Tag Archives: OnePeterFive

Church History, Editorials

Ratzinger vs. The Benedict Bot: A case in point: The 3rd Secret of Fatima

8 Comments

 

by Br. Alexis Bugnolo

After my revelations that I had been threatened over the phone by Archbishop Ganswein, the revelations which burst out from Archbishop Viganò and others in January about the duplicity of the private secretary of Pope Benedict XVI, shed real light on the need to review all the statements alleged to be from Pope Benedict XVI after February 2013, as to their authenticity. (See links in this paragraph for pertinent articles about this).

Editor’s Note: The phrase, “The Benedict Bot”, as used above in the title of the present article, is a term coined by Frank Walker, editor of Canon212.com, and used to characterized the apparently manufactured and artificial statements by others in the Vatican, which are attributed by the Vatican Press Office to the Roman Pontiff, in such wise as to raise grave concerns whether they are in any way an authentic expression of his mind. Thus the Benedict Bot is the persona created by the Vatican. This term obviously refers to a theory of interpretation, because without video confirmation that Pope Benedict XVI has said something, the matter is always capable of doubt, especially after the Vatican has been caught twice falsifying the letter and statements of Pope Benedict, as FromRome.Info has reported previously, not to mention every translation of his Declaration of Feb. 11, 2013.

Now, on the fourth anniversary of the controversy over the Third Secret of Fatima which exploded in Catholic Media in May of 2016, I think that time has come to compare the real Ratzinger with the Benedict Bot. So lets examine what Cardinal Ratzinger is alleged by a close friend on 3 occasions to have said, BEFORE February 2013, and what he is alleged to have said by the Vatican Press Office in 2016.

Cardinal Ratzinger on the Third Secret

Here is the testimony of Father Paul Kramer, in his interview in the Fatima Crusader edition of 2009, where he reports the testimony of Father Ingo Dollinger, regarding the Third Secret of Fatima, and his conversations with Cardinal Ratzinger.

Then on June 26, 2000, Cardinal Ratzinger published for the world the document [on the Third Secret] contain-ing the vision of a “bishop in white”, claiming that the en-tire Secret is set forth in this document. Yet it can only be understood that way if we say that he is using a mental res-ervation; that what is set forth by Our Lady in Her words is already implicitly contained symbolically in the vision. The elderly German priest, Ratzinger’s long-time person-al friend, took note of the fact that when this vision of the Third Secret was published it

The Fatima Crusader 10 May 2009May 200911 The Fatima Crusader did not contain those things, those elements of the Third Secret that Cardinal Ratzinger had revealed to him nearly ten years earlier. The German priest — Father Döllinger — told me that his question was burning in his mind on the day he concelebrated with Cardinal Ratzinger. Father Döllinger said to me, “I con-fronted Cardinal Ratzinger to his face.” And of course he asked Cardinal Ratzinger, “how can this be the entire Third Secret? Remember what you told me before?” Cardinal Ratzinger was cornered. He didn’t know what to say and so he blurted out to his friend in German, “Wirklich gebt das der etwas” which means “really there is something more there,” meaning there is something more in the Third Secret. The Cardinal stated this quite plainly.

I have tracked down the original article, here. Christopher A. Ferrara refers to this interview in his commentary on the events of 2016, here.

The Fatima Crusader, on its FaceBook page, in on May 17, 2016, reported Father Kramer’s more detailed testimony thus:

STATEMENT FROM FATHER PAUL KRAMER
Regarding the Recent Confirmation by Fr. Ingo Döllinger

<< Third Secret of Fatima Still Mainly Concealed; Warns Against an Evil Council and Changes in the Liturgy >>

“Fr. Ingo Döllinger is a several decades long close personal friend of Pope Benedict XVI. Cardinal Ratzinger told Dr. Döllinger around 1991 that the 3rd Secret speaks of an ‘evil council,’ and warned against changing and adulterating the liturgy of the Mass — literally against adding extraneous elements into the liturgy (which is exactly what Bugnini & Co. did by adding Protestant elements into the liturgy).

“The Secret, according to Döllinger, also speaks negatively about the Conciliar popes, according to what Ratzinger told Döllinger — comparing one pope to a chameleon, another to a serpent, etc.

“Dr. Döllinger spoke not only to me and Joseph Cain on what Ratzinger had told him, but he related even more details to the young clerics in the seminary of Anapolis (Brazil), where he had been rector. I myself and Joseph have spoken not only with Döllinger, but also with the priests and deacons in Brazil who had heard Dr. Döllinger relate to them the details of the Secret that had been told to him personally by Cardinal Ratzinger around 1991.

“After the publication of the ‘bishop in white’ vision of the 3rd Secret, Döllinger noticed that the details of the Secret that Ratzinger had revealed to him nearly a decade earlier were not in the ‘bishop in white’ version of the secret. When Döllinger had his next opportunity to meet with Cardinal Ratzinger (after a concelebrated Mass), Döllinger asked Ratzinger how it can be said that the whole Secret has been published, since the details of the Secret earlier mentioned to him by Ratzinger were conspicuously absent from the version of the Secret published by Ratzinger on 26 June 2000. Ratzinger was cornered, and therefore blurted out, ‘Wirklich giebt es da noch etwas.’ (‘Really there is more there.’) Dr. Döllinger also told Joseph and me that he had personally known (St.) Pio of Pietrelcina, and that he had made his confession to Padre Pio fifty-eight times.”

Andin 2016, Maike Hickson revived the story and started a firestorm by doing so, by quoting Father Dollinger thus, in her article at One Peter Five, published on May, 15, just two days earlier:

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.

Thus, Cardinal Ratzinger before becoming pope.

The Benedict Bot Responds

Now for the Vatican Press office response of May 21, 2016:

Several articles have appeared recently, including declarations attributed to Professor Ingo Dollinger according to which Cardinal Ratzinger, after the publication of the Third Secret of Fatima (which took place in June 2000), had confided to him that the publication was not complete.

In this regard, Pope emeritus Benedict XVI declares “never to have spoken with Professor Dollinger about Fatima”, clearly affirming that the remarks attributed to Professor Dollinger on the matter “are pure inventions, absolutely untrue”, and he confirms decisively that “the publication of the Third Secret of Fatima is complete”.

The first thing to notice is that the Benedict Bot is calling a life long friend and confidant, of impeccable public reputation, a bold face liar.  I do not know of any case in the entire personal history of Pope Benedict XVI that he calls anyone a liar, let alone a close friend. That is entirely out of character for Benedict. But not for Bergoglio and many who now rule the Vatican.

Second, the Vatican Press Office does not quote the sources of the reports they are attempted to rebut. Are they afraid that others might start analyzing the evidence?

Third, the Vatican Press Office does not say to whom Pope Benedict XVI made these recent statements, who was present, who witnesses them, nor reports their entire context, or even if they refer to his conversations with Father Dollinger, because if you notice how the quotations are spliced, important context has been left out to verify such a relation between them — even if they are authentic quotes — to Father Dollinger’s reported statements on the Third Secret.

For these three reasons, one can doubt that the statement from the Vatican Press Office is an authentic representation of anything Pope Benedict XVI said in 2016, if he said anything at all.

Finally, seeing how Archbishop Gänswein was caught in bold face lies when he denied that Pope Benedict XVI had collaborated in certain matters regarding the Book on Celibacy by Cardinal Sarah, I think we might be able to guess where the source of the Benedict Bot statements of 2016 may have come from.

+ + +

 

[simple-payment id=”5295″]

Editorials, Faith

Stoicism is not Catholicism

Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism (Photo c/o The Basics of Philosophy, click image to access)
Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism (Photo c/o The Basics of Philosophy, click image to access)

Editorial, Rome, February 15, 2015:  Stoicism was ancient pagan philosophy which taught that every excess of human emotion was evil, and that man should seek to perfect himself by the application of right reason to his affections.  Since the Stoic philosophers of ancient times taught a system of ethics similar in many things to Christianity, they were often cited by the Fathers and later writers with approbation.  But in recent centuries, some authors forgot the underlying error and departed from a sound send of human nature under the influence of the 16th century rationalists, who abandoned Christian doctrine and morals and took up once again the ancient pagan philosophers as their guides.

A common error, therefore, is found in many books which advocate “spirituality”, an error drawn from the system of the Stoics. It says that one must never allow emotions to arrive at intense levels, especially anger, which is the emotion which naturally is most disordering of right reason.

A stoic, for example, will always confess getting angry. For to him anger is an evil passion.

A Catholic, however, knows better, taking as he does Our Lord Jesus Christ as his role model of virtue.  Remembering that Christ got so angry at the avarice of those who had care for His Father’s House, the Temple of old in Jerusalem, that He went so far as to make an impromptu whip out of the rope available at hand, and used it to drive the money lenders out of the outer court of the Temple: a Catholic understands that there are things worthy of getting angry about, and that to allow such passion is not a sin, but a virtue.

This is not to say, that anger can be unjust or excessive.  It is unjust when it is directed against what is not evil or threatening; it is excessive when it exceeds the bounds of what is needful or appropriate to the evil opposed.

For this reason, it is a very good thing if a Catholic would allow himself to get angry when a Catholic bishop would use his sacred office to promote error, even as regards the natural world.  Such an error as the global-warming mania, which puts the blame on the variations of solar radiation on humans.  Everyone with any concept of physics, understands that the magnitudes of scale are so great between the variations of the output of solar radiation and any effect human activity, even of all 6-8 Billion of us, that the latter could never ever effect the human climate in any appreciable manner.  And thus the sane and impartial know that the global-warming mania is just that, a mania, a phobia: and if you look deeper, you will find that it is a phobia promoted by international socialists, who to convince those opposed to socialism to accept the socialist agenda of societal reorganization, use the phobia of climate change.

Writers, therefore, are justly angered that this is what Pope Francis is to do in his upcoming encyclical letter on the environment.

One such writer had strong words about the Pope on this issue:

It comes as no surprise. Handwriting has been on the wall along the Viale Vaticano from the get-go. At the beginning of his pontificate, Francis revealed himself to be fastidiously attuned to image. He refused to give communion in public ceremonies lest he be photographed giving the sacrament to the wrong kind of sinner. So, when he agreed to pose between two well-known environmental activists and brandish an anti-fracking T-shirt, we believed what we saw.

It was a portentous image. Press toads hopped to their keyboards to correct the evidence of our lying eyes. Francis was neither for nor against fracking, you see. Nothing of the sort. He was simply using a photo-op to assert blameless solidarity with the victims of ecological injustice. (Both a decisive definition of such injustice and its particular victims went unspecified.)

If that restyling were true, then the more fool Francis. But Francis is not a fool. He is an ideologue and a meddlesome egoist. His clumsy intrusion into the Middle East and covert collusion with Obama over Cuba makes that clear. Megalomania sends him galloping into geopolitical—and now meteorological—thickets, sacralizing politics and bending theology to premature, intemperate policy endorsements.

Later this year, Francis will take his sandwich board to the United Nations General Assembly, that beacon of progress toward the Kingdom. Next will come a summit of world religions—a sort of Green Assisi—organized to lend moral luster to an upcoming confederacy of world improvers in Paris. In the words of Bishop Marcelo Sorondo, chancellor of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Francis means “to make all people aware of the state of our climate and the tragedy of social exclusion.”

There is a muddle for you. The bishop asserts a causal relation between two undefined, imprecise phenomena. His phrasing is a sober-sounding rhetorical dodge that eludes argument because the meaning is indeterminable. Ambiguity, like nonsense, is irrefutable. What caliber of scientist speaks this way?

(Source: First Things, Francis & Political Illusion, by Maureen Mullarkey )

Steve Skojec, over at OnePeterFive, upon reading these words, makes a very good observation:

Mullarkey’s is only the latest thrust in a battle that has been going on for the better part of the Francis papacy. This, sadly, is what it looks like when you “make a mess” in the Church – division, bitterness, and venom. Amidst the salvos back and forth between the various camps, however, thinking Catholics are faced with a growing suspicion that the powers in Rome see the Church differently than the rest of us. Rather than an institution founded by Christ to convert the world and bring about the salvation of souls, they seem to prefer that she more closely resemble a trendy social-issues NGO. As our own Eric Sammons wrote last week, what the Church has been doing for the past half century hasn’t worked; the practice of the faith is decimated, leaving only a tiny minority of Catholics embracing their religion in an orthodox fashion. The impression that this is no accident is only enhanced when hand-picked papal advisers support communist, pro-abortion, and pro-homosexual institutions, or simply foment heresy in the pope’s name. Making matters worse, the Extraordinary Synod on Marriage and Family produced a public work so deviant from Catholic teaching that it caused one bishop to declare it “the first time in Church history that such a heterodox text was actually published as a document of an official meeting of Catholic bishops under the guidance of a pope” and something that “will remain for the future generations and for the historians a black mark which has stained the honour of the Apostolic See.”

(Source:  This is What a Mess Looks like)

Mr. Skojec goes on to say that both sides in the Church, which is dividing between the liberal and conservative camps, need to tone down the rhetoric and use less angry words.  While I agree that unjust anger and excessive anger, even in just things, is morally wrong, I disagree with Mr. Skojec when he suggests that both sides need to respond similarly.

For this reason:  Stoicism is not Catholicism.