…wants us to turn away and bury our heads from the reality of what’s going on and what will come if we do not respond,” said Barry. “She has not made light of this. She has made this very serious” and has warned about a future world war just as she predicted the start of World War II in her Fatima apparitions, he said.
“That rosary needs to be an extension of who we are,” instructed Barry. “We should not leave the house without one on us. I heard an exorcist say that one time. The devil despises the rosary like no other sacramental out there. It is like a chain that binds him and casts him down. No Catholic should ever leave the house without a blessed rosary on their person in some way, shape, or form.”