THE COMMUNIST WHO SHOT AT OUR LADY

A British Catholic of the highest integrity told me the following true account. I have pondered it for many years and feel a certain call even an urgency to share it now, even though it may poke nerves in people, which is not my intention, it is nevertheless worthy of our attention because it begs the question as to that which can ensue when Our Blessed Mother - and her devotees - suffer injury. 

In the 1970s, an old friend mixed with a lot of Eastern Europeans and Russians at his job in London. Once he got to know an elderly man who had been a most zealous Communist in his youth, a self-proclaimed worshipper of Lenin. He was born into the lower working-class strata of the former Russian Empire, was orphaned young and developed a militant atheism that could take, well, violent turns. As you will learn, his atheism was loosed from him. 

This comrade looked like he was made of steel, gulped his strong liquor like water and liked living in England because as it was no longer Catholic. He was triggered by my friend - a devout Catholic who was particularly devoted to Our Lady - and even though he was one tough guy with a face like a battered metal plate, and eyes like the head of iron nails, he shivered when he heard my friend describe his practice of saying the Rosary. 

My friend got curious because whenever devotion to the Blessed Mother was mentioned this comrade looked like he was suppressing fight or flight symptoms. He chalked it up to the way Our Lady can make hardened malcontents feel uneasy, but this fellow was so cold-blooded he could have watched someone being shot and felt nothing. Yet, the mere mention of fealty to the Virgin Mary made him quake in his hobnail boots. 

There came a time when he told my friend why. He'd been a young man, pistol in pocket, and had traveled over the border to Poland, a few years after the 1917 revolution. He remembered a lawlessness characterized the countryside; his country men did unspeakable acts there for which they were seldom if ever punished. After he had passed through a dense, turquoise forest, he found himself in the garden of an old farmhouse where he saw an old woman kneeling before a statue, her hair completely covered in a linen chustki, so he knew she was married, but no man was in sight. 

She was praying fervently, but she looked like she had known more prosperous days; a feeling of riches lost and loneliness for dead loved ones hung in the misty garden. The comrade held her in instant contempt, and wasn't she pitiful to pray before a large, inanimate ornament as though to a real person?

He introduced himself to her by way of scoffing and sneering. The Polish lady tried to give him a sense of his trespassing; he was on her lawn, intruding upon her prayer time, and she went about fixing flowers at the feet of the Virgin. In his callowness, he felt slighted she preferred to direct her attention at a clay representation of a young women as opposed to him, and so he took out his pistol and started twirling it in his fingers. 

To get a rise from her, he pointed it directly at the statue which meant the Polish lady reacted with a solemn and stern, "No, no!" Then he threatened to shoot, he'd show her the uselessness of her faith. She begged him not to, and even pleaded, "This statue is all I have!" He believed her because there was such desolation around the farmhouse, like poverty was breaking down the doors. 

Angered by her petty pretensions and especially because they were arguing back and forth like it concerned a real human being, he mouthed filthy imprecations and fired at the statue. His bullet ripped off the left arm of the statue. The Polish lady was inconsolable and tears pooled in her eyes, but she had the fortitude to hold a bony finger in the air and say to him that one day he'd have a daughter who would be born without one arm. This caused him to laugh uncontrollably like a chimp on cocaine. 

But some years later, that is exactly what happened. His daughter was, according to my friend, a lovely person who was born with severe disabilities and she never missed what she'd never known, a limb. But her father was the one who never recovered. 

What if he'd left the Polish lady alone that day, let her pray her beads while she knelt so humbly in the grass before the only possession that she had? The same way the man had been smote by the power of Lenin, he was stunned by the mere idea that his act of vile destructiveness against a statue of the Mother of God could have such consequences. And when he beheld his newborn baby girl, he was no longer an atheist. 

Is it a bit too obvious a story? The daughter's condition could have been caused by foetal alcohol syndrome because the comrade and his missus seemed like the heaviest of heavy imbibers, but the Polish lady's warning was made before the comrade ever met his missus, and her words had come true to the letter. 

The comrade had no reason to divulge his transgression; it put him in the worst light, an act of desecration against Our Lady and injury to the Polish lady who'd known loss, and it did rather undercut his atheistic Communism, that a pious Pole could mystically know the future. And his daughter's disabilities meant he could never forget that time when he shot at Our Lady. 

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All images used are in the public domain. The classic painting was executed by Albrecht Durer.