BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

ALWAYS AND EVER OUR MOST BELOVED BENEDICTUS XVI



See preceding page for earlier posts today, 5/8/17...




The other side of the Pope's Egyptian visit:
An Islamic attack words from the Al-Azhar imam
who speaks with a forked tongue
[And echoes Bergoglio in blaming 'arms traders' for terrorism]

May 8, 2017

One week after the visit of Pope Francis to Egypt, much has been said about what he did. But little about what happened on the other side - from the Islamist point of view.

What held sway there was the speech of the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, Sheikh Ahmad Al-Tayyib, who spoke in Arabic (the official English version may be found here: http://magister.blogautore.espresso.repubblica.it/2017/04/28/speech-of-the-grand-imam-ahmad-al-tayyib/

Unlike Francis, who in his speech immediately afterward attributed the violence carried out in the name of religion to an “idolatrous falsification of God,” with nonexplicit but transparent reference to terrorism and wars of Islamic origin, Al-Tayyib maintained that there is "no one logical reason justifying these disasters" if not "arms trade and marketing," plus the oblivion that "modern civilization" has cast over the "divine religions and their invariably established ethics."

Al-Tayyib therefore denies that there is any foundation in attributing to Islam the terrorist acts perpetrated in its name, solely for the reason that there are “small groups of followers” that are carrying them out, because then, he added, the same accusation would hit Christianity and Judaism, they too with followers who sow death “carrying the cross" or "the teachings of Moses."

But these statements did not pass without criticism from some of his co-religionists. [I wish Magister had cited a few of these other criticisms.]

The most biting commentary came from an Egyptian Muslim intellectual, Islam Al-Behairy - sentenced to one year in prison for his previous criticism of Al-Azhar but then pardoned by President Abd Al-Fattah Al-Sisi - who also burst out two years ago into a resounding attack on what is the most famous university of Sunni Islam, enjoining it to undertake as soon as possible a “religious revolution” capable of “uprooting” the fanaticism of Islam in order to “replace it with a more enlightened vision of the world.”

Al-Behairy presented his criticisms of the grand imam of Al-Azhar in an interview with AsiaNews, the online news agency of the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions:
> For Islam Al-Behairy, pope's visit, a missed opportunity http://www.asianews.it/news-en/For-Islam-Al-Behairy,-popes-visit,-a-missed-opportunity-for-Al-Azhar-40624.html

For him, Al-Tayyib’s explanations blaming Islamic terrorism on arms trafficking and postmodern thought are psuedo-reasons:

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"If the reasons for religious terrorism are postmodern ideas and arms trafficking, we live in the dream world. There are in fact texts in our classical jurisprudence that incite violence. We see people blowing themselves up, killing dozens of people, because they have read texts that give them carte blanche to kill anyone, and this for the simple reason that they have an unshakable faith that they are doing the right thing for God, immolating themselves and killing many other people along the way.

This is not just about arms trafficking. I call upon the Egyptian government to review meticulously the views of Sheikh Al-Tayeb. Because according to his way of thinking, the State will never be able to put an end to the violence...

I call on Al-Azhar to stop showing to the world books written by certain medieval imams, which it sells as the legacy of true Islam. Because what is in these books is what Daesh [the Arabic term for ISIS] does literally, to the last comma.

If sheikh Al-Tayyib really wants to counter what is happening, he would listen to those who ask him to re-read these texts and say that what is in them does not correspond to the truth. Past imams hurt our people, the image of Islam, and even the relations of Islam with other religions.

But the sheikh does not want to talk about a new interpretation. He is fiercely opposed it and goes after those who favour it. In fact, he is a source of perpetual contradiction. In a statement addressed to the West, he says that Islam does not call for killing apostates. But in Egypt, he lets himself say that Islam encourages to do so." [An accusation that most Western experts on Islam have always pointed out. But Bergoglio will, of course, always play blind to anything that does not fit into his idea of what things are rather than of what they really are.]

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There is an arresting similarity between these criticisms of Al-Behairy against Al-Azhar and those formulated in the run-up to Pope Francis’s journey by two Egyptian Jesuits thoroughly familiar with this subject, Fathers Henri Boulad and Samir Khalil Samir, in interviews with L'Osservatore Romano and AsiaNews, respectively, both of them reprinted by Settimo Cielo.

Al-Tayyib’s record is in effect full of contradictions:
- In 2007, he was one of the signers of the famous “letter of 138 Muslim scholars” to Benedict XVI in dialogical response to his lecture in Regensburg.
- But he is also the one who at the beginning of 2011 broke off relations between Al-Azhar university and the Holy See solely because Benedict XVI had publicly prayed for the dozens of victims of the new year’s attack on the Coptic church of Saints Mark and Peter in Alexandria, Egypt.
- He has repeatedly been an honored guest at the inter-religious meetings for peace organized by the Community of Sant’Egidio.
- But he is also the one who in 2004, at one of these meetings, gave public approval of the terrorist acts carried out in Israel against civilians, including children.
- In 2015, when ISIS killed a captured Jordanian pilot by burning him to death in the town square, he condemned that act as “not Islamic.” - - But in compensation he decreed that those assassins “must be killed, crucified and amputated of feet and hands.”

Given these precedents, it comes as no surprise that Al-Behairy should declare himself skeptical over the international conference for peace organized at Al-Azhar by Al-Tayyib in conjunction with the pope’s visit: "This peace conference leads nowhere. There is nothing specific about the fight against terrorism. It is a comedy far from reality."

Just as there is still nothing like acceptance - except by a few isolated pioneers - for the revolutionary proposal that Benedict XVI issued to the Islamic world in December of 2006, three months after Regensburg.

A proposal of extraordinary relevance, but one that has fallen too far into oblivion, even within the Catholic Church. One more reason to reread it in its entirety:

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"The Muslim world today finds itself facing an extremely urgent task that is very similar to the one that was imposed upon Christians beginning in the age of the Enlightenment, and that Vatican Council II, through long and painstaking effort, resolved concretely for the Catholic Church....

"On the one hand, we must oppose a dictatorship of positivist reasoning that excludes God from the life of the community and from the public order, thus depriving man of his specific criteria of judgment.

On the other hand, it is necessary to welcome the real achievements of Enlightenment thinking – human rights, and especially the freedom of faith and its exercise, recognizing these as elements that are also essential for the authenticity of religion.

Just as in the Christian community there has been lengthy inquiry into the right attitude of faith toward these convictions – an inquiry that certainly will never be concluded definitively – so also the Islamic world, with its own tradition, stands before the great task of finding the appropriate solutions in this regard.

The content of the dialogue between Christians and Muslims at the moment is above all that of encountering each other in this effort to find the right solutions.

We Christians feel ourselves to be united with all those who, precisely on the basis of their religious convictions as Muslims, struggle against violence and in favor of synergy between faith and reason, between religion and freedom."
- BENEDICT XVI
Regensburg, Sept. 12, 2006

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The writer risks being unfashionable and out-of-lockstep with those who would and do blame Benedict XVI for having made a Pope Bergoglio possible...
I do take issue with the title 'Ratzinger rising' which suggests that he has in any way been 'sunk'...

When Joseph Ratzinger resigned as Pope Benedict XVI, some of his opponents predicted, unkindly, that his abdication would be the only thing remembered about his life and pontificate. It turns out that it is Benedict’s critics who are now being eclipsed, while Joseph Ratzinger’s reputation continues to rise.

- In 2012, a year before his retirement, the University of Notre Dame had already published a commemorative volume of essays on Ratzinger’s impressive theology and writings.
- Two years before that, following his successful visit to the United Kingdom, new Catholic youth movements began springing up, followed by an unexpected increase in men and women pursuing religious vocations. - After his retirement, an online initiative titled “Generation Benedict” emerged, inviting young people to describe how Joseph Ratzinger had changed their lives.
- And this year, the Vatican’s publishing house, in cooperation with the Benedict XVI Foundation, released a new tribute, titled Cooperatores Veritatis (“Co-workers of the Truth”), written by the winners of the Ratzinger Prize, an award now given to leading theologians and scholars.

[Doino, of course, omits all the books (including at least 4 or 5 new biographies) that have been written on Benedict XVI or that have anthologized his writings on a variety of subjects since February 2013 (not to mention the lat interview boom with Peter Seewald, and the continuing publication of his Opera Omnia in various languages). I have not done a comparative count - and it is time I did just that, along with all the titles I am aware of - yet I think it is safe to say the number would rival if not surpass the books written about or ostensibly by his successor.

In addition, what about all the continuing international activities to propagate and perpetuate his theological thought? Off the top of my head, by the Ratzinger Foundations (the Munich-based one set up by the Ratzinger Schuelerkreis, and its subsequent counterpart in Rome, Fondazione Vaticana); by the Regensburg-based Institut Papst Benedikt XVI which is publishing other books on him besides the Opera Omnia; by the New Schuelerkreis composed of younger followers of his thought; by the master's program on Ratzinger Studies at the Augustinianum in Rome; by the theological college named for him at Heiligenkreuz Abbey near Vienna...

Benedict XVI's hoity-toity ultra-trad critics - from Ferrara and Verrecchio and the Remnant stable, to Steve Skojec and lightweights like Frank Walker - can write all they want against him, but their entire combined life corpus (corpora) will not equal, much less eclipse, a single line in Benedict XVI's teaching.]

Ratzinger’s achievements are significant not just for the following they’ve produced, but for the keen insights and teachings they contain.

Nowhere has Ratzinger’s influence been greater than in theology, and specifically in expounding and defending the foundational beliefs of Christianity. In his now-classic Introduction to Christianity, published in 1968 at the height of the Cultural Revolution, Ratzinger not only defended biblical Christianity through a profound elucidation of the Apostles’ Creed, but presented it as the only cure for the chaos then convulsing society.

Before and after becoming Pope, Ratzinger also defended the essential truth of Holy Scripture, against both a literalist reading and the modern-day effort to “de-mythologize” it.

Ratzinger’s theological contributions culminated in his Jesus of Nazareth trilogy, along with his related writings on eschatology, Mary, the apostles, the saints, the Doctors of the Church, and, not least, Christian worship.

No modern Catholic leader has done more to revive the latter than Ratzinger did with his book The Spirit of the Liturgy and his motu proprio Summorum Pontificum. This welcome document allowed for unprecedented freedom for modern priests to celebrate the Tridentine Mass — now known as the Extraordinary Form of the Mass — following its suppression in favor of the New Mass of Paul VI. Addressing the “liturgical wars” directly, Benedict taught that both forms are valid and authentically Catholic, and should not be seen as rivals.

Ratzinger’s writings on the Second Vatican Council, which he attended as a theological expert, culminated in his now famous critique of the “hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture,” which has portrayed Vatican II as a radical, irreconcilable break with classic Catholic teaching — when, in fact, Vatican II is continuous with it, within the context of legitimate reform and development, rooted in the Sacred Deposit of Faith.

Ratzinger’s proper reading of Vatican II answers both modernists and arch-traditionalists who, having mistaken Vatican II for a revolution, try to use it as either a charter for dissent, or a target for reactionary rebellion.

Ratzinger, in contrast, represents the vital center of Catholic orthodoxy, which seeks to bring the Gospel to the contemporary world, without losing its salt or falling prey to secularism and relativism.

That said, Ratzinger has not been afraid to criticize the Council for omitting or downplaying vital aspects of Catholic tradition, or for its reluctance to confront dangerous ideologies and pathologies. In doing so, he has demonstrated how faithful Catholics can support the Council without romanticizing it. [Yet his ultra-trad critics insist on presenting Benedict XVI's support of Vatican II teachings as absolutely unconditional and uncritical, ignoring the body of his critical writings on this subject since 1965.]

The continuing value of Joseph Ratzinger's work can be seen — to cite three examples — in the intense debates over “decentralization” in the Church, Amoris Laetitia, and the right approach to radical Islam.

Back in 2001, Cardinal Ratzinger (then prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) and Walter Cardinal Kasper publicly debated decentralization in the Church. Kasper argued for the importance of the local Church and its practices, over and against the universal norms promulgated by Rome, which Ratzinger strongly defended.

Many bishops in Germany regrettably followed Kasper’s advice, and the disastrous consequences can be seen in the country’s empty pews, mass secularization, and open defiance of Catholic teaching. Robert Cardinal Sarah, the Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship, recently spoke about the damage localization and decentralization have caused within the Church, citing Ratzinger:

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As Pope Benedict XVI tells us: “It is clear that a Church does not grow by becoming individualized, by separating on a national level … by giving herself an entirely cultural or national scope; instead, the Church needs to have unity of faith, unity of doctrine, unity of moral teaching. She needs the primacy of Peter, and his mission to confirm the faith of his brethren.”

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Absent that, warned Cardinal Sarah, the Church risks fragmentation, and even schism.

On Amoris Laetitia, three professors at the Pope St. John Paul II Institute in Rome have just produced a handbook for faithfully interpreting it—and their guide for doing so is Ratzinger's hermeneutic of continuity. As Stephan Kampowski, one of the book’s authors, explained:

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Catholics believe that the Holy Spirit guides the Church along the ages in the understanding of the revelation that God has given us once and for all in Jesus Christ. While there is growth in understanding, no new revelation is to be expected. …

Now, the Holy Spirit does not contradict itself. Therefore, a hermeneutic of continuity is the only legitimate one for interpreting magisterial texts. A manner of reading the difficult passages of Chapter 8 [in Amoris Laetitia] that clearly contradicts the magisterium — in particular, with respect to the concrete practice, John Paul’s Familiaris Consortio and Benedict XVI’s Sacramentum Caritatis … is not simply implausible, but, theologically speaking, illegitimate.

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Consequently, the book reaffirms Church teaching forbidding Holy Communion for those in grave states of sin, and doesn’t try to get around that teaching by speculating about a person’s individual culpability (something only God knows for certain), or invoking mistaken notions of conscience, mercy, discernment, and accompaniment. Full and genuine repentance of one’s mortal sins, followed by a firm intention not to commit any more, say the authors, must precede Holy Communion.

Benedict’s 2006 Regensburg address, undoubtedly his most controversial speech, was an eloquent reflection on faith and reason, but was heavily criticized for raising pointed questions about Islam. Yet, over a decade later, with radical Islamic terrorist attacks proliferating, that address is seen by many, including reform-minded Muslims, as prophetic.

Although Pope Francis has been far more reluctant to question any aspect of Islam, he recently rose to the occasion in Egypt, echoing some of the themes Benedict broached. As John Allen commented:

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In effect, what Francis delivered on his first day … was almost his version of Pope Benedict XVI’s celebrated, and controversial, 2006 speech … [which] caused a firestorm of protest by quoting a line linking the Prophet Mohammed with violence. Francis avoided the incendiary quotation, but nevertheless delivered a clear and powerful call to religious leaders — which, in the Egyptian context, unmistakably means Islam in the first place — to reject violence in the name of God.

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[Does Allen not realize that is all just empty rhetoric when, with every jihadist attack that takes place, Bergoglio's first reaction is to say it has nothing to do with Islam, and it has all to do with arms traders? Indeed, Bergoglio ignores that Islam is not just a religion but a monolithic set of unbending beliefs and rigid rules that govern every single thought and action of its followers who are indoctrinated that all of it is 'in the name of Allah and his prophet Mohammed'! That is perhaps one of this pope's most incredible blind spots. He wants 'rigid'? All he has to do is look to Islam!]

Joseph Ratzinger’s warnings to the Church should not be taken to mean that his life or pontificate have been dominated by such critiques, or by an all-consuming suspicion of the world. In fact, Ratzinger has always welcomed fruitful dialogue with those outside the Church, including non-believers, and encouraged Catholics to embrace beauty, especially through art, music, and literature.

The goal of Joseph Ratzinger’s work has consistently been to uplift and inspire, and to draw people closer to “the pierced one,” Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. The joy Christianity brings has been the overriding theme of his life and pontificate; and one could detect some of that joy on the pope emeritus’s face when he recently celebrated his 90th birthday with friends and family. It is a joy that the Church will long share in, as Catholics continue to thank heaven for the gift of Joseph Ratzinger.

A belated post because I have been unable to use Photobucket the past two days - there is an erratic glitch - so I had to resort to Flickr as an alternative. After finally figuring out how to get the image URL, it has been the source of the new images I have managed to post the past two days, and where I have just uploaded these weekend headlines which is where I got stuck in Photobucket...

May 6-7, 2018 headlines

PewSitter


Canon212.com


Will try to post May 9 headlines now...

May 9-10, 2017 headlines

PewSitter


Canon212.com


It's Father Z who's commenting on the Luther jubilee frenzy among Jorge Martin Bergluther and his Berglutherans...

I just don’t get the whoopdeedoo
about Luther this year in the Catholic Church
[Not 'in the Catholic Church, Fr Z - in the church of Bergoglio]
by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf
Posted on 9 May 2017

I received a note from priest friend. He included a PDF of an article to be published. Here is the synopsis:

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Synopsis: A close analysis of Kasper’s book on Mercy reveals a powerful embrace of Luther’s theology of grace and mercy. But Luther had no moral theology since, in his eyes, human beings are incapable good, and God’s mercy replaces his justice.

Beneath a panegyric to divine mercy, Kasper’s persistent theme is a diminution of divine justice against which mercy is revealed and illumined. The result is a trivialization of God’s mercy, the enormity of Christ’s sacrifice, man’s freedom of moral choice and participation in his own salvation, and by necessity, thereby, his dignity.

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Look. I’m a former Lutheran. When I was in seminary, we had to read Kasper’s Christology books, the best Lutheran Christology I ever read!

In his book on Mercy, Kasper pretty much says what the Council of Trent anathematized.

I just don’t get the whoopdeedoo about Luther in the Catholic Church.

In the Lutheran churches (not real churches according to the CDF because they don’t have Apostolic Succession, etc.), I get it completely. If they want to celebrate Martin Luther, great!

But… should we?

There are many things I don’t understand about this.

Another thing I don’t get is why lots of women and many Jews are not upset by the big celebration of Martin Luther. Just read Luther, for heaven’s sake! Why are not feminists upset? Where are the women, for pete’s sake? Is this an example of what McCarthy describes in The Grand Jihad? The enemy of my enemy is my friend?

Luther didn’t say exactly kind things about Jews. Where are they with this? I don’t get it. Pope Francis used an analogy the other day about Syrians and camps and lots of people were upset. Read Luther on our Jewish elder cousins someday.

I don’t see why we are supposed to celebrate the shredding of Christendom. [Ask Bergoglio and Koch (who I find does great disservice to Benedict XVI who named him to the Pontifical Council for Promoting christian Unity)].

I know about the blah blah about things in the Church that needed reform in the 16th c and following, and even today. I’m a convert, remember?

Am I getting this wrong? Where am I wrong?


Two comments on a newly reported outrage from the mouth [or pen] of one of Jorge Bergoglio's most outspoken surrogates these days,
the coconut-palm cardinal Coccopalmerio - who, most commentators forget, along with Cardinal Kasper, chaired (chairs?) the so-called
'Cenacolo degli Amici di Papa Francesco' which first began meeting shortly after the conclusion of the first 'family synod'...

In effect, Cardinal Coco-Nut, who is the President of the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts, "in a recently published book...
calls into question Pope Leo XIII’s 1896 papal bull that Anglican orders are 'absolutely null and utterly void'."

BTW, Lamb does not think it necessary to tell us the title of the book. I went back to Google the cardinal's books in Italian to make sure
I don't miss anything, and his last published book, I see, was his booklet in defense of AL Chapter 8 (at which he infamously decided not
to attend its formal presentation). I cannot imagine what hook he used to get from AL to Anglican orders, unless he argues that 'the
Church' should also recognize all Anglican unions as valid, including those between same-sex bishops, presumably...

The ultraliberal UK Tablet, which reported this, started the story with the over-reaching premise that "Leo XIII’s remarks...have been
a major stumbling block to Catholic-Anglican unity". The Tablet, of course, ignores the fact that Benedict XVI requires Anglican
Anglican priests joining the Ordinariate first had to be ordained with Catholic Holy Orders, which none of the Ordinariate bishops and priests
around the world ever questioned.]

Herewith, two reactions: the first, from Ordinariate priest Fr. Kirk of the UK, who makes it the subject of one of his 'Frank and Justin'
correspondence series, ostensibly letters between this pope and the current Archbishop of Canterbury and chief Anglican primate, Justin Welby.
I looked up what the Latin title means - it's 'obstacle'.

Praepedimentae
by Fr. Geoffrey Kirk

MAY 10, 2017

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Dear Frank,

I read in The Tablet that your man Cardinal Coprophilia wants you to declare Anglican Orders pukka. [Pukka is an Anglo-Indian term meaning 'genuine'.]

Of course we would be delighted.

If they’re truthful most Anglicans have a residual anger about Apostolicae Curae [Leo XIII's Papal Bull of 1896 in which he ruled that Anglican orders are invalid. Note to the Tablet writer, Christopher Lamb (who also spun the Knights of Malta mess for the Tablet): The statement by Leo XIII was not a mere 'remark' but the subject of a Papal Bull].

Being called ‘absolutely null and utterly void’ does rile a chap somewhat. At the very least, it’s not very ecumenical. So it is good news that you are thinking of doing the gentlemanly thing after all.

However, I must make one thing plain.

The acceptance of the validity of Anglican Orders must include those conferred on women. [Gotcha, Cardinal Coco-Nut! Bet you didn't think of that, huh? Or maybe you did, projecting forward to when the church of Bergoglio does ordain women!] We are nothing if we are not egalitarian. And, in any case, I don’t want hours of fruitless wrangling with Martyn Percy [Anglican priest, academic and author, current Dean of Christ Church College in Oxford, who has a progressive outlook on a number of social issues, such as LGBTQ rights and the ordination of women].

Personally I don’t see how you can do it. I have not read Coprophilia’s paper, so he may well have come up with some witty scheme for separating the sheep from the goats which has eluded me. But all must have an equal bite of the cherry! On that we are quite adamant.

Heigh-ho! It always seems to be the same with sweeping ecumenical gestures. No sooner are they made than some passionate ideologue comes along and puts a spoke in the wheel.

Ut unum sint.

Your friend Justin

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The second reaction comes from canonist Edward Peters:
Questions relating to Cardinal Coccopalmerio’s
comments on Anglican orders
Was Leo’s 'Apostolicae curae' an exercise of the extraordinary papal magisterium, making infallibly certain
the invalidity of Anglican orders and thus requiring Catholics to hold them 'absolutely null and utterly void'?

May 10, 2017

A rock dropped into quiet waters produces a visible splash and observable ripples. The same rock thrown into a storm-tossed sea, however, passes unnoticed, for its effects are overwhelmed by larger and wider waves.

Before the splash of Cdl. Coccopalmerio’s startling comments toward recognizing Anglican orders disappears in the theological chop that is the new normal for Catholics, let’s record some questions deserving of consideration.

Note, the only source I have for Coccopalmerio’s comments is The Tablet and, as that site sets the stage for its report by recalling “Leo XIII’s remarks [on] Anglican orders” — as if Leo’s Apostolicae curae (1896), which declared Anglican orders “absolutely null and utterly void”, simply conveyed, you know, some “remarks” — one is not reassured that The Tablet [or at least, writer Lamb] fully grasps what is at issue here.

In any case, no Tablet quotes attributed to Coccopalmerio directly attack Leo’s ruling (we are not even told what language the cardinal was speaking or writing in, and I think that is an important point) so there is some room for clarification. [Since Lamb claims that the cardinal made this statement in a book, presumably written originally in Italian - and surely Lamb reads Italian, so we must assume the cardinal did say what he is claimed to say.]

But, if Coccopalmerio said what The Tablet reports him as saying, the following questions would warrant airing.

1. Was Leo’s Apostolicae curae an exercise of the extraordinary papal magisterium, itself making infallibly certain the invalidity of Anglican orders and thus requiring Catholics to hold them “absolutely null and utterly void”? I think it was, and I think we must, but I am open to counter arguments.

2. Or, was Apostolicae curae a prominent exercise of the ordinary papal magisterium which coalesced with several centuries of other ordinary exercises of papal-episcopal magisterium in rejecting the validity of Anglican orders to the point that Catholics must hold them invalid?

I think they surely came together thus and so hold that Catholics must regard Anglican orders as null. I can scarcely see any counter argument, let alone a plausible one, here, but if someone wants to offer it, I would listen.

3. Or, finally, does Apostolicae curae, and the effectively unanimous rejection of Anglican orders by Catholic authorities over the centuries, and the express inclusion of the invalidity of Anglican orders by then-Cdl. Ratzinger in his doctrinal commentary on Ad Tuendam Fidem (1998) as something known with infallible certainty, and therefore as something to be held definitively by Catholics, leave any room whatsoever for speculating on, let alone defending, the possible validity of Anglican orders? Surely the question is rhetorical.

Next, if the answer to any of the above scenarios is Yes, do we not then face the situation anticipated by Canon 750 § 2 whereby one who rejects an assertion “proposed definitively by the magisterium of the Church” is in that regard “opposed to the doctrine of the Catholic Church”?

And, if the answer to that question is Yes, would not ‘obstinacy’ (which, I hasten to add, can scarcely be proven by a few comments) in rejecting a “doctrine mentioned in can. 750 § 2” leave one, following fruitless admonition by the competent ecclesiastical authority, liable to a “just penalty” under Canon 1371, 1º?

Now, besides the possibility that Coccopalmerio did not say what The Tablet thinks he said, or that he said it but, on further consideration, he wishes to revise his remarks, the only other accounting I can come up with for his remarks is that, while Anglican orders are themselves invalid, some Anglicans are nevertheless validly ordained — not in virtue of their Anglican orders, to be sure, but in virtue of a post-Edwardian reintroduction of valid orders (conferred by break-away Catholic bishops or Orthodox prelates), such that a given Anglican minister might, by doing an ‘ordination pedigree’ search, be able to trace his orders back to a prelate possessed of valid orders.

Such a query can be tedious, of course, and it might impact only a small number of Anglican ministers, but I think it only fair to acknowledge the possibility. (For what it’s worth, I think the Roman decision to ordain “absolutely” all Anglican ministers coming into full communion who wish to serve as priests — if applied without regard for the possibility that some could trace their orders to a bishop with valid orders — is problematic). Maybe this unusual source of sacramental validity is what the prelate had in mind.

If, by the way, our speaker above were not a credentialed canonist, I would pause to make it clear that the canonical-doctrinal conclusion of the invalidity in Anglican orders does not, repeat not, mean that “nothing happened” at, or as the result of, the rites undergone by Anglican ministers. Such rites can of course be occasions of great grace for their recipients and ministry conducted in their wake can, and doubtless has, helped many to grow closer to Christ.

But canonists need no reminding that the power of a devotional rite to dispose one toward a closer cooperation with grace is not to be confused with whether a specific sacrament was (i.e., validly), conferred thereby, and so I mention this point only for the sake of others following this discussion.

In the end, though, perhaps the prelate said exactly what The Tablet claims he said, and perhaps he meant it just the way it sounds. If so, I grant, he would not be alone, at least not in, how to put this?,ruminating around the possible validity of Anglican orders.

That said, and as important as the above questions might be, the cardinal’s further statement, one directly attributed to him, also deserves a closer look: namely, that the Church has “a very rigid understanding of validity and invalidity: this is valid, and that is not valid. One should be able to say: ‘this is valid in a certain context, and that is valid another context.'”

That, folks, is huge. [Yup, the deadly sting in the scorpion's tail!]

But, one issue at a time, shall we?

BTW, if the Coco-nut Cardinal really represents Bergoglio's thinking about Anglican orders - very likely, after all, since no pope has been so aggressively 'ecumenical' even at the expense of Catholic doctrine, i.e., plainly and simply anti-Catholic. If he can allow interfaith communion with Lutherans who do not believe in Trans-substantiation, recognizing the validity of Anglican ordination is surely a much 'shorter step' to take! - then Leo XIII joins St. Pius X, St. John Paul II and Benedict XVI as popes whose magisterium this pope does not have any qualms about trampling down.

Phil Lawler's comment echoes my conjecture:

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“When someone is ordained in the Anglican Church and becomes a parish priest in a community, we cannot say that nothing has happened, that everything is ‘invalid’,” writes Cardinal Francesco Coccopalmerio in a new book.

But isn’t that pretty much what Pope Leo XIII did say, when he declared Anglican orders “absolutely null and utterly void”? Yet the statement by Cardinal Coccopalmerio cannot be dismissed lightly, since he is president of the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts: the Vatican body that is responsible for the official interpretation of the Code of Canon Law.

He argues that the Church has suffered from “a very rigid understanding of validity and invalidity.” (And “rigidity,” of course, seems to be regarded as the one unforgiveable sin in his pontificate.) Are we being prepared for another break with the teaching of previous Pontiffs?

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Then there's Hilary White, who thinks the discussion over Anglican orders is pointless because a) it's a carryover from the mid-1960s by the surviving but now-doddering Vatican-II dodos (well, I take that back, since the biggest dodo now happens to be pope!) and b) there are very few Anglicans left anyway, goes on to the more problematic issue about Cardinal Cocco-nut:

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But a much more fundamental issue is actually at stake (albeit being stirred in the world’s smallest and least interesting teapot), and it’s about the nature of truth. To Catholics of the past, doctrine was like math: a description of objective reality. But that language is out, right?

The reason its important to say that then it was no but now it’s yes, is that:
The. Most. Important. point of all of FrancisChurch is that a “no” can be made into a “yes”.

How? Because, power. The only thing this pontificate is about is power.

All you really have to do is wait a while, and talk enough marshmallowy, Anti-Rational gibberish, and hold out until your audience is so intellectually ill-formed and morally stunted that they can’t tell the difference between “development of doctrine” and denial of it.

And BINGO! Aren’t we ever there! Leo XIII? Oh man! That guy was SOOooooo 19th century! This is the current year! Times change! A man can become a woman, marry a woman who became a man, and have the pope call them a “married couple”. (Yep, not making that one up either.)

Believe me, their time has come. We are in the age when people talk about “moving past” the logical principle of non-contradiction … and they think they’re really saying a Thing.

But no. It’s not about Anglicans.

---

P.S. Canon212.com has updated its 'above-the-fold' headlines for May 10:

Perhaps Bergoglio's hommage-to-Luther trip to Lund, Sweden, last Halloween, totalled more hours than he is willing
to spend in Fatima!

etail from St. Peter preaching, Masolina da Panicale (14thc), Brancacci Chapel.

Perhaps Mons. Barron should copy-furnish the pope who named him bishop with this essay...

How to preach like the apostles
Good preaching, if it is truly evangelical, is meant to draw people into the Church.
That they are staying away from the Church in droves today says something negative
about the quality of our preaching.
By Bishop Robert Barron

May 9, 2017

I have always loved the Acts of the Apostles and have often recommended it to those who are approaching the Bible for the first time. Filled with colorful narratives, adventure, martyrdom, persecution, journeys by sea, etc., it makes for stimulating reading indeed.

But I love it especially because it shows us the excitement of being a follower of Jesus. Long before there were parishes and dioceses and the Vatican and other institutional structures, there was this band of brothers and sisters who were so overwhelmed and energized by the fact of the resurrection that they went careening around the world and to their deaths with the message of Jesus.

It also features some wonderful exemplifications of Christian preaching, for it relates to us some of the earliest kerygmatic proclamations of the apostles. If we attend carefully to these speeches, we can learn a lot about good preaching, but also a lot about the nature of Christianity. [Which is not what one is bound to get from the preaching of Jorge Bergoglio who always sounds not only as if only he can properly interpret what Jesus said, but worse, that he can tell the world something better than what Jesus said.]

A particularly fine example is the sermon given by St. Peter on Pentecost morning and described in the second chapter of the Acts of the Apostles. We hear that Peter stood up with the Eleven and raised his voice.

First lesson: all legitimate Christian teaching and proclamation is apostolic, which is to say, grounded in the witness of the first intimate followers of Jesus. Bishops are entitled to preach precisely because they are successors of the apostles; priests and deacons are formally commissioned to preach by bishops.

This is to assure that what preachers say is not just a matter of private opinion or the fruit of the present cultural consensus, but is rather rooted in the experience of those who knew Jesus personally. [Do you hear that, JMB? Of course not! You will persist in preaching rooted in your personal experience and from your own all-knowing better-than-Jesus mind!]

So what does apostolic preaching sound like? Peter says, "Let the whole house of Israel know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified."

Notice, first, the strength, confidence, and edginess of this proclamation. There is nothing weak, vacillating, or unsure about it. This is not a preacher sharing his doubt with you or reveling in the complexity and multivalence and ambiguity of faith.

This is a man speaking (in a loud voice) about his absolute conviction. And what is he convicted about? "That God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified." Christos, the Greek term for Messiah from which we derive the English word Christ, has the sense of anointed, which implies the new David, which means the fulfillment of the expectation of Israel.

Good preaching always puts Jesus in relation to Israel, for he makes sense only kata ta grapha (according to the Scriptures). A Jesus abstracted from the history of Israel devolves in short order into a mere religious teacher or teacher of timeless spiritual truths.

And not only is he Christ; he is also Kyrios (Lord). This term had, at the time of Peter and Jesus, both a Jewish and a Roman sense. On the Jewish reading, it designated Yahweh, the God of Israel, for Adonai (Lord, in Hebrew) was the typical substitute for the unpronounceable tetragrammaton, YHWH.

Paul, who continually calls Jesus "Lord," says that Jesus was given the name above every other name, by which he means the name of God. Preaching that leaves the divinity of Jesus aside or in the shadows is, therefore, not Apostolic preaching.

Now Kyrios also had a Roman sense, since Caesar was called kyrios ['caesar' is its Latin form], meaning the one to whom final allegiance is due. Do you see how edgy and subversive it was to declare that Jesus is Lord, and by implication, Caesar is not? And do you see why those who made that claim usually ended up imprisoned and/or put to death?

A twentieth century Anglican bishop memorably expressed the insight as follows: "When Paul preached, there were riots; when I preach, they serve me tea."

Notice, next, that Peter is not tickling the ears of his hearers: "God has made both Lord and Christ this Jesus whom you crucified." He's not pulling any punches or trying to win friends and influence people. About as bluntly and clearly as he possibly can, he names the sin of his audience. And this is precisely what "cuts to the heart" of his hearers. [Not sting their ears and stir up rage, as JMB's tiresome and dishonest platitudes do!]

Trust me when I tell you that abstract spiritual principles, tired bromides, and timeless moral truths don't cut people to the heart. And so they cry out, "What are we to do?" Peter's sermon continues: "Repent and be baptized for the forgiveness of your sins."

Every truly evangelical sermon should be a call to repentance, to turn one's life around. If it doesn't lead to contrition and a conviction to change, it has not cut to the heart. Mind you, this doesn't entail moralizing in a brow-beating way [You might want to consult the ever-growing Bergoglio's Little Book of Insults to remind you what Bergoglian brow-beating really means!], but rather presenting the message of Jesus in such a clear and compelling way that people naturally see how they've fallen short and want to change.

Peter concludes: "Save yourselves from this corrupt generation." Followers of Jesus are a holy nation, a people set apart. We have renewed minds and wills; we should profile ourselves distinctly against the backdrop of the world.

If we think and act like everyone else, we haven't taken in the Gospel. Relatedly, if all we hear from the pulpit is what can be heard on talk-shows and in discussion groups and in political conversations, we haven't heard the Gospel.

Finally, we are told that, "Three thousand persons were added [to the Church] that day." I know that everyone and his brother tells us not to worry about numbers and there is indeed truth to that. For God wants us to be, not successful, but faithful, as Mother Teresa said.

However, like it or not, the Bible is interested in numbers. And good preaching, if it is truly evangelical, is meant to draw people into the Church. That they are staying away from the Church in droves today says, I would suggest, something rather negative about the quality of our preaching.

To all preachers, I might recommend a careful consideration of the kerygmatic sermonizing in the Acts of the Apostles. If you preach like Peter, they might not serve you tea after every homily, but they will know that they've been cut to the heart.

 

Perhaps nothing so underscores, highlights, marks in red capitals the idiosyncratic and irrational judgments of Jorge Bergoglio than his handling of the Venezuelan tragedy - in its way, the South American equivalent of the Syrian tragedy in the Middle East, for going on and on without a resolution while the suffering of the Venezuelan people goes from bad to worse to intolerable...

Pope Francis: Playing Pontius Pilate
in the Venezuelan tragedy

May 11, 2017

The number of dead is now around forty, the wounded number a thousand. It is the price of a month of popular demonstrations, even of only women dressed in white, against the presidency of Nicolás Maduro, in a Venezuela on the brink.

A Venezuela in which a new factor has recently taken the field, and this is the growing, systematic aggression against properties and personnel of the Catholic Church.

Vatican sources - starting with L'Osservatore Romano - as detailed as they are in covering the developments of the crisis, are sparing with news about aggression against the Church.

There is not a single reference to this even in the letter that Pope Francis wrote on May 5 to the Venezuelan bishops, who on the same day published a vibrant declaration against the announcement made by Maduro of a “constitutional convention” to reform the state for his use and consumption, meaning in practice - the bishops charge - to impose “a totalitarian, militaristic, violent, oppressive police state system” even worse than the “21st-century socialism” set up by Maduro’s predecesssor, Hugo Chávez, a leader still praised by many leftist populist groups in Latin America and elsewhere.

For Sunday, May 21, the bishop have called a “Day of prayer for peace in Venezuela.” But meanwhile, here is an initial survey of the aggression against the Catholic Church, published by the Venezuelan journalist Marinellys Tremamunno in La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana of April 2:
> Venezuela, inizia la persecuzione della Chiesa
www.lanuovabq.it/it/articoli-venezuela-inizia-la-persecuzione-della-chiesa-1...

Nothing is off-limits.
- Death threats and blasphemous graffiti on the walls of churches. - Masses interrupted by incursions of Chavist “colectivos.”
- Caracas Cardinal Jorge Urosa Savino silenced during the homily and forced to leave the church.
- The venerated image of the Nazarene in the cathedral of Valencia smeared with human excrement.
- The chanceries of the dioceses of Guarenas and Maracay plundered. - - Thefts of consecrated hosts in Maracaibo.
- The headquarters of the episcopal conference devastated. One priest killed in Guayana and another abducted.

But it doesn’t end there. On May 4, the doors of the cathedral of Caracas were damaged and its walls were covered with graffiti in praise of the government. That same day, a crowd of students from the Catholic university marched on the episcopal residence, as a sign of solidarity.

Because by now the bishops too are an “enemy” against whom the Maduro presidency is lashing out with vehemence. Especially after the failure at the outset of the attempt at mediation between the government and opposition groups supported at the end of last year by pope Jorge Mario Bergoglio through his envoys:
> Venezuela, a Nation on the Brink of the Abyss (7.11.2017)
chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo/1351406bdc4.html?eng=y

The stance adopted by the Vatican authorities to foster a reconciliation among the parties was that expressed by Cardinal Pietro Parolin, formerly the nuncio in Caracas before his appointment as secretary of state, in the letter he sent to the parties in mid-December, “in the name and at the behest of the Holy Father.”

In it, he identified four conditions for the opening of dialogue:
- humanitarian channels to guarantee the population food and medicine;
- restitution to the parliament (in which the opposition groups are in the majority) of the prerogatives stipulated by the constitution;
- the liberation of political prisoners;
- new free elections.

But the Maduro presidency has not wanted to meet any of these conditions. On the contrary, it has made additional decisions that have ramped up the repression.

And Pope Francis has been punctually informed about everything. Also through direct conversations with Venezuelan bishops, including the president of the episcopal conference, Cardinal Baltazar Porras Cardozo, archbishop of Mérida, who met with the pope in Rome on April 27, on the eve of his journey to Egypt.

So one can understand the disappointment and anger of many Venezuelans, including bishops, when two days later, on April 29, during the customary press conference on the flight back to Rome from Cairo, Francis said this about the crisis in Venezuela:

---

“There was an effort by the Holy See, but this did not produce results, because the proposals were not accepted, or were diluted with a ‘yes, yes, but no, no.’ We all know the difficult situation in Venezuela, which is a country that I love very much. I know that now there is insistence - I believe on the part of the four former presidents [of Colombia, Spain, Panama, and Santo Domingo - editor’s note] - to restore this facilitation. I believe that conditions have already been presented. Very clear conditions. But part of the opposition does not want this. Because it is curious, the opposition is divided. And, on the other hand, it appears that the conflicts are intensifying all the time. There is something astir, I am informed about it, but it is very much up in the air. [Excuse me, Hugo Chavez died on March 4, 2013, and since then, things have only grown worse and worse for Venezuela. What do you mean 'something is astir... and very much in the air'???] But everything that can be done for Venezuela must be done. With the necessary guarantees. If not, we are playing ‘tintìn pirulero’ [where everyone wants to get out of paying the pledge - editor’s note], snd this is no good.” [TYPICAL EMPTY BERGOGLIO RHETORIC!]

---

The next day, Sunday, April 30, speaking at the “Regina Caeli,” Francis moderated somewhat the dismissive words he spoke on the plane against the Venezuelan opposition groups, practically blamed for being the ones who ruined the agreement.

He addressed “a heartfelt appeal to the government and to all the components of society that every further form of violence be avoided, human rights be respected, and negotiated solutions be sought for the grave humanitarian, social, political, and economic crisis that is devastating the population.” [More namby-pamby platitudinizing! He's been pope since 10 days after Chavez died, and what has he really done about it? How has Parolin helped in any way despite the fact that he was Nuncio to Venezuela before he became Bergoglio's Secretary of State? What does it say that the first Latin American pope has been so ineffectual and virtually unheeded in seeking to mediate a major national crisis in the continent's potentially richest nation where most of the people have been starving for years?... And BTW, he still said not a word about the stepped-up persecution against the Church in Venezuela! How do you explain that blatant omission?] But this correction has by no means calmed the waters.

Twelve hours later, in fact, the opposition groups wrote a letter to the pope in which “not divided but unanimous” they said that they agree to the conditions set by Cardinal Parolin - unlike the government, which has always rejected them - and indicated free elections as the only way out of the crisis.

The fact is that between Pope Francis and the Venezuelan bishops, concerning the crisis that is ravaging the country, there is an abyss. The bishops stand with the population that is protesting against the dictatorship, and are respected and listened to as authoritative guides. While Bergoglio is judged on a par with Pontius Pilate, unforgivably reckless with Maduro and Chavism, in addition to being incomprehensibly reticent on the victims of the repression and on the aggression that is striking the Church itself.

It is a fracture analogous to the one produced in Bolivia, where President Evo Morales has his biggest critics in the bishops, and instead a tireless supporter in the pope. Or that which was seen during the pope’s journey to Cuba, where Francis did not conceal his admiration for the Castro brothers, while not dignifying the dissidents with so much as a word or a glance.

Many see the root of the pope’s behavior in his invincible populist sentiment, typically Latin American, brought to light once again in recent days by one of the leading scholars of the phenomenon, Professor Loris Zanatta of the University of Bologna, in a long essay in Il Foglio of May 8:

---

“Reality, Bergoglio repeats, is greater than ideas. And yet, seeing his silence on the social drama in Venezuela, or in the country that with Chávez had set itself up as a model of anti-liberalism by invoking the stereotypes dear to the pope, the thought arises that he too, like many, prefers his ideas to reality." [Yup, that's Bergoglio, alright, at his most hubristic I-alone-know-right manner!]

---

On the eve of the most significant anniversary we are celebrating this year, Fr H has a most timely reminder - perhaps it should go first
of all to the man who is supposed to lead - nominally at least - the Church in the celebration, but who seems to have given priority to
the Lutheran quinquecentenary over any other celebration this year...

Fatima

May 11, 2017

I beg to remind you that, in as couple of days, the Fatima centenary will be under way. I wrote the following last October.

The Fatima visionaries, poor little peasant mites, are unlikely to have known this; but, in the first millennium, May 13 was sometimes a festival of our Lady within the Roman Rite. To me, who incline to share St John Paul's view that in the workings of Providence there are no coincidences, this seems interesting.

This is how it happened. In 609, Pope S Boniface IV dedicated the old Roman Pantheon, built originally by Marcus 'Actium' Agrippa but subsequently rebuilt after a fire, as the Church of Sancta Maria ad Martyres. He did this in collaboration with the emperor Phocas ... not an altogether nice chap, but possibly the last emperor, I think, not to use the style Basileus; it had thus taken more than six centuries to dissipate the old Roman gut sentiment which animated Brutus and his associates, to the effect that no one in Rome ought to deem himself Rex ... but I'm rambling again ...

Phocas donated an Ikon of our Lady which is still enthroned above the Altar of that Church; and the relics of many of the martyrs were disinterred and brought into the church; hence its name. This was the period when Marian Ikons, and relics of Saints, used to be processed round the wall of Constantinople when barbarian enemies appeared on the scene; I rather suspect that Pope St Boniface had in mind to construct a defensive powerhouse in Old Rome rather than merely to stimulate pious devotion.

Pre-modern, and particularly First Millennium, Christianity has a very practical and down-to-earth side to it. Possibly Pope and Emperor may even have had in mind the idea that, just as Actium had (according to the Augustan PR machine) saved Rome, so the Theotokos and the Martyrs might do the same in their own day.

In the early centuries of the English Church, this festival on May 13 seems to have been important. The Leofric Missal, the Altar Book of the early Archbishops of Canterbury, based on texts brought to England by St Augustine, includes it and, interestingly, demonstrates the continuing relevance of this festival by including in the text later scribal additions and adaptations.

Perhaps the Church of St Mary in Canterbury emulated the mother church in Rome. Something similar appears to have happened in Exeter (to which the Leofric Missal was later taken), where a Saxon church of Sancta Maria ad Martyres lay, I think, West of the present Cathedral and on the same axis.

I am sure that the significance of the Martyrs will have struck readers. The Third Secret of Fatima is full of the theme of Martyrs and Martyrdom; indeed, we are still living in an Age of Martyrs which rivals any earlier such age. I would draw the attention of those who do not know it to the official CDF documentary collection of 2000, The Message of Fatima,
http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20000626_message-fatima_en.html
and especially to the fine and elegant exposition by Cardinal Ratzinger. To which I return on Saturday.

Sancta Maria ad Martyres, ora pro nobis.

And two from Fr. De Souza...

The Fatima century:
Lethal and blessed
by Fr. Raymond J. de Souza, SJ

May 9, 2017

The centenary of the apparitions at Fatima invites us to look back at 1917, a year in which an old world order gave way to a new, more lethal one.

The apparitions of Our Lady of Fatima are well known to be linked to St. John Paul II and the peaceful defeat of communism. That, combined with Our Lady’s prophecies about the First and Second World Wars, gave Fatima an unusual focus on the events of our time.

What might be called the “Fatima century” has been dramatic for more than just Soviet communism. The year 1917 shifted the religious landscape of the global order in ways that are still shaping global affairs.

The Fatima apparitions do not address all of those shifts, but it is noteworthy that Our Lady would appear at a moment of enormous religious upheaval in the affairs of nations.

Our Lady appeared to the shepherd children in the same year that the Bolshevik Revolution toppled the tsar in Russia. The Blessed Mother spoke to the children of the conversion of Russia, and thus became linked with the struggle against communism. With the assassination attempt of May 13, 1981, on St. John Paul II, the protagonist of the defeat of communism, the “triumph of my Immaculate Heart” of which Our Lady of Fatima spoke is usually understood in those historic terms.

Yet there was much more that was going on in 1917. Consider the impact on the place of world religions in global affairs.

Orthodoxy
In a trend that continues to the present day, 1917 marked the beginning of a catastrophic century for Orthodoxy. The Russian Revolution and the introduction of totalitarian atheism meant a dark night descended on the Russian Orthodox Church, the largest by far of the Orthodox Churches.

In 1917, the Moscow Patriarchate had some 300 bishops. Twenty-five years later, after liquidation under Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, there were just a handful.

After Hitler invaded Russia in June 1941, Stalin would reconstitute the Russian Orthodox Church, but as a branch of the communist state. Communism is gone from Russia, but the Orthodox Church in its most important country still has to untangle itself from the Kremlin.

Meanwhile, the First World War also meant the end of the Ottoman Empire, the great Islamic caliphate with its capital in Istanbul — Constantinople, the primary see of Orthodoxy. With the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, and the rise of the secular Turkish state, Orthodoxy in its historic capital began to be squeezed.

The liberty of the Patriarchate of Constantinople to govern itself, control its properties, operate its seminary and regulate its own succession is restricted. The number of Orthodox Christians in Constantinople is a few thousand, fewer than in a moderately sized suburban American parish.

Between state pressure on Moscow and Constantinople, Orthodoxy has had to fight for survival for most of the century since Fatima. The “conversion of Russia” spoken of there related principally to Soviet communism, but the full conversion of Russia will only be accomplished when the Russian Orthodox Church is able to return to its proper identity as the largest of the “Eastern lungs” of the Church universal.

Judaism
The messages of Fatima did not address what was called in 1917 the “Zionist question,” but the Fatima century has been the most dramatic for the Jewish people since biblical times. And to the extent that Fatima spoke about the causes of peace, the redrawing of the Middle East is highly relevant.

As the Ottoman Empire was tottering, Great Britain and France concluded the “Sykes-Picot” agreement in 1916, which redrew the boundaries of the Middle East, creating various new Arab states. That arrangement is now unraveling, as four of those are no longer states in any functioning sense — Syria, Iraq, Libya and Yemen — and they will not be put back together again.

In the context of a post-Ottoman Middle East, in 1917 the British “Balfour Declaration” raised the possibility of a homeland for Jews in the land of Israel — the return to Zion, or “Zionism.”

After 18 centuries of diaspora existence, the return of Jews to a Jewish state in the ancient land of Israel cannot be regarded as only a geopolitical maneuver; it is a religious phenomenon.

The state of Israel would take another 30 years to be established by the United Nations, on the other side of the darkest hour for the Jewish people, the Shoah. Their attempted extermination in Europe and subsequent return to the land promised to Abraham meant that ancient biblical texts of exile and restoration were read as contemporary news. Fifty years after the Balfour Declaration, the Six-Day War in 1967 meant that Jews were free to pray again at the Western Wall.

The Arab-Israeli question has been at the forefront of the search for world peace for most of the Fatima century. It requires careful and difficult discernment, but the finger of Providence has been writing a new book in the history of the Jewish people.

Islam
The end of the Ottoman Empire meant the disappearance of the geopolitical expression of Islam on the world stage. It has been a tough century for global Islam, now roiling with the rise of a jihadism that plagues not only the Islamic countries, but the whole world.

As the recent visit of Pope Francis to Egypt made clear, the question of Islam is now at the top of the global agenda.

“I believe that the Blessed Virgin chose to be known as ‘Our Lady of Fatima’ as a pledge and a sign of hope to the Muslim people, and as an assurance that they, who show her so much respect, will one day accept her Divine Son, too,” said Archbishop Fulton Sheen.

“Archbishop Sheen held that Our Lady did not appear in the only place in Portugal with a Muslim name (Fatima was named after a Muslim princess who converted to the Catholic faith) simply to convert Russia. She came also for the conversion of the Muslim people because, he believed, unless a great number of Muslims were converted, there would never be peace in the world,” explains Father Andrew Apostoli, postulator of the Fulton Sheen cause.

He is quoted in Our Lady of Fatima: 100 Years of Stories, Prayers and Devotions, a good introductory book by Donna-Marie Cooper O’Boyle.

Catholicism
The Fatima centenary will be celebrated as a Catholic event, and it provides an interpretative key to the life of the Church in the 20th century.

Just as Pope Leo XIII organized the Jubilee Year of 1900 around devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, St. John Paul II put Fatima at the heart of the Great Jubilee of 2000. He traveled to Fatima that year in the only foreign trip, aside from visits to the biblical lands, and beatified there Francisco and Jacinta.

In October 2000, he had the statue of Our Lady of Fatima brought to Rome, where he entrusted the third millennium to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, a renewal of the consecration of the whole world to the Immaculate Heart he had completed in 1984, in accord with the request of Our Lady of Fatima.

Contemporary Catholic piety has been marked by the return of the saints to a place of prominence, with the new saints of our time leading the way. The three most important saints of the 20th century are linked to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

St. Maximilian Kolbe, long before his martyrdom at Auschwitz, put the Immaculate Heart of Mary at the center of his piety. He also dedicated to Mary the Franciscan friary he founded (the largest in the world at the time) and his million-circulation magazine, Knight of the Immaculate.

St. John Paul II, the Totus Tuus (“Totally Yours,” in relation to his Marian devotion) Pope, understood his life and pontificate to be delivered from violent death by Our Lady of Fatima.

St. Teresa of Calcutta, while awaiting approval of her plans for the Missionaries of Charity, wrote that she would “do the work of Our Lady of Fatima in the slums.”

When Mother Teresa died in 1997, she was laid beneath a statue of Our Lady of Fatima, a devotion she had promoted since the days when she created a little shrine to Our Lady of Fatima as a Loreto Sister more than 50 years previous.

Indeed, the beatification (and May 13 canonization) of Francisco and Jacinta Marto is a sign of the Church’s new generosity in recognizing the saints God is sending to the Church.

The Fatima visionaries are the youngest saints ever canonized who are not martyrs.

One hundred years on, the Catholic Church is living in a Fatima age.


In a skeptical, secular age,
Fatima remains a miracle
by Fr. Raymond J. de Souza, SJ

May 10, 2017

Do divine interventions in history belong only to the biblical period, and then only as fantastic tales intended to make a general point? Or do they accompany us through history?

This Saturday, May 13th, the Catholic world will mark the centenary of the apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary to three shepherd children at Fatima, Portugal. Pope Francis will travel to Fatima for the celebrations, during which he will declare two of the children, who died early, to be saints. (The third lived to be 97 and died in 2005; the examination of her life for possible canonization is still underway.)

The Catholic Church is extremely cautious about claims that Jesus or Mary has appeared somewhere, but is open to the possibility. After rigorous investigation, most such claims are dismissed, but some are approved as authentic. The Fatima apparitions are in the latter category, and have enjoyed papal favour. Pope Paul VI visited Fatima on the 50th anniversary in 1967; John Paul II went three times; Benedict XVI visited in 2010, and now Francis.

St. John Paul II had a particular link to Fatima. He was shot on May 13, 1981 — the liturgical feast day of Our Lady of Fatima — at point-blank range by a professional assassin. He would later comment that “one hand fired the gun, another guided the bullet” — expressing his belief that Mary had saved him from certain death. Hence he went to Fatima on the first and tenth anniversaries of the shooting to give thanks for his life being spared and his ministry continuing.

At Fatima the three children reported that the “Lady” of the apparitions spoke to them about world events of which they would have known nothing: the first world war then raging, the second world war yet to come, the rise of communism first in Russia and then globally. For that reason the Catholic struggle against communism was often associated with prayers asking for the intercession of Our Lady of Fatima.

The assassination attempt of May 13, 1981, linked the Fatima apparitions with the great vanquisher from behind the Iron Curtain, John Paul II. The peaceful defeat of communism was foreseen by no one, that the great evil empire would not only be defeated but dismantled, erased from the map of Europe. Was this not an intervention by God in our time, akin to the great victories won by the children of Israel over their enemies — Moses over Amalek, Joshua at Jericho, David over Goliath?

For those with the eyes of faith, it is easy to see divine providence at work. For those who only see material forces at work in history, first premises exclude that possibility. Consider though a middle case, that of Vaclav Havel, not a Christian believer but a man open to the spirit. The dissident who led the 1989 Velvet Revolution welcomed John Paul to Prague in April 1990 as the first president of a free Czechoslovakia.

“I do not know whether I know what a miracle is,” Havel said. “Nonetheless, I dare say I am party to a miracle now: the messenger of love comes into the country devastated by the ideology of hatred; the living symbol of civilization comes into the country devastated by the rule of the uncivilized. For long decades, spirit has been chased out from our homeland. I have the honour to be a witness to the moment when its soil is being kissed by the apostle of spirituality.”

Not unusually for Marian apparitions, Fatima was accompanied by miraculous signs. There were of course skeptics aplenty, thinking that the children were delusional or seeking publicity. The anti-clerical municipal authorities arrested the children and interrogated them, threatening them with torture by boiling oil and death. The children remained steadfast, a model for the millions of faithful who would be persecuted by the state out of hatred for God.

The Virgin Mary told the children that she would provide a sign at the last apparition on October 13, 1917. Some 70,000 people gathered in a downpour. After the apparition, which only the children could see, the “Miracle of the Sun” occurred, where the sun appeared to change colours and “dance” in the sky. After it concluded, everyone was suddenly dry. The miracle was covered by the secular newspapers, perhaps the first miracle to be witnessed by tens of thousands in the media age.

Miracles provoke disputes as those who a priori rule them impossible cannot accept them. Specific miracles are not as important though as the more profound conviction that God is at work in history. On Saturday in Fatima, Pope Francis will renew that conviction on behalf of Catholics the world over. [I am really dreading the Bergoglian platitudes that will be trotted out in Fatima, but let not the 'messenger' on that occasion detract from the enduring message of Our Lady at Fatima given 100 years ago.]

May 11, 2017 headlines

PewSitter

The big bold headline comes from Russell Shaw
http://www.catholicworldreport.com/Blog/5634/legalism_old_and_new.aspx
who claims that the Church has been all about legalism since the Council of Trent to before Bergoglio, but he defines this 'old legalism'
in Bergoglio's terms, namely, “a theology of yes, you can [and] no, you can’t.”

I think Mr. Shaw forgets that God framed the Ten Commandments in terms of "No, you can't". Is Bergoglio then wiser than God with
his 'new legalism' - which is “trying to lessen the obligations of Christian life….Doing as one pleases is then called
‘following one’s conscience’”???

Of course, Shaw mitigates his declarations by concluding that this 'new legalism' is "even more unsatisfactory than the old". So maybe
God is wiser than Bergoglio after all.

Canon212.com

The big bold headline comes from Hilary White's commentary that I cited in the Cardinal Cocco-nut post.

'Braying ass', ‘Evil clown’, ‘spawn of Satan’, or ‘Satanic Bergoglian trinity’ – he is all one and the same.

My declaration of all-out war
against this Satanic pope

As I have made it clear from the first criticism I ever made of this pope, all my criticism, objections and dislike – my increasing contempt,
in short – is for the man Jorge Bergoglio, and for all the objectionable anti-Catholic things he has been doing as pope - not for the papacy
itself. That office remains sacrosanct and inviolable in the deposit of faith – and will be so again in fact, once this pope
passes away and is replaced by a genuine Catholic.

Despite which all Catholics should continue putting Bergoglio’s conversion at the top of the list of what we pray for daily for
our Church and faith. We must: We are obliged to do so as we are obliged to pray daily for our own conversion to holiness,
and for the salvation of all souls, Catholic or not.

Jorge Bergoglio has taken over completely the persona of the pope he was elected to be. In that sense, Bergoglio and the man who is called
Pope Francis are one and the same, inseparable, and therefore, I harbor the same contempt and disrespect for Bergoglio as for ‘Pope Francis’.

And if I am ruthless and relentless about this, it is because I am ruthless and relentless in defense of my faith and the deposit of faith that
this person/personage has been trampling on. If some find my attitude offensive - especially now that it is openly ad hominem but always in
reference to specific objections - it cannot be more offensive than the offenses that Bergoglio-'Pope Francis'-the 'spirit' has inflicted on the faith.

Mundabor simplifies his contempt by calling Bergoglio ‘the evil clown’, which is much too simplistic, IMHO, (‘spawn of Satan’ might be more
appropriate). But in the light of what I have said above, he is really two-evil-persons-in-one (Bergoglio and the so-called Pope
Francis), or better, three-evil-persons-in-one, counting the ‘spirit’ he always loves to invoke for his most outrageous anti-
Catholic if not anti-Christian statements. In short, he has made himself the satanic parody of the Most Holy Trinity, a parody
he himself likes to call ‘the god of surprises’ in typical self-apotheosis.

This is someone who did not need a Wormwood, nor even a Screwtape, to screw himself up - and the faith - as Satan wishes. If I were not
so outraged beyond words, I would pity him. But he does not need or deserve pity. He needs our prayers desperately. STORM HEAVEN WITH
PRAYERS IN HIS BEHALF!

The ass that keeps braying –
and how to deal with it

MAY 11, 2017

I am at times – like, I suspect, many – tempted to just ignore Francis. It's not only that the man is so boringly repetitive. It is that one tends to think at times that the entire planet has had enough of this ever-talking man and the best thing to do is to help the world forget his miserable existence. [If we only could! But miserable and objectionable as he is, he happens to be pope.]

However, I then reflect that, much as the world has already suffered Francis Overload, the man is still the Pope and will therefore always get more resonance boxes than we would like. [There we are!]

There is, in fact, an entire industry – made of Catholic magazines and, in some Countries, Catholicism sections of big newspapers [and a specially dedicated weekly magazine in Italy] – literally living out of what the Vatican does and the Pope says, and they will not let Francis go unnoticed no matter how many heresies he can spout in one day. [It's the same thing as the 99.99% anti-Trump media in the USA except that they are happily cashing in on feeding hatred for Trump and everything he does.]

Therefore, it behooves us to do our best so that Francis's heresies, sacrileges, and assorted stupidities be exposed again and again, untiringly. If the man has decided that he has nothing better to do than to promote heresy, we must have nothing better to do than to expose it. [Which is why, much to my regret, this Benedict XVI thread has become mostly an anti-Bergoglio thread – there is not enough ‘news’ on the emeritus Pope to rival the floods of reporting and commentary that need to be made to expose every single one, if possible, of Bergoglio’s faults and errors.]

But this is just half of the story and, as I have already done in the past, I must stress another important ingredient in the fight against heresy: the utter demolition and complete destruction of the man's reputation. [Not entirely realistic, but at least, one can make sure that not one of his idiocies and blunders gets by unnoticed, unremarked and underscored the best way we can. Which is the reason for all the anti-Bergoglio material I choose to post on this Forum, and my own increasingly unfettered opinion of a man I have come to find utterly despicable, not only because he tolerates all the utterly despicable men speaking up in his behalf but because Jorge Bergoglio himself has revealed himself to be a shamelessly opportunistic anti-Catholic in these past four years and counting…]

Heresy is not only fought with rational (and obvious) arguments about the sanctity of marriage, the importance and meaning of the Sacraments, or the spotlessness of the Blessed Virgin. Heresy is also fought by ridiculing the heretic, exposing his evil dumbness for all the world to see. If we want the Papacy to be upheld, it is necessary that such an insult to the Papacy be utterly and completely insulted, annihilated, incinerated, [B]made the butt of jokes the Catholic world over. [No, a man as destructive for the faith and the Church as the Satanic Bergoglio trinity is cannot just be 'the butt of jokes' - he must be held up as a true and proper enemy of the faith, to be fought everytime he does something that offends or violates the faith.]

Whatever traction Francis still might have with low-information, low-IQ, high-excuse “faithful” (invaluable immortal souls, all of them, no matter how dumb)[ is due to the pussyfooting of too many critics towards Francis. If the criticism of Francis had been robustly offensive since, say, 2014 at the very latest, we would today experience a far more discredited Pope. [I really do not see why the pussyfooters cannot separate the man from his office, when clearly the man is doing everything he can to discredit the office of the papacy by remaking it into the office of Caudillo Maximo of the church of Bergoglio.]

Ridicule is an extremely powerful weapon. Calling an idiot an idiot is a true wake-up call for many who are slumbering. Disabuse the people around you of the “but he is the Pope” emergency exit. Go all over him with the steamroller. Leave no doubt whatever in your listener as to what you think. Your words as a devout Catholic will carry more weight in those who know you than forty BBC pro-Francis reportings.

Therefore, my suggestion to you is:
1. Never tire of countering Francis.
2. Incinerate the man with everyone you can reach.

Francis is in total opposition to Catholicism, and a massive insult to the Papacy. If you want to defend the institution, you must attack its enemy.

Keep braying, old … man.
We are ready.
 

I shall continue using this banner for Benedict XVI during all of 2017.

Recent photos of the Pope Emeritus from the Facebook pages of the Fondazione Vaticana Joseph Ratzinger/Benedetto XVI, which I really should
learn to check out daily:


May 5, 2017 - With Cardinal Bechara of Lebanon, who never misses visiting the Pope who made him cardinal whenever he is in Rome.


May 9, 2017 - With unidentified visitors in the Vatican Gardens.

NB: 1. Those running the Fondazione's Facebook page should provide appropriate information for the photos they use.
2. Mons. Gaenswein should remember to give the Emeritus a comb to smooth down his hair before pictures are taken when he meets visitors in the Vatican Garden.
It seems all the photos taken recently outside Mater Ecclesiae have the Pope's hair all disheveled.



Also, some news today:



Naples celebrates Joseph Ratzinger
Translated from

May 12, 2017

A study meeting on Joseph Ratzinger in a city that is particularly dear to him takes place on Tuesday, May 16, at the Pontificia Facoltà Teologica dell’Italia Meridionale (Pontifical Theological Faculty of Southern Italy) of Naples, in the district of San Tommaso d’Aquino. Cardinal Ratzinger opened the college’s academic year 1994-1995

The occasion is the 90th birthday anniversary of Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI and the publication of the book
Joseph Ratzinger Benedetto XVI – Immagini di una vita by Edizioni San Paolo, in which journalists Maria Giuseppina Buonanno and Luca Caruso highlight important stages in his long life of service to the Church.

Additionally, the meeting will feature discourses on the theological work and Magisterium of one of the greatest theologians of the 20th century who visited Naples frequently as cardinal, and on his pastoral visit as Pope in October 2007 said, “I am among you, dear friends, to share with you the Word and the Bread of Life. The terrible weather today does not discourage us because Naples is always beautiful!”

The meeting takes place one month after Benedict XVI’s 90th birthday and close to two other signal anniversaries in his life this year: 40 years since his Episcopal ordination on May 28, and since he became a cardinal on June 29.

On May 16, the program will be introduced by Gaetano di Palma, vice-president of the host Pontifical Theological Faculty. Speakers will include: Mons. Gennaro Acampa, auxiliary Bishop of Naples; Luca Caruso, press officer of the Fondazione Vaticana Jr/B16 and co-author of the new book; and Antonio Ascione, professor at the Theological College. Another professor, Giuseppe Falanga, will be the moderator.

The publisher’s blurb on the book says:

---

On February 11, 2013, Benedict XVI announced to the Church and to the world that he would be renouncing the Pontificate. Starting off from that announcement which is still fresh in everypne’s memory, the book recounts the life of Joseph Ratzinger, from his birth in a small Bavarian town on April 16, 1927, to his present life as the Emeritus Pope, living a life of prayer in the Mater Ecclesiae monastery at the Vatican.

It is an engaging narrative organized in 9 chapters and illustrated with 120 photographs, some of them previously unpublished, the book goes through the principal stages of the human and spiritual adventure of this ‘humble worker in the vineyard of the Lord’: his childhood in the Germany of the 1930s; the tragedy of Nazism, the war and imprisonment; his priestly vocation; his brilliant academic career; his participation in the Second VaticnanCouncil; his appointment as Archbishop of Munich-Freising and elevation to the rank of cardinal one month later; his 23-year service as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith alongside John Paul II, and the eight years of a Pontificate that had its successes as well as some difficult episodes.

It is an extraordinary patrimony of images, remembrances and testimonials which bring us all of the rich human, theological and pastoral legacy of Joseph Ratzinger-Benedict XVI.

---

Fatima and the Masonic plot
to co-opt European leadership
through Bolshevism
1918 Vatican Archive document says plot was disclosed
to the last German emperor the day before he abdicated
by Maike Hickson

May 11, 2017


Dr. Michael Hesemann, the German Church historian [who has written several books including co-authoring My Brother the Pope with Mons. Georg Ratzinger in 2010], has just given an interview to Robert Moynihan’s Inside the Vatican , in which he talks about the 100th Anniversary of the apparitions of Fatima.

Dr. Hesemann makes the following statement:

---

Also in 1917, Freemasonry celebrated the 200th anniversary of the foundation of the first Grand Lodge in London in 1717. The Masonic ideology is not only based on deism, but also on the Gnostic heresy of self-salvation and “enlightenment,” and has a decidedly anti-Catholic agenda.

In 1917, Maximilian Kolbe, one of the greatest saints of the 20th century, witnessed a Masonic procession in Rome, carrying banners with the slogan “Satan must reign in the Vatican. The Pope will be His slave.”

One year later, the German Emperor Wilhelm II was warned by German Freemasons that the Grand Orient [premier Masonic lodge in Europe] planned to force all sovereign monarchs in Europe to abdicate – which indeed happened in 1918 – [also] to destroy the Catholic Church and to bring Europe under the control of American Big Business, according to a document I found in the Vatican Secret Archives.

Bolshevism would be the instrument of Freemasonry to reach this goal. Indeed, 1917 was the year of the Russian [Bolshevik] revolution which ended in a massive persecution of the Church.

1917 also marked the United States’ entry into World War I – [in effect, therefore], the year when the two superpowers were born who would shape the history of the 20th century for the next 74 years.

---

Dr. Hesemann personally rejects the view that Russia has not been sufficiently consecrated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and denies that there is still a part of the Third Secret of Fatima missing. Nevertheless, he thinks that the message of Fatima is still with us and that some form of grave chastisement is still imminent.

And this chastening might, in my view, be connected to the words quoted above: namely, the destruction of many of the European monarchies, together with the weakening and undermining of the Catholic Church. Many historic nations may also be thereby destroyed (as Our Lady implied).

Inspired by his statement that he unexpectedly found an important document in the Secret Vatican Archives, I contacted Dr. Hesemann personally, and he generously offered immediately to share with me that original document. He has conducted extensive research at the Secret Vatican Archives since 2009.

In March of 2017 and in his own preparation for the 100th Anniversary of Our Lady of Fatima, Dr. Hesemann actually published an article about this historic document in which he himself quotes the most important parts of that document.

The document which Dr. Hesemann found in the Vatican files of the Apostolic Nunciature of Munich is a handwritten letter written dated 8 November 1918 by the Archbishop of Cologne, Cardinal Felix von Hartmann, and addressed to the Apostolic Nuncio in Germany, Archbishop Eugenio Pacelli — who would later become Pope Pius XII.

In that letter, Cardinal von Hartmann informed Archbishop Pacelli about some information that Emperor Wilhelm II just had received and which he wanted to pass on to the pope, with the help of his personal friend Cardinal von Hartmann. What follows are the most important excerpts of that historic letter:

---

Your Excellency,
His Majesty the Emperor just has let it be known to me “that, according to news that came to him yesterday, the Grand Orient has just decided first to depose all Sovereigns – first of all him, the Emperor – then to destroy (?) the Catholic Church, to imprison the pope, etc and, finally, to establish on the ruins of the former bourgeois society a world republic under the leadership of American Big Capital.

The German Freemasons are purportedly loyal to the [German] Emperor (which is to be doubted!) and they informed him about it. Also England wants to preserve the current bourgeois order. France and America, however, are said to be under the full influence of the Grand Orient [Freemasonic Lodge]. Bolshevism is said to be the external tool to establish the desired conditions.

In the face of such a great danger which threatens the Catholic Church in addition to the Monarchy, it is thus important that the German episcopacy be informed and that also the pope be warned.”

As for the message of His Majesty. I have believed myself to be duty-bound to pass it on to Your Excellency, and I leave it to Your judgment whether You wish to pass this message on to Rome. The stormy demand of the [German] Social Democrats that the Emperor should abdicate gives a certain confirmation to this message. May God protect us and His Holy Church in this terrible turmoil! [….]
With utmost devotion and being at His Excellency’s disposal,
Cardinal Felix von Hartmann
(Source: A.S.V., Arch. Nunz. Monaco d.B. 342, fasc. 13, p. 95-96)

---

As Dr. Hesemann himself points out in a manuscript written in May of 2016 which he kindly shared with me, it was only one day later that the November Revolution broke out in Germany with the consequence that the German Emperor Wilhelm II had to abdicate. The warning had come true.

Dr. Hesemann – who has authored more than 40 books and who has gained much recognition for his important research about the Armenian Genocide – concludes his report on this historic letter with the following words:

---

How far away we are today, 98 [now 99] years later, from such an announced [and recommended] “world republic under the leadership of American big capital,” each of us may judge for himself. The “Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership” TTIP would certainly have brought the world an immense step closer to that goal.

In this respect, the document from the year 1918 seems nearly prophetic. However, it does not describe the visions of a seer, but, rather, quotes a purported plan. Was such a plan of the Freemasonic Grand Orient also the blueprint for the European history of the 20th and early 21th century? That would certainly be a simplification, just like any conspiracy theory. However, one cannot deny that Freemasonry planned, nearly one hundred years ago, what afterwards has come true, and in an almost uncanny way.

---

I believe, on the basis of ample evidence, that Freemasonry is inherently anti-God as a divine being, anti-Christian and anti-Catholic, and while its avowed principles would seem to be 'humanitarian' in the secular sense of the word, it has posed a clear and present danger to the Church as an institution and as a religious faith over the past three centuries.

And while Bolshevism/Communism may have served its purpose as the Masonic tool to bring down the Church when it was a dominant ideology over a great part of the globe, today Freemasonry does not need them anymore because their greatest tool today for that demolition is the man himself who is supposed to lead the Church. Despite, one must add, recent lip service against Freemasonry by Bergoglio. Sandro Magister has looked at this apparent paradox in a recent article: http://magister.blogautore.espresso.repubblica.it/2017/05/03/the-masons-are-rooting-for-bergoglio-but-he-views-them-like-the-plague/
And he links to a recent series in 1Peter5:

http://www.onepeterfive.com/freemasons-love-pope-francis/
www.onepeterfive.com/freemasons-love-pope-francis-part-ii/
onepeterfive.com/freemasons-love-pope-francis-part-iii/
What's not to love? He is doing all the dirty work for them and from the very summit of the Church!
St Maximilian Kolbe, intercede for his immediate deliverance from the clutches of Satan!

Earlier today, Fr. Z reminds us of the pre-Marian apparition to Lucia, Francisco and Jacinta in Fatima.

Fatima's major theme:
Prayer and penance

May 13, 2017

...Taken all together, the central message of Our Lady in her apparitions at Fatima is the urgent need to pray, do penance, and make reparation for sins, our own and those of others.

This major theme was prepared before Our Lady started to appear in May 1917.

In the late September or early October of 1916 an angel appeared to the three children of Fatima to whom Our Blessed Mother would later appear 100 years ago today.

The angel taught them a prayer, an act of reparation.

The angel calling himself the Angel of Peace held a chalice over which was suspended a Host. Drops of the Precious Blood fell from the Host into the chalice. The angel prostrated himself on the ground before the Host and Chalice, and repeated the act of reparation three times. He then administered Holy Communion to the children saying, “Eat and drink the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, horribly outraged by ungrateful men. Make reparation for their crimes and console Our Lord.”

---

An Act of Reparation
From the Angel of of Peace at Fatima
Most Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, I adore You profoundly and I offer You the most precious Body, Blood,
Soul and Divinity of Jesus Christ, present in all the tabernacles of the world, in reparation for the outrages,
sacrileges and indifferences by which He Himself is offended. And by the infinite merits of His Most Sacred Heart
and the Immaculate Heart of Mary, I beg of You the conversion of poor sinners.

---

One hundred years since it happened, there continues to be active controversy over the so-called THIRD SECRET OF FATIMA. Whether
we believe the official line of the Church that it has been completely revealed, or whether we entertain doubt on the basis of plausible
arguments that something has been held back from the public for the good of the Church, does not affect the sheer power of the message
contained in the THIRD SECRET as officially revealed. Indeed, the officially released text does not rule out that the suppressed portion -
if any - may in fact refer to apostasy at the highest level of the Church as one of the possible catastrophes Our Lady warned
would befall the world unless men took the path of prayer and repentance to make up for our sins.

I shall begin this post by citing the THIRD SECRET FIRST, so we can all start out on the right foot:

---

The Third Secret of Fatima
Official Vatican translation
of the handwritten account
by Suor Lucia dos Santos
April 3, 1944

I write in obedience to you, my God, who command me to do so through his Excellency the Bishop of Leiria and through
your Most Holy Mother and mine.

Illustration by J. Gill, for the book Calls from the Message of Fatima (2001), the sixth and last book published by Sor Lucia. She died in February 2005 at the age of 97.

After the two parts which I have already explained, at the left of Our Lady and a little above, we saw an Angel with a flaming
sword in his left hand; flashing, it gave out flames that looked as though they would set the world on fire; but they died out
in contact with the splendour that Our Lady radiated towards him from her right hand: Pointing to the earth with his right hand,
the Angel cried out in a loud voice: ‘Penance, Penance, Penance!'.

And we saw in an immense light that is God: ‘something similar to how people appear in a mirror when they pass in front of it'
a Bishop dressed in White (‘we had the impression that it was the Holy Father'). [In the image of Lucia’s letter on the Vatican
page documenting the entire 2000 revelation of the Third Secret, the words are enclosed in quotation marks, as if to set it off from all
the other words which are supposed to be descriptive of the vision.]

Other Bishops, Priests, men and women Religious going up a steep mountain, at the top of which there was a big Cross of
rough-hewn trunks as of a cork-tree with the bark; before reaching there the Holy Father passed through a big city half
in ruins and half trembling with halting step, afflicted with pain and sorrow, he prayed for the souls of the corpses he met
on his way.


A more apocalyptic rendition of an image from the Third Secret.

Having reached the top of the mountain, on his knees at the foot of the big Cross, he was killed by a group of soldiers who
fired bullets and arrows at him, and in the same way there died one after another the other Bishops, Priests, men and women
Religious, and various lay people of different ranks and positions.

Beneath the two arms of the Cross there were two Angels each with a crystal aspersorium in his hand, in which they gathered up
the blood of the Martyrs and with it sprinkled the souls that were making their way to God.

Tuy
3-1-1944

---

Complete documentation of the Vatican's presentations of the Third Secret in 2000 may be found here:
http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20000626_message-fatima_en.html

Here was the first reaction I saw to Bergoglio's pilgrimage to Fatima:

Bergoglio in Fatima:
‘I am the bishop dressed in white’

May 11, 2017

[After quoting the text of the THIRD SECRET released by the Vatican in August 2000, the commentator continues:]
The Vatican explanation at the time was that the "bishop dressed in white" was then reigning Pope John Paul II, whose life had almost ended on another May 13 (1981), with a murder attempt on St. Peter's square.

The pope himself would say so: "As regards the passage about the Bishop dressed in white, that is, the Holy Father—as the children immediately realized during the 'vision'—who is struck dead and falls to the ground, Sister Lucia was in full agreement with the Pope's claim that 'it was a mother's hand that guided the bullet's path and in his throes the Pope halted at the threshold of death' (Pope John Paul II, Meditation from the Policlinico Gemelli to the Italian Bishops, 13 May 1994)."

Now, in the official missal of his visit to Fatima today and tomorrow, in the Prayer specially written for this day, Francis identifies himself as the "bishop dressed in white":

---

Hail Holy Queen, blessed Virgin of Fatima, Lady of the Immaculate Heart, refuge and path that guides to God! Pilgrim of the Light that we receive from your hands, I thank God the Father that, at all times and places, acts in human history; pilgrim of the Peace that you announce here, I praise Christ, our peace, and for the world I ask for concord among all peoples; pilgrim of the Hope which the Spirit encourages, I want to be prophet and messenger so as to wash the feet of all at the same table that unites us.

Hail Mother of Mercy, Lady of the white robe! At this place where one hundred years ago you showed all the designs of our God's mercy, I look upon your robe of light and, as bishop dressed in white [como bispo vestido de branco], I remember all those who, robed in baptismal white, want to live in God and pray the mysteries of Christ to attain peace.

---

I would here flash back to Benedict XVI and what he told newsmen enroute to Fatima in May 2010 about the Third Secret:

---

Fr. Lombardi: We now come to Fatima, in some way the culmination, even spiritually, of this visit. Your Holiness, what meaning do the Fatima apparitions have for us today? In June 2000, when you presented the text of the third secret in the Vatican Press Office, a number of us and our former colleagues were present. You were asked if the message could be extended, beyond the attack on John Paul II, to other sufferings on the part of the Popes. Is it possible, to your mind, to include in that vision the sufferings of the Church today for the sins involving the sexual abuse of minors?
Before all else, I want to say how happy I am to be going to Fatima, to pray before Our Lady of Fatima. For us, Fatima is a sign of the presence of faith, of the fact that it is precisely from the little ones that faith gains new strength, one which is not limited to the little ones but has a message for the entire world and touches history here and now, and sheds light on this history.

In 2000, in my presentation, I said that an apparition – a supernatural impulse which does not come purely from a person’s imagination but really from the Virgin Mary, from the supernatural – that such an impulse enters into a subject and is expressed according to the capacities of that subject. The subject is determined by his or her historical, personal, temperamental conditions, and so translates the great supernatural impulse into his or her own capabilities for seeing, imagining, expressing.

Yet these expressions, shaped by the subject, conceal a content which is greater, which goes deeper, and only in the course of history can we see the full depth, which was – let us say - “clothed” in this vision that was accessible to specific individuals.

Consequently, I would say that, here too, beyond this great vision of the suffering of the Pope, which we could in the first place refer to Pope John Paul II, an indication is given of realities involving the future of the Church, which are gradually taking shape and becoming evident.

So it is true that, in addition to the moment indicated in the vision, there is mention of, there is seen, the need for a passion [suffering] of the Church, which naturally is reflected in the person of the Pope, yet the Pope stands for the Church and thus it is sufferings of the Church that are announced.

The Lord told us that the Church would constantly be suffering, in different ways, until the end of the world. The important thing is that the message, the response of Fatima, in substance is not directed to particular devotions, but precisely to the fundamental response, that is, to ongoing conversion, penance, prayer, and the three theological virtues: faith, hope and charity. Thus we see here the true, fundamental response which the Church must give – which we, every one of us, must give in this situation.

As for the new things which we can find in this message today, there is also the fact that attacks on the Pope and the Church come not only from without, but the sufferings of the Church come precisely from within the Church, from the sin existing within the Church.

This too is something that we have always known, but today we are seeing it in a really terrifying way: that the greatest persecution of the Church comes not from her enemies without, but arises from sin within the Church, and that the Church thus has a deep need to relearn penance, to accept purification, TO LEARN FORGIVENESS ON THE ONE HAND, BUT ALSO THE NEED FOR JUSTICE. FORGIVENESS DOES NOT REPLACE JUSTICE.

In a word, we need to relearn precisely this essential: conversion, prayer, penance and the theological virtues. This is our response, we are realists in expecting that evil always attacks, attacks from within and without, yet that the forces of good are also ever present and that, in the end, the Lord is more powerful than evil and Our Lady is for us the visible, motherly guarantee of God’s goodness, which is always the last word in history.

---

At the time, commentators chose to interpret Benedict XVI’s words about ‘sufferings of the Church coming precisely from within the Church’ in the narrow context of the clerical sex abuse crisis.

But one can now look at these words as prophetic of what has been happening in the Church in the past four years to a degree Benedict XVI could not have imagined in 2010 – even if Bergoglianism and all it means as lethal poison for Catholicism is merely the logical culmination of the ‘spirit of Vatican II’ apostasy that had been injected into the Church by Vatican II – despite John Paul II’s and Benedict XVI’s best efforts to combat that apostasy which has now become firmly rooted with no less than the man nominally supposed to be the leader of the Catholic Church the most active agent and instrument of that apostasy…

Not to forget what Benedict XVI says about forgiveness and justice, which at the time, one thinks, specifically referred to how the Church must deal with sex-offender priests, but which nonetheless, expresses the Church’s general, perennial and unchanging teaching of the Church about forgiveness (i.e., mercy, in the Bergoglian lexicon) and justice.

And a point I want to make after reading Bergoglio's appropriation of the 'bishop dressed in white' citation: Unlike his great predecessor and his questionable successor, Benedict XVI does not at all make the Fatima message about himself!

Antonio Socci, who in 2006 published a whole book about the unanswered questions regarding the THIRD SECRET, has a scathing commentary today about Bergoglio’s published text for the candle-blessing ceremony in the Fatima Shrine on Friday, May 11, but I will start with the Post-Script he added after the event:

Bergoglio in Fatima:
He has demolished the significance of Fatima
and the message of the Mother of God
Translated from

May 13, 2017

POST SCRIPTUM
Friday night, Bergoglio presented himself before the image of Our Lady of Fatima and attributed to himself the expression ‘bishop dressed in white’ from Suor Lucia’s account of the Third Secret, textually citing one of the personages described therein.

It was surprising, and perhaps those around him should have advised him not to do so, because in all the reflections about the Third Secret that have been rife over the past many decades, it seems to be the consensus that the ‘bishop dressed in white’ is a figure that is ambiguous and disquieting.

[Socci appears to discount John Paul II’s interpretation that it referred to him. And much as I venerate and pray to St. John Paul II daily, I have always thought that his interpretation of the vision showed by Mary to the three shepherds – claiming it was a prophecy of the assassination attempt against him - was uncharacteristically self-centered and also far-fetched, even if I have absolutely no doubt that Our Lady saved his life on that occasion.]

The description was quite different for the other figure, “the Holy Father, trembling with halting step, afflicted with pain and sorrow” who comes to the top of the mountain. [I do not understand why Socci says this is a different figure from the ‘bishop dressed in white’ – when it is clear from the official text of the THIRD SECRET that the children had the impression that the ‘bishop dressed in white’ was the Holy Father, and thereafter Suor Lucia refers to the figure as ‘the Holy Father’. Equally, however, I cannot understand why Bergoglio should claim to be that ‘bishop in white’ as he is the very opposite of ‘afflicted with pain and sorrow’, this man who has said “it is very entertaining to be pope” and “I really enjoy being pope”.]
[Rather, it is plausible to think that it is precisely the enigma of that disquieting figure – ‘the bishop dressed in white’ – that Our Lady explains in the unpublished part of the Third Secret [Socci's working hypothesis] which is believed to refer to apostasy at the Church and the most serious problems at the summit of the Church.

It is true that Suor Lucia wrote about ‘the bishop dressed in white’ that ‘we had the impression it was the Holy Father’, but it is a strange formulation.

In my book Il quarto segreto di Fatima published in 2006 – long before the events of the past few years – I posed these questions and hypotheses: Why, we ask, does the visionary use a roundabout expression here – ‘a bishop dressed in white’ – when right afterwards, she expressly and directly names the pope in saying ‘the Holy Father’?

Is the formulation ‘bishop dressed in white’ - (of whom) “we had the impression it was the Holy Father” - simply a roundabout way to designate the pope or could it refer to someone who is wearing papal white without being the pope or without being so legitimately? In effect, the expression could not be casual because it is in itself inexplicable, complicated and illogical [Not really - because the four words are simple enough as a description] It makes sense only if one considers that it describes exactly what the children saw. [There you are!]

But how could Lucia have seen ‘a bishop dressed in white’? No one has ‘bishop’ written on his face, and being a bishop is not a visible trait as is being blond or black-skinned. [[Besides, one must ask what idea or impression these children had about a bishop, any bishop, before they were shown the vision. The most likely explanation why Lucia described the figure as a ‘bishop’ - assuming these peasant children had been taught enough about bishops or seen pictures of bishops - is that the figure they saw wore a miter, which in the Catholic Church, only bishops and abbots wear. That Socci fails to mention this possibility is a measure of his tendentiousness on the entire issue of the Third Secret, and a point of reproach against his objectivity.]

The use of the word ‘bishop’ qualified by ‘dressed in white’ could lead us to think that the figure was meant to represent an illegitimate pope, or an anti-Pope, or a usurper. [[Socci has a point when he underscores that he wrote this in 2006, because at the time, who would even have thought the question of a pope’s legitimacy would ever arise?
Suor Lucia says she wrote out the Third Secret with the direct assistance of the Virgin, ‘word for word,’ so the formulation ‘bishop dressed in white’ was directly inspired from above. Is the ‘bishop dressed in white’ different - from the one called explicitly ‘the Holy Father’- walks through a ruined city, etc?

[Does Socci not question why Lucia interjected the statement ‘we had the impression it was the Holy Father’, a statement which surely could not have been from Mary? And it would have been unnecessary for Lucia to interject that in her account of the vision, because she then goes on, without any indication of introducing another figure in the vision, to refer to presumably the same figure as ’ the Holy Father’, who walks up to the Cross at the top of the mountain and is killed there. Probably the best proof that the Third Secret constitutes an enigmatic and prophetic message is that it poses so many questions of logic!]

For all these reasons – which Bergoglio probably does not realize – I remain disconcerted by his official choice to call himself ‘the bishop dressed in white’. I would have advised him not to do so.

It is really urgent to make an ardent prayer to Our Lady of Fatima to protect the Church, to sustain Benedict VXI, and to enlighten Papa Bergoglio. My small personal prayer for this pope is unceasing.

Now to Socci’s main thesis in his May 13, 2017 column:

Benedict XVI, on his pilgrimage to Fatima, expressed the wish on May 13, 2010, that the centerary of the apparitions in 2017 would see the triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary prophesied in the message of Our Lady.

But in May 2017, Papa Bergoglio substantially liquidated Fatima and the message of the Mother of God. In his homily today, thank God, he read the usual celebratory statements prepared by his Vatican theologians for the canonization of Jacinta and Francisco Marto, with even a fleeting reference to hell (a typical Bergoglian strategy).

But yesterday, May 11, his real Bergoglian discourse was quite scandalous. He came to Fatima precisely to say these words which oppose everything said in that very shrine by the three popes before him who had made the pilgrimage to Fatima.

One can well think Bergoglio has an account to settle with Fatima because during the polemics during his 'family synods’ [whose ultimate objective was really and only to allow communion to remarried divorcees], some important words said by Suor Lucia, the third Fatima visionary who lived to age 97, were brought up - words which underscored the wrongness of the ‘modernizations’ theorized by Walter Kasper and that Bergoglio wished to impose.

Cardinal Carlo Caffarra, who steadfastly fought in defense of the deposit of faith at the two synods and would later be one of the Four Cardinals who sent the pope their DUBIA on the conclusions he drew in Amoris laetitia, recalled that at the time John Paul II named him to establish and head the Pontifical Institute for Studies on Marriage and the Family at the Lateran University in 1987, he wrote Suor Lucia to ask for her prayers.

To his surprise, the nun sent him a long reply saying, among other things, that “The final encounter between the Lord and the kingdom of Satan will be over the family and marriage. Do not be afraid, because whoever works for the sanctity of matrimony and the family will always be fought and opposed in every way because this is the decisive issue… But Our Lady has already crushed the serpent’s head”.

In general, one can well think that the Fatima apparitions are not particularly dear to Bergoglio: Not the vision of Hell, not the invitation to conversion and penitence, nor the prophecy over the advent of Communist atheism which with its crimes, especially the persecution of Christians, drenched the 20th century (and beyond) in blood.

All the principal themes of the Fatima message are detested by Bergoglio. But one did not imagine that Bergoglio would have decided to use this centenary pilgrimage to Fatima in orer to demolish the apparitions and their message.

We must look to his words on Friday evening at the ceremony to bless the candles. He never once mentioned Hell, nor atheist Communism but he explicitly questioned the words of Our Lady and her prophesy to the point of ridiculing the specific message mentioned by Suor Lucia to Cardinal Caffarra.

In fact, the central content of the Fatima apparitions was the vision of the horrors of Hell that Our Lady showed to the three shepherd children.
- It was for this that she appeared to them – to express her heart-deep sorrow that so many souls were being lost, cast into the abyss of Hell.
- She warned against the advent of atheist Communism (which just a few days after the last apparition in Fatima did take power in Russia with the October Revolution).
- She asked for conversion and penance to war off eternal damnation and the catastrophes that the choice of evil would draw down on mankind and the world.

But Bergoglio went to Fatima to overturn all that.

He claimed that it was “a great injustice against God and his grace when it is affirmed that sinners are punished by his judgment” because it must be said first that “they are pardoned by his mercy”. And he repeats it: “We must place mercy before justice”.

Who is he opposing here? Evidently, his target is the Message of Fatima, as reported by Suor Lucia, who simply recounted what Our Lady told her and her two cousins.

So we have three possibilities here:
- God, in Bergoglio’s mind, is not merciful enough and is wrong to condemn so many souls to eternal suffering; or
- Bergoglio does not believe in the apparitions (and therefore he is really opposing Suor Lucia); or
- He is directly accusing Our Lady of having committed “a great injustice against God” for bribnging up Hell and repentance.

That Bergoglio does not really believe in apparitions and miracles is more than just a suspicion, because he himself said in the interview book Heaven and earth: “I have an immediate mistrust when faced with healings, even those related to revelations or visions – these are all things that place me on the defensive. God is not a kind of courier who keeps delivering messages”.

In practice, Bergoglio has been telling us that he believes in a God, but not the God in whom Catholics believe. And he said so openly to Eugenio Scalfari: “I believe in God. But not in a Catholic God. A Catholic God does not exist”. [Was it then, back in September 2013, I came to the conclusion that Bergoglio is plainly and simply anti-Catholic and has no business being pope even if he was elected pope?]

Even Muslims – or Masons for that matter – could say the same thing. But not Catholics.

But there we have the problem: a man who, as pope of the Catholic Church, is taking this Church out of Catholicism. [I prefer to say simply “…is anti-Catholic”, and for the rest of Socci’s statement, “…is building his own church of Bergoglio by imposing it over the Church of Christ”.]

That is why in Fatima yesterday, Bergoglio ridiculed the fear of Hell and the maternal admonition of Our Lady against eternal damnation. [Clearly, in Bergoglio’s maniacally hubristic mind, if he were God, he would never have even thought of eternal damnation for anyone. So why does he love to pay lip service now and then to denouncing Satan – who was the very first creature ever condemned to eternal damnation without any hope of redemption????]

Bergoglio took direct aim at the popular devotion to Our Lady, with the ironic comment that she has been turned into “a mere santina [prayer card] to whom one turns in order to get favors at a cheap price.”

The statement reveals his contempt for the Christian piety of many Catholics [especially the ‘simple folk’], and then he says something that appears directed at Suor Lucia, when he says “we have been given a ‘caricature of Our Lady “sketched by subjective sensibilities which see her as upholding the arm of divine justice that is ever ready to punish”.

This is an explicit and scandalous rejection of the Message of Fatima and of La Sallette (the Church has officially recognized the Marian apparitions in both sites).

As I said, Our Lady’s warning about the risk of eternal damnation is directly overturned by Bergoglio: ““We must place mercy ahead of justice”. Which is his now-familiar and ‘subjective’ idea that we are all already saved and therefore, we do not need conversion, much less penitence. Bergoglio who, like Luther, tells us that “Jesus ransomed us on the Cross. And therefore, in the faith which unites us to the Cross of Christ, we are liberated from our sins”.

And that is why Bergoglio never mentions Hell in Fatima.

For all his ulterior motives, Bergoglio concludes by calling on the faithful to “free themselves from ‘fear of God’ [Does he forget that ‘fear of God’ is one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit?] that Our Lady teaches, saying: ““Let us set aside every form of fear because it does not indicate who is loved”. In effect, Bergoglio himself has no ‘fear of God’. [If an ueber-ultra-hyper-maniacal mind thinks he is really better than God, why should he fear any ‘lesser being’?][/dim

In his interventions, he has swept aside the God preached by the Catholic Church (“A Catholic God does not exist”) [What then is the Most Holy Trinity whom only Catholics believe in?]; he has ridiculed the Trinity (“Even among themselves, the Most Holy Trinity are always quarrelling behind closed doors while they present an external image of unity”); he ridicules the Son of God (“Jesus sometimes acts the fool…”); and then proceeds to blaspheme him by saying that on the Cross “Jesus made himself the Devil”. [Socci fails to include Bergoglio's statement last Easter that the Resurrection was, for the Apostles, an act of faith, not necessarily historical fact.]

[A simple priest who said any of those things, much less all of them, would by now have been denounced to the CDF for utter reckless blasphemy, but the Bergoglio-captive media, especially those supposed to be Catholic, don’t even blink, much less protest!

One must underscore that the Bergoglio Vatican has never denied any of this pope's most outrageous anti-Christian and ant-Catholic statements. [Which they cannot even if they wanted to because, to begin with, the statements are documented and reported by the Vatican media themselves.] The only two statements explicitly denied or clarified by Fr. Lombardi in his time - and none since Greg Burke took over - had to do with Bergoglio's supposed statements to Scalfari that 1) 2% of all the world's priests are pedophiles, 'including some bishops and cardinals'; amd 2) that he has a 'final solution for the problem of sex-offender priests".]

And now, he would demolish the Message of Fatima and popular devotion to Our Lady. At this point, we must ask: What other demolition must he made in order to open the eyes [AND MINDS] of his enthusiastic idolators?

Aldo Maria Valli, reflecting on the Fatima centenary, has an equally hard-hitting commentary on the deliberate oversight by Church leaders today of the so-called Last Things - death, judgment, heaven and hell - which are the last stages in the life and afterlife of the soul. Benedict XVI speaks of the Last Things powerfully in that most sublime of encyclicals, Spe salvi. I shall post Valli's blog as soon as translated.

One wonders how Jorge Bergoglio, elected pope beneath the sweep of Michelangelo's LAST JUDGMENT in the Sistine Chapel, could so insistently and consistently omit the fact that God judges and must judge every soul, and will then mete out heaven and hell according to how he judges each of us. But hey, 'reality is more important than ideas', n'est-ce-pas, as idiotic as that Bergoglian postulate is!

May 14, 2017
P.S. I found this most amusing - but also on-the-mark - comment to this pope's apparent claim to be the 'bishop in white' alluded to in the Third Secret: It can't conceivably refer to him, because the bishop described by Suor Lucia kneels in front of the Cross (and, I might add, there are no Muslims anywhere near the Cross in the vision that might have caused Bergoglio to do what he will not do even for the Eucharist at Consecration).

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May 13, 2017

Pope Francis visited Fatima this weekend to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the first apparition of Mary on May 13, 2017, and to canonize Francisco and Jacinta. Granted I did not watch the full coverage of Pope Francis, and fast forwarded through the videos on YouTube but…what struck me most is that I never saw a clip of Pope Francis kneeling in prayer before the statue of Our Lady of Fatima. It took me all of 5 seconds to search YouTube to see if there was video of Pope Benedict XVI kneeling before a statue of Our Lady of Fatima...

There is also a clip of Pope Francis visiting the tombs of Francisco and Jacinta at Fatima. Again, he did not even kneel to say a simple prayer or meditation beside the tombs – even with a kneeler in front of him! All very odd.

When it is remembered that by all accounts Pope Francis never seems to kneel or genuflect at the consecration or in the presence of the Eucharist, none of any of this should come as a surprise. There could potentially be a health issue involved, such as a bad back, which might make it impossible or difficult to kneel. That might seem an explanation, but given the Pope will kneel when washing the feet of those he does on Holy Thursday, the health angle won't wash.

Curiously, it is reported that Pope Francis while at Fatima referred to himself as the “bishop dressed in white” – a phrase used by Sister Lucia, one of the Fatima visionaries, in writing of the Third Secret...

Now, Pope Francis certainly is a “bishop dressed in white,” but he cannot be the “bishop dressed in white” referenced by Sr. Lucia. How do we know this? First of all, the Vatican explanation of the Secret is that John Paul II is the bishop of the vision, which – they say – describes the attempted assassination of him.

Beyond that, even if the Vatican interpreters are wrong and we posit that some future pope is intended, we still have very good reason to doubt – with a high degree of certainty – that Pope Francis would be the “bishop dressed in white.”

The reason it is improbable is because the pope of the above vision is actually said to be “on his knees at the foot of a big cross” – and the “on his knees” thing seems to be something Pope Francis just does not do [Unless before Muslims! Somehow, I think that Bergoglio as the 'god 2.0' he thinks himself to be, does not think his strange and inconsistent attitude about kneeling violates the First Commandment: 'Thou shalt not have strange gods before me!' Muslim refugees and non-Christian jail inmates are certainly strange gods, but that's Bergoglianism for you!]

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PPS At his inflight news conference returning from Fatima, the pope explained his use of the expression 'bishop dressed in white' to refer to himself. For what it's worth, he said:

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I did not write the prayer [in which he says it]. The words are those of the Shrine in Fatima. But I did note the link between the bishop dressed in white, Our Lady dressed in white, white which represents the innocence of children at baptism... I believe that the color white expresses the desire for innocence, for peace, not to do bad to others, not to make war. In any case, I believe that Cardinal Ratzinger in 2000 explained everything very clearly. [DIM=9pt][The last sentence sounds like a non sequitur, but perhaps he meant the cardinal had 'explained everything' about the Third Secret.]

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[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 15/05/2017 03:14]

Riccardo Cascioli not surprisingly echoes Antonio Socci's commentary on Jorge Bergoglio's outrageous destruction-by-personal-exegesis
of the message of Fatima...

Question for Pope Francis:
Which Mary do you invoke in your personal
interpretation of the message of Fatima?
By Riccardo Cascioli
Translated from

14-05-2017

“Which Mary?” Pope Francis asked Friday evening in his address before the blessign of the candles at the Chapel of the Apparitions in Fatima.

“Which Mary?”, he asked, only to give an answer which – as often happens – only serves to divide Catholics into the good (few) and the bad (the overwhelming majority).

But so many Catholics would have asked ‘Which Mary?”, and especially “Which Lady of Fatima?”, after this pope’s personal itnerpretation of the events which took place in Cova da Iria, Fatima, 100 years ago.

Because in the pope’s address, there was no trace of any call for conversion, for penitence, for sacrifice for the reparation of sins, of the vision of Hell, of the historical consequences in our time of mankind (wars continue and Communism has not stopped to propagate its nefarious consequences, even within the Church herself).

The problem we have with the pope’s address is not primarily his interpretation but facts. Like it or not:
- The three shepherd children were shown a horrible vision of Hell.
- Francisco and Jacinta, who were canonized yesterday, freely offered their lives and their sufferings for sinners.
– Our Lady clearly stated what the historical consequences of sin would be in our time unless mankind converted.
- Mary also recommended praying the Rosary and asked that the world be consecrated to her Immaculate Heart.

The message, for all the infinite grandeur of the mystery of God’s love that it communicates, is very simple in its contents. And if one speaks of Fatima, one cannot fail to use these simple facts that constitute the unique and extraordinary events in Fatima 100 years ago.

Of course, the apparitions were also a manifestation of God’s mercy, but to oppose mercy to judgment and justice gives the idea of an indiscriminate general amnesty in which man’s behavior no longer counts since Christ already took care of all that. And this is an idea which is very evident in a problematic passage of the pope’s address on Friday evening:

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[Jesus did not deny sin but he paid for us all on the Cross. And thus, in the facity which unites us to the Cross of Christ, we have been freed from our sins. Let us set aside every form of fear or timore, because it does not befit anyone who is loved.”

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In short, it seems that it is enough to have faith in the crucified Christ in order to be saved – a statement which, in the way it was said, reinforces the position Martin Luther took, which discounts man’s freedom to choose good or evil.

Then what sense did it make for Mary to show the children the vision of Hell, or to ask for prayer, penitence and sacrifice in reparation for our sins? This is a question that cannot be avoided noncommittally. The Church recognized the authenticity of these apparitions and the messages that came with them.

The cliché of the ‘prayer card’ Madonna to which this pope expresses such aversion can certainly not be applied to Our Lady of Fatima, even if she did tell the children the dates when she would appear to them next.

The facts of the apparitions at Fatima are historical, and its message is a reality that challenges us to exercise the freedom to choose good or evil that God gave us. God’s love is manifested so, and having experienced that love, Francisco and Jacinta responded with the sacrifice of their own lives for the salvation of sinners.

Like every parent who loves her children, Mary warns against the dangers of sin not to terrorize us but to help us to choose the good, to respond to love. It is not accidental that ‘fear of God’ is one of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit. [As I had pointed out in my remarks to Socci’s commentary. But perhaps it is one proof that the ‘spirit’ Bergoglio often invokes is not necessarily the Holy Spirit, otherwise how could he fail to realize that ‘fear of God’ is a necessary virtue for believers – it is the awe and total surrender to the Almighty which makes us respect and follow his commandments “because I dread the loss of heaven and the pain of Hell, but most of all because I have offended you whop art all good and deserving of all my love”. Does Bergoglio even pray the Act of Contrition, since he believes there is no Hell at all???]

But far clearer than my own words are those that then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger wrote in his Theological Commentary to the Secrets of Fatima when the Third Secret was published by the Vatican in the Jubilee year 2000. I call attention to it because – with respect to the Third Secret and the visions shown to the three shepherd children – he restitutes for us the extreme actuality of the message of Fatima and the task which it sets us:

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[The angel with the flaming sword on the left of the Mother of God recalls similar images in the Book of Revelation. This represents the threat of judgement which looms over the world.

Today the prospect that the world might be reduced to ashes by a sea of fire no longer seems pure fantasy: man himself, with his inventions, has forged the flaming sword. The vision then shows the power which stands opposed to the force of destruction—the splendour of the Mother of God and, stemming from this in a certain way, the summons to penance.

In this way, the importance of human freedom is underlined: the future is not in fact unchangeably set, and the image which the children saw is in no way a film preview of a future in which nothing can be changed. Indeed, the whole point of the vision is to bring freedom onto the scene and to steer freedom in a positive direction. The purpose of the vision is not to show a film of an irrevocably fixed future. Its meaning is exactly the opposite: it is meant to mobilize the forces of change in the right direction.

Therefore we must totally discount fatalistic explanations of the “secret”, such as, for example, the claim that the would-be assassin of 13 May 1981 was merely an instrument of the divine plan guided by Providence and could not therefore have acted freely, or other similar ideas in circulation. Rather, the vision speaks of dangers and how we might be saved from them.

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Let us contrast what Bergoglio said yesterday about Medjugorje at his inflight news conference returning from Fatima - probably the BIG NEWS that definitely overshadows his pilgrimage:

Francis closes door on Medjugorje:
'This is not the Mother of Jesus'


... Francis also produced what will most likely be as close to a final ruling on the Medjugorje hoax as we'll ever get, with the Pontiff proclaiming "This is not the Mother of Jesus."

Francis, in a mocking way only he can deliver, further -- and rightly -- ridicules the hoax from Hell, comparing the fake woman in the fake apparition to a "head of a telegraphic office" who shows up at the same time every day. Let this be the final death knell that took far too long to toll.

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Pope Francis: ... The apparitions, the presumed current apparitions: the report [Ruini] has its doubts.

I personally am more nasty, I prefer the Madonna as Mother, our Mother, and not a woman who’s the head of a telegraphic office, who everyday sends a message at such hour. This is not the Mother of Jesus. And these presumed apparitions don’t have a lot of value. This I say as a personal opinion. But, it’s clear.
Who thinks that the Madonna says, ‘come tomorrow at this time, and at such time I will say a message to that seer?’ No.

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[The last paragraph echoes his statement at Fatima that 'God is not a messenger service'. But as sarcastic as Bergoglio may think he is, he totally discounts the fact that in both the Lourdes and Fatima apparitions, Our Lady did set the time and date for her subsequent 'appointments' with the seers. Whereas in Medjugorje, as I understand it, the 'apparition' has simply appeared daily since 1981 to more than one of the 'seers' and apparently, wherever they are! Which is, of course, the most dubious part of the claims made by the seers - before one even considers the so-called 'messages' they get.]

Fr. Hunwicke's selected excerpt from Cardinal Ratzinger's Theological Commentary:

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"Beneath the arms of the cross, angels gather up the blood of the martyrs, and with it they give life to the souls making their way to God.

Here, the blood of Christ and the blood of the martyrs are considered as one: the blood of the martyrs runs down from the arms of the cross. The martyrs die in communion with the Passion of Christ, and their death becomes one with his. For the sake of the body of Christ, they complete what is still lacking in his afflictions (cf. Colossians 1:24).

Their life has itself become a Eucharist, part of the mystery of the grain of wheat which in dying yields abundant fruit. The blood of the martyrs is the seed of Christians, said Tertullian. As from Christ's death, from his wounded side, the Church was born, so the death of the witnesses is fruitful for the future life of the Church.

Therefore, the vision of the third part of the "secret", so distressing at first, concludes with an image of hope: No suffering is in vain, and it is a suffering Church, a Church of martyrs, which becomes a sign-post for man in his search for God.

The loving arms of God welcome not only those who suffer like Lazarus, who found great solace there and mysteriously represents Christ, who wished to become for us the poor Lazarus.

There is something more: from the suffering of the witnesses there comes a purifying and renewing power, because their suffering is the actualisation of the suffering of Christ himself and a communication in the here and now of its saving effect."

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And a sidebar from Father H apropos the papal visit to Fatima:

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...Interesting, that Guido Marini still prints the genuflections at Consecration in his libretti; and puts out a prie Dieu which is never used. (I have some sympathy for the Holy Father's incapacities in this respect.) Is all this so as to maintain, with a view to future pontiffs, the position as to what should happen, pontifical health permitting?

I thought it did Pope Bergoglio some credit that, after the blessing of the sick, when he went with the Monstrance and was giving Eucharistic Benediction to some other layfolk, and a proportion of them started clapping, waving, and shouting Viva il papa, he did look disconcerted.

Perhaps little telling details like this may help him to understand the questionable nature of the 'papal international celebrity' cult which he did not invent but has done so little to counter.

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Fr. H, I have an explanation for why Bergoglio ignores the prie-Dieu's that Mons. Marini insists on providing for him during liturgies: Even if Bergoglio were inclined to kneel, he would not use the prie-Dieu at all because "If I kneel, I will kneel like any other ordinary Catholic - on the floor if I have to, or on a pew kneeler! I can't be given special treatment!" Yeah, right. So who's stopping you from kneeling on the floor? And BTW, you can't have a prie-Dieu to perform the Consecration as you only have to genuflect, and you won't even do that!

BERGOGLIO IN FATIMA -
Nope, not once, on his knees

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 14/05/2017 22:54]

Sorry,sorry, sorry... The Medjugorje bombshell exploded by the pope as reported by Rorate caeli and re-posted above
is quite incomplete. It was not an outright dismissal of all alleged apparitions in Medjugorje - the initial apparitions
in 1981 are apparently still under study... CNA has a more complete report.

Pope Francis: 'I am suspicious
of ongoing Medjugorje apparitions'
by Elise Harris

Vatican City, May 13, 2017(CNA/EWTN News)- Asked by journalists about the alleged appearances of the Virgin Mary at Medjugorje, Pope Francis said the original apparitions more than three decades ago deserve further study, but voiced doubt about the supposed ongoing visions.

He stressed the need to distinguish between the two sets of apparitions, referencing a report submitted to the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith by a commission set up to study the apparitions by Benedict XVI in 2010.

“The first apparitions, which were to children, the report more or less says that these need to continue being studied,” he said, but as for “presumed current apparitions, the report has its doubts.”

“I personally am more suspicious, I prefer the Madonna as Mother, our Mother, and not a woman who’s the head of an office, who every day sends a message at a certain hour. This is not the Mother of Jesus. And these presumed apparitions don’t have a lot of value.”

He clarified that this is his “personal opinion,” but added that the Madonna does not function by saying, “Come tomorrow at this time, and I will give a message to those people.”

Differentiating between these and the first apparitions, he said, is key.

Pope Francis spoke to the 70 journalists on board with him during his May 13 flight from Fatima back to Rome. The presser followed a two-day trip to mark the centenary of the Marian apparitions that occurred in Fatima in 1917. During the visit, he also canonized two of the young visionaries, Francisco and Jacinta Marto.

While the Fatima apparitions have long been approved by the Vatican and local bishops, debate continues to cloud discussion over the authenticity of the alleged appearances in Medjugorje.

The apparitions allegedly started June 24, 1981, when six children in Medjugorje, a town in what is now Bosnia and Herzegovina, claimed to have witnessed apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

According to the alleged visionaries, the apparitions conveyed a message of peace for the world, a call to conversion, prayer and fasting, as well as certain secrets surrounding events to be fulfilled in the future.

These apparitions are said to have continued almost daily since their first occurrence, with three of the original six visionaries claiming to have received apparitions every afternoon because not all of the “secrets” intended for them have been revealed.

In April 1991, the bishops of the former Yugoslavia determined that “on the basis of the research that has been done, it is not possible to state that there were apparitions or supernatural revelations.”

On the basis of those findings, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith directed in October 2013 that clerics and the faithful “are not permitted to participate in meetings, conferences or public celebrations during which the credibility of such 'apparitions' would be taken for granted.”

However, Benedict XVI established a commission, headed by Cardinal Camillo Ruini, to study the topic in further detail.

In January 2014, the commission completed their study on supposed apparitions' doctrinal and disciplinary aspects, and was to have submitted its findings to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The congregation has yet to submit its final document to the Pope for a final decision.

Pope Francis told journalists that Cardinal Ruini’s report was “very well done,” and that there are three main takeaways that must be kept in mind when thinking of the report.

First, he stressed the importance of studying the first apparitions of 1981 as their own entity, and attached to this was the second point on the need to be wary of the alleged ongoing appearances, always distinguishing between the two.

Third, he emphasized the need to also look at the pastoral and spiritual dimensions of Medjugorje, because “people go there and convert. People encounter God, change their lives.”

This isn’t a result of “magic,” he said, but is a valid spiritual and pastoral fact that “can’t be ignored.”

On this point, he made reference to the appointment in February of Archbishop Henryk Hoser of Warszawa-Praga as a delegate of the Holy See to look into the pastoral situation at Medjugorje. The Polish archbishop is to “suggest possible pastoral initiatives for the future” after acquiring a deeper knowledge of the local pastoral situation.

Francis said Archbishop Hoser was named for the post because “he has experience” for it, and while he has already spoken on both the fruits and challenges of Medjugorje, will provide his full insights in due time.

Sorry for the belated translation... It is obvious that Aldo Maria Valli's cri du coeur here is ultimately and primarily addressed to the man
who has been relentlessly and shamelessly promoting Bergoglianism instead of Catholicism even if he was elected to lead the Catholic Church...

The mystery of Fatima today:
Are we still able to believe
in Hell, Purgatory and the judgment of God?
Translated from

May 11, 2017

Just think of it: A mother takes three of her children, good children and tranquil, and then she shows them what? Hell!

With the mentality of today, 2017, such a mother would be denounced for child abuse! But 100 years ago, the Mother of God showed herself to three children – Lucia, Francisco and Jacinta – and showed them Hell – the damned, the flames, all the rest. No one had a problem with that.

It is often said that in a hundred years, the world has changed completely. But also the Church [radically and almost formally, under this pope]. Now, her leaders speak of mercy, openness, tenderness, goodness. Imagine if today, a parish priest or a nun thought to take three children in primary school to show them images of Hell with all the stark details. The children’s mothers would revolt, and polemics in the media would never end.

Then consider the words of Our Lady at Fatima: “Pray, pray a lot and make sacrifices for sinners. Many souls indeed have gone to hell because no one prays and sacrifices for them”.

Let us be truthful: These are words that seem to have nothing to do with ‘the Church’ as we know her today. Sinners? Sacrifices? People going to Hell? Who talks that way at all these days? If a parish priest did, he would be accused of psychological terrorism, his bishop would summon him and perhaps the poor priest would be suspended or asked to take ‘a pause for reflection’.

For years, we have been told by many Church leaders and theologians that perhaps Hell exists or does not, or if there is Hell, it must be empty. [Pray tell, where do Satan and his legion of devils live???]

We have been told [and are being told, most recently on May 11, by the nominal leader of the Catholic Church] that in the end, everyone is saved because God simply cannot condemn anyone. [To JMB: Did God not irrevocably condemn Lucifer and his legion of rebellious angels? Did he not conditionally condemn Adam and Eve and all their issue – until he sent down his Son to offer man the means to eternal salvation?]

And no one talks about purgatory anymore, which would lead us to believe that even purgatory does not exist, and therefore, there are no souls ‘in between’ Heaven and Hell for whom we must pray.

We are told that forgiveness is superior to every other virtue and that divine justice cannot possibly contemplate condemning anyone. [Then why, Papa Bergoglio, did Jesus speak so clearly about the Last Judgment? Was the great mural of the Last Judgment that overlooked the cardinals who elected you pope a mere artistic masterpiece that does not depict any Truth – Revelation itself – and therefore has no business being the centerpiece of the most important Christian chapel in the world?] And we know that anyone who dare speak of divine punishment should, at the very least, expect to be treated like a madman or an evil one.

The Marian apparitions at Fatima are recognized by the Church and celebrated in the Church calendar, as are Lourdes and Guadalupe. And two of the three shepherd children of Fatima are now saints, and the third one is a Venerable awaiting the next step in the sainthood process. And yet between the Church in 1917 and ‘the Church’ today, 2017, there seems to be an interval in time and space far greater than just a hundred years.

Hell, fear of God, the rosary, pray for reparation, the souls in purgatory, penitence, sacrifices: The older ones among us know that the Church once spoke to the faithful of all this, and that the faithful believed. But for the past 20-30 years, if these teachings were brought up at all, they would seem to be unheard of and incomprehensible to most Catholics who might well ask [after listening to all the Bergoglian anti-Catholic blather] “Is it possible that the good God could treat us this way?” [i.e., threaten condemnation for those who insist on sinning and fail to do penance and amend their life].

[I might remind Mr Valli that Benedict XVI wrote a brilliant exposition of the so-called Last Things (an expression we never hear from Bergoglio and his followers] – namely, death, judgment, heaven and hell – in his 2006 encyclical Spe salvi about the hope for eternal salvation that underlies everything we do on earth. Unfortunately, even if this second encyclical (IMHO, Benedict's best) sold as well as the precedent-setting Deus caritas est, Fr. James Schall is probably the only Catholic commentator who has referred to it at all (and continues to do so every chance he gets) after its publication.]

Fatima is a tangle of questions and mysteries, but the greatest mystery today that we must examine closely is how to reconcile the Church as she was in 1917, where the Mother of God spoke of Hell, its tortures, purgatory, sacrifices and punishment, with ‘the Church’ of 2017 which seems to be all about forgiving, encounter, mercy and welcome.

I am not saying that the Church in 1917 was ‘better’ than ‘the Church’ today. The problem is very complicated and it would not be serious nor appropriate to confront it in a few lines. I am saying that I feel very strange about a church which ‘celebrates’ Fatima but at the same time, is most different from everything that Fatima represents.

It may be said: But you are ignoring inculturation, namely, the fact that the Church should speak to the faithful in different ways depending on the times and on circumstances. I understand that. But this is not just a question of words, of language, of style. It is a question of content.

Let us just consider Divine Judgment. The impression is that ‘the Church’ today would be embarrassed, at the very least, to have to speak of the Father who judges. This ‘Church’ prefers to speak generically of mercy, of accompaniment, of discernment – making it seem as though God is obliged to pardon everyone.

Just try to say today that punishment is the logical consequence of sin, just as if one takes a deadly poison, then one will die! That divine justice metes out punishment [not just reward, or it would not be justice at all], sin itself and the punishment that is the consequence of sin, are all [being made] inconceivable for us today.

Our Lady said something very clear and precise in Fatima: God is not obliged to pardon the sinner who does not repent.

And the sinner cannot pretend he is forgiven if he does not reject his sin. So when the sinner does not repent, God will punish him. None of this eliminates the idea of mercy. All it says is that mercy does not eliminate judgment or justice.

There is Hell, there is Paradise, there is Purgatory. Our Lady confirmed this in Fatima. But do we believe it? Are we today in a condition to believe this?

That, in my humble opinion, is the true mystery of Fatima today.

It turns out that Fr. De Souza wrote a third article to mark the centenary of the Fatima apparitions. In this, he underscores how the vision of Hell shown by Mary to the three shepherd children is the central context for the message of Fatima, yet it is one of those aspects of the Fatima apparitions that Jorge Bergoglio expressly chooses to ignore as 'unpleasant', i.e., 'unmerciful'. Bergoglianism must be all nice and easy - how dare Jesus Christ come and preach about sin and repentance and the Last Judgment, and how dare the Mother of God follow his example!

Bergoglio, who is no less than the 'god' of Bergoglianism, a 'god' that is a decided improvement over the God Catholics believe in, 'God 2.0' if you will, spares his followers any moral burden or responsibility at all - but he does enjoin them to wholeheartedly support secular causes: welcome all immigrants indiscriminately, recycle your wastes, stop using fossil fuels, and give to the poor.

Fatima at 100:
Our Lady’s harrowing message of freedom
by Fr Raymond de Souza, SJ

May 12, 2017


Fr. De Souza illustrates his article with this painting by a follower of Hieronymus Bosch: 'An angel leading a soul into hell'. But I find it strange that an angel should be doing that - should it not be Satan or one of his devils?

At Fatima, Our Lady scared the hell out of the children to whom she appeared. Or more precisely, she frightened the children out of hell and took them instead to heaven. Pope Francis will confirm that on Saturday when he canonises Francisco and Jacinta in Fatima on the centenary of the first apparition on May 13, 1917.

Until the “third secret” of Fatima was revealed during the Great Jubilee of 2000, there was great speculation about what it might mean in terms of predicting the future. When it was released, the Holy See confirmed that the third secret related to events in the past, namely the martyrs of the 20th century and the assassination attempt on St John Paul II in 1981.

It should be remembered, though, that the “secret of Fatima” was really a vision granted to the children and recorded in three parts. The first part of the vision, recorded in the “first secret”, was a revelation of hell, filled with souls in great torment. It made a profound impression on the three of them, such that they greatly intensified their prayers and penances. They were so determined that they were able to resist even the threats of torture and death made by the local authorities.

Sister Lucia writes about the vision of Hell in the first part of the Secret:

---

“Our Lady showed us a great sea of fire which seemed to be under the earth. Plunged in this fire were demons and souls in human form, like transparent burning embers, all blackened or burnished bronze, floating about in the conflagration, now raised into the air by the flames that issued from within themselves together with great clouds of smoke, now falling back on every side like sparks in a huge fire, without weight or equilibrium, and amid shrieks and groans of pain and despair, which horrified us and made us tremble with fear...

How can we ever be grateful enough to our kind heavenly Mother, who had already prepared us by promising, in the first apparition, to take us to heaven. Otherwise, I think we would have died of fear and terror.”

---

It is amazing how in some 90 words, Lucia conjures a vision that not even the most horrifying depictions of Hell in paintings have been able to convey. This description alone would erase any doubt as to the authenticity of what the shepherd children saw.

It is the vision of hell that provides the context for the message of Our Lady of Fatima. Her appearance there dealt with great events of history – the world wars, the rise of communism, the triumph of her Immaculate Heart over totalitarian atheism – but more generally Fatima addresses the great mystery of iniquity and providence in history. Fatima thus is fundamentally about freedom, human and divine.

God creates free creatures – angelic and human persons – so that His love might be returned in love. Love is only possible where there is freedom; it cannot be coerced. God creates out of love for the purpose of love, which is why He creates free persons.Evil enters the world when freedom is used not for good, not for God, but for lesser goods, contrary to God’s providential plan. In order for freedom to be real, there must be consequences; freedom takes its value from the consequences.

The greater the consequences at stake, the more important the freedom. That is why hell – the more real and more horrific it is – underscores the heights of the freedom for which we have been created. A cosmos without hell becomes a cosmos of inconsequential freedom.

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger wrote in his Theological Commentary on the Third Secret in 2000:

---

“The Evil One has power in this world, as we see and experience continually; he has power because our freedom continually lets itself be led away from God.

“But since God himself took a human heart and has thus steered human freedom towards what is good, the freedom to choose evil no longer has the last word. From that time forth, the word that prevails is this: In the world you will have tribulation, but take heart; I have overcome the world (John 16:33). [B]The message of Fatima invites us to trust in this promise.”

---

The fallen world is a world of freedom corrupted. Into this world God Himself enters by the perfect freedom of the Virgin Mary – hence it is through her Immaculate Heart that salvation comes, that heart capable of returning love for love in uncorrupted freedom.

The providence of God works through human freedom, above all the freedom of Christ who sets us free for freedom (Galatians 5:1), the freedom of the Blessed Mother, and the freedom of the saints, whether they be little shepherd children like Blessed Francisco and Blessed Jacinta, or the mightiest figures of history, like St John Paul II.

That is why the third secret, with the assassination of the Holy Father, was not a fixed image of future, like a photograph transported back in time. The Lady of Fatima intervened to make God’s providence all the more manifest. God’s freedom remains always in history, His love that moves the sun and the other stars, and can move our freedom too.

More about Fatima and Hell...Everyone else seems to get it, just not Bergoglio and his followers.

100 years on, Fatima
is more important than ever
by Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith

May 12, 2017

As I write this, the Pope is on his way to Fatima for a lightning one night visit, when he will say Mass and lead people in the Rosary.

The eyes of the Catholic world are turned towards the Portuguese shrine, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the apparitions, which falls tomorrow, the feast of Our Lady of Fatima. And people are not just thinking of Fatima because the Pope is going there – he is the fourth Pontiff to visit – rather it is because Fatima is important, and, a hundred years on, more important than ever.

I used to think that Fatima was something of a sideshow, a specialist interest, which appealed to a niche market in the Church. I certainly do not think this now. There are several reasons for this.

First of all, at Fatima, Our Lady told it like it is. She is the one person who could never be guilty of what the world calls hate crime or hate speech, being a mother and the most loving mother of all. But at Fatima she made it clear to us all that sin has consequences, and that these consequences are not good. Professor Stephen Bullivant writes about this in the magazine this week and how right he is.

Hell has been a neglected theme in Catholic theology and discourse of late, and it needs to be given its rightful place in both. That we should neglect Hell is odd, because the 100 years since 1917 have seen the enormous growth in examples of the hell we create for ourselves.

We should have no difficultly in believing in an otherworldly Hell – a place quite without the love of God – when we have seen pictures and heard descriptions of the hells on earth that human beings have made for their fellow creatures: the trenches of the First World War, the Gulag, the Nazi death camps, the killing fields of Cambodia.

These terrifying examples should convince us that we are capable of evil and that evil actions have dreadful consequences. Perhaps contemporary preachers and theologians (and I am one) steer away from Hell, not wanting to give offence. Well, insofar as we have failed, let us pass the microphone, so to speak, to Our Lady of Fatima.

The second thing is the emphasis on the Rosary. It is such a simple prayer, and so easy to say. So just say it. It can’t possibly do any of us any harm, and will do us, we are promised, much good.

Thirdly, there is the emphasis on the Immaculate Heart. This is the thing that thrills me most. Our Lady said at Fatima:

---

“If my requests are heeded, Russia will be converted, and there will be peace; if not, she will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church. The good will be martyred; the Holy Father will have much to suffer; various nations will be annihilated. In the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph. The Holy Father will consecrate Russia to me, and she shall be converted, and a period of peace will be granted to the world.”

---

The triumph of the Immaculate Heart is the great promise of Fatima. In the end, Lenin and Stalin and Brezhnev’s evil will be blown away by the triumph of that Heart. War and suffering will be forgotten, and love alone will triumph.

This prophecy is something of which we find echoes in Scripture, particularly in the Old Testament, in those passages to do with the coming of the Messianic Age. In particular I think of these verses from Isaiah:

---

“The haughty eyes of man will be lowered, the arrogance of men will be abased, and the LORD alone will be exalted, on that day. For the LORD of hosts will have his day against all that is proud and arrogant, all that is high, and it will be brought low.” (2:11-12)

---

The same sentiment is expressed in the New Testament in Our Lady’s Magnificat. That is the song that is the perfect expression of the love that fills the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and devotion to the Immaculate Heart unlocks this passage of scripture for us, I think.

I have never been to Fatima, but I intend to right this omission shortly!

The day after the 100th anniversary day of the first apparition in Fatima, Antonio Socci came out with the following blogpost, which, however,
refers to a post he had on August 17, 2014 – which I missed seeing then.

I am wary about posting anything by Socci about the Third Secret of Fatima because he is personally invested 100 percent in the belief that
the Vatican has suppressed a second letter from Suor Lucia to supplement the letter of April 1944 in which she describes the apocalyptic
vision shown to her and her two cousins by Mary in July 2017. He wrote a book in 2006 to argue this,and has continued to promote it aggressively.

Because subsequently, he has argued and acted on his conviction that Benedict XVI was forced to resign the Papacy by unnamed and totally
amorphous elements – i.e., he did not resign of his own free will, as canon law requires - and that therefore, Jorge Bergoglio may not be
a legitimate pope (for which he adduces additional reasons having to do with the pre-Conclave campaigning in his behalf and a technical issue
or two with the actual balloting in the Sistine Chapel), I have been very guarded, even downright dismissive, about the claims he makes
in support of both his pet hypotheses (on Fatima and the legitimacy of Benedict XVI’s resignation and Bergoglio’s election).

However, for the ‘new’ information it contains, I thought I would translate his new post on Fatima – as well as the one he posted on August 17,
2014 – in both of which he cites a description by Suor Lucia of an apocalyptic vision she had in 1944 when she sought guidance from the Lord
to overcome her terror about writing out what we have all come to call ‘the Third Secret’ of Fatima. The new post necessarily reiterates the
material he posted in August 2014 but with ‘updated’ commentary.

To balance out Socci’s position regarding an incompletely-disclosed Third Secret, I shall re-post a rebuttal of all the hypotheses about an
‘incomplete’ Third Secret made in a 2011 book on Fatima by Fr. Andrew Apostoli, a founding member of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal
and vice-postulator for the canonization cause in behalf of Venerable Fulton Sheen.

In a 2013 book published by the Carmelites,
Suor Lucia confirmed she wrote two texts
on the Third Secret, but few paid attention
Translated from

May 14, 2017

One hundred years since the first Marian apparition in Fatima, all the media focused once more on her prophecies about the 20th century and the mystery in those prophecies.

But what is the point today? I have studied those events for years, especially the continuing question over the Third Secret, its publication in 2000, and the controversy over whether the entire text was released by the Vatican.

But I believe that the most significant development took place in 2013 to general disattention and is still generally ignored.

I wrote about this on August 17, 2014, in Libero, to report on a book published in Portugal which was edited by the Carmelite sisters of the monastery in Comibra, where Suor Lucia Dos Santos, the third seer, lived most of her life after the apparitions and where she died at age 97 in 2005.

It was an official publication entitled Un caminho sob o olhar de Maria (A journey under the eyes of Mary), a biography of Lucia which drew on those of her her writings which had up to then been secret and unpublished. But the book was practically unnoticed in the media. However, I was told by an authoritative source that the pages included a ‘genuine bombshell’.

I verified that this was so. The 'bombshell', in fact, resolved [could resolve?] in effect the tiresome controversy over the Third Secret – because the book makes it clear that in fact, what was published of the Third Secret in 2000 was incomplete, and what the missing content was.

How is it possible that the Carmelites of Coimbra decided to come out with the revelation which, drawn from handwritten texts by Suor Lucia, appears incontestable and undermines the Vatican version? Such a weighty decision could not have been solely on their own initiative.

It could be that Suor Lucia herself had asked them to publish the document after her death, considering its importance as a serious and specific warning for mankind. But her wish alone would not have sufficed, because if she had the faculty to publish it while she was alive, she would have done so.

Evidently, the publication had to have a ‘placet’ from on high, and we know that on the subject of Fatima, such an auithorization can only come from the Vatican [the Pope, specifically]. [NB: Pius XII had surprisingly refused to even look at the letter sent by Suor Lucia when the letter was finally sent to him from the Archbishop of Leiria which had kept the letter in custody in 1957. His successor, John XXIII, decided not to release that letter even if Suor Lucia had wanted it published by 1960. And John Paul II waited until the Jubilee celebrating the start of the third millennium of Christianity to publish it – according to all official accounts, what was published in 200 was the full and only text about the Third Secret.]

The Carmelite book was published in 2013, i.e., it was prepared and intended for publication under Benedict XVI, and having been published with all the requisite seals of ecclesiastic approval, it is reasonable to hypothesize that the authorization came directly from Benedict XVI. Who, as Prefect of the CDF, had to write the Theological Commentary to the Third Secret, including what it said about ‘a bishop dressed in white’.

In view of the time frame, we may identify the date that marked a change in Benedict XVI’s official attitude about the Third Secret – May 13, 2010.

At that time, the Church was truly under heavy attack, and for the 93rd anniversary of the first apparition in Fatima (and the 10th anniversary of the beatification of Francisco and Jacinta), the Pontiff decided – hastily and surprisingly – to make a pilgrimage to the Portuguese shrine. [What is Socci talking about? Back in early May 2009, shortly before Benedict XVI travelled to the Holy Land, the Vatican already made known that four trips abroad were contemplated in 2010 when it confirmed he would be travelling next to the Czech Republic in September 2009, at which time the Archbishop of Leiria announced the visit to Portugal on the website of the Fatima shrine.

Four destinations were announced and anticipated in 2010: Malta, Portugal , Cyprus and the United Kingdom – all of which did
take place, in April, May, June and September, 2010, respectively. There was nothing at all about the preparations for
the visit to Portugal that was surprising or hasty.]

Enroute to Portugal and while he was there, Benedict said said surprising words which actually contradicted what had always been said before then at the Vatican about Fatima.

He said in his homily in Fatima on May 13, 2010: “We would be mistaken to think that Fatima’s prophetic mission is complete.” On the plane he said,

---

“I would say that… beyond the great vision of the suffering of the Pope, which we could in the first place refer to Pope John Paul II, an indication is given of realities involving the future of the Church, which are gradually taking shape and becoming evident. [Socci cuts off his citation at this point, but I think it is important to show the entire passage which continues as follows:]

So it is true that, in addition to the moment indicated in the vision, there is seen, the passion [suffering] of the Church, which naturally is reflected in the person of the Pope, yet the Pope stands for the Church and thus it is sufferings of the Church that are announced.

The Lord told us that the Church would constantly be suffering, in different ways, until the end of the world. The important thing is that the message, the response of Fatima, in substance is not directed to particular devotions, but precisely to the fundamental response, that is, to ongoing conversion, penance, prayer, and the three theological virtues: faith, hope and charity.

---

[Next, Socci quotes something from Benedict XVI as though he had said it in Portugal in May 2010, when it comes from the letter that the Pope had written the bishops of the world in March 2009 – in the wake of the controversy over (now ex)-SSPX Bishop Williamson, namely:] that “In our day, when in vast areas of the world the faith is in danger of dying out like a flame which no longer has fuel, the overriding priority is to make God present in this world and to show men and women the way to God.” [Socci only quotes the bolded words.]

Benedict notes in his Fatima homily:

---

“Mankind has succeeded in unleashing a cycle of death and terror, but failed in bringing it to an end… [Socci ends his citation there, but I think the rest of the paragraph ought to be cited:] In sacred Scripture we often find that God seeks righteous men and women in order to save the city of man and he does the same here, in Fatima, when Our Lady asks: “Do you want to offer yourselves to God, to endure all the sufferings which he will send you, in an act of reparation for the sins by which he is offended and of supplication for the conversion of sinners?”

---

In short, during his apostolic visit to Portugal, Benedict XVI made it clear that the message of Fatima continues – it has not ended because of the apparent realization of part of the prophecy [in Ali Agca’s attempt to assassinate John Paul II], but it is urgently necessary to heed Our Lady’s exhortation to conversion, to penitence and to prayer, because the Church is always under attack (even, and perhaps, especially, from within) and the faith is dying out in many parts of the world – and that mankind therefore is poised to fall into an abyss.

It is plausible that the Carmelite book, published three years after Benedict’s visit to Fatima, was authorized by Benedict XVI, not just because ‘burning’ issues about Fatima like Suor Lucia’s writings have always been decided at the highest levels in the Vatican, but also because the' revelation’ contained in the book is in perfect agreement with the concerns that Benedict XVI expressed in May 2010.

Indeed, it constitutes a dramatic warning to the Church and to mankind that a tremendous sword of Damocles hangs over us all.
Here then is an account of the till-then unpublished text of Suor Lucia. In this particular page, she speaks about how she overcame the difficulty she had to write out the ‘Third Secret’ as requested by Church authorities.

It was January 3, 1944. At 4 p.m., the nun went to the chapel to pray to Jesus to show her his will: “I felt a friendly hand, affectionate and maternal, on my shoulder”. It was the Mother of God who told her: “Be at peace and write what they ask you to, but not that which you were given to understand about its meaning”.

Words which confirm the hypothesis – borne out by so many other indications – that the ‘Third Sedret’ as written out by Suor Lucia was composed of two texts: one reporting the vision that the three children were shown, the text published in 2000; and a second text in which Suor Lucia subsequently transcribed the interpretation of the vision that Our Lady conveyed to the children.

It was this second text that so struck John XXIII who decided that it must be kept secret, on the ground that it could only be Lucia’s own thinking, without any supernatural origin. It is the part which has never been disclosed by the Vatican which officially denies it exists.

Could it have to do with the figure of the ‘bishop dressed in white’ and on ‘the Holy Father, half trembling with vacillating steps, afflicted by pain and sorrow’?

What we know for sure – because it has been revealed for years by high Church officials and priests who were very close to Suor Lucia – is that the suppressed text speaks of apostasy in the Church and of a grave danger incumbent upon mankind.

That us why the rest of Suor Lucia’s heretofore unpublished writing in the Carmelite sisters’ book is indeed, very eloquent. After hearing the words of Our Lady who asked her to write what was asked of her, she writes:

---

I felt my spirit inundated by a mystery of light which is God and in him I saw and heard: The tip of a lance like a lengthening flame touching the axis of the earth, which trembles: mountains, cities, towns and villages with their inhabitants are buried. The seas, the rivers and clouds escape their limits, overflow, inundate and drag with them as in a turbine, houses and persons in numbers one cannot count. It is the purification of the world from the sin in which it has been immersed. Hatred and ambition provoke a destructive war. Afterwards, I felt in the accelerated beating of my heart and in my spirit a light voice which said, “In time, only one faith, only one Baptism, only one Church – holy, catholic and apostolic. In eternity, Heaven!”

---

Suor Lucia's vision is very eloquent both in order to understand the danger incumbent on mankind, and what is happening in the Church, where its very leader, Jorge Bergoglio, has reached the point of saying “A Catholic God does not exist”.

Whereas Our Lady proclaims the opposite: “In time, only one faith, only one Baptism, only one Church – holy, catholic and apostolic. In eternity, Heaven!”

Here is Socci's blogpost on August 16, 2014 when he first reports about the new biography of Suor Lucia: 

Apocalyptic news about Fatima
And the latest mystery: Why have the Carmelite nuns
chosen to keep silent on any further questions?

8/16/2014

There is something new in the ongoing ‘mystery’ of the Third Secret of Fatima, a prophecy that covered all of the 20th century and appears headed for further realizations.

The news is found in an official publication of the Carmelite monastery of Coimbra (Portugal) where the oldest of the Fatima visionaries, Suor Lucia dos Santos, lived for decades as a cloistered nun till her death in 2005. It is entitled “Un caminho sob o olhar de Maria” (A journey under the eyes of Mary), a biography of Suor Lucia written by her fellow Carmelites, drawing from invaluable previously unpublished writings of Suor Lucia.

First, one must remember well the story of Fatima.

As the First World War raged, Our Lady first appeared on May 13, 1917, to three shepherd children in a place called Cova da Iria in the town of Fatima, Portugal. She subsequently appeared to them four more times.

At the time, the secular newspapers ridiculed the ‘gullible’ who believed in the apparitiosn and dared the Virgin to give a public sign of her presence. She told the children that she would give this sign on her last apparition to them which would be on October 13, 2017. And on that day, 70,000 persons came to Cova da Iria and witnessed with terror as the sun spun in the sky. An event which would then be reported in all the newspapers, though they were all anti-clerical.

In her apparition on July 13, Mary had entrusted to the children a message for the whole world – a vision of Hell and a dire prophecy about the coming decades if mankind did not turn back to God.

In fact, everything she prophesied took place: the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the spread of Communism around the world, the bloody persecutions against the Church, and finally, the Second World War.

But there was a third part of the secret which, Mary told the children, should not be revealed till 1960. But when that date came, Pope John XXIII decided not to reveal anything because he thought the content was ‘terrible’ for the Church.

Thus began a jumble of hypotheses about what has come to be called the Third Secret of Fatima. In 2000, John Paul II decided to release a text which contained the now-familiar vision of ‘a bishop dressed in white’ and a Pope walking through a city in ruins, strewn with corpses, and finally, the martyrdom of the Pope, along with bishops, priests and faithful at the foot of a great Cross.

There were many indications that the text disclosed in 2000 was not all there is to the Third Secret. I was one of those who wrote a book about this. Mine was published in 2006 and entitled The Fourth Secret of Fatima, where I sought to show that the text released by the Vatican in 2000 did not include the part which was written and sent later by Suor Lucia to the Vatican, in which she wrote out the words with which Our Lady explained the meaning of the vision described in the Third Secret.

John XXIII’s private secretary himself, Mons. Loris Capovilla, who knew the circumstances of John XXIII’s decision not to reveal the secret in 1960 as Our Lady had instructed, told journalist Solideo Paolini about the existence of the supplementary note to the Third Secret.

But the Vatican has steadfastly denied its existence, much less that it contains anything that pertains to contemporary history [other than the hypothesis that the vision 'prophesied' the attempted assassination of John Paul II].

However, an implicit confirmation appears to have been made by Benedict XVI who said during his pilgrimage to Fatima, in his homily on May 13, that “We would be mistaken to think that Fatima’s prophetic mission is complete.” [Which could mean simply what he said, not necessarily that the text of the Third Secret released by the Vatican is incomplete!

He added that "an indication is given of realities involving the future of the Church, which are gradually taking shape and becoming evident." [Socci is being ‘dishonest’ or sloppy here here because what he quotes was said by Benedict XVI three days earlier in his news conference on the plane going to Portugal.]

But what prophecies could be found in the 2000 text?

We need to reflect on two other statements the Pope made in Fatima: “Mankind has succeeded in unleashing a cycle of death and terror, but failed in bringing it to an end” and “In vast areas of the world the faith is in danger of dying out like a flame which no longer has fuel”. [Again, as I pointed out in my remarks on Socci's May 14, 2017 post, Socci is being ‘dishonest’ here. The second statement comes from Benedict XVI’s letter to the bishops of the world in March 2009 after the uproar when he lifted the excommunication of the four Lefebvrian bishops including [now ex-SSPX] Mons. Richard Williamson who denies the Holocaust.]

One gathers from Benedict XVI’s words that there is truly more to the Third Secret that has not been revealed and that has dramatic implications for the Church and the world. And perhaps the publication of this book, which reveals another piece of the truth about the Third Secret, arose from that trip.

Indeed, the book draws from the letters of Suor Lucia and her unpublished diary entitled Il mio cammino (My journey). Among this unpublished material is her account of how she overcome the terror that had kept her from writing out the third part of the Secret [what everyone now calls the Third Secret].

Around 4 p.m. on January 3, 1944, the nun went to the chapel, and before the Tabernacle, she prayed to Jesus to show her his will: “I felt a friendly hand, affectionate and maternal, on my shoulder”. It was ‘the Mother of God’ who told her: “Be at peace and write what they ask you to, but not that which you were given to understand about its meaning”, referring apparently to the significance of the vision that had been revealed by Mary herself.

Shortly thereafter, she writes:

---

I felt my spirit inundated by a mystery of light which is God and in him I saw and heard: The tip of a lance like a lengthening flame touching the axis of the earth, which trembles: mountains, cities, towns and villages with their inhabitants are buried. The seas, the rivers and clouds escape their limits, overflow, inundate and drag with them as in a turbine, houses and persons in numbers one cannot count. It is the purification of the world from the sin in which it has been immersed. Hatred and ambition provoke a destructive war. Afterwards, I felt in the accelerated beating of my heart and in my spirit a light voice which said, “In time, only one faith, only one Baptism, only one Church – holy, catholic and apostolic. In eternity, Heaven!”

---

And that is how she found the strength to write out the Third Secret.

The hitherto-unpublished text which I have cited is a very interesting document, in which those who have been researching the Third Secret will easily confirm the historical reconstruction according to which the Third Secret [written out by Suor Lucia] was composed of two parts: One, the vision itself, was written and sent off first, while the other – that in which the words of Mary herself reveal ‘the significance’ of the vision – was written and sent later.

This part is the famous and mysterious ‘attachment’ referred to by Capovilla. That text, which has not been published, presumably contains the words that had terrified Suor Lucia. The same that terrified John XXIII, and which Papa Roncalli decided not to make known because, in his opinion, it could have been merely Suor Lucia’s own thinking and did not have a supernatural origina.

It is apparently so explosive that the Vatican officially continues to deny its existence. And the opening made by Benedict XVI in 2010 which [Socci presumes] led to the publication of the book, has been closed again.

This is shown by what happened to Solideo Paolini, Italy’s leading scholar on Fatima, who, after seeing the pages of the book that I sent him, wrote the Carmelite monastery in Coimbra requesting to be allowed to consult the previously unpublished texts by Suor Lucia referenced in the book, believing that they might reveal more details about the ‘hidden’ text of the Third Secret.

His registered letter reached its destination (he has the receipt) but he never got a reply. Paolini then wrote again, further explaining his reasons, and asked whether Suor Lucia had ever written down the ‘significance of the vision’ that was given to her from on high and which on January 3, 1944, she claims she was told by Our Lady to omit from her written account.

Paolini wrote: “In the writings which I have requested to be able to consult, is there any reference to ‘something more’ about the Third Secret which remains textually unpublished to date?” Paolini’s second letter was received on June 6, but it too did not have a reply. Even if it would have been easy to simply answer “NO”.

One must conclude that the answer is YES, but it cannot be said, because that would be truly explosive. And so, the Carmelites will not say more.

Nonetheless, the vision [of January 3, 1944] recounted in the book implies the two elements that are thought to be contained in the ‘attachment’ to the Third Secret: the prophecy of an immense catastrophe for the world and of a great apostasy and crisis in the Church. An apocalyptic ordeal after which, as Our Lady herself said in Fatima, ‘my Immaculate Heart will triumph”.

Is it this hoped-for ‘triumph’ that Benedict XVI referred to in 2010, when he said, “May this seven years which separate us from the centenary of the Apparitions in 2017 hasten the pre-announced triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary for the glory of the Most Holy Trinity”?

Does it then mean that, today, in 2014, we have embarked on the apocalyptic ordeal? Yes, if we look at the news.

]
 

The Third Secret has been dealt with in two chapters in this book. Chapter 8 presented the content of the Third Secret as Lucia, Francisco and Jacinta saw it revealed to them. Chapter 16 presented how Sister Lucia wrote the Third Secret on a separate manuscript and then placed it in a sealed envelope. The chapter also traces what popes John XXIII, Paul VI and John Paul II did after reading it.

The Third Secret was first made public at the Beatification Mass of Francisco and Jacinta Marto on May 13, 2000, in the Cova da Iria where the secret was originally revealed to the three children on July 13, 1917. Unfortunately,controversy created by certain objections surrounded the Third Secret almost from the moment it became public. We will look at each main objection separately, and offer a response to each.

Objection: The original Third Secret was written on one sheet of paper.
Many clerics who were familiar with the original text, including bishops who worked with popes John XXIII and Paul VI, said that the Third Secret was written on a single sheet of paper (e.g., Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, who read the Third Secret with Pope John XXIII). [1]

The controversy came about when on June 26, 2000, the Vatican released a copy of Sister Lucia's handwritten text in a four-page format. [2] Though there are several possible ways a single sheet of paper can be turned into more than one page (written on both sides, folded and written on multiple sides, etc.) or copied onto more than one page, some critics said that the Vatican copy could not have been made from the authentic text and that some other document exists that contains the real Third Secret.

The Vatican copy of Sister Lucia's handwritten manuscript appears in the document The Message of Fatima prepared by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. In the introduction, the secretary of the Congregation at the time, Archbishop Bertone, stated: "There is only one manuscript, which is here reproduced photostatically."

Sister Lucia herself confirmed the validity of the Vatican text. Archbishop Bertone and Bishop Seraphim de Sousa of Leiria met with Sister Lucia at her Carmelite convent in Coimbra, Portugal, on April 27, 2000. The Archbishop presented two envelopes to Sister Lucia. The first or outer envelope contained the second envelope, which held the Third Secret. Touching it with her fingers, Sister Lucia said, "This is my letter." Then, while reading it, she said, "This is my writing." [3] When asked if this document was the one and only Third Secret, Sister Lucia answered, "Yes, this is the Third Secret, and I never wrote any other." [4]

We have additional proof from Sister Lucia that the photocopy of the Third Secret was authentic. She met again with Archbishop Bertone on November 17, 2001. A communique about that meeting carried this most important point: [quote[dik=10pt]With reference to the third part of the secret of Fatima, [Sister Lucia] affirmed that she had attentively read and meditated upon the booklet published by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith [The Message of Fatima] and confirmed everything that was written there.

To whoever imagines that some part of the secret has been hidden, she replied: "everything has been published; no secret remains." To those who speak and write of new revelations, she said: "There is no truth in this. If I had received new revelations, I would have told no one, but I would have communicated them directly to the Holy Father." [5]

I have more than a couple of Fatima articles to post, but I am starting with this one, because it is not just about Fatima – even if the event took
place in Fatima. I know the pope is unlikely to have had anything to do with the monstrance that the keepers of the Fatima shrine gave him to use
during the Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament, but Mons. Guido Marini generally makes a preliminary visit beforehand to check out all the liturgical
arrrangements and preparations before the pope’s actual visit. Did he not protest at the choice of the monstrance to be used by the pope? Surely,
the Shrine in Fatima has other more appropriate – and historical - monstrances to choose from.

I wouldn’t have known about this, of course, if Mundabor had not written about it, and the first question that came to my mind when I saw the
picture was: What would Francis of Assisi have thought about the monstrance – even assuming the monstrance were made of
pure platinum? He might well have thought it monstruously inappropriate.

Banalizing God:
A monstrance that looks
like an Ikea wall clock

MAY 16, 2017



Forgive me if I am saying something wrong here, but I always thought that a Monstrance had to be splendid. Not nice. Not beautiful. Splendid.

This is, very obviously, because the fact that the Monstrance is destined to carry the Blessed Sacrament has as obvious corollary that no material can be too precious, no design too elaborate, no expenses can be deemed excessive.

In the end, the Monstrance – even the most elaborate – will always be the palest attempt at conveying the Preciousness of its content. Still, the more precious it is, the less unworthy the attempt.

I now see on Father Z’s blog the photo reproduced above, of the “propeller-monstrance” used in Fatima last weekend and carried by the Evil Clown himself.

What immediately strikes me as evident is not the ugliness of the design, but the banalisation of the object and, by reflection, the downplaying of its sacred content.

Vatican II and, the more so, its latest version on steroids, aims at taking the divine out of the Church. In the same way as Francis keeps insulting the Blessed Virgin as an ignorant girl of the people, which not only banalises but outright protestantises the way the Church sees the Blessed Virgin, he does the same with this monstrance; which, though certainly made of silver, could be any frame of a domestic clock for people who never learned subtlety.

The design is appropriate for everyday decoration. The material wants to look like everyday metal. There is nothing here of the exceptional effort, immediately visible to the onlooker, that says “the importance of what is contained here is such that no container could be too precious”. No, this here looks like an Ikea wall clock that has been dismounted to put a huge host in its place.

The sabotaging of everything that the Church is and believes is not only done through off-the-cuff speeches and heretical homilies. It is also visual, as visible symbols can convey theological meanings, a fact out of which the Church has made the most wonderful use during the centuries.

These visual symbols are now demolished one by one: banal and horrible croziers, the demise of the tiara or the sedia gestatoria, the refusal to wear appropriate papal garments and accessories; and, now, the extreme banalisation of even the monstrance containing the Blessed Sacrament. It starts with communion in the hand, it ends with the Ikea monstrance.

To Francis and his people [that is, in Bergoglianism] nothing is sacred [except perhaps Bergoglio in the eyes of his idolators]. Everything must be banalised and reduced to your everyday experience. The Blessed Virgin didn’t really know what was happening. She was, perhaps, angry at God under the Cross. 'Laudetur Jesus Christus' [or the simple Sign of the Cross and the words that go with it!] must be replaced by ‘Buonasera’. The Blessed Sacrament is displayed in a department-store clock frame.

But woe to the one who builds a wall to keep illegals and criminals out.

SO, IS MEDJUGORJE TO BE DECLARED
A GENUINE MARIAN APPARITION?

Obviously, Andrea Tornielli had the inside track as well as the green light to make the following report, but I find it very odd.

After the pope's statements about Medjuorge on May 13, coming back Rfrom Fatima, one might have thought that - as Rorate caeli concluded,
he had 'closed the door' on Medjugorje as a Marian apparition site.

Yet this report indicates that the papal commission named by Benedict XVI to study the question voted strongly in favor of acknowledging that
the first seven apparitions in 1981 were supernatural in origin, but cannot express an opinion on all the supposed daily
apparitions reported by the seers over the past 26 years.

So is Tornielli pre-empting the pope's formal announcement eventually that the Church recognizes the initial apparitions at Medjugorje as
'genuine', i.e., supernatural in origin? Or does Jorge Bergoglio reserve the right to decide for himself regardless of what the Ruini commission
and members of the CDF think? In any case, the Ruini report appears to have something to satisfy both sides of the Medjugorje controversy.

Medjugorje: The findings of the Ruini report
It is positive on the first few appearances, but dubious about all the rest,
and proposes to make Medjugorje a pontifical shrine
by Andrea Tornielli
Adapted from the English service of
VATICAN INSIDER
MAY 16, 2017

VATICAN CITY -Thirteen votes were in favor of recognizing the supernatural nature of the first seven appearances in Medjugorje, one vote against and one “suspensive” ballot (the person who cast it will give a final answer later), But for the rest of the apparitionsfrom the end of 1981 to today, many doubts and a majority of suspensive votes

These are the results of the work done by the commission on Medjugorje established in 2010 by Benedict XVI and chaired by Cardinal Camillo Ruini, who was president of the Itaian bishops’ conference for 15 years, as well as the Vicar of Rome for both John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

Pope Francis mentioned this report in the press conference on the return flight from Fatima when he revealed the distinction between the first apparitions and the later ones, saying, “A commission of good theologians, bishops, cardinals. Good, good, good. The Ruini report is very, very good”

The Pontiff was positive about the spiritual fruits and the conversions (”people who go there and convert, people who meet God and change their lives”, but is negative with regard to the current apparitions ( “I prefer Our Lady as a Mother, and not the head of the telegraphic office, who sends a message every day”.)

The commission named by Benedict XVI started work on March 17, 2010, a report on January 17, 2014. Besides Cardinal Ruini, its members were Cardinals Jozef Tomko, Vinko Puljić, Josip Bozanić, Julián Herranz and Angelo Amato; psychologist Tony Anatrella; theologians Pierangelo Sequeri, Franjo Topić, Mihály Szentmártoni and Nela Gašpar; Mariologist Salvatore Perrella, anthropologist Achim Schütz, canonist David Jaeger, a representative from ;the Congregation for the Causes of Sainthood, Zdzisław Józef Kijas; psychologist Mijo Nikić and an official from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Krzysztof Nykiel.

Their task was to “collect and examine all the material” about Medjugorje and to present “a detailed report” followed by a vote on the “supernatural nature or not” of the apparitions as well as the most appropriate “pastoral solutions”. The committee met 17 times and screened all documents filed in the Vatican, the parish of Medjugorje and the archives of the secret services of the former Yugoslavia. The commission heard all the seers and witnesses involved, and in April 2012, they carried out an site inspection.

The commission noted a very clear difference between the beginning of the phenomenon and its subsequent ‘development’, and therefore decided to issue two distinct votes on each phase: the first seven presumed appearances between June 24 and July 3, 1981, and all that happened later.

The commission came out with 13 votes in favor of recognizing the supernatural nature of the first visions. A member voted against and an expert expressed a suspensive vote. [DIM=9pt [Since the commission included the former and present bishops under whose diocese Medjugorje falls, are we to conclude that both bishops - who have been very emphatic in the past that they do not consider the Medjugorje apparitions to be supernatural in origin - have now changed their mind at least with respect to the first seven apparitions? Or may the member who voted against was one of the two bishops.]

The commission notes that the seven young seers were psychically normal and were caught by surprise by the apparition, and that nothing of what they had seen was influenced by either the Franciscans of the parish or any other subjects. They initially showed resistance in telling what happened despite being arrested by the police and death threats. At the same time, the commission rejected the hypothesis of a demonic origin for the apparitions.

With regard to the subsequent ‘apparitions’, the commission took note of the conflict over the apparitions between the local bishop (two of them since 1981) and the Franciscan fathers who were in charge of the village parish [and whose subsequent manipulations, according to many reports, orchestrated the propaganda and became the ‘masterminds’ for the seers in order to exploit the commercial possibilities of the pilgrim traffic generated by the reported phenomena].

Likewise, the commission noted that subsequent apparitions appeared to be programmed individually for each seer and are supposed to have continued daily to the present [now going on 26 years, which really taxes all credulity and plausibility!] with repetitive messages of an apocalyptic nature. [Surely, the theologians on the commission would also have commented on the reportedly heterodox content of these supposed Marian messages!]

On the dubious apparitions, the commission took two votes. First, taking into account the spiritual fruits of Medjugorje but leaving aside the behaviors of the seers, 3 members and 3 experts say there are positive outcomes; 4 members and 3 experts say they are mixed but mostly positive, and the remaining 3 experts think the negative effects outweigh the positive effects.

But when the behavior of the seers over the past 26 years was taken into account, eight members and four experts believe that an opinion cannot be expressed, while two other members voted flatly against a supernatural nature.

Having noted that the seers were never appropriately ‘accompanied’ on the spiritual side, and the fact that they have long acted individually and not as a group, the commission coted to end the ban on organized pilgrimages to Medjugorje. Thirteen out of 14 members voted in favor of “an authority dependent on the Holy See” to be established in Medjugorje, and to transform the arish into a pontifical shrine.

The decision, it was made clear, was based on pastoral reasons – namely, for the adequate care of millions of pilgrims and to avoid the formation of ‘parallel churches’, as well as for clarity on economic issues, none of which implies recognition of the supernatural nature of the apparitions.

A decision based on pastoral reasons - the care of millions of pilgrims, avoiding the formation of “parallel churches”, clarity on economic issues - which would not imply the recognition of the supernatural nature of all the alleged apparitions.

Hpwever, the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith led by Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller expressed doubts about the phenomenon and about the Ruini report, which it considers an authoritative contribution to be considered along with other opinions and reports. All such documentation has been furnished to the cardinals and bishops who are members of the CDF in order to get their opinion.

But Pope Francis respects the Ruini report and was unwilling to have it ‘put up for auction’, as it were, so he asked that the CDF members send their opinions to him, not to the Cardinal Mueller.

After examining the Ruini report and the opinions of the CDF members, the Pope appointed Polish Archbishop Henryk Hoser to undertake a “special mission of the Holy See” to “acquire more in-depth knowledge of the pastoral situation In Medjugorje, and “above all, the needs of the faithful who come to pilgrimage” and to “suggest any pastoral initiatives for the future.” Hoser is expected to make his report this summer, at which time the pope will make a decision. [Over what? Whether to announce, in accordance with the Ruini report, that the Church recognizes the first seven apparitions in Medjugorje to be supernatural in origin, but not all the rest?]

I checked Wikipedia to see which Marian apparitions have the seal of the Church and surprised myself:

---

Canonically approved apparitions
6.1 Approved by the Roman Catholic Church
6.1.1 Our Lady of Guadalupe (1531)
6.1.2 Our Lady of Laus (1664–1718)
6.1.3 Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal (1830)
6.1.4 Our Lady of La Salette (1846)
6.1.5 Our Lady of Lourdes (1858)
6.1.6 Our Lady of Pontmain (1871)
6.1.7 Our Lady of Knock (1879)
6.1.8 Our Lady of Fátima (1917)
6.1.9 Our Lady of Beauraing (1932–1933)
6.1.10 Our Lady of Banneux (1933)

---

I must confess I had never even heard the place names Pontmain, Beauraing and Banneux before I saw this list (all three names sound French, which gives France 7 out of the 10 approved apparitions [Laus, the Miraculous Medal (Paris), La Sallette, Lourdes, Pontmain, Beauraing and Banneux). Now I must go read about the three I had not heard of before.

The 1973 apparitions in Akita, Japan, have not been decided upon by the Church, and there are conflicting and unclear reports about the fate of the 'cause for Akita' at the CDF.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Lady_of_Akita

The following three pieces reflect on how this pope appears to have completely missed the point about the Message of Fatima. I find Marco Tosatti's
commentary the best of the three.

But what 'fourth secret'?
During the pope's visit to Fatima,
nothing was even said about the first three!
Translated from

May 14, 2017

I was curious to see in what way – perhaps during the return flight from Fatima – the pope would deal with the question of the Third Secret, and the vexatious question of whether the Vatican had published it ‘in full’ in 2000. The issue was revived recently, in articles, interviews and books, with the centenary of the Marian apparitions in 1917. I thought someone among the media people travelling with the pope would bring it up.

Then I realized it could and would not have happened. Days before, Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Parolin said in an interview with Vatican Radio:

---

“I think that the message of Fatima is the central message of Christianity, that which we are experiencing during this Easter period, namely, the announcement that Jesus is risen, Jesus is alive, Jesus is the Lord of history.

So much speculation has been made – and yes, there will be more speculation – on the ‘secrets’ of Fatima, but they are useless speculations, in a way, because what Fatima tells us has been said publicly and openly. Which is precisely the central message of the faith, of our Christian faith, of our Catholic faith”.

---

[I would have to disagree strongly with Cardinal Parolin’s unorthodox, perfunctory and generic interpretation of what Fatima was about. It was not about the fundamental basis of our faith – namely, the Risen Christ – a message that even Our Lady presumed was known by the three shepherd children she appeared to.

No, her message had to do with how we must live that faith, namely through prayer and penitence, so we may save our souls from Hell. For Cardinal Parolin not to mention ‘prayer and penitence’ at all in his interview is a measure of how much he and his fellow progressivists have appeared to secularize and genericize Fatima and its message.]

The message Parolin conveyed was clear above all to our colleagues in the media who are sensitive to the humors and draughts hovering around Casa Santa Marta and its surroundings. God forbid there should be any conjectures about apostasy in the Church starting from the top!

But I do think that the pope himself summed up his trip to Fatima with great sincerity on the inflight news conference from Fatima:

---

“Fatima has a message of peace brought to mankind by three great communicators who were younger than 13. The world can expect peace, and with everyone, I would talk peace. In Rome before I left, I gave an audience to scientists of different religions who took part in a conference sponsored by the Vatican Observatory, and one of them said to me: “I am an atheist, and I ask a favor from you. Tell Christians that they should love Muslims more”. That is a message of peace”.

---

[OMG, see what shocks I spare myself by not reading reports about this pope unless I have to! True to form, Bergoglio takes Parolin’s generic, misses-the-point interpretation of the message of Fatima to a level of absurdity! One would think, listening to Bergoglio, that Mary at Fatima was the epitome of a beauty contestant whose stock answer for what she most wants is ‘world peace’.

He deliberately misses the point, of course, that wars - the terrible wars spoken of by Our Lady that were as well as those yet to come, are not, as Bergoglio sees them, caused by arms traders whose only aim is profit! But that they are part of God's punishment to mankind for our sins.

They are the modern equivalent of the Great Deluge - though on a far vaster scale compared to those who populated the world in the time of Noah. And the deluge isn't of water but of human blood! And for as long as these wars persist, world peace is merely a delusion to people like Bergoglio and beauty contestants.]

Tosatti does his readers a service by asking them to re-read the three parts that constitute the 'Secret of Fatima'. And here they are, in English,from the CDF documentation of 2000:

---

The first part is the vision of hell.
Our Lady showed us a great sea of fire which seemed to be under the earth. Plunged in this fire were demons and souls in human form, like transparent burning embers, all blackened or burnished bronze, floating about in the conflagration, now raised into the air by the flames that issued from within themselves together with great clouds of smoke, now falling back on every side like sparks in a huge fire, without weight or equilibrium, and amid shrieks and groans of pain and despair, which horrified us and made us tremble with fear.

The demons could be distinguished by their terrifying and repulsive likeness to frightful and unknown animals, all black and transparent. This vision lasted but an instant.

How can we ever be grateful enough to our kind heavenly Mother, who had already prepared us by promising, in the first Apparition, to take us to heaven. Otherwise, I think we would have died of fear and terror. We then looked up at Our Lady, who said to us so kindly and so sadly:

---

“You have seen hell where the souls of poor sinners go. To save them, God wishes to establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart. If what I say to you is done, many souls will be saved and there will be peace.

The war is going to end: but if people do not cease offending God, a worse one will break out during the next Pontificate. When you see a night illumined by an unknown light, know that this is the great sign given to you by God that he is about to punish the world for its crimes, by means of war, famine, and persecutions of the Church and of the Holy Father.

To prevent this, I shall come to ask for the consecration of Russia to my Immaculate Heart, and the Communion of reparation on the First Saturdays. If my requests are heeded, Russia will be converted, and there will be peace; if not, she will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church. The good will be martyred; the Holy Father will have much to suffer; various nations will be annihilated.

In the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph. The Holy Father will consecrate Russia to me, and she shall be converted, and a period of peace will be granted to the world”.

---

And the third part:
After the two parts which I have already explained, at the left of Our Lady and a little above, we saw an Angel with a flaming
sword in his left hand; flashing, it gave out flames that looked as though they would set the world on fire; but they died out
in contact with the splendour that Our Lady radiated towards him from her right hand: Pointing to the earth with his right hand,
the Angel cried out in a loud voice: ‘Penance, Penance, Penance!'.

And we saw in an immense light that is God: ‘something similar to how people appear in a mirror when they pass in front of it'
a Bishop dressed in White (‘we had the impression that it was the Holy Father').

Other Bishops, Priests, men and women Religious going up a steep mountain, at the top of which there was a big Cross of
rough-hewn trunks as of a cork-tree with the bark; before reaching there the Holy Father passed through a big city half
in ruins and half trembling with halting step, afflicted with pain and sorrow, he prayed for the souls of the corpses he met
on his way.

---

Tosatti ends his commentary with this:
A message of peace? Are we sure that's what it is? [Ask Bergoglio - he's the one who insists!]

This pope ‘re-interprets’ Fatima
and completely ignores Our Lady's
message about sin and penitence
By Roberto de Mattei
Translated from
IL TEMPO
May 14, 2017

Half a million people were present at the Esplanade in Fatima for Pope Francis’s canonization of Francesco and Jacinta, two of the Fatima seers who died at the age of 11 and 9, respectively, not too long after they and their older cousin Lucia saw and heard the Mother of God at Cova da Iria between May 13 and October 13 in 2017. [Both children as well as Lucia, would have other visions that came to them individually, and any account of these visions is quite fascinating.]

The canonization took place and the Church has inscribed them as the youngest non-martyred children who have been declared saints. The cause for the beatification of Lucia who died at age 97 in 2005 is underway [the process to begin it was expedited by Benedict XVI upon her death].

But what devotees around the world expected was not just the canonization of the two children, but also the fulfillment by the pope of some requests that had been made by Our Lady in 2017, which have so far gone unheeded. [I really do not understand the dispute over whether the popes have consecrated Russia to the Immaculate Heart or not. In 1957, Suor Lucia appears to have thought not, but then came John Paul II and Benedict XVI. De Maettei and other traditionalists appear to believe that, for some reason, the popes were not specific enough about Russia, though I can understand why Bergoglio does not mention Russia and Fatima in the same breath because he is nothing but most politically correct.]

This year, two contrasting centenaries are being observed: the apparitions I Fatima and the Bolshevik revolution in Russia the very same month of the last Marian apparition in Fatima.

In Fatima, Mary announced that Russia would spread her errors throughout the world, and that these errors would bring forth wars, revolutions as well as persecutions against the Church. And to avoid such disasters, Our Lady asked for sincere repentance from mankind for its sins (implying a return to the principles of Christian moral order).

To this urgent and necessary conversion of their lives by Christians, Our Lady added two specific requests: the consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary by the Pope in union with all the bishops of the world, and the propagation of the First Saturday devotions, in which on the first Saturday of each month, for five consecutive months, the faithful would unite with her, having confessed and received communion, to pray and meditate the Holy Rosary.

The Five Saturdays devotion has never been promoted by Church authorities; the pontifical acts of entrusting and consecrating the world – Russia in particular – to the Immaculate Heart of Mary have been partial and incomplete; but above all, for at least 50 years, the men of the church no longer preach the spirit of sacrifice and penance which is so intimately bound to the spirituality of fFrancisco and Jacinta.

When, in 1919, Lucia visited Jacint in the hospital before the latter died, their conversation was all about the sufferings offered by her and Francisco to help keep sinners from the pains of Hell that had been shown to them by Our Lady.

Pope Francis, who had never been to Fatima before, not even as a priest, did not refer to any of the themes of Mary’s message at Fatima. On May 12, at the Chapel of the Apparitions, presenting himself as ‘a bishop dressed in white’ , he said: [ “I come as a prophet and messenger to wash the feet of everyone at the same table which unites us”. [Does a prophet ever call himself a prophet? Is that not for others to do?]

Then, in calling on the faithful to follow the example of Francisco and Jacinta, he said, “Thus, we follow every route, we walk as pilgrims all our life, we shall bring down all walls and cross every frontier, heading towards all the peripheries, manifesting the justice and peace of God”.

In his homily at the canonization Mass on May 13, he remembered “all my brothers in Baptism and in humanity”. Especially “the seek and the disabled, the imprisoned and the unemployed, the poor and the abandoned”, inviting them to “rediscover the young and beautiful face of the Church which shines best when she is missionary, welcoming, free, faithful, poor in means but rich in love”. [Can I say ‘Yeccchhh…”, or is it more respectful to say, “yada, yada, yada…”?]

But the tragic dimension of the message of Fatima, which revolves around the concept of sin and punishment, was totally shelved. Our lady told little Jacinta that wars are nothing but punishment for the sins of the world, and that the sins which mot bring souls to hell are those against purity.

‘If we are currently experiencing ‘a Third World War piecemeal’, as this pope often says, how can it not be linked to the terrible explosion of contemporary immorality which has reached the point of legalizing the inversion of mora [and natural] laws?

Our Lady also told Jacinta that without conversion and penitence, mankind would be punished, and yet, her Immaculate Hart would triumph and the whole world would be converted. Today, the word ‘punishment’ is not just abhorred because ‘the mercy of God cnacels every sin’, but the very idea of conversion is frowned upon, because according to this pope, proselytism is ‘the strongest poison against ecumenism”.

We must admit that the message of Fatima re-interpreted according to Bergoglio’s sociological categories has little to do with the prophetic announcement that the Immaculate Heart of Mary will triumph ultimately as she herself announced 100 years ago.


Francis at Fatima:
The good and the bad
by Christopher A. Ferrara

May 15, 2017

The papal visit to Fatima is over. Pope Bergoglio canonized Jacinta and Francisco, and for this we should give thanks to God.

Once again, the Fatima event is front-and-center in the life of the Church, for Our Lady will have it so. The Message of Fatima will never be forgotten because it involves a request by the Mother of God that has yet to be fulfilled.

Hence the fourth Pope in a row has made a pilgrimage to the site of the apparitions. It is almost as if the Popes are supernaturally drawn to the place despite the best efforts of their worldly-wise collaborators to consign Fatima to the post-Vatican II memory hole. [Not that anyone expected Bergoglio – whatever his advisers may think – not to go to Fatima at all for the centenary and the canonization of the two children! How could he possibly miss an event that is so singularly ‘signal’ for himself and for his pontificate?]

But, sad to say, Pope Bergoglio, despite the great good of the canonizations, could not leave Fatima without leaving his own imprint on the place, by which I mean his peculiar brand of liberal Jesuit theology that so often strikes at the foundations of what Catholics believe.

Hence during his remarks for the Blessing of Candles the night before the canonizations on Saturday, Pope Bergoglio deployed his all too-familiar rhetorical devices of caricature and the false alternative, along with a dash of Luther’s sola fides, the net effect of which is to employ divine mercy to obscure divine judgment, rendering the latter of no account. This, essentially, was to eliminate the Fatima event as a salutary warning to the Church and the world.

Said the Pope of the Virgin Mary:

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Pilgrims with Mary… But which Mary? A teacher of the spiritual life, the first to follow Jesus on the “narrow way” of the cross by giving us an example, or a Lady “unapproachable” and impossible to imitate? A woman “blessed because she believed” always and everywhere in God’s words (cf. Lk 1:42.45), or a “plaster statue” from whom we beg favours at little cost?

Virgin Mary of the Gospel, venerated by the Church at prayer, or a Mary of our own making: one who restrains the arm of a vengeful God; one sweeter than Jesus the ruthless judge; one more merciful than the Lamb slain for us?

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Of course, Mary is no mere “teacher of the spiritual life,” nor merely “the first to follow Jesus,” nor merely one who is “giving us an example.” She is the Immaculate Conception, the sinless Virgin Mother of God, the Mediatrix of all Graces, and the Co-Redemptrix, who from all eternity was destined to play Her central role in the Redemption by bearing the God-Man conceived by the Holy Ghost in Her own womb, flesh of Her flesh, Her true Son.

Nor do Catholics view Mary as “unapproachable,” “impossible to imitate” or just a “plaster statue.” This is a haughty caricature of the simple faithful to whom Francis professes to be humbly subservient. Add this to the pile of insults he has hurled at believing Catholics over the past four years.

And then the false alternative, combined with caricature: it is either the “Mary of the Gospel” or the “Mary of our own making: one who restrains the arm of a vengeful God; one sweeter than Jesus the ruthless judge; one more merciful than the Lamb slain for us…”

Implicit in this snide distortion of the traditional Catholic view of Mary is, first of all, an implicit negation of the entire Message of Fatima, which involves precisely the ultimatum that God will inflict terrible punishments on humanity and that souls will be lost for all eternity unless the Virgin’s requests are granted. Moreover, the vision the Vatican itself published in 2000 depicts the destructive rays emanating from the avenging angel being repelled by none other than the Blessed Virgin.

That Catholics believe God deigns to withhold His punishment because of Our Lady’s intercession does not mean that Christ is a “ruthless judge” or that She is “more merciful” than Christ, but rather that His mercy extends, through Her, to souls that have recourse to Her. That is, God deigns to allow His Mother a singular intercessory power possessed by no other human creature. [But she could not and would not intercede for unrepentant sinners, could she?]

And yet, any faithful soul can intercede with God to stay the hand of His just punishment — punishment of oneself or others. This too belongs to the heart of the Fatima message: that the prayers and penances of Catholics can save souls from eternal damnation, and that without those prayers and penances, souls will be lost forever.

As John Paul II noted in his homily during the Mass at Fatima during which he beatified Jacinta and Francisco:

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“In her motherly concern, the Blessed Virgin came here to Fátima to ask men and women ‘to stop offending God, Our Lord, who is already very offended’. It is a mother's sorrow that compels her to speak; the destiny of her children is at stake. For this reason she asks the little shepherds: ‘Pray, pray much and make sacrifices for sinners; many souls go to hell because they have no one to pray and make sacrifices for them.’”

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Apparently, Pope Bergoglio does not think very much of Our Lady of Fatima’s explicit warning that God imposes eternal punishment because people do not pray for the souls that are lost. Does this mean that God is a “ruthless judge” or that we are more merciful than He? What demagogic nonsense, which invites booing and hissing at the very idea of an economy of salvation involving human cooperation, of which Mary is the grand exemplar.

Then there is this dash of Lutheranism in the papal remarks:

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Great injustice is done to God’s grace whenever we say that sins are punished by his judgment, without first saying – as the Gospel clearly does – that they are forgiven by his mercy! Mercy has to be put before judgment and, in any case, God’s judgment will always be rendered in the light of his mercy.

Obviously, God’s mercy does not deny justice, for Jesus took upon himself the consequences of our sin, together with its due punishment. He did not deny sin, but redeemed it on the cross. Hence, in the faith that unites us to the cross of Christ, we are freed of our sins; we put aside all fear and dread, as unbefitting those who are loved (cf. 1 Jn 4:18).

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This is misleading at best. At the time of the Last Judgment, there is no longer any opportunity for mercy. The wayfaring state has ended, and souls who die in a state of unrepented mortal sin can no longer obtain mercy.

As Saint Catherine of Siena, Doctor of the Church, writes in her Dialogue: “When you are alive, you have a season of mercy, but once you are dead it is your season of justice.” (Dialogue, Paulist Press Ed., p. 112)

Again, the rescue from final impenitence and the fires of hell is the very point of the Message of Fatima.

Furthermore, the notion that the Redemption means not only that Christ atoned for our sins, making possible the reconciliation of repentant souls with God, but also that He suffered the punishment due to our sins in our place, so that there is no longer any punishment for sin — here or hereafter — so long as we have faith, is pure Luther.

As the Catholic Encyclopedia notes, it is an error to “treat the Passion of Christ as being literally a case of vicarious punishment. This is at best a distorted view of the truth that His Atoning Sacrifice took the place of our punishment, and that He took upon Himself the sufferings and death that were due to our sins.”

We must be grateful for Pope Bergoglio’s gesture in canonizing Jacinta and Francisco at Fatima. [No thanks to him at all. The children deserve it!]

We cannot be grateful, however, for what he said there, which is at odds with the Fatima event and the truths of the Faith it teaches. But then, at this point in the Bergoglian pontificate, we should be accustomed to the intrusion of Pope Bergoglio’s peculiar ideas into what the Church has always believed.