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 He also told Dollinger that the published part of the Secret is authentic and that the unpublished part of the Secret speaks about “a bad council and a bad Mass” that was to come in the near future.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?

When God Looked on God–in His Mother's Eye

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Once, God walked among us as a man. But he didn't arrive here in a heavenly chariot or suddenly appear in a blast of smoke. Rather, He chose to be born as all of us are. And so God the creator of the universe had a human mother, and for a period of time was a growing infant in her womb and then a helpless child, nurtured by her.

Though, of course we know this. I'm not sure many of us have really thought about it as much as it deserves to be thought about. I certainly haven't. We contemplate His death and resurrection as of course we should. But too often perhaps we think of His birth as a kind of eternal snapshot with Mary, Joseph, the shepherds and the wise men gathered around an angelic looking creature wearing a halo.

But He wasn't an angel and there was no halo.

He was fully God, but He was also a fully human baby with a fully human mother, Mary.

G.K. Chesterton wrote often on this. He felt that it, as much as anything else, gave Christianity its character.

In his wonderful poem "A Little Litany", he imagines the baby Jesus climbing up from His mother's lap and seeing His reflexion in one of her eyes. I say "imagined", but surely it must have happened.

And I mean really happened. Slightly more than 2,000 years ago, a few thousand miles away from where I am now writing, in a place now called "Israel", God looked on God–in His mother's eye.

A Little Litany (1926)

When God turned back eternity and was young,
Ancient of Days, grown little for your mirth
(As under the low arch the land is bright)
Peered through you, gate of heaven—and saw the earth.

Or shutting out his shining skies awhile
Built you about him for a house of gold
To see in pictured walls his storied world
Return upon him as a tale is told.

Or found his mirror there; the only glass
That would not break with that unbearable light
Till in a corner of the high dark house
God looked on God, as ghosts meet in the night.

Star of his morning; that unfallen star
In that strange starry overturn of space
When earth and sky changed places for an hour
And heaven looked upwards in a human face.

Or young on your strong knees and lifted up
Wisdom cried out, whose voice is in the street,
And more than twilight of twiformed cherubim
Made of his throne indeed a mercy-seat.

Or risen from play at your pale raiment's hem
God, grown adventurous from all time's repose,
Or your tall body climbed the ivory tower
And kissed upon your mouth the mystic rose.

Then the Lord Now Spoke: "Boko Haram is Gone."

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I think it's safe to say that even faithful traditionalist Christians and Catholics, the sorts of people that believe the miracles in the Bible actually happened (as opposed to the modernist tripe that the miracle descriptions are all mere allegories or whatever), often do not believe that "large-scale" miracles--pillars of fire, seas parting and so on--currently happen. Or rather, while there might be occasional cases--the "dancing sun" at Fatima, for instance--they appear to be in some sense disconnected from other historical events. The allies won the First World War not with a dancing sun but with guns and bullets. Or so it would seem.

Indeed, I think there's almost a distaste for desiring "large-scale" intervention, whether visible or not. You want God to help the "good-guys" gain a majority in Congress? How narrow of you. Doesn't God have better things to do? Why not ask for His grace to help you go a bit easier on your drinking or whatever. And wouldn't such an exercise of Divine power interfere with people's free will, to say nothing of letting us off the hook as God's committed soldiers down here on Earth?

I think these thoughts and worries have merit, but they do not express the entire truth. Post-biblical "large-scale" miracles do happen. The 16th century miraculously created image of Our Lady of Gaudalupe was said to have been responsible for converting 9 million native Americans to the Christian faith. The missionaries bravely and tirelessly carried out their tasks. Many of them died. But they had help.

Much of Christian Nigeria is currently under vicious and sustained assault by Boko Haram, a truly Satanic movement if there ever was one. Scarcely a day goes by without a report of another massacre, another village destroyed, with its men shot, hacked or burned to death and its women abducted into slavery. Evil seems to have, so to speak, the momentum.

But reports have recently come out of, well, a miracle. One hesitates to even state it, as if it would jinx it or something. Or perhaps, we have the fear that it's too good to be true. A hoax, perhaps.

The Catholic News Agency released a video of the testimony of a Nigerian bishop--Bishop Oliver Dashe Doeme, head of the Diocese of Miduguri in Nigeria's Borno State--who claims to have had an apparition of Jesus. I recommend watching the short (2:32) interview, partly because the bishop's sincerity is obvious and his joy is infectious. But I have also transcribed it below.

I said, towards the end of last year, one evening I was praying in my chapel before the Blessed Sacrament. The Blessed Sacrament is for us twenty-four hours--perpetual adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. 

So, I was there before the Blessed Sacrament, praying the Rosary. And then suddenly, the Lord appeared and I saw him--Hallelu!--this is Jesus with a sword in His own hand! And I started trembling. I said, "Lord, what is this?" He didn't say anything. He just stretched out his arms with the sword in his hands towards me. And then I also stretched my hands and received the sword. As soon as I received the sword it turned into a Rosary. It turned into the Rosary. 

Then, the Lord now spoke: "Boko Haram is gone. Boko Haram is gone. Boko Haram is gone." Three times, He said that and then he disappeared. 

I didn't need any prophet to give me this explanation. It was clear. That with the Rosary we would be able to expel Boko Haram from our diocese. That, with the intervention of His own mother whom I so cherish whom I am so close to, and then if I encourage our own people to do the same thing, we will dislodge Boko Haram. 

And that is exactly what is happening. Most of this part of out diocese that was under Boko Haram have been reclaimed and our people have started coming back. 

So what does that prove? Does one need to know that, yes, the message the Lord brought is correct? And as I've said, it's not because I'm an extraordinary person, the very wonderful bishop. No, it has nothing to do with that. The Lord just brought His message to (unclear) someone who could do this--to his own people so that the people would be strengthened, especially at this trying moment in their own lives as a people, and then as a Church. 

And that's exactly what has happened. So, I want to thank my Blessed Mother Mary. I want to thank Jesus Christ Her Son. I want to thank the Trinity. I am nothing. I am nothing. Just a very very simple servant of the Lord.

Steve Skojec at OnePeterFive recently picked up on this story, following a report from Church Militant. But yesterday, Steve added a crucial piece to it: 

Fast-forward one month, and the position of Boko Haram in Nigeria appears to have all but collapsed (my emphasis). Gbenga Akingbule, reporting for the Wall Street Journal, describes the sudden and surprising turn of events: 

"Boko Haram has abandoned so many hundreds of kidnapped women and girls recently that Nigerian officials tasked with bringing them back into society on Sunday said they were looking to open a second rehabilitation camp, a nod to how fast the tide of abductions has reversed. In the past few weeks, as troops from Nigeria and surrounding countries have punched deep into Boko Haram territory, soldiers said they have rescued about 1,000 women and girls, hostages the Islamist insurgency left behind. They include about 275 that army pickup trucks brought into the city of Yola on Saturday night and 260 rescued on Sunday."

I think it's fair to say that the mood among faithful Catholics concerning the recent "successes" of ISIS, Boko Haram and Muslim aggression in general, is grim. The consensus seems to be that we are experiencing a new and heightened phase of Christian martyrdom, which will only get worse. God is on our side, as always of course, but first, great suffering seems to be part of the plan--a necessary chastisement or purification, perhaps.

There's no question that that's at least partly true. But maybe it's not the full story. Maybe, at least for some of the worst affected, there can be an end to it. Now. 

Boko Haram is gone. Boko Haram is gone. Boko Haram is gone.

One can hope. And pray.