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:
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?
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:
“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.’”
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:
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).
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.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 17/05/2017 04:47]