FATIMA IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM
Translated from
the Italian service of
May 8, 2010
On Tuesday, May 11, Benedict XVI will leave for Portugal on his 15th apostolic trip abroad with the motto "With you, we walk in hope - Wisdom and mission".
The visit which will last four days takes place on the tenth anniversary of the beatification of the shepherds Jacinta and Francisco.
Let us listen to the editorial of our director, Fr. Federico Lombardi, for Octava Dies, the weekly newsmagazine of CTV:
John Paul II wanted the 'third secret' of Fatima to be revealed on the occasion of the beatification of the two shepherd children Jacinta and Francisco during the Jubilee Year 2000, on the passage from one millennium to the next.
A century was ending that had been characterized by great afflictions, about which the visions at Fatima had given a spiritual reading that was luminous and tragic at the same time: a time of wars and martyrdom, in which the Church adn the Pope himself would participate to the utmost in the sufferings and in the thirst for salvation of all mankind.
To simple unlettered children, in an insignificant place - so characteristic of the great Marian events - a message was entrusted which, in its simplicity, unleashed a spiritual force capable of surpassing limits and conveying itself through the most serious convulsions in the history of mankind.
Now that the 'secret' has been revealed after the fact, what does the message of Fatima still have to say to us? In concluding his theological commentary upon the publication of the 'third secret', then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger* said: "The action of God, the Lord of history, and the co-responsibility of man in the drama of his creative freedom, are the two pillars upon which human history is built. Our Lady, who appeared at Fatima, recalls these forgotten values. She reminds us that man's future is in God, and that we are active and responsible partners in creating that future."
We need clear and innocent eyes to read the road signs in the new millennium and to understand its truest risks and hopes. The message of Fatima keeps all of its gravity in the face of history.
*
I must point out that Fr. Lombardi quoted the ending from Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone's Introduction to the 'Third Secret', not from Cardinal Ratzinger's Theological Commentary.
Whenever any Vatican document cites a previous Vatican document, I always look up the official English translation of the document if it exists, in order to use the official text. But when I turned to Cardinal Ratzinger's commentary just now, I could not find anything that corresponded to the words cited by Fr. Lombardi. Since the only other original text at the publication of the 'third secret' was Cardinal Bertone's Introduction (in his capacity then as Secretary of the CDF), I looked it up, and sure enough, Fr. Lombardi's citation came from his text, not from Cardinal Ratzinger.
Ten years after Vatican disclosure,
some say 'third secret' is still secret
by JOHN THAVIS
VATICAN CITY, May 7 (CNS) -- Ten years after the Vatican divulged one of the Church's best-kept secrets -- the third part of the message of Fatima -- a small band of skeptics and critics are still questioning the official explanation.
More than 100 of them gathered at a hotel not far from the Vatican in early May for a weeklong conference on such topics as "Fatima and the Global Economic Crisis," "The Present Need for the Consecration of Russia" and "Is There a Missing Text of the Third Secret?"
For those in attendance, the answer to that last question is a no-brainer.
"The evidence points to only one conclusion: that something has to be missing," said Christopher A. Ferrara, a U.S. attorney and Catholic commentator who spoke at the conference.
Ferrara pointed to what he described as a series of incongruities and inconsistencies in the Vatican's version. Among people truly familiar with the events at Fatima, he said, only a minority "cling steadfastly to the notion that an ambiguous vision of a bishop dressed in white outside a half-ruined city is all there is to the third secret."
That's the heart of the question for people in the "Fatima Challenge" movement. They argue that the third secret of Fatima was a prophecy so traumatic and dire that several popes decided not to make it known to the faithful, and yet the text published in 2000 contained little more than an allegory about the Church's past struggles with 20th-century ideologies.
They say there's good reason to believe the third secret wasn't just about the Church battling outside forces, but about Satan working in the church -- at the highest levels. Some have deduced that the secret foresaw the changes of the Second Vatican Council, especially in liturgy and ecumenical dialogue, as part of the "great apostasy" which church leaders refuse to acknowledge.
[So, granted that any undisclosed part of the message says all that - not directly, of course, as such messages never do - but in metaphor and allegory, why are we fretting about it? We know it has happened - Satan in the guise of prelates of the Church - and is still happening and is bound to happen in the course of human affairs! Why do we need the 'supernatural' to tell us what reason and objective observation already make very clear to us?
Perhaps it was no coincidence that Paul VI used that very metaphor - about the fumes of Satan having seeped within the Church - to express his grand disillusion at the course that the immediate post-Conciliar years quickly took!...
It is absurd to be so literal about the Virgin Mary's messages from 1917 and think of them not just as 'secrets' to be selectively divulged but also as concrete 'prophecies' - even if in code - as though Our Lady of Fatima were nothing more than a 1917 Nostradamus! (Come to think of it, 'Nostradamus' is literally 'Our Lady'!)...
To obsess about the secrecy and prophecy aspects of the message is to miss the message itself, which as Cardinal Ratzinger pointed out in 2000, was unmistakably, and repeatedly, a call to 'Penitence, penitence, penitence' through incesssant prayer and acts of atonement. That, along with solid catechism of the faithful on the essentials of the faith are the ways in which the Church fights - and has always foguht - heresy and treason that may seriously undermine it from within.]
Most recently, several of these "diehard Fatimists" -- as a Vatican official once described them -- have suggested that the priestly sex abuse crisis in the Church is a clear sign of the crisis of faith and pastoral negligence prophesied, they say, by Mary at Fatima.
[Not a sign, but the consequence of the crisis of faith!]
The conference took place a few days before Pope Benedict XVI's visit to Fatima, and organizers went out of their way to invite the Pope and Vatican officials. None showed up. The Pope's Vatican aides consider the "Fatimists" a fringe element that is best ignored.
Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican secretary of state, has said one of the reasons the third secret was made public in 2000 was that people were spreading "absurd theses" about catastrophic events or heresy at the top levels of the Church.
{I can understand this in the light of Cardinal Ratzinger's famous ductum that the CDF exists, among other things, to preserve the faith for the simple faithful - who do not deserve to be confused by extraneous non-essentials.]
Cardinal Bertone, who was personally involved in the publication of the third secret, said he was puzzled that some still think the Vatican is hiding something.
In 2006, an Italian journalist wrote a book titled "The Fourth Secret of Fatima" that laid out a Vatican conspiracy theory, prompting a new round of publicity.
[The journalist is Antonio Socci, whose single-minded obsession about the 'secret' I find hard to reconcile with his lucidity and rationality on any other subject he writes about.[
In 2007, Cardinal Bertone wrote his own book, "The Last Visionary of Fatima," which reiterated the official version of the Fatima messages and secrets and was based, he said, on long conversations with Carmelite Sister Lucia dos Santos, the last of the visionaries to die. In TV appearances, the cardinal strongly denied theories of a Vatican cover-up.
Pope Benedict was also personally involved in publishing the third secret. As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the Vatican's top doctrinal official, he presented the text of the secret to the press and wrote a lengthy commentary about it.
That news conference on June 26, 2000, is still memorable for Vatican journalists. The stage was set for disclosure of a text that for decades was thought to be too disturbing to reveal. But instead, Cardinal Ratzinger began by deflating expectations and announcing that there was nothing apocalyptic.
"No great mystery is revealed; nor is the future unveiled," he said. He went on to give a theological framework to the apparitions and messages of Fatima, insisting that in the church's tradition, "prophecy" is not like a "film preview," but more like offering signs that can be useful for Christians.
Cardinal Ratzinger said that was how to understand the third secret's vision of a "bishop in white" who struggles up a hill amid corpses of slain martyrs, and then falls dead after being shot by soldiers.
Whether this bishop symbolized Pope John Paul II, who was shot and wounded on May 13, 1981, or a "convergence" of several 20th-century pontiffs who helped the Church ward off the dangers, it doesn't mean someone must be killed, the cardinal said.
That explanation still sticks in the craw of "Fatimists," who say it deliberately removes the vision's apocalyptic scenario and lulls the faithful into a false sense of security. The Vatican's version, they say, suggests these problems are behind the Church, when in their view the worst is yet to come.
Father Nicholas Gruner, a Canadian priest who founded "The Fatima Crusader" magazine, has long maintained that Russia has yet to be consecrated to Mary in accordance with the instructions of Our Lady of Fatima.
"We haven't had the conversion of Russia by any stretch of the imagination -- not militarily, not morally. It's the largest abortion capital of the world.... There's just no sign of conversion in any sense," Father Gruner said in Rome May 6.
That's another issue the Vatican is tired of dealing with. Church officials say Pope John Paul II in 1984 led the world's bishops in the consecration of Russia and the world. The late Sister Lucia, one of the three Portuguese children who saw Mary in 1917 and the one who received the instructions for the consecration, had said that it was properly performed.
The Fatima messages are not dogma, and the Church does not impose belief or any single interpretation. That seems to ensure that the "Fatimists" will continue to broadcast their theories to whoever will listen.
"The Bishop dressed in white:
The Popes and Fatima"
A documentary exhibit recalling papal visits to Fatima has opened in the atrium leading to the Chapel of Apparitions at the Basilica of Santissima Trinita in Fatima. The exhibition was opened by Mons. Antonio Marto, Bishop of Leiria-Fatima.
Paul VI was the first Pope to visit Fatima, having been also the first Pope to ever travel outside Italy in the modern era. John Paul II cameto Fatima three times - in 1982, 1987 and 2000. The center photos in the lower panel show the crown of the statue of Our Lady inset with the bullet that missed killing John Paul II on May 13, 198i, and the Golden Rose offered to the Shrine by Paul VI.
Cardinal Ratzinger came to Fatima in October 1990 to preside at the International Pilgrimage aniversary celebrations. The exhibit includes a photograph of him taken in Malta last month.
The image of Our Lady of Fatima that is venerated at the Shrine, in the Chapel of the Apparitions. Like most famous Marian images, the Fatima Madonna is a modest-sized image.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 09/05/2010 01:17]