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The Third Secret and the Vatican documents

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The chief priests and the Pharisees gathered the council, and said, “What are we to do? For this man performs many signs.  If we let him go on thus, every one will believe in him, and the Romans will come and destroy both our holy place and our nation.”…  So from that day on they took counsel how to put him to death. (John 11:47-48, 53)

May 12, 2017                                                                                                                                     The Memorial of Saints Nereus, Achilleus, & Pancras

Seventeen years ago now, in the late spring and early summer of the year 2000, there was a flurry of statements from some very notable Church officials concerning the Fatima Apparitions and the famous Third Secret.  These statements were all cobbled together by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and released on June 26, 2000 under the title The Message of Fatima and can be read here.  I urge you to read these documents because they have cast a shadow over the discussion of Fatima within the Church for almost two decades now.

First, these documents are not the product of a single author, but rather three men produced this thing, and Pope Saint John Paul II (who was reigning at the time) was not among them.  The authors were Archbishop (now Cardinal) Tarcisio Bertone, SDB, Archbishop Emeritus of Vercelli the then Secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Angelo Cardinal Sodano the then Secretary of State of the Vatican City State, and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) the then Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

These are strange documents issued by men who at that time had no authority to do what they were doing and it shows.

1) Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone

The first task of Archbishop Bertone seemed to be to convince Catholics that there was no longer any need for the Consecration of Russia.  In fact he went so far as to claim that Pope John Paul II had done it sixteen years before, even though the Holy Father had never made that claim himself.  To understand this we have to remember that in the year 2000 the Berlin Wall had been down for ten years and the world seemed to be at peace.  The Soviet Empire and indeed the Soviet Union itself had long since disappeared and there was not even any reason to think about Russia anymore.  These were the first days of Vladimir Putin’s presidency and the country seemed a basket case.

So Archbishop Bertone put the first dagger in the heart of the Fatima message: Russia had already been consecrated and the fall of the Berlin Wall proved it.  He cited a universal consecration of the world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary that Pope Saint John Paul II conducted on March 25, 1984 and said that this was the long awaited consecration that everyone had been hoping for.  He even provided the text of that prayer and no one seemed to notice that there was one word that Pope Saint John Paul II never used when making that consecration that day: Russia.  Read the prayer at the above link to the CDF documents and tell me if you see that word anywhere.

Archbishop Bertone also produced a single sentence from a much ballyhooed letter from Sister Lucia to Pope John Paul II where she says: “Yes it has been done just as Our Lady asked, on 25 March 1984.”  The curious thing about that letter is that it is dated November 8, 1989.  Do you remember what was going on in the world on November 8, 1989?  Massive demonstrations in all the major cities of East Germany forced the government to resign that day.  The Soviet Union was refusing to intervene as she had done in past uprisings against the Eastern Bloc governments and the next day the Berlin Wall came down.  Possibly Sister Lucia was just as caught up in the euphoria as everyone else on the planet.  She was only human after all.

And everyone bought it.  But to understand why they were so easily convinced of this thing we have to remember what the world looked like in the spring of 2000.  We forget now how good things looked at that time. The Berlin Wall had been down for a decade and the September 11 attacks had not happened yet.  The global economy was booming in the first flush of globalization and the internet age.  The European Union was in the process of implementing the new common currency, the Euro, that promised to bind the nations of that continent so tightly together that war could never erupt there again.  Peace was even threatening to break out in the Middle East.  Israel had withdrawn from south Lebanon a month before, ending an 18 year long disastrous adventure there, and Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat were set to go to Camp David two weeks after the release of the Fatima documents to make a final peace deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians.  Times were good, and they were going to stay that way.  We don’t need to worry about Fatima and all that doom and gloom stuff anymore.

The second task of Archbishop Bertone was to dispense with the Third Secret.  This was really the third part of a single secret delivered to the children on July 13, 2017.  The first part was the vision of hell, and the second was the prophecy of the Second World War and the request for the consecration of Russia, and the third part– well nobody knew what the third part of the Secret was.  It was written down by Lucia on order of the Bishop of Leira in 1944 and placed in a sealed envelope which was kept by him until it was transferred to the Archive of the Holy Office in 1957.  Sister had by her own volition written not to open it before 1960 on the envelope.  Pope John XXIII looked at the envelope in 1959 and decided to send it back unopened.  Pope Paul VI read the contents in 1965 and decided not to release it.  Pope John Paul II read it after the attempt on his life in 1981 and again decided not to release it.  But in 2000 these men, ostensibly with the Pope’s approval, were going to release and interpret the thing.

The only hint to the contents of the Secret were two little tidbits that Lucia had written in her memoir.  Regarding the July 13, 1917 Apparition the only thing that she tells us that the Blessed Virgin said about that last part of the Secret was this: “In Portugal, the dogma of the Faith will always be preserved; etc…  Do not tell this to anybody.  Francisco, yes, you may tell him.”  The ‘etc…’ would tend to indicate that the Blessed Virgin completed that statement with words, wouldn’t it?  Remember that.

I will save the second tidbit until after we see to the Third Secret.  By the year 2000 the Third Secret had long since acquired a mythological status among Catholics.  It was a great mystery known to every Catholic and every Catholic worth his salt had a theory about what it was.  If Fatima was ever going to be “part of the past,” as Cardinals Sodano and Ratzinger declared in these documents that it was, then the Third Secret had to be dispensed with.  So they mentioned several times, too many times if you ask me, in these documents that the Third Secret would therein be published in its entirety, and here is what they published:

“J.M.J.

The third part of the secret revealed at the Cova da Iria-Fatima, on 13 July 1917.

I write in obedience to you, my God, who commanded me to do so through his Excellency the Bishop of Leiria and through your Most Holy Mother and mine.

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 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.

Tuy-3-1-1944″

That is no secret.  By itself there was no need to keep it secret for more than half a century.   If this is all that it was then what precisely was it that stopped Pope Paul VI or Pope John Paul II from releasing this in 1965 or in 1981?

I confess that I was not much of a Catholic in the year 2000 and these things made little impression on me.  I am not entirely certain that I was even aware of this while it was going on.  However I do not doubt that there might have been people who were devoted to Our Lady of Fatima and, on seeing this, began to doubt whether the Message was really all that important after all and just threw up their hands and walked away.  And of course that was the whole idea of the people who perpetrated this thing.

I have no doubt that this vision formed a part of the Fatima Secret, but it wasn’t the whole thing; it simply could not have been the whole thing.  Lucia wrote in her memoir that the Virgin told them “In Portugal, the dogma of the Faith will always be preserved; etc… Do not tell this to anybody.  Francisco, yes, you may tell him.”  She told them something.  Remember that Lucia and Jacinta could both hear the Virgin, but Francisco could only see her.  If this vision had been all that it was then Lucia would not have had to tell Francisco anything because he would have seen it himself.

And then there is the matter of the dogma of the Faith in Portugal.  That line is absolutely not commented on at all in any of these documents.  It is one of two glaring omissions.  The only reference to it is in footnote number 7 where the anonymous footnote writer says this:

In the “Fourth Memoir” Sister Lucia adds: “In Portugal, the dogma of the faith will always be preserved, etc…”.

What do you mean ‘Sister Lucia adds’?  Were you there?  No.  You weren’t.  But Sister Lucia was most definitely there and she was the only one alive who knew exactly what the Virgin said.  Are you saying that Sister Lucia made this up and added it later?  Is that the idea you are trying to worm into peoples’ minds?  And if Sister Lucia made this part up then the whole thing is open to question isn’t it?  Oh this type is so clever…

So after all this we still do not know what the third part of the Secret is.  We know that there was that vision associated with it but we do not know the context.  We don’t know what the Virgin said save “In Portugal, the dogma of the Faith will always be preserved; etc…”  But what does that mean?

If the Blessed Mother is speaking about the preservation of dogma in one place it can be taken as a clear indication that it will not be preserved in others.  Some sort of general apostasy seems to be being prophesied here.  This should not be surprising since all the groundwork for such a thing has been laid up and down various Church institutions throughout all of our lives.  In fact a soft apostasy is the day to day experience of most Catholics in the world.  But it has not yet reached the point where anyone is threatening to chop off your head if you do not fall down on your face before their false god or their false christ.  And the notion of apostasy helps make sense of the vision.  The Church is often described as a city in Sacred Scripture.  A half ruined city, corpses (i.e. souls dead in sin), bishops and priests and even the Holy Father himself being taken out.  You do the math.  Such a thing is prophesied to happen before the end with the rise of the great false prophet, the second beast rising up from the earth, who is helpmate to the antiChrist in the Book of Revelation.

Many people take the line “In Portugal, the dogma of the Faith will always be preserved;” as an indication that somehow Portugal will be kept safe from whatever is to come.   I wouldn’t be so quick to do that.  Sister Lucia was very irregular with her punctuation and it would be unwise to take that semicolon as a full stop.  We do not know what the conclusion to that thought was.  It could have been “In Portugal the dogma of the Faith will always be preserved in such and such a town or such and such a monastery,” or it could have been “In Portugal the dogma of the Faith will always be preserved among people who pray the Rosary every day or people who consecrate themselves to my Immaculate Heart” or a million other possibilities.

2) Angelo Cardinal Sodano

Cardinal Sodano was called upon at an address he gave following the Papal Mass at Fatima on May 13, 2000 to make the interpretation that the above related vision was fulfilled in the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II in 1981.  It pains me to say this about a Prince of the Church, but that is ridiculous.

As if the Queen of Heaven would come to earth to prophesy and to warn of a terrible World War, show a vision of Hell, warn of the annihilation of nations, but the real reason that she came and what she told the children must at all costs be kept secret from anybody and everybody was that sixty four years later some one would attempt to assassinate the Pope.

Popes have often been assassinated.  During the first three centuries every Pope was martyred.  Pope Pius VI was kidnapped by the armies of the French Revolution who were sacking Rome and trying to destroy the Papacy as an institution in 1798 and marched off to France where he died of maltreatment in captivity at Valence a year and a half later.  That did not merit a special warning from Heaven.  Why should this merit one, and sixty four years in advance?

This sold at the time because John Paul II was very highly regarded by many Catholics who thought he showed great courage during that ordeal and believed he was instrumental in the fall of the Berlin Wall.  We all felt that it was providential that he hadn’t been killed that day in Saint Peter’s Square, so the ground had already been prepared for many people to buy into something like this.  But, in the vision the Pope dies, which John Paul II did not.  End of story.

3) Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger

I was a big fan of Pope Benedict XVI and was very sorry to see his papacy end the way it did.  I am forever grateful to him for Summorum Pontificum and for the restoration of the ancient Latin liturgy to the life of the Church.  I do not like what he did on this day when he was Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger though.

He meanders through an overly long discourse on private vs. public revelation touching on Church History and psychology and the interior lives of children while ignoring the most important aspects of the events at Fatima.  He speaks as if the events at Fatima were simply interior experiences of the three children.  He speaks as if no one was standing on that holmoak, even though eyewitnesses saw the boughs bend.  He never in his entire discussion mentions the abundance of evidence that 70,000 people saw the sun dance on the Cova da Iria.

Even though his helpmate Archbishop Bertone stated at the outset of these documents that

Fatima is undoubtedly the most prophetic of modern apparitions.  The first and second parts of the “secret”– which are here published in sequence so as to complete the documentation– refer especially to the frightening vision of hell, devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, the Second World War, and finally the prediction of the immense damage that Russia would do to humanity by abandoning the Christian faith and embracing Communist totalitarianism.

Cardinal Ratzinger discounts the prophetic nature of the vision reported as part of the Third Secret saying that “The purpose of the vision is not to show an irrevocably fixed future.  Its meaning is exactly the opposite: it is meant to mobilize the forces of change in the right direction.”  Fine, but what are these “forces of change”?  Communion of Reparation, Consecration of Russia, Penance.  Everything that your cronies in this enterprise are trying to drive people away from.

I have been overly long on this topic and I will conclude here on the saddest note.  Commenting on the vision the future Pope Benedict XVI states that

The concluding part of the “secret” uses images which Lucia may have seen in devotional books and which draw their inspiration from long-standing intuitions of faith.

He didn’t believe.  If Lucia got any part of these Apparitions from devotional books, and she was questioned repeatedly on that subject as a child, then the whole thing is open to question.  If this is what Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger really thought about Fatima, if he thought that it was somehow or other the product of childish imagination, then that might explain why Pope Benedict XVI’s papacy ended the way it did.

While all of these high Church officials were saying these strange things about her Sister Lucia remained silent in her convent in Coimbra, always obedient to the Church.  She died in peace five years later and Our Lady took her to Heaven; while these three men linger on in a world that is darkening by the hour.

Blessed Jacinta Marto

But as to that second little tidbit that was recorded in Sister Lucia’s memoir about the Secret it goes like this.  She records in her first volume this exchange between herself, Jacinta’s mother and Jacinta after Blessed Jacinta had fallen ill on p. 45 of Fatima in Lucia’s own words

One day my aunt made this request: “Ask Jacinta what she is thinking, when she covers her face with her hands and remains motionless for such a long while.  I’ve already asked her, but she just smiles and does not answer.”  I put the question to Jacinta.

“I think of Our Lord,” she replied, “of Our Lady, of sinners, and of… (and she mentioned certain parts of the Secret).  I love to think.”

This may be the greatest revelation we will ever get about the Third Secret of Fatima outside of its fulfillment: there was something in that Secret that made soon to be Saint Jacinta Marto smile.

The Apparition of October 13, 1917 and the Miracle of the Sun

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And there will be signs in sun and moon and stars, and upon the earth distress of nations in perplexity at the roaring of the sea and the waves, men fainting with fear and with foreboding of what is coming on the world; for the powers of the heavens will be shaken (Luke 21:25-26).

April 27, 2017

I will begin here with an excerpt from William Thomas Walsh’s Our Lady of Fatima (pp. 142-44) where he describes the journey of the children and their parents from Aljustrel to the Cova da Iria and the moments that passed just prior to the Apparition:

It was a long and slow journey.  The highroad was crowded all the way from Fátima to Cova da Iria.  Men and women were kneeling in the thick slime on both sides, imploring their prayers.  Hands reached out to touch them.  Wet burros brushed against them.  Umbrellas threatened to poke out their eyes.  But what a sight when at last they arrived near the scene of the apparitions!  Fully 70,000 men, women, and children, people of all ages and conditions, were standing patiently in the rain waiting for them-a dark mass under innumerable black umbrellas, dripping sombreros, soaked blankets.  They were packed so densely between the highway and the azinheira that the children were able to get through only with the help of a chauffeur, who seized Jacinta and mounted her on his shoulder, crying, “Make way for the children who saw Our Lady!”

Ti Marto followed with Lucia and Francisco.  When they reached the place of the apparitions, he was surprised to find his wife already there.  He had forgotten her in his anxiety for Jacinta.  “My Olimpia turned up from another direction, I don’t know from where,” he confesses.

At all events there she was close to the stump of the azinheira, which Maria Carreira had lovingly draped, along with her alms table, under garlands of flowers.  The crowd lurched and swayed this way and that, ducked umbrellas, huddled together for warmth, scanned the leaden eastern sky.  Loud voices were repeating the Rosary in various rhythmical cadences.  A priest who had been praying all night in the rain and mud was reading his breviary and from time to time nervously fingering his watch.  Presently he turned to the children and asked at what hour Our Lady was going to arrive.

“At midday,” replied Lucia.

He glanced at his watch again, and said, disapprovingly: “It is midday already.  Our Lady is not a liar.  We shall see.”

Nearly all the people now were saying the Rosary. “Avé, Maria, cheia de graça… Santa Maria, Mãi de Deus, rogai por nos pecadores…”

“Put down your umbrellas!” cried Lucia-why she never knew-and one after another they obeyed, although the rain was still falling.  “Put down your umbrellas!” said one after another.  They all stood patiently in the rain.

A few minutes more passed.  The priest looked at his watch again.

“Midday is past,” he said with gloomy finality.  “Away with all this!  It is an illusion.”

He began to push the three children with his hands, if we may trust the memory of Maria Carreira.  But Lucia, almost in tears, refused to budge, saying.

“Whoever wants to go, can go, but I’m not going.  Our Lady told us to come.  We saw her other times and we’re going to see her now.”

Disappointed murmurs and grumblings began to be heard among the bystanders.  Then of a sudden Lucia looked toward the east and cried:

“Jacinta, kneel down, for now I see Our Lady there.  I can see the flash!”

“Watch out daughter!”  It was the shrill voice of Maria Rosa.  “Don’t let yourself be deceived!”

Lucia did not hear the warning.  Those near her noticed that her face had become flushed and transparently beautiful.  She was gazing rapturously now at the Lady herself, who stood in a flood of white light on the flowers that Maria Carreira had draped on the stump of the azinheira.  Jacinta and Francisco, on either side of her, stared likewise, both radiant, both quite oblivious of the multitude around them.

I will continue with the account of this Apparition here for Sister Lucia’s account in Volume IV of her memoir, as published in the 1998 version of Fatima in Lucia’s own words (pp. 177-79):

A little later, we saw the flash of light, and then Our Lady appeared on the holmoak.

“What do you want of me?”

“I want to tell you that a chapel is to be built here in my honour.  I am the Lady of the Rosary.  Continue always to pray the Rosary every day.  The war is going to end, and the soldiers will soon return to their homes.”

“I have many things to ask you: the cure of some sick persons, the conversion of sinners, and other things…”

“Some yes, but not others.  They must amend their lives and ask forgiveness for their sins.”

Looking very sad, Our Lady said:

“Do not offend the Lord our God any more, because He is already so much offended.”

Then, opening her hands, she made them reflect on the sun, and as she ascended, the reflection of her own light continued to be projected on the sun itself.

Here, Your Excellency, is the reason why I cried out to the people to look at the sun.  My aim was not to call their attention to the sun, because I was not even aware of their presence.  I was moved to do so under the guidance of an interior impulse.

After Our Lady had disappeared into the immense distance of the firmament, we beheld St. Joseph with the Child Jesus and Our Lady robed in white with a blue mantle, beside the sun.  St. Joseph and the Child Jesus appeared to bless the world, for they traced the Sign of the Cross with their hands.  When, a little later, this apparition disappeared, I saw Our Lord and Our Lady; it seemed to me that it was Our Lady of Dolours.  Our Lord appeared to bless the world in the same manner as St. Joseph had done.  This apparition also vanished, and I saw Our Lady once more, this time resembling Our Lady of Carmel.

The Miracle of the Sun

The three children were enraptured with the vision of Our Lady, and Lucia in particular with the last phase of the Apparition with the appearance of St. Joseph and Our Lord and Our Lady in her various manifestations, and they did not see the Miracle of the Sun.  But it was not meant for them to see.  It was meant for those 70,000 in the Cova da Iria.  Here is how William Thomas Walsh describes this great miracle on pp. 145-46 of Our Lady of Fatima:

What they all did see, however, was something stupendous, unheard of, almost apocalyptic.  The sun stood forth in the clear zenith like a great silver disk which, though bright as any sun they had ever seen, they could look straight at without blinking, and with a unique and delightful satisfaction.  This lasted but a moment.  While they gazed, the huge ball began to “dance”-that was the word all the beholders applied to it.  Now it was whirling rapidly like a gigantic fire-wheel.  After doing this for some time, it stopped.  Then it rotated again, with dizzy sickening speed.  Finally there appeared on the rim a border of crimson, which flung across the sky, as from a hellish vortex, blood red streamers of flame, reflecting to the earth, to the trees and shrubs, to the upturned faces and the clothes all sorts of brilliant colors in succession: green, red, orange, blue, violet, the whole spectrum in fact.  Madly gyrating in this manner three times, the fiery orb seemed to tremble, to shudder, and then to plunge precipitately, in a mighty zigzag, toward the crowd.

A fearful cry broke from the lips of thousands of terrified persons as they fell upon their knees, thinking the end of the world had come.  Some said that the air became warmer at that instant; they would not have been surprised if everything about them had burst into flames, enveloping and consuming them.

“Ai Jesús, we are all going to die here!”

“Save us, Jesus!  Our Lady, save us!”

“Oh, my God, I am sorry-”  And one began the Act of Contrition.

Some who had come to jeer fell on their faces and broke into sobs and abject prayers.

The Marques do Cruz said, “Oh my God, how great is Thy power!”

This had lasted about ten minutes, perhaps.  Then all saw the sun begin to climb, in the same zigzag manner, to where it had appeared before.  It became tranquil, then dazzling.  No one could look at it any longer.  It was the sun of every day.

The people stared at one another in joy and amazement.  “Miracle!  Miracle!  The children were right!  Our Lady made the miracle!  Blessed be God!  Blessed be Our Lady!”  The shouts were taken up all over the Cova da Iria.  Some were laughing, others weeping with joy.  Many were making the discovery that their drenched clothes had in some unexplained manner become perfectly dry.

That testimony is based on the memory of eyewitnesses reported to William Thomas Walsh that he published approximately thirty years after the events in Our Lady of Fatima.

But Walsh next recounts an eyewitness account contemporary to the events published in the Lisbon newspaper O Seculo on October 17, 1917, four days after the events.  This newspaper generally supported the policies of Portugal’s at the time fiercely anti-Catholic government.  The author of the article is a man named Avelino de Almeida, managing editor of O Seculo, who was a public Freemason and, while he was not as eager to ridicule those who believe as some of his cohorts in that stupid death cult, he did retain that strong dislike for all aspects of religion, and of Catholicism in particular, that is necessary to thrive in the Masonic orders.  Despite all that here is what he reported to his Lisbon readers on October 17, 1917:

“a spectacle unique and incredible if one had not been a witness of it…  One can see the immense crowd turn toward the sun, which reveals itself free of the clouds in full noon.  The great start of day makes one think of a silver plaque, and it is possible to look straight at it without the least discomfort.  It does not burn, it does not blind.  It might be like an eclipse.  But now bursts forth a colossal clamor, and we hear the nearest spectators crying, ‘Miracle, miracle!  Marvel, marvel!’

Before the astonished eyes of the people, whose attitude carries us back to biblical times and who, full of terror, heads uncovered, gaze into the blue of the sky, the sun has trembled, and the sun has made some brusque movements, unprecedented and outside of all cosmic laws-the sun has ‘danced,’ according to the typical expression of the peasants…  An old man whose stature and face, at once gentle and energetic, recall those of Paul Deroulède, turns toward the sun and recites the Credo with loud cries from beginning to end.  I ask his name.  It is Senhor João Maria Amado de Melo Ramalho da Cunha Vasoncelos.  I see him afterwards addressing those about him who have kept their hats on, begging them vehemently to uncover before so extraordinary a demonstration of the existence of God.  Similar scenes are repeated in all places…

The  people ask one another if they have seen anything and what they have seen.  The greatest number avow that they have seen the trembling and dancing of the sun.  Others, however, declare that they have seen the smiling face of the Virgin herself; swear that the sun turned around on itself like a wheel of fireworks; that it fell. almost to the point of burning the earth with its rays..  Another tells that he has seen it change color successively…

Pray the Rosary every day.  Offer sacrifices for sinners.  Many souls go to hell because there is no one to pray and to sacrifice for them.

Prelude to October 13, 1917: the great rain

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In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened.  And rain fell upon the earth forty days and forty nights.  On the very same day Noah and his sons, Shem and Ham and Japheth, and Noah’s wife and the three wives of his sons with them entered the ark (Genesis 7:11-13)

April 19, 2017                                                                                                                                   Wednesday in the Octave of Easter

The Miracle of the Sun is the great event of the modern times.  The events of October 13, 1917 are like in their suspension of the normal natural course of events to the great miracles of the Old Testament: the crossing of the Red Sea (Exodus 14:9-31), the crossing of the Jordan river into the Promised Land (Joshua 3:7-17), the sun and the moon standing still (Joshua 10:9-14), and the shadow moving backward on the sundial of Ahaz (Isaiah 38:4-8, 2 Kings 20:8-11).  One might even make the argument that October 13, 1917 was even greater than any of these events because Our Lady predicted three separate times on July 13, on August 19, and on September 13 that a great miracle would be done around midday on October 13, 1917.  God did not tell Moses in advance not to worry about the Egyptians because He was going to take care of them in the Red Sea, but Our Lady did tell that to Lucia and Jacinta who told it to Francisco and anyone else who would listen.

This great event occurred in front of 70,000 witnesses who all knew in advance to expect something great that day and who all likely would have come down on the children pretty hard if nothing happened.  There were great fears for the lives of the children.  Even Lucia’s mother, Maria Rosa, who thought flat out that her daughter was either making all of this stuff up or being deceived by the devil, decided to go with her daughter on October 13 to the Cova da Iria.  She was convinced that there would be no miracle and that the crowd would turn on the poor child so she resolved to die with her daughter.

But there was a great miracle.  The strange thing is now, a century later, that this greatest event of modern times is covered by a blanket of silence.  It is not so much denied as it is just not talked about, and in the not talking about it the thing tends to be forgotten.  I doubt that even one in a thousand Catholics who attend Mass on Sunday even know anything about the events of October 13, 1917, and maybe one in a hundred thousand might appreciate them for what they are.  This should not be surprising given the nature of the ridiculous pseudo-gnostic death cult that has sought from the shadows to control the affairs of men since the 18th century and has driven even the idea of God from almost every facet of human life and sadly wormed its way into the highest positions of the Church.

So we will tell the story of the Miracle of the Sun here.  It will take more than one post.  I want to start with the poetic description of the all night rain over the Cova da Iria on October 12-13, 1917 that William Thomas Walsh gives on pp. 135-39 of Our Lady of Fatima because it gives not only a good description of the rain but of the tenor of the times in that disastrous year in human history: 1917.

That afternoon the sky became overclouded, and a fine cold mist began to fall over the gloomy autumnal expanse of the Serra da Aire.  Shepherds in Aljustrel locked the beasts up early, for it was plain that thick weather was brewing in the northeast.

What a night!  It was as if the devil, somewhere in the ice and snow that could never slake the burning of his pain, had resolved to destroy with one blow all that remained of the Europe which had so long been his battleground against the Thing he hated most.  Somewhere in the dark misery of Siberia, he was permitted, heaven knows why, to disturb the equilibrium of the air, setting in motion a cold and cutting blast that shrieked across the continent to the western sea.  It may have passed howling over a cabin in Finland where a little lynx-eyed man who called himself Lenin was waiting to enter St. Petersburg (he had lately sown the seeds of revolution there), and to begin, in a very few weeks, the transformation and destruction of all that world which owed what was best and noblest in it to the teachings of Christ.  It screamed in mockery over vast armaments moving stealthily through Germany to prepare for the “peace through victory” drive of 1918.  It scourged poor wretches of both armies into the cover of slimy dugouts all along the western front, and plastered with mud the Italian fugitives from Caporetto.  It seemed to echo and enlarge the despair that was settling over the vineyards of war-wearied France, where Haig stood, as he said, with his back to the wall.  Finally it dashed itself against the Pyrenees, and then, as if it had gathered up all the hatreds and discontents of disobedient men and all the rebellious powers of a corrupted nature in its mad career from the Baltic to Cape Saint Vincent, it let them all loose on the little country that has never been permanently conquered, the land where she who treads upon the serpent’s head has long been honored, the terra da Santa Maria.

Darkness fell swiftly, with blacker clouds scudding from the northeast, and huge shapeless masses of fog drifting along the mountain sides and down the river valleys to the ocean.  As the drizzle thickened to a fine, cold, slanting rain, the wind whipped to a gale, bent under it the waving and moaning plumes of the pine forests near Leiria; it ripped the square sails of ancient windmills on the gray heights of the Serra da Aire; it scattered pale glistening leaves of poplars and aspens across the swollen Tagus; it flattened the plucked and reddened vineyards of Braga and the withered gardens of Moita and Fátima; it went roaring across hundreds of miles of narrow beaches until the frothy Atlantic bellowed back in anger, and cast up vengeful floods into village streets.  The rain fell steadily, pitilessly.

Yet there were thousands of human beings and many beasts on the roads of the little Republic that night.  For faith is stronger than doubt, and love is hardier than hate.  Devout Catholics in every village had heard by this time that Our Lady had promised to return to Cova da Iria to perform a miracle on October 13.  Rain or shine, that was all they needed to know.  Peasant families slung their wicker baskets and earthen water jugs over their shoulders, or packed them in panniers on the backs of burros, and started out under the lowering skies.  Fathers and mothers carried sick or lame children in their arms for incredible distances.  Fishermen left their nets and boats on the beaches of the Vieira and took to the oozy roads.  Farmhands from Monte Real, sailors from ships in the harbors of Porto or Algarve, factory workere from Lisboa, serranas from Minde or Soublio, ladies and gentlemen, scrubwomen, waiters, young and old, rich and poor, all sorts of people (but most of them humble, most of them barefoot, most of them workers and their families) were plodding through the mud under the pelting rain that night, like a great scattered army converging upon Fátima, hoping to find there some favor of health or conversion, forgiveness of sin, consolation for sorrow, the beginning of a better life, the blessing of the Mother of God.

It made no difference to these devotees if saturated trousers or skirts sloshed around their tired legs as their bare feet plowed the mud or splattered the puddles of bad roads.  Laughter was heard among groups of several families as they walked along together.  Fragments of old hymns would echo back from the wet cliffs, or come floating down out of the darkness of a lonely road.  “Ave, Ave, Ave Maria!”  Not for nothing had the ancestors of these people sung the Salve Regina on the decks of galleons in the Indian Ocean or whalers in the China Sea.

This description of the pilgrims marching toward Fatima is in its way an excellent metaphor for the Church and her march through history.  She gathers her humble children from the mountains and from the fields, from the factories and the harbors, from the streets and the forests, from the deserts and the bayous and they take their place with her, singing ancient hymns and thanking God for that great gift of the Immaculate Heart of his most holy Mother and all that she conceived, on the march through the terrible stormy night of history.  And it is a storm that will grow much darker and much more terrible, the devil knowing how short his time is now, as she approaches her final goal: to meet her Lord who stands waiting for his Bride when dawn breaks on the far shore of the Resurrection and the final Judgement of the human race.

Impressions of the September 13 Apparition and a step through the minefield

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Then he opened their understanding, that they might understand the scriptures.  And he said to them:  Thus it is written, and thus it behooved Christ to suffer, and to rise again from the dead, the third day: And that penance and remission of sins should be preached in his name, unto all nations, beginning at Jerusalem (Luke 24: 45-47).

April 18, 2017                                                                                                                                     Tuesday in the Octave of Easter

We are forced to deal here with one of the most disastrous and likely most deliberate, in its origin at least, misstatements in the whole history of Fatima, but first a bit of background.  When Sister Lucia published her memoirs, a quarter of a century after the Apparitions, she revealed for the first time the extent of the penances and sacrifices that the children were practicing.

Apparently the movement in their heart to do penance started after the second Apparition of the Angel of Portugal in 1916 when he told them to “Make of everything you can a sacrifice, and offer it to God as an act of reparation for the sins by which He is offended, and in supplication for the conversion of sinners.”  This movement toward sacrifice and penance only accelerated, especially for Blessed Jacinta Marto, after Our Lady showed the children the vision of Hell on July 13, 1917, told them to sacrifice for sinners, and gave them the Fatima intention for which to offer their sacrifices: “O Jesus, it is for the love of You, for the conversion of sinners, and in reparation for the sins committed against the Immaculate Heart of Mary.”

During this time the children followed her commands and the inspirations given by the Holy Spirit to their hearts to do penance.  Often when they were shepherding their families’ sheep they would do without their lunch and either give it to whatever poor children they found or, if no impoverished families were at hand, they would give their lunch to the sheep.  They would deprive themselves of water to drink on those unfathomably hot summer afternoons of the Portuguese serra at a time when there was no air conditioning to retreat into.  They prayed constantly, Jacinta spending hours sometimes with her forehead pressed against the earth repeated the prayers of the Angel and the O my Jesus prayer the Blessed Virgin taught them that we now recite after each Mystery of the Rosary.  This six year old girl made of everything she could a supplication for the conversion of sinners, to save them from Hell.  Blessed Francisco Marto spent the days when other children were in school (since Our Lady had assured him that he wasn’t long for this world he felt no purpose in learning lessons to help him advance in it) before the Blessed Sacrament in the local church seeking to console Our Lord and Our Lady for the outrages committed against them.  Blessed Francisco was only nine when he was doing this, and Blessed Jacinta only six.  What were you doing when you were nine?  What was I doing when I was six?  What are any of us doing right now?

The tragic misstatement about Fatima originates with one of the penances the children were practicing.  They chanced upon the idea a few days after the August 19, 1917 Apparition of tying a rope around their waists as a penance.  Here is Lucia’s description from Volume II of her memoir repeated on page 78 of 1998’s Fatima in Lucia’s own words:

Some days later, as we were walking along the road with our sheep, I found a piece of rope that had fallen off a cart.  I picked it up and, just for fun, I tied it round my arm.  Before long, I noticed that the rope was hurting me.

“Look, this hurts!” I said to my cousins.  “We could tie it round our waists and offer this sacrifice to God.”

The poor children promptly fell in with my suggestion.  We then set about dividing it between the three of us, by placing it across a stone and striking it with the sharp edge of another one that served as a knife.  Either because of the thickness or roughness of the rope, or because we sometimes tied it too tightly, this instrument of penance often caused us terrible suffering.  Now and then, Jacinta could not keep back her tears, so great was the discomfort this caused her.  Whenever I urged her to remove it, she replied: “No!  I want to offer this sacrifice to Our Lord in reparation, and for the conversion of sinners.”

This was the genesis of Our Lady’s instruction to the  children on September 13, 1917 that God is pleased with  your sacrifices.  He does not want you to sleep with the rope on, but only to wear it during the daytime.

This statement of Our Lady is often mutilated by various persons who talk and write about Fatima into some form of the following lie: “Yes the children were doing terrific penances, but Our Lady came and told them to stop doing that.”  Quite obviously that is not what she said.  She said that God was pleased with the penances were offering, but that He wanted them to modify one of them slightly.  After all God made us, and He knows us infinitely better than we know ourselves.  He knows what we can handle and what what we cannot, what will draw us to Him and what will drive us away.

Yet you will hear this stupid misstatement that “Our Lady told the children to quit doing penances” in some form or another from people who seem to have devoted their lives to spreading the message of Fatima, who have written books about Fatima, who have made careers dealing with Fatima.  It has sadly become part of ‘what people say’ about Fatima.

Why is this important?  Because there has been a movement in the Church for a long time, starting in fact many lifetimes before the Second Vatican Council, to be done with penance.  It probably goes back in some way to Martin Luther in 1517 and all of his successors and their declarations that the way one lives his life has nothing to do with whether or not he will be saved or not.  So over the centuries this idea has crept into and consumed the Church.  Penance and mortification, both exterior and interior, slowly over time began to lose their importance.  Yet this is what it is to be a Christian: our screwed up will must be subdued and our fallen nature must be conquered.  Penance and mortification are how you do that.  And there is no other way.  To remove penance from the Christian life is in many ways like removing the soul from the body: all you have left is a decaying corpse.

There is also the matter of what penance on our part can do for others and for the world.  The Fatima revelations remind us of something that is made clear throughout Sacred Scripture: penance softens the anger of God and loosens the grip that devils have on souls in the world.  Consider the account of the exorcism that Our Lord performed when He came down from Mount Tabor with Peter, James, and John after the Transfiguration.  He encounters the rest of the Apostles who had been trying and failing to exorcise a demon from a young boy.  Notice here as well the intimate connection between prayer and fasting and belief and faith.  Here it is from the Gospel of Mark:

One of the crowd answered him, “Teacher, I brought my son to you, for he has a dumb spirit; and wherever it seizes him, it dashes him down; and he foams and grinds his teeth and becomes rigid; and I asked your disciples to cast it out, and they were not able.” And he answered them, “O faithless generation, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you? Bring him to me.” And they brought the boy to him; and when the spirit saw him, immediately it convulsed the boy, and he fell on the ground and rolled about, foaming at the mouth.  And Jesus * asked his father, “How long has he had this?” And he said, “From childhood.  And it has often cast him into the fire and into the water, to destroy him; but if you can do anything, have pity on us and help us.”  And Jesus said to him, “If you can! All things are possible to him who believes.”  Immediately the father of the child cried out and said, “I believe; help my unbelief!”  And when Jesus saw that a crowd came running together, he rebuked the unclean spirit, saying to it, “You dumb and deaf spirit, I command you, come out of him, and never enter him again.”  And after crying out and convulsing him terribly, it came out, and the boy was like a corpse; so that most of them said, “He is dead.”  But Jesus took him by the hand and lifted him up, and he arose.  And when he had entered the house, his disciples asked him privately, “Why could we not cast it out?”  And he said to them, “This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer and fasting. (Mark 9:17-29)”

This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer and fasting.  And what is the message of Fatima?  Prayer and fasting.  In this sense fasting, penance, sacrifice, they are three different words for the same thing.  If you wish to drive out the demons afflicting souls in our world then heed the message of Fatima.

This would seem to have been a primary reason for Our Lady’s appearance at the Cova da Iria four centuries after Father Martin Luther’s little outburst: to call people back to penance.  After all Our Lord Himself after his Resurrection stated that penance should be preached in his Name to all nations.  How many times do we read in the Apocalypse, the Book of Revelation, that the followers of the Beast (Antichrist) and his false prophet will in the last days of this world refuse to do penance, despite the plagues that afflict them, and instead blaspheme God?

The penances that these children did were a primary reason for the beatification of Francisco and Jacinta Marto in the year 2000 so why do these people continue to repeat the lie that “Our Lady told them to stop making these sacrifices?”  How can you call them ‘Blessed’ if you deny the reason for their beatification?  Some of it is just habit, some of it is just a herd mentality i.e. people feel safe (even though they are in mortal danger) when they just repeat what everybody else says despite the fact that they know better and some are just ignorant, whether that ignorance is willful or not is between them and God.

But there is another group who have another purpose.  They think that by spreading this lie they can undo a large part if not the whole message of Fatima.  They are not the ones who repeat this lie publicly, rather they whisper it in the ears of authors of books on the subject, they cause it to be written in footnotes or cause it to be repeated by people who are supposed to be authorities on the subject.  And trust me they are there.  They do exist.  Just ignore them and the fruits of their work and do penance.

So what is penance?  What sacrifices are we called to make?  Are we supposed to go out and buy a hairshirt or wrap a cilice around our thighs and wear it until we draw blood?  No.  If God wants you to do that you will know it and it won’t be because you read this post.  But that is a dangerous place to start doing penance because most often those things are purely self will and feed only your pride and hurry you down the road to spiritual disaster.  So what do we do?

Penance is primarily doing the will of God, especially when it contravenes your own will.  Penance is not sinning, especially when the devil makes sin look like a good and reasonable choice that will do no harm to anyone and may perhaps actually help somebody.  Penance is enduring and conquering with prayer and patience grievous temptations that afflict you to commit certain sins. Penance is being patient with the troublesome and helping them bear their burdens.  If you want to do real penance then try this: the next time you encounter someone whom you deem to be rude and inconsiderate and whom you think is in your way then be kind to them, smile at them, pray a Hail Mary for them, ask them if you can help them in any way and maybe, just maybe, try getting out of their way.  In other words learn to live and love the Works of Mercy.

Sometimes penance is just to live in this world that is so awash with sin and error that 99.9999999% of the human race perceives good to be evil and evil to be good and not to succumb to it.  To not say Ave (2 John 1:10) to those in positions of authority who preach all manner of heretical yet seductive stupidity from the pulpit and to keep the commandments of God and bear the testimony of Jesus Christ in a world that is constantly screaming in your ear at the top of its lungs that neither of them have ever existed, that it is all a delusional fantasy.

These things are penance too, and if you let Him the Holy Spirit will show you more and better ways of doing penance than anything I could come up with.  Pray the Rosary every day and do penance.  Make supplication in reparation for the outrages committed against the Holy Trinity and for the conversion of sinners.  Place your forehead against the earth and say:

O Most Holy Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, I adore You profoundly, and I offer You the most precious Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Jesus Christ, present in all the tabernacles of the world, in reparation for the outrages, sacrileges and indifference with which He Himself is offended.  And, through the infinite merits of His most Sacred Heart, and the Immaculate Heart of Mary, I beg of You the conversion of poor sinners.

The vision of Hell

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Before I go whence I shall not return, to the land of gloom and deep darkness, the land of gloom and chaos (Job 10:21-22)

March 4, 2017                                                                                                                                     The Memorial of Saint Casmir

Hell is real.  People go there.  God makes us free.  He desires the love of free creatures.  And freedom by definition demands that free creatures are presented with alternatives.  Hell is the alternative.

We are called to love God, to follow his commandments, as Our Lord told his apostles the night before He poured out the last drop of Blood and Water from his most Sacred Heart to save us.  But this Sacrifice was only to open the door to Life, not to force us to walk through.  We are free.

Hell was created for those who choose not to love God.  What a strange choices this is, but Sacred Scripture and our own experience confirm that this is true.

He loved to curse; let curses come on him! He did not like blessing; may it be far from him!                                                                                 (Psalm 109:17)

For some mysterious reason, the mystery of iniquity as Saint Paul calls it, there are some who choose Hell.  To understand this one must be able to understand the human heart, and as the prophet Jeremiah reminds us: that is the purview of the Lord and of Him alone.  But Hell is a choice, and that is what we must always remember.

No one, and especially no Catholic, will get off at their Judgement by claiming that it is unfair or that they didn’t know.  God in his Mercy grants to each of us what we desire and we were made to desire Him, and Him alone.  If we choose something else we fail and consign ourselves to destruction.  We do not wish to follow the Law of Love, the Law of Charity, the Law of God then He grants us to live in a place where there is no Law.  No law, no order.  Complete and total chaos, the deprivation of everything that you were made for.  Perhaps this is the source of the disequilibrium that the children saw.  And there is something else.  You will not be alone there, nor will you be the most powerful inhabitant of Hell.

You will be subject to the fallen angels, and angels are infinitely more powerful than you are.  Here they can tempt you and trick you and generally make your life miserable, but even the greatest sinner while he is here on earth is still protected from them in some measure by God’s grace.  There you will not have that protection, because you have told God by the way that you lived your life that you do not want it.

Here you have told God that you are the master and the author of life and of laws and that you can do whatever you want.  In Hell you will wake up to the awful reality that this is not the case.  In Hell you will be a slave to the fallen angels who hate you.  Yes they hate you with a malice and a loathing that you cannot imagine.  Do not forget: you were created to take the place they forfeited in Heaven.  And if you were baptized, confirmed, and/or God forbid ordained you were given the Sacramental graces not only to replace them but to destroy their kingdom on earth, and that mark will stay with you forever.  And because you were stupid enough to despise your destiny and become their slaves they will loathe you all the more.  And all of this is quite real.  You know it in your gut.  You know it when you can’t sleep at night.  You know it when the endless distractions you fill your life with still won’t drive any of this away, but make it worse.

Repent and don’t go there.  The message of Fatima can be summed up in these words: don’t go to Hell.

All of the prophecies about nations and popes etc. are important because the currents of history can help to lead people toward Heaven or Hell but the bottom line is this: Don’t go to Hell.  Save souls from Hell.

O my Jesus forgive us, save us from the fire of Hell, lead all souls to Heaven, especially those most in need.

The Apparition of May 13, 1917

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For just as the lightning comes from the east, and flashes even to the west, so shall the coming of the Son of Man be (Matthew 24: 27).

February 15, 2017

I will recount here the first apparition of Our Lady of the Rosary to the three young children as recounted by the Servant of God Venerable Sister Lúcia of Jesus and of the Immaculate Heart in her fourth memoir composed in 1941 using the English version published in 1998.

Just one word in advance.  The primary witnesses of the Apparitions were the children Lucia dos Santos and her cousins Blessed Francisco and Blessed Jacinta Marto.  During the Apparitions Francisco only saw the Blessed Virgin, but did not hear what she said while both Jacinta and Lucia heard the words of Our Lady.  Lucia however was the only one who ever spoke to the Virgin.  Now on to the account of the Apparition of May 13, 1917:

High up on the slope in the Cova da Iria, I was playing with Jacinta and Francisco at building a little stone wall around a clump of furze.  Suddenly we saw what seemed to be a flash of lightning.

“We’d better go home,” I said to my cousins, “that’s lightning; we may have a thunderstorm.”

“Yes, indeed!” they answered.

We began to go down the slope, hurrying the sheep along toward the road.  We were more or less half-way down the slope and almost level with a large holmoak tree that stood there, when we saw another flash of lightning.  We had only gone a few steps further when, there before us on a small holmoak, we beheld a Lady all dressed in white.  She was more brilliant than the sun, and radiated a light more clear and intense than a crystal glass filled with sparkling water, when the rays of the burning sun shine through it.

We stopped, astounded, before the Apparition.  We were so close, just a few feet from her, that we were bathed in the light which surrounded her, that we were bathed in the light which surrounded her, or rather, which radiated from her.  Then Our Lady spoke to us:

“Do not be afraid.  I will do you no harm.”

“Where are you from?”

“I am from heaven.”

“What do you want of me?”

“I have come to ask you to come here for six months in succession, on the 13th day, at this same hour.  Later on, I will tell you who I am and what I want.  Afterwards, I will return here yet a seventh time.”

“Shall I go to heaven too?”

“Yes, you will.”

“And Jacinta?”

“She will go also.”

“And Francisco?”

“He will go there too, but he must say many Rosaries.”

Then I remembered to ask about two girls who had died recently.  They were friends of mine and used to come to my home to learn weaving with my eldest sister.

“Is Maria das Neves in heaven?”

“Yes, she is.”  (I think she was about 16 years old).

“And Amelia?”

“She will be in purgatory until the end of the world.”  (It seems to me that she was between 18 and 20 years of age).  “Are you willing to offer yourselves to God and bear all the sufferings He wills to send you, as an act of reparation for the sins by which He is offended, and of supplication for the conversion of sinners?”

“Yes, we are willing.”

“Then you are going to have much to suffer, but the grace of God will be your comfort.”

As she pronounced these last words “…the grace of God will be your comfort”, Our Lady opened her hands for the first time, communicating to us a light so intense that, as it streamed from her hands, its rays penetrated our hearts and the innermost depths of our souls, making us see ourselves in God, Who was that light, more clearly than we see ourselves in the best of mirrors.  Then, moved by an interior impulse that was also communicated to us, we fell on our knees, repeating in our hearts:

“O most Holy Trinity, I adore You!  My God, My God, I love you in the most Blessed Sacrament!”

After a few moments, Our Lady spoke again:

“Pray the Rosary every day, in order to obtain peace for the world, and the end of the war.”

Then she began to rise serenely, going up towards the east, until she disappeared in the immensity of space.  The light that surrounded her seemed to open up a path before her in the firmament, and for this reason we sometimes said that we saw heaven opening.

There are a lot of things I want to say about this apparition, but I will let them be for a moment.

Pray the Rosary every day.  Pray for the five lost Sees.  Pray for the conversion of the Muslim peoples.  Pray for the Holy Father.  Pray for Pope Francis.  He is our only pope and he is surrounded by men who are not his friends, and they are not your friends either.