New Fatima Report Raises More Questions than it Answers

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Why?

The recent article by Maike Hickson at OnePeterFive is another fascinating piece from one one of the premier Catholic websites. The above post title is not a criticism of Dr. Hickson or the site, obviously. Rather, they deserve nothing but thanks for continuing to break important stories. But that doesn't make things any less . . . frustrating.

Here is the heart of the piece:    

Today, on the Feast of Pentecost, I called Fr. Ingo Dollinger, a German priest and former professor of theology in Brasil, who is now quite elderly and physically weak. He has been a personal friend of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI for many years. Father Dollinger unexpectedly confirmed over the phone the following facts: 

Not long after the June 2000 publication of the Third Secret of Fatima by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger told Fr. Dollinger during an in-person conversation that there is still a part of the Third Secret that they have not published! “There is more than what we published,” Ratzinger said. He also told Dollinger that the published part of the Secret is authentic and that the unpublished part of the Secret speaks about “a bad council and a bad Mass” that was to come in the near future. 

Father Dollinger gave me permission to publish these facts on this High Feast of the Holy Ghost and he gave me his blessing.

Read the rest, including important commentary and further context here.

Fatima conspiracy people (and I guess I'm one of them) believe that the Church has been infiltrated by . . . let's call them the bad guys. Now of course all knowledgeable and faithful Catholics would agree with this to some extent. The Church has always contained bad guys. The only question is how pervasive it is and how far up it goes. Fatima people believe it goes all the way to the "top"--although what even that means is debated.

Though the implications of this are horrific, it doesn't in and of itself raise any logical questions. Bad guys will be . . . bad guys. Obviously they will have an interest in undermining the Church, in suppressing the truth about Our Lady's words and in (forgive me) screwing with people's faith.

But what of the good guys? Pope Benedict is one of them, or at least we would hope so. And the above would seem to confirm that. If you believe that the above is true or at least partly true, then Benedict would seem to have at least some interest in making the truth known. After all, he allegedly told Fr. Dollinger about it.

The question I would want to ask Dollinger is why he didn't ask Ratzinger/Benedict at the time why such important information wasn't revealed publicly? Why only reveal it in private? It seems like such an obvious question. And I can imagine possible answers that would be reasonable. But I have not seen any answers.

Why did Ratzinger/Benedict not publicly reveal what he knew? Given the awfulness in the current Church--which must have seemed even worse to him given what he knew about the unrevealed secret--why did he then step down? Or putting that aside, why doesn't he reveal the rest of the secret now? Why doesn't the Pope Emeritus announce a press conference and just do it? I am of course not being critical of Benedict per se; only noting the obvious incongruity. It's as if there's a fourth secret (or a fifth) that asks the good guys in the know to act their parts in a sort of play, biding their time. Why? Until when? And of course everyone seems to be following some sort of tacit agreement to not go public (though it seems okay to give the occasional hint to old friends or card-carrying Fatima conspiracy authors or whomever). 

I do not think I will ever become a sede or go back to being a non-practicing quasi-agnostic, but this almost seems calculated to make me throw up my hands and do so. Is it some sort of test of faith? And what of the countless souls lost in the interim?

Yes, I know mortal men are not supposed to know everything. God never promised that we would or should. But He did promise that we would be given enough information. Didn't He?

Vatican Insider Mistakenly Uses Hitler Metaphor to Describe Evo's Sick Pope Gift

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"The Pope Wears the Decorative Honors Received From the President"

Were they communist symbols, swastikas or laughing Satan bas reliefs? Oh, at this point who really cares? 

We all know what the Pope was given by his close friend, Bolivian President  Evo Morales on Friday--a hammer and sickle "crucifix" with Jesus affixed to it. Early reports say the Pope criticized or rejected it. But that turned out to be a lie.

A few hours later he apparently re-gifted it to Mary.

Holy Mother of God, please accept this vile icon with my compliments.

Francis.

Here's the current Vatican Insider story on it. But also note the Freudian slip:

Pope leaves decorative honours with the hammer and anvil in Bolivia 

This morning Francis lay the two presidential honours he received Wednesday from President Evo Morales in La Paz, at the feet of Our Lady of Copacabana. One of these featured the hammer and anvil with a carving of a crucifix. 

Before leaving Bolivia, Francis placed two gifts he received on Wednesday from President Evo Morales at the foot of a statue of Mary. One of these, a chain with a chunky medallion, had the figure of the crucified Christ carved into a wooden hammer and anvil. This image had been drawn by Fr. Luis Espinal, the Jesuit priest who was assassinated in Bolivia in March 1980... 

Francis accompanied this gesture with the following words: “The President of the nation was kind enough to offer me two decorative honours on behalf of the Bolivian people. I thank the Bolivian people for their affection and the President for this courteous gesture. I would like to dedicate these two decorations to the patron saint of Bolivia, the Mother of this noble nation...”

Did you get it? It wasn't a hammer and anvil. It was a hammer and sickle. The hammer and anvil metaphor was made famous in a speech by Hitler, who in turn lifted it from Goethe.

One is either the hammer or the anvil. We confess that it is our purpose to prepare the German people again for the role of the hammer.

And so on and so forth. Cue World War Two and the Holocaust.

What an odd mistake.

Then again, Che Guevara, whose now too familiar mug graced the jacket of the Pope's most recent warmup act, was the moral equivalent of any concentration camp guard sadistic psychopath, as a number of his Cuban victims have testified. More on that in another post. But until then, as they say...

The crisis continues.