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The “Fourth Secret” drama continues
In the continuing drama of the "Fourth Secret" of Fatima (that is, the part of th Third Secret which hasn’t been revealed by the Holy See) read this from CWN:
Italian journalists protest exclusion from Fatima discussion
Rome, Sep. 27, 2007 (CWNews.com) – Two Italian journalists involved in a dispute over the content of the "third secret of Fatima" have complained that they were roughly treated by security guards when they attempted to attend a lecture in which Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone (bio – news) discussed that topic. [Card. Bertone is the bete noir for some of the writers on the Third Secret.]
On September 21, Cardinal Bertone introduced his book, The Last Fatima Visionary: My Meetings with Sister Lucia, at a reception at the Pontifical Urbanianum University. Antonio Socci and Solideo Paolini, authors of competing books on Fatima, say that they were prevented from attending the event or speaking to the cardinal.
Socci and Paolini report that they asked Father Federico Lombardi, the director of the Vatican press office, whether they could participate in the reception and question Cardinal Bertone about his book. When they were told that the cardinal would not take questions, the two journalists tried to confront the Vatican Secretary of State [LOL!] as he entered the room. Security guards hustled them out of the building, while Cardinal Bertone entered by a side door.
After the confrontation, Socci told reporters that the treatment he had received was "outrageous." In speaking to reporters at the event, Socci and Paolini produced a tape recording in which Archbishop Loris Capovilla, who once served as private secretary to Pope John XXIII, revealed that there were two texts of the "third secret."
Socci, in his popular book The Fourth Secret of Fatima, argues [convincingly] that the Vatican has not disclosed the entirety of the message given by the Virgin Mary to three children at Fatima. In his book Cardinal Bertone cites Sister Luica, one of the Fatima seers, who counters: "Everything has been published; no secret remains."
This has now become certifiably ludicrous.
When you have Vatican security behaving like THUGS and forcibly restraining Catholic journalists, you KNOW that something is being hidden.
Likewise for Cardinal Bertone’s deliberate evading of a man—Socci—whom he knows very well.
I recall that when Cardinal Bertone appeared on that Italian television show with a number of others attempting to “debunk” Socci’s book, he held up the envelope for the “official” released secret on which was written, to the effect, by Sr. Lucia “To be revealed in 1960 by explicit order of Our Lady.” This was, to repeat, held up on national television.
The Vatican’s official version says that it was Sr. Lucia’s idea to reveal things in 1960, not the Blessed Virgin’s.
What happens when people attempt to spin a complex web of half-truths, mental reservations, and plain lies about a matter whose content is, at times, empirically verifiable (e.g., the non-conversion of Russia) is that, eventually, the truth will come to light.
Perhaps not coincidentally, the problems with Fatima are heating up at the same time the Traditional Mass has been freed.
Comment by MJ — 27 September 2007 @ 5:36 pmI think it is worth mentioning that Akita, Japan is a fully approved apparition site that is often overlooked, and has been compared to Fatima. There, Our Lady did not mince her words…
Comment by Chris — 27 September 2007 @ 5:36 pmFather, I have tried to THINK before posting, but I can’t help feeling, by your introductory sentence and the “convincingly” that you are actually insinuating that Card. Bertone and the present Holy Father – who was responsible for revealing the third secret at the order of his predecessor – as well as previous Popes are lying to the Church and to the world. As this is impossible, could you please clarify.
Comment by Berolinensis — 27 September 2007 @ 5:58 pmHas Socci’s work ever been translated into English (or French)? I have heard his arguments are airtight, but I would like to see for myself.
Comment by Arieh — 27 September 2007 @ 6:09 pmthe two journalists tried to confront the Vatican Secretary of State as he entered the room.
It sounds to me like they deserved to be tossed. I’d throw them out myself if they acted like jerks and I’m not a thug.
Comment by William — 27 September 2007 @ 6:37 pmWhen I see a convincing argument for why Rome would withold the rest of the Secret, I might attempt to believe some of this.
Comment by Jonathan Bennett — 27 September 2007 @ 6:38 pmCould the “missing” portion of the Third Secret have been revealed to a holy nun in Japan (an order dedicated to the true presence of Christ in the Eucharist)?
On April 22, 1984, the late Bishop John Shojiro Ito of the Diocese of Niigata, Japan, signed a pastoral letter authorizing “the veneration of the Holy Mother of Akita, while awaiting that the Holy See publishes definitive judgment on this matter.” In this letter, Bishop Ito recounted the apparently miraculous events of tears and blood flowing from a carved wooden statue of our Lady, located at Akita in the convent chapel of the Institute of the Handmaids of the Eucharist, and the restoration of the hearing of Sr. Agnes Sasagawa. The letter also included three messages claimed to have been given to Sr. Agnes by our Lady, seemingly coming from that same wooden statue. The third message came on an anniversary of the Miracle of the Sun in Fatima, October 13, 1973, as follows:
My dear daughter, listen well to what I have to say to you. You will inform your superior.
As I told you, if men do not repent and better themselves, the Father will inflict a terrible punishment on all humanity. It will be a punishment greater than the deluge, such as one will never have seen before. Fire will fall from the sky and will wipe out a great part of humanity, the good as well as the bad, sparing neither priests nor faithful. The survivors will find themselves so desolate that they will envy the dead. The only arms which will remain for you will be the Rosary and the Sign left by my Son. Each day recite the prayers of the Rosary. With the Rosary, pray for the Pope, the bishops and the priests.
The work of the devil will infiltrate even into the Church in such a way that one will see cardinals opposing cardinals, bishops against other bishops. The priests who venerate me will be scorned and opposed by their confreres, churches and altars sacked, the Church will be full of those who accept compromises and the demon will press many priests and consecrated souls to leave the service of the Lord.
The demon will be especially implacable against souls consecrated to God. The thought of the loss of so many souls is the cause of my sadness. If sins increase in number and gravity, there will be no longer pardon for them.
Bishop Ito added that: “This message is based on the condition that if men do not repent and better themselves…” (Teiji Yasula, O.S.V., trans. John M. Haffert, Akita: The Tears and Message of Mary [101 Foundation, 1989], pp. 190-199).
A former Philippine ambassador to the Vatican, Howard Dee, said in a 1998 interview with Inside the Vatican magazine, “Bishop Ito was certain Akita was an extension of Fatima, and Cardinal Ratzinger personally confirmed to me that these two messages, of Fatima and Akita, are essentially the same.”
Comment by Malta — 27 September 2007 @ 6:55 pmComment by Berolinensis: “by your introductory sentence and the “convincingly†that you are actually insinuating that Card. Bertone and the present Holy Father – who was responsible for revealing the third secret at the order of his predecessor – as well as previous Popes are lying to the Church and to the world. As this is impossible, could you please clarify.”
Solideo Paolini, referred to in this article, had a fairly reasonable explanation for this aspect of your question:
“Maybe they say that everything has been published, with this meaning:“Everything we thought was the authentic Third Secret, so everything we thought was said by Our Lady, we’ve published it. While instead what we deemed as not authentic, not a revelation from Heaven but mere thoughts of Sister Lucy, we didn’t publish. We have considered these thoughts of Sister Lucy not to be a secret from Heaven, therefore we have discarded them from a supernatural point of view.â€
Such an explanation would give an explanation to the repeated claim, by the Vatican, that they have published and revealed everything about the Third Secret, while taking into account the evident proofs that something, indeed, is missing. We will see later on, in my last meeting with Archbishop Capovilla, how he explicitly confirmed to me this thesis, this interpretation of the matter…”
Comment by BK — 27 September 2007 @ 7:41 pmComment by Jonathan Bennett: “When I see a convincing argument for why Rome would withold the rest of the Secret, I might attempt to believe some of this.”
Another good question might be,
“What in the content of the Third Secret, as revealed in 2000 by the Vatican, was worth postponing 40 years to publish?“
Here is the text published in 2000:
“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; 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.”
Comment by BK — 27 September 2007 @ 8:04 pmI should think that the word of the Holy Father (who is the final judge regarding private revelation) and the last living seer should be sufficient to close the issue.
What is ludicrous is not the restraint placed on obsessive journalists, but rather the persistence of those who will not be convinced.
WAC
Comment by Will Cubbedge — 27 September 2007 @ 8:09 pmI believe that the official story, just doesn’t add up myself. Now I’m not imputing anything to anyone, beyond regular everyday frailties and human weaknesses.
I just cannot see how wthe meaning of what was revealed in 2000 can be termed as being “clear” in any sense. It is beyond cryptic.
Our Lady in light of Catholic doctrine on private revelations, is not the Oracle of Delphi for goodness sakes. She actually has a cogent message when authentic apparitions take place!
How does the 2000 message square with the one Our Lady said “would become more clear” around 1960?
Comment by Matt Robinson — 27 September 2007 @ 9:08 pmI am very much devoted to Our Lady and have been since I was a young boy. I accept the veracity of those revelations and apparitions that have received approval by the Church. That being said, I think we need to remember that the revelations of Our Lady at Fatima and other places are private revelation and are not in any way necessary for salvation. It seems, however, that some would give them even more importance than the Gospel.
What is quite disheartening is that Satan is using the revelations of Fatima to cause division and rancor in the Church. The very fact that their are secrets, never mind their contents, have been used by Satan to foment arguements and bad feelings which seem rather pervasive. Clearly this is not what Our Lady had in mind!
The message of Fatima (and others) is one of prayer, penance and conversion. Yet rather than be about the business of fulfilling these requests there are many who would rather talk about them ad nauseum. I do not mean to say that discussion of them is not a good and necessary thing, but they were not given to us for discussion. They were given to us to act upon.
St Alphonsus teaches us that meditation and prayer must lead to action if it is to be truly prayer. That’s the point of moral theology. Our meditations must bring us to affections which in turn lead to resolutions… actions. If we don’t ACT upon them, then our prayer is fruitless. The Mass is not and isolated liturgical prayer but one that must lead us to ACT… we must LIVE the Mass. So too with the Fatima revelations. We must ACT on them. The power of Fatima is not in the messages themselves, but in what will be effected when they are acted on. The secrets of Fatima are useless if they do not spur us to ACT on the message. But we don’t need the Fatima secrets just as we don’t need the message. They are a gift to us from a loving Mother, a reminder of what Christ himself gave us in the Gospel.
Enough talk. Talk will not save us nor change the world. Action will. Pray. Do penance. Convert. If Fatima is important to you, forget the secrets, forget the speculation, forget the arguements and do what Our Lady requested. Otherwise Satan wins.
Comment by Fr. Scott Bailey, C.Ss.R. — 27 September 2007 @ 9:37 pmSocci and Paolini tried to confront Cardinal Bertone? Sounds like the conduct of cranks to me?
As for the claim that there were two texts of the Third Secret, does that mean that there were two versions of the Third Secret? And if so, does that mean that one version was less faithful in communicating what Our Lady revealed?
Chris said:
I think it is worth mentioning that Akita, Japan is a fully approved apparition site that is often overlooked.
No, Akita is certainly not “fully approved.”
http://www.theotokos.org.uk/pages/unapprov/akita/akita.html
Comment by Jordan Potter — 27 September 2007 @ 9:43 pmA lot of Fr. Gruner followers here!
I like the quote of Sr. Lucia that, paraphrased, went something like “all these people writing about some fourth secret or other third…well, if they know more, then they should print it! As for me all that was revealed by the Vatican is complete”. I believe that Pope JPII emphasized that Fatima was for the last century, but that its messages re: prayer and reparation must continue and may be even more important for the world entering this century.
In the account of the meeting between Sr. Lucia, Archbishop Bertone, and Bishop Serafim, Bishop of Leiria-Farima she was asked why she wrote on the envelope of the secret that it could be opened only after 1960 she replied ” It was not Our Lady. I fixed the date because I had the intuition that before 1960 it would not be understood, but that only later would it be understood.” She said that she wrote down what she saw but it wasn’t up to her to interpret it, but for the Pope.
The newer visions mentioned above could be interpreted in the sense of the farewell discourse of the Lord when, leaving his disciples, he said: “I have yet many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.”
Of course visions/prophecies are not written in stone – “predicted” events can be mitigated through prayer and sacrifice. Perhaps that is why the “Mother guided the bullet” that could have had a more final ending.
Comment by chris K — 27 September 2007 @ 10:00 pmRe: Akita…actually approval is accepted on the basis of the local bishop unless Rome would itself interfere. So as the structure for approval is set up, Akita is as approved as it can be! I wouldn’t cite theotokos as a reliable objective source – they seem to find obscure opinions to back their own.
Approval of the local Bishop
After having himself been an eyewitness of the events, and having carefully investigated them for years, Most Rev. John Shojiro Ito, Bishop of Niigata (the diocese Akita belongs to) declared the events of Akita, Japan, to be of supernatural origin, and authorized throughout the entire diocese the veneration of the Holy Mother of Akita, in a long message which he ordered to be read in every parish of his diocese on Easter Sunday, April 22, 1984.. He said: “The Message of Akita is the Message of Fatima.â€
Approval of Rome
Bishop Ito went to Rome a third time in June of 1988 to seek the opinion of the Holy See. “I was worried because of the seriousness of the Message,†he said. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, the Prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, reassured Bishop Ito that he had acted properly, and gave definitive judgement on the Akita events and Messages as reliable and worthy of belief.
From:
The Marian Library/International Marian Research Institute, Dayton, Ohio:
Out of the 386 apparitions, the Church has decided that “yes” there is a supernatural character only in 8 cases: Fatima (Portugal), Beauraing (Belgium), Banneux (Belgium), Akita (Japan), Syracuse (Italy), Zeitoun (Egypt), Manila (Philippines) (according to some sources), and Betania (Venezuela). Local bishops have approved of the faith expression at the sites where these 8 apparitions occurred.
Comment by chris K — 27 September 2007 @ 10:27 pmhttp://www.apparitions.org/akita.html
Comment by Malta — 27 September 2007 @ 10:31 pmFr. Scott Bailey,
Thank you. You’re absolutely right.
Pray for me.
Comment by moretben — 28 September 2007 @ 3:28 amIt now seems that the journalists have a credibility problem.
I have a friend who was like a bible thumper talking in favor of Soci and Paolini. He and other friends met with Archbishop Capovilla on Tuesday the 25th of September. What he said did not support what the journalists are saying. In fact, as I underst