David Allen White is a former professor at the U.S. Naval Academy and author of several books. He has also lectured for years and is an expert on Russian culture and literature. In this interview, he talks about why Russia has not yet converted to the Church, and why the Pope did not do the same.
00:02:24.460I've been lucky enough to visit Russia twice.
00:02:27.780So, I'm not an expert, but then I am of the opinion that right now, as soon as you hear the word expert, turn and run the other way.
00:02:37.460So, we're always hearing about the experts who are telling us things that turn out to make their opinions questionable.
00:02:46.880So, mine probably is too, but at least I'm not an expert.
00:02:51.240But, to get to your question, yes, there was the consecration that was done, but there have been similar consecrations in the past.
00:03:05.100But, not yet one that fully adheres to every element in the request that was sent by God through his Blessed Mother.
00:03:20.320And, I find it astonishing that there could have been this parade of popes who cared enough to do something, but were all reluctant and hesitant to the point of leaving out something.
00:03:37.180Now, the thing I would say, and this is the old poetry professor talking here now, every word matters.
00:03:50.620You know, it wouldn't be the same to say to be or possibly not to be.
00:03:56.500That would be an entirely different way.
00:03:58.420What the request said, God now asks the Pope to consecrate Russia to my Immaculate Heart in conjunction with all the bishops in the world.
00:04:14.580Now, it is true, the invitation went out, you know, if you're not busy on this day, if you don't have a golf date, then, you know, please join me in the consecration.
00:04:29.220It's not saying, look, at this day, at this time, we're all doing it.
00:04:34.220So, that, and the Ukraine, the world, the people of the world were not mentioned.
00:04:42.220It was to be Russia, and in many of, and some of the other consecrations as well, we got a small list or other things added on.
00:04:54.220There isn't the purity of the exact words conveyed to us through our lady.
00:05:03.220So, I think, I would say, again, nice try, but no cigar.
00:05:11.220It just, it just didn't finally fulfill the request, the command, you know, although God didn't command it.
00:05:20.220God, the word is, God asks the Pope, okay, which means there's still free will there.
00:05:31.220And, it would take a real act of humility, I think, to submit to every single portion of what is asked, because they always seem to know better or hesitant about offending someone.
00:05:52.220Certainly, nobody seems terribly worried about offending God, but that's the time we live in.
00:06:01.220If you, you can tell us a bit about what you make of prophecy generally.
00:06:05.220It's a curious thing, and it's a fascinating thing, in that we have a collection of great and real prophets, and they're in the Old Testament.
00:06:20.220So, I would say that T.S. Eliot, in one of his last poems, The Four Quartets, goes at length about, not mocking, but making fun of those who are going to fortune tellers, or reading tea leaves, or looking at, you know, whatever, to try to judge the future.
00:06:45.220But, the Old Testament prophets did know.
00:06:48.220They were prophesying directly from the supernatural.
00:06:54.220They were given what they were to say, and we have that.
00:06:59.220So, in that sense, I would call those the greatest and perhaps the only certain prophecies.
00:07:09.220Now, it is an impulse, though, that God put into every human being so that you can have, for example—it can happen in history, but there are not that many cases.
00:07:45.220Then, when he's on his way to the Capitol, Act 3, Scene 1, the soothsayer shows up again, and Caesar mockingly says, the Ides of March have come.
00:08:00.220And the soothsayer says, hi, Caesar, but not gone.
00:08:05.220And, of course, Caesar goes into the Capitol and we know what happens there.
00:08:12.220Shakespeare uses his source, Plutarch.
00:08:15.220That is in the history of Julius Caesar, so that that is a part of actual history.
00:08:23.220We know nothing about the sooth there, although it's a great stage role.
00:08:28.220It's one of Shakespeare's shortest parts, but, boy, you put an actor in it, it can be just spine-chilling.
00:08:35.220Then there are, I would call them the myths, particularly the Greeks, who are among the more rational of all societies.
00:08:47.220They had their dark side, their downside, but they were trying to figure out everything on their own.
00:08:54.220They didn't have that divine inspiration, but they knew very well there was a divinity there, there was the supernatural there.
00:09:03.220So in many of their myths, Cassandra, for example, brought back to Argos after the fall of Troy by Agamemnon,
00:09:11.220who carries the curse of being able to prophesy accurately, but nobody will ever believe her.
00:09:20.220In Oedipus Rex, we have Tiresias, the old blind prophet, who tells Oedipus certain, makes certain predictions.
00:09:30.220In fact, Sophocles' Oedipus Rex is, in a curious way, a brilliant Greek mind wrestling with that mysterious division between free will and faith.
00:09:45.220Well, I'll just call it faith. We could call it divine providence.
00:09:49.220Aquinas speaks about it in the Summa. A friend of mine, a bishop said to me once when I said, well, I read it, I didn't quite understand it.
00:10:02.220He said, well, no one will fully understand it. This side of the grave is really one of God's great mysteries.
00:10:11.220We know they both exist. We know they both exist simultaneously. And so there is that sense that to prophesy is an attempt to understand faith.
00:10:26.220And for the Greeks, they presented mythically, which I think is really, really quite interesting.
00:10:36.220Occasionally, things will show up in literature. There will be a prophecy in literature.
00:10:41.220The most famous one ever is in Virgil's fourth eclogue, where Virgil talks about, and this probably would have been written about 30, 40 years before our Lord's birth.
00:10:58.220But Virgil in the fourth eclogue speaks of the coming birth of the boy child will put an end to the age of iron and bring in an age of gold through his greatness.
00:11:13.220Now, modern scholars poo poo it and come up with all sorts of explanations for it.
00:11:21.220But St. Augustine and Dante and some other figures such as that believe absolutely it was that Virgil was given a vision of what was coming and set it down.
00:11:35.220And that's a great prophecy. That's extraordinary.
00:11:40.220There's a couple from our own time. This is one that chills me to the bone.
00:11:47.220The greatest of all Swedish writers is named August Springberg. Nobody reads him.
00:11:52.220Occasionally one of his plays gets done. He was really, genuinely crazy and brilliant and a great writer.
00:12:04.220He had a conversion experience of a kind, went from being an atheist to believing in a God.
00:12:16.220But the God demanded suffering from those of us who are mortal.
00:12:23.220That was how we were to serve him. We were here to suffer.
00:12:27.220And only through suffering could we attain wisdom.
00:12:30.220His last play is called the great highway.
00:12:35.220And it's a pilgrimage play principal characters called the pilgrim.
00:23:25.220I'll go back to my primary and first love Shakespeare.
00:23:31.220The terrible words spoken by that charming woman, Lady Macbeth, near the end of that one of Macbeth, when she's trying to get her husband to go through with the murder of Duncan.
00:23:45.220She says, I have given suck and know how tender it is to love the baby that knows me.
00:23:56.220I would, while it was smiling in my face, have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums and dash the brains out.
00:24:07.220Had I so sworn as you have done to this.
00:24:11.220She should be the patroness of all of all the abortion people.
00:24:16.220And what it is, is a desire for power and an attempt to control the future.
00:24:23.220Macbeth really is one reason why we have all those witches, all the prophecies.
00:24:36.220And there are aspects of the future that we are not to know.
00:24:39.220By the way, let me say one other thing.
00:24:43.220What is violated, I mean, the murder is hideous, but he was a guest in their home.
00:24:51.220Anybody who hears this nonsense of, you know, it's my body and I can do what I want with it, simple response.
00:25:00.220Does it have the same blood type you have? Does it have the same DNA you have? Does it have the same fingerprints you have?
00:25:10.220Then it's a guest that you have allowed into your body.
00:25:16.220And if you kill it now, you will basically do what the Macbeths do to King Duncan, and you can plan on not getting much sleep and sleepwalking at night, at night, trying to rub the blood out of your hands.
00:28:18.220He had had the young czar Dmitri murdered.
00:28:22.220So he began his reign with blood on his hands.
00:28:26.220And he was in that sense, a false czar.
00:28:30.220In the opera, a young go getting man decides that he learns this story about the murder that's been, and it's been hidden, and decides he will proclaim himself the real Dmitri.
00:28:45.220And therefore, he will get to be czar, and he goes out and starts, starts getting an army to follow him.
00:28:53.220So we have the false czar, we have the false Dmitri.
00:28:57.220We have, I mean, it's just falsehood of people who are not what they're pretending to be.
00:29:04.220Um, let's just say that era of Russia is everywhere now.
00:29:10.220I'll start with being rather more polite and say simply, we have economists who are, who don't know the economy.
00:29:20.220We've got teachers who don't know what they're teaching or how to teach it.
00:29:26.220We've got music that is banished melody and is unlistenable.
00:29:31.220Um, we've got, you, you just run through it.
00:29:34.220We have questions about the highest offices in the church.
00:29:39.220We have questions about the highest rulers of our country.
00:29:43.220Even to the point where I don't know if you followed any of this.
00:29:47.220There are some questions about Sister Lucy.
00:29:51.220Um, and I won't get into that now, but I will just say this notion of is anything real?
00:35:48.220And he went from being a revolution, a Russian revolutionary, to being, um, a counter revolutionary,
00:36:01.220with a deep understanding of what would happen if, if socialism ever took hold in mother Russia.
00:36:11.220There is an uproariously funny scene where all the radicals get together.
00:36:16.220And they're all arguing about everything with, I mean, it's a, it's almost like a modern committee meeting or something, but they're all crazy.
00:37:03.220And then a man who's unidentified, simply, he's simply called the lame old man who's sitting in a corner says,
00:37:11.220I, uh, if, if, if this is going to succeed, a hundred million heads will have to roll.
00:37:20.220Basically we'll put a hundred million of our own citizens to death.
00:37:26.220Solzhenitsyn in the Gulag archipelago says, and they laughed at Dostoevsky, because there was a prediction he made that if socialism took place in, in Mother Russia in the next century,
00:37:39.220a hundred million heads would be destroyed, would, would roll.
00:37:43.220Um, Solzhenitsyn said they laughed at Dostoevsky and they were right to laugh at it because he was wrong.
00:38:11.220So, but the mayor's wife is trying to, she's one of those learned ladies.
00:38:16.220So she wants to keep up with the revolutionary thing.
00:38:19.220So she's holding this big fest, this, this festival, and all of these, these great thinkers are coming and reading their works.
00:38:29.220Well, of course it ends in total chaos, but there's a little figure that appears out of nowhere.
00:38:36.220And Dostoevsky describes this little man as being bald in the front and the back and having a pointed beard and lifting his fist and shoving it down.
00:41:56.220He requests that that passage from the Gospel of Luke be read.
00:42:03.220These demons who come out of the sick men and enter into swine.
00:42:08.220It's all the sores, all the miasmas, all the uncleanness, all the big and little demons accumulated in our great and dear sick man in our Russia for centuries, for centuries.
00:48:50.220The great writer of the middle ages was Dante.
00:48:54.220The great writer of the Renaissance era, the shift from the medieval world into our modern world was Shakespeare.
00:49:03.220The great writer for our age is a Russian named Alexander Solzhenitsyn, because his topic is totalitarianism, the loss of freedom, the hatred of God, and the, the blood on blood on the hands of the mass murderers.
00:49:22.220Um, with, with a full and deep and rich understanding that the only hope left for us, the only hope that remains is, um, I'll quote the end of this Harvard commencement address from 1978.
00:49:41.220Mankind has no other way to go upward.
00:49:46.220We have to, we have to be willing to recognize God, begin trying to raise ourselves up and do penance for what we've done.
00:50:00.220So, um, he's, he's, uh, the great Malcolm Muggeridge said, um, the great Malcolm Muggeridge, the modern student could do no worse than to read the entire works of Solzhenitsyn.
00:50:15.220So there's a contemporary, a modern writer worth reading.
00:50:19.220But of course they're dumping all the great writers of the past and reading these pipsqueaks that pretend to be writers in our own time.
00:50:28.220I just learned there's a, there's some sort of, uh, contest going on.
00:50:34.220I'm glad I retired in the English department at the Naval Academy.
00:50:38.220Dropping Shakespeare is a requirement for English majors.
00:50:43.220And one reason is in a survey of the 50 leading universities in America, only four require a Shakespeare course from their English majors.
00:50:59.220Dr. White, I want to thank you so much for sharing with us your love of literature, your love of the faith, your understanding of Russia, and amazingly, the evidence of prophecy, not only in spiritual works of the scriptures, but also in the works, great works of literature.
00:51:19.220And I'm sure you've whet the appetite, uh, for many to get back to the great works.