Holy Week has passed and allow me to share with you what I’ve been reading during the Holy Week. I’ve written many times here that I only read books on history and on our Catholic faith. Last year we wrote about that very interesting, albeit controversial book/magazine from Loreto Publications entitled “The Fourth Secret of Fatima” written by Catholic writer Antonio Socci. If you’ve been reading about the apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary at the Cova de Iria in Fatima from May 13 to Oct. 13, 1917, you will learn much about the revelations by our Immaculate Mother to the whole world, which affects all of us, especially here in the Philippines.
The Oct. 13, 1917 apparition gave the three children, Jacinta, Francesco and Lucia (she became a nun and died only in the year 2005) three Secrets of which the 3rd Secret was not allowed to be revealed until 1960. In this book by Antonio Socci, he accuses Tarsisio Cardinal Bertone of covering up the complete 3rd Secret who in turn wrote his own book to discredit Socci.
It has been told that the 3rd Secret was about the apostasy within the top leadership of the Catholic Church… and if you ask the pertinent questions like, “If the Fatima apparitions were considered by the Vatican and succeeding Popes as Divinely inspired, why then were the request of our Blessed Virgin Mary to consecrate her Immaculate Heart to Russia not heeded?”
The current book that I’ve been reading is entitled “The Devil’s Final Battle: How the rejection of the Fatima Prophecies Imminently threatens the Church and the world and what you can do about it to protect yourself and your family” written by Father Paul Kramer, The Missionary Association. The cover of this book has a quote from Cardinal Mario Luigi Ciappi who said, “In the Third Secret (of Fatima) it is foretold, among other things, that the great apostasy in the Church will begin at the top.”
Scriptures teaches us that in John 3:16 “God so loved the World that he gave us his only begotten Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.” Since the 1800’s, the Blessed Virgin Mary has come and appeared to simple people from La Salette, Rue du Bac, in Paris, Lourdes, Fatima, Kibeho, Betania, Venezuela, Knock, Ireland, Akita, Japan and Medjugorje sending us a message or warning and a call to conversion for the world has turned its back away from God.
So if God sent his only Son Jesus Christ to save us, logic dictates that before a great chastisement befall on our world, he must have sent the Theotokos, the Mother of God to warn us and that’s exactly why the world experienced many apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the most profound warnings can be found in Fatima.
As Fr. Paul Kramer wrote “in 1982 Pope John Paul II posed this question in his sermon on Fatima, “Can the Mother, Who with all the force of love that She fosters in the Holy Spirit and Who desires everyone’s salvation, can she remain silent when She sees the very bases of Her children’s salvation undermined? The Pope answered his own question, “No, She cannot remain silent.” What intrigued Mr. Socci and yes, I too am intrigue by the statement of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Fatima when she said, “In Portugal, the dogma of Faith will always be preserved.”
It is such mysterious statement that triggered Antonio Socci to write his book because he believes that the 3rd Secret of Fatima was never released in its entirety. Well know too well that the dogma of Faith is being held at the Vatican in Rome… so why would the Blessed Virgin Mary say that the dogma of faith would be preserved in Portugal? It could only mean that the dogma of the Catholic Church will be challenged or even changed and this is what the apostasy is all about and it is happening even here in our church.
Fr. Kramer writes about changing our infallible dogma, “Another example of this undermining is the attack on the dogma that outside the Catholic Church there is no salvation. The Tridentine creed, quoted in full about, states, “I shall most constantly hold and profess this true Catholic faith, outside which no one can be saved…. Yet today, the dogma is denied and undermined by an “ecumenism” which declares that neither the Protestant heretics nor the Orthodox schismatics need to return to the Catholic Church, because of this “outdated ecclesiology. And in many other places today, the dogma is denied.”
But Socci and Fr. Kramer argue… this dogma was never changed, not even in Vatican II? If today there is still no World Peace, it is because the Catholic Hierarchy has refused to heed the request of our Immaculate Mother to consecrate Russia to her Immaculate Heart. You want to learn more about this, get a copy of the Fatima Crusader or email them at www.fatima.org or www.fatimachallenge.com. At the end of her apparition the Blessed Mother said, “In the end my Immaculate Heart will triumph.”
* * *
For e-mail responses to this article, write to vsbobita@mo-pzcom.comor vsbobita@gmail.com. His columns can be accessed through www.philstar.com.