Yesterday
I celebrate, for instance, the one hundredth anniversary of the death of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, pseudonym Lenin, the day after the event, rather than on the day itself. This has nothing to do with the old Julian calendar, which was formerly observed in Russia. (It has now been almost universally replaced by Pope Gregory’s calendar of 1582, which has made New Year’s since the most explicitly Catholic festival.) Rather, my celebration is of the fact that Lenin’s anniversary is over, and all anticipation of it can end.
Lenin, and his archetypal successor, Stalin, were among the greatest monsters in human history — with far more victims than Hitler, but less than Mao. Those who embrace Communism, to this day, must explain the accumulation of tens of millions of corpses, in exchange for nothing gained.
Does God have a plan to save murderers like these? It would have to be “secret,” for it is not mentioned in any document He inspired. God, I should think, does not do “secrets” like that. But, perhaps theology is as far above my head as it is over “Tucho” Fernández’s.