Pope Benedict XVI's interest
in Marian devotion
VATICAN CITY, May 10 (AFP) - Pope Benedict XVI, a bookish theologian, holds a deep-rooted interest in the popular cult of the Virgin Mary, which will be on display during his visit to the shrine of Fatima in Portugal.
"Contrary to what one could imagine, Benedict XVI has a very positive opinion of demonstrations of popular faith like the one you can see in Fatima," Vatican expert Sandro Magister told AFP.
The Pope heads to Portugal on Tuesday to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of the beatification of two young shepherds who claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary appear.
"Like his predecessor John Paul II, Benedict XVI is very pious with regards to Mary," French Cardinal Paul Poupard told AFP.
Several trips have already brought Benedict to sanctuaries devoted to the Virgin Mary, where he celebrated masses in front of thousands of faithful: Marizell in Austria, Loreto in Italy, Aparecida in Brasil, Altotting in Germany, the "house of Mary" in Turkey and Lourdes in France.
As prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, the Pope - then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger - dealt thoroughly with apparitions and miracles.
In 2000, John Paul II entrusted Ratzinger with writing a theological document on an aspect of the Virgin's six apparitions to three shepherds in Fatima between May 13 and October 13 in 1917.
The text dealt with what is known as the third secret of Fatima, which John Paul II believed to be a prophecy of the assassination attempt he survived on May 13 1981.
The three secrets of Fatima are visions and prophecies allegedly given by an apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary to three young Portuguese shepherds.
"The Pope's visit to Fatima is not a visit to just 'any sanctuary' dedicated to Mary, as it was in other trips," the Pope's spokesman Federico Lombardi said. "The Pope dealt thoroughly with these events [in Fatima] from the theological and spiritual point of view," he said.
Since the beginning of Benedict's papacy in 2005,
references to the Virgin in his homilies have been on the rise.
[That's misleading. One should say instead that references to Mary have been constant, with him and the other Popes who have taken part in the weekly Angelus or Regina caeli. And it is standard in his homilies and in his addresses to bishops and priests to end with invoking the intercession of Mary, even when other saints are also invoked because of the place and occasion for the homily.]
Benedict "has often underscored the importance of Catholicism speaking to everyone, including the 'lost sheep,' Catholics who do not practice on a regular basis," Magister told AFP.
"These pilgrimage sites are a way to gather masses. It is not contradictory to his love of science and with his university experience," he added.
Benedict has also often shown appreciation for the simple and popular faith of Bavaria, the predominantly Catholic region in the south of Protestant Germany, where he was born.
The above is a very superficial and cursory look at the subject that does not even mention what Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI has written about Mary.
It includes 3 books - Daughter Zion written back in 1983; the 2005 Mary: The Church at the Source, with Marian reflections by Joseph Ratzinger and Hans Urs von Balthasar; and the very recent MARIA, Ignatius Press's de luxe compilation of Marian texts by Benedict XVI...
NB: John Paul II's Marian writings are compiled in A Catechesis on Mary, the Mother of God, his 1995-1997 catechetical cycle on Mary. He also devoted the 1987 encyclical Redemptoris Mater to Mary; its English edition as a book uses the statement by Cardinal Ratzinger when he presented the encyclical to the media as its Introduction; and the 2002 Apostolic Letter Rosarium Virginis Mariae.]
Another AFP pre-visit story:
Pope's visit to shrine of secrets
After making a holy vow of penitence, some walk for miles and then crawl past the souvenir shops, chapels, hospitals and hostels for sick pilgrims that surround the main basilica in the town that has become the bastion of Portuguese Catholicism.
Fatima is big business, spiritually and commercially.
About four million people go to the town each year to see the place where three shepherd children -- Lucia Santos, 10, Jacinta and Francisco Marto, aged nine and seven -- say they saw a vision of the Virgin Mary on May 13, 1917 and then again on four other occasions.
They also say they saw her on August 19 of that year in the neighbouring village of Valinhos.
Procession in Fatima on May 13, 2009, to mark the 82nd anniversary of the first apparition.
Since then it has been one of the Church's most important pilgrimages. Pope Paul VI went there in 1967 and Pope John Paul II in 1982, 1991 and 2000. John Paul said the Fatima angel saved him from an assassin's bullet in May 1981.
Benedict will spend two days at the shrine town where between 300,000 and half a million people are expected to join him on Thursday morning for a special Mass in the esplanade to mark the 10th anniversary of the beatification of Francisco and Jacinta.
The Pope arrives in Fatima on Wednesday, the second day of a four day stay in Portugal, and his first duty will be to pray in front of the statue of Our Lady of the Rosary at the Chapel of Apparitions built on the site where the children said they were told holy secrets by the Virgin Mary.
After the first visions, thousands quickly started to join the children at monthly gatherings. But the Church was at first sceptical and it was only in 1930 that the Vatican declared the apparitions as being "worthy of belief".
[It took four years to 'recognize' Lourdes, but considerably longer for all other apparitions.]
Since then, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims have gathered at the basilica each May 13, overruning the central Portuguese town which normally has a population of about 15,000.
Fatima is today "the epicentre and the central pillar of popular Portuguese Catholicism and it is very strongly linked to the cult of the Virgin," sociologist Steffen Dix told AFP.
Some Catholics call Fatima the "Altar of the World" and the pilgrims who walk hundreds of miles to the town or crawl across the esplanade are a mark of the religious devotion that it inspires.
Since 1952, the bodies of Jacinto and Marta Santos have been in the main basilica. Their cousin Lucia died in 2005 at the age of 97, and is also laid to rest in the shrine.
In 2007, the Church of the Most Holy Trinity was completed at the complex, and at 12,300 square metres (132,000 square feet) it is one of the largest Christian churches in the world.
Lucia said that the Virgin Mary had told the children three secrets. Two were revealed at the start of the 1940s, one described hell, and the second a terrible conflict which some say was World War I and World II.
Fatima was used a national symbol by the right-wing dictatorship which ruled Portugal from the 1930s until 1974.
"Today it has lost all ideological connotation and nobody uses it for any anti-communist reference," said Dix, who has written 10 books on religion in Portugal.
The third secret was revealed in May 2000 during John Paul II's final visit. According to the Church, it predicted the attack that the pope was a target of in Rome 1981, strengthening the prophetic nature of Fatima.
Speculation over the secret has been the subject of books and hundreds of web sites and even inspired a 1981 hijacking of an Aer Lingus flight between Dublin and London by an Australian man who wanted the Vatican to reveal it.
Today the bullet that hit John Paul II is part of the crown on the statue of the Virgin Mary in the basilica.
AP's pre-visit situationere predictably accentuates the negative... and watch how Winfield manages to work in the 'sex abuse scandal' into the story!
Pope to mark Fatima anniversary,
but this may be overshadowed by
economic crisis, gay marriage issue
by Nicole Winfield
VATICAN CITY, May 9 (AP) - Pope Benedict XVI visits Portugal this week to mark key anniversaries surrounding Fatima, the famous shrine beloved by his predecessor.
What he will find is an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic country that like much of western Europe has strayed far from Church teaching on key issues and is in the throes of Europe's spreading financial crisis.
The centre-left Socialist government passed a law in 2007 allowing abortion on demand. In 2008, the Socialists introduced a law allowing a judge to grant a divorce even if one of the spouses is opposed. In January, Parliament passed a bill seeking to make the country the sixth in Europe allowing same-sex couples to marry.
The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, didn't rule out that the Pontiff would raise the gay marriage issue during the four-day visit, which starts Tuesday and will bring the 83-year-old pontiff to the capital Lisbon, Fatima, and Porto, the country's second-largest city.
Portuguese Cardinal Jose Saraiva Martins was more blunt: "Certainly during the trip he will confront many arguments that aren't strictly religious, concerning those values and principles which - aside from being Christian - are human, such as the value of life, the value of family," he told Associated Press Television News.
Those terms are Vatican-speak for the Church's opposition to abortion and its belief that a family is based on marriage between a man and a woman.
Portugal is nearly 90 per cent Catholic, but only around 2 million of the country's 10.6 million people describe themselves as practicing Catholics. Like much of western Europe, it has seen the number of priests drop sharply and Benedict himself lamented the "growing sea of non-practicing Christians" when he met with Portuguese bishops at the Vatican in 2007.
Speaking to pilgrims and tourists in St. Peter's Square on Sunday, Benedict told them he would have the "joy" of visiting Portugal, and he asked faithful for their prayers.
He also asked them to pray for the church, "in particular for priests", but
made no mention of the clerical sex abuse scandals rocking the Church in much of Europe.
[Why on earth is the Pope expected to mention this topic every time he speaks??? It's not like he's Obama with his compulsion to blame everything on George Bush every time he speaks!]
Prime Minister Jose Socrates has been the driving force behind the abortion and gay marriage initiatives, saying they are part of his attempt to "modernize" Portugal, western Europe's poorest country.
Portugal's Catholic bishops strongly opposed the gay marriage bill, and tried unsuccessfully to put it to a referendum; the conservative President Anibal Cavaco Silvo must now decide whether to veto or ratify the bill.
Portugal has also been hard hit by the financial crisis and is currently striving to avoid becoming the next victim of Europe's debt problems. Mounting debts have forced the government to enact an austerity plan, including a public sector pay freeze, sparking outrage from unions and leftist parties.
Portugal's Minister for the Cabinet, Pedro Silva Pereira, told the church's news agency Ecclesia he expected Benedict to address the crisis, noting the pontiff's 2009 encyclical "Charity in Truth" dealt specifically with the global financial meltdown.
He called the visit a "mobilization of hope" that was important not just for Portugal but other countries facing a "very painful crisis."
Technically, though, the heart of Benedict's trip is in Fatima, where he will celebrate a Mass on May 13, the anniversary of the day in 1917 when three Portuguese shepherd children reported having visions of the Virgin Mary.
Since then, the Fatima shrine has drawn millions of pilgrims a year and was a favourite of Pope John Paul II, who made his third and final visit in 2000 when he beatified two of the three shepherds.
During that visit, the Vatican revealed the so-called third secret of Fatima, the third part of the message the Virgin allegedly told the children: a description of the May 13, 1983 assassination attempt on John Paul.
John Paul believed the Virgin intervened to spare his life after a Turkish gunman fired on him in St. Peter's Square. In gratitude, he gave the bullet extracted from his wound to the Fatima shrine and it now adorns the crown of a statue of the Virgin where Benedict will pray.
The gunman, Mehmet Ali Agca, has said he wanted to travel to Fatima to meet with Benedict; no such meeting is on the Pontiff's schedule.
Agca's lawyer, Haci Ali Ozhan, said he received a telephone call from the Portuguese prime minister's office asking Agca to postpone his visit to Fatima because authorities there will be overwhelmed with the Pope's pilgrimage. Ozhan said Agca will be travelling there at a later, unspecified, date.
The prime minister's spokesman could not immediately be reached for comment.
The first two secrets of Fatima have long been known and were said to have foretold the end of World War I and the outbreak of World War II and the rise and fall of Soviet communism.
No new secrets are expected during Benedict's visit, which marks the 10th anniversary of the beatification of the two shepherds and the fifth anniversary of the death of the third — Sister Lucia.
Lucia is on an accelerated path to beatification, the first step before possible sainthood. Saraiva Martins, the retired head of the Vatican's saint-making office, says no announcements on her case are expected.
Pope's visit to Portugal may shed
light on the 'third secret' of Fatima
By Nick Squires in Rome
09 May 2010
The Pope will travel to Portugal this week amid hopes that he might shed light on one of the Catholic Church's most intriguing mysteries – the so-called Third Secret of Fatima
During his four day visit, Benedict XVI will pray at the shrine of Fatima, one of the best known centres of Catholic pilgrimage in the world and the focus of endless conspiracy theories and Doomsday predictions.
Its cult is founded on the belief that three shepherd children witnessed a series of apparitions and prophecies of the Virgin Mary in 1917.
Three secrets were supposedly disclosed to them, with the first and second relating to a vision of Hell and predicting the end of World War I, the outbreak of World War II, the collapse of the Soviet Union and Russia's return to Christianity.
The third secret was only disclosed by the Vatican in 2000 and was said to have foretold the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II by a Turkish gunman in 1981.
There has been intense speculation ever since that the Vatican withheld part of the secret, which is said to have concerned the Satanic infiltration of the Catholic Church, the rise of an anti-Pope or even nuclear Armageddon.
The Holy See claims that it has released the full text of the secret and that it is holding nothing back, but many Catholics are not convinced.
Benedict is one of the world's leading authorities on the mystery because as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, before he was elected Pope in 2005, he was responsible for developing the Vatican's official position on the miracle of Fatima and wrote a scholarly interpretation of the Third Secret.
Benedict's visit is heavy with symbolism. He will be in Fatima on May 13 – the same day, in 1917, that the Madonna supposedly first appeared to the children. It is also the date on which Turkish gunman Mehmet Ali Agca came close to killing John Paul II after shooting him in St Peter's Square.
Sandro Magister has also posted a pre-visit article in www.chiesa in which he focuses on Benedict XVI's involvement in the 'third secret'- much of it excerpted from the Vatican website, which has the most complete presentation of this subject, among the doctrinal documents of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith:
www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20000626_message-fatima...
The documents include pertinent photocopies of documents written by Sor Lucia and a note by John XXIII about the secret.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 05/05/2011 23:35]