November
2003
Review Article
AMCHURCH COMES OUT: THE U.S. BISHOPS, PEDOPHILE SCANDALS AND THE HOMOSEXUAL AGENDA by Paul A. Likoudis, Roman Catholic Faithful, Illinois, 2002. Hardback, 250pp. $24.95 from Roman Catholic Faithful, PO Box 109, Petersburg, IL 62675 U.S.A. Fax: 217-632-7054. Or order online at www.rcf.org/book.htm.
THE DEVIL'S FINAL BATTLE compiled and edited by Father Paul Kramer, Good Counsel Publications, 2002. Paperback, 294pp. $14.95 ($22.50 Canada) from The Missionary Association, ph: 1-800-954-8737, www.devilsfinalbattle.com. Also available for '8.95 from Carmel Books, PO Box 40, Wellington, Somerset TA21 8WG Tel/Fax: 01823 664 751 (Mon-Fri 9.30am-12.30pm).
MICHAEL McGRADE
Last January, in the lead up to the Iraq war, Sir David Frost was greasing up to the British Prime Minister on national television during one of those inconsequential one to one's he has made his own. I was slipping into a pap-induced torpor when, suddenly, in the spirit of big-man fraternity, with all the thespian gravitas he could muster, the old bootlicker asked his embattled mate: "Do you think you're dealing with a man who's mad or bad?" Tony looked at Toady, and concluded: "Bad, certainly."
This brief exchange momentarily roused me. After years of tracking the shameful conduct of Western prelates, comparisons between the Iraqi dictator and our latter-day prince bishops had naturally come to mind. If Saddam Hussein was "bad," what of them? "Do not be afraid of those who can kill the body, and after that can do no more," Christ told His disciples. "I will tell you who it is you must fear; fear him who has power not only to kill but to cast a man into hell; him you must fear indeed." Hussein had ruined his country to satisfy his megalomania, through a despotic reign built on terror and carnage; the bishops had wrecked the Church to suit their collective, egotistical Modernist disorder, through a liberal tyranny engendering spiritual desolation, apostasy and lost souls. Arrogant and insouciant, systematic and ruthless in perpetrating their destructive agendas, there was no mitigating 'madness' about either party. Ah, for the righteous satisfaction, I mused, of leaning across that studio coffee table, looking Frostie cold in the eye and declaring on national prime time that, yes, Saddam was "bad, certainly," but in terms of the only war that matters, the salvific struggle with Satan for immortal souls, Catholic bishops of the Latin Rite were "worse, still!"
Evil Hegemony
Anyone who doubts it for a moment simply hasn't been paying attention. Foolishly and to the detriment of Holy Mother Church, they have not kept themselves informed via faithful counter-revolutionary journals like Christian Order which for decades, along with orthodox contemporaries elsewhere, has documented the Modernist infiltration and devastation. And they most certainly haven't been reading The Wanderer, America's renowned independent weekly, whose tireless and inspirational news editor Paul Likoudis has been filing the most extraordinarily shocking reports of Modernist activities and events, week in and week out, for over a dozen years.
But never mind. With the publication of Amchurch Comes Out, Likoudis has now enabled everyone, not just those still living in wilful ignorance, to really understand the height, depth and breadth of the ecclesiastical 'badness' - the institutionalised evil - behind the endless and interrelated catechetical/liturgical/sexual scandals and cover-ups which have come to define the Catholic crisis. Linking together and updating many of his key exposes of the 1990s detailing episcopal connivance in the systematic corruption of American souls, Likoudis effectively retraces the causal route to our present unholy pass - where, as the admirable Father Joseph Wilson states in his Foreword, "the unacceptable has become desirable, the unimaginable has become reality, the perverted has become the norm."
The common denominator underlying this descent to apostasy, perversion and criminality as documented in page after page of engrossing, mind-numbing information and case-studies, is "the deeply entrenched, influential, dissident faction" within the leadership of the Church in America – "among the bishops, the heads of Religious orders, college and university administrators, chancery officials, prominent theologians and seminary faculty." Likoudis labels them "Amchurch." Their treacherous mindset is so universally mirrored, however, that we could just as easily call them "Britchurch" or "Auschurch" or "Eirechurch," depending on the nation concerned. Whatever their national stripe, these entrenched Judas-cliques throughout the Western Church have frustrated, stifled, stonewalled and buried Vatican correctives and orthodox initiatives for decades, while using ecclesiastical offices, funds and resources to pursue their agenda of destroying the Church from within and remaking Her in their own licentious image.
Diabolical Logic
The seamless slide from dissidence to debauchery courses through the book. By introducing heretical catechesis and rejecting the natural moral law advanced by Humanae Vitae; replacing the Faith with self-centred psycho-babble and PC posturing; imposing pornographic classroom sex-ed while presenting abortion and sodomy as lifestyle choices – in these and so many associated ways, Amchurch has set about deconstructing Catholic doctrinal and moral teachings while "successfully advancing a sexual liberation agenda that will not end until every social stigma attached to any sexual activity, no matter how bizarre, has been erased." A diabolical programme, to be sure. Yet eminently logical. As a lay theologian wrote to Father Wilson:
"Years of watching the situation carefully have convinced me that it really is all about sexual autonomy. People don't turn institutions upside down because they'd rather hear the Mass in English. You can do that without destroying buildings and the structure of religious life, and catechesis. You turn institutions upside down to support a 'complete change in teleological purpose' in your life – and eliminate unpleasant reminders that maybe your new purpose, sexual autonomy, isn't such a great idea."
There is, in other words, for those who still haven't cottoned on, nothing remotely high-minded about the post-conciliar Modernist rebellion. When all is said and done, it reduces to a debauched grab for Power, Sex and Money. "Well-protected by their peers in the police, the courts, legislatures and the media," a network of homosexuals and fellow-travellers within the US ecclesiastical bureaucracy has pursued these ends with messianic zeal in their efforts to sodomise the Church in America and especially Catholic schoolchildren. (Recent US polls indicate that 80% of Catholic high school seniors believe homosexuals should have the "right" to "marry"!)
Depraved Prelates
As in England, the power of episcopal patronage enables Amchurch to dismiss and crush any parental opposition to their unspeakable plans. Indeed, CO readers everywhere will feel an overpowering sense of déjà vu as again and again Likoudis reveals the brazen complicity of a hopelessly corrupt and dysfunctional Catholic hierarchy in this homosexual push. To mention just a few examples:
' Cardinal Hickey of Washington and Bishop Boland of Kansas City are cited as "giving public honours to homosexual priests."
' Bishop Moeddel of Cincinnati likes "explaining how he has tried to convince all principals of Catholic schools in his archdiocese to establish youth support groups for gays and lesbians."
' Bishop Gumbleton of Detroit openly advocates a change in Catholic teaching on homosexuality and opines that "How to be celibate and to be gay at the same time, and how to be celibate and heterosexual at the same time, that's what we were never really taught how to do."
' Bishop Clarke of Rochester "hosted a special, highly-publicized Mass for 'gays, lesbians and bisexuals' at Sacred Heart Cathedral [where] he not only affirmed the 'lifestyles' of gays and lesbians, saying they had much to teach the wider Church, but he delivered a stinging rebuke to faithful Catholics and admonished them to 'update' themselves on contemporary biblical scholarship." When the local chapter of the Catholic Physicians Guild publicly accused him of dissenting from Church teaching on homosexuality, he disciplined the association by prohibiting them from "distributing any teaching material of any sort of a theological or moral issue" without his "explicit permission."
' Cardinal Mahoney of Los Angeles "welcomed 170 Catholic homosexual activists to a conference in Long Beach hosted by the National Association of Catholic Diocesan Lesbian and Gay Ministries (NACDLGM), the high point of which was a burlesque performed by Fr. Peter Liuzzi, O.Carm, his top 'minister' to the lesbian and gay community, [who] pretended to bless attendees with puppy urine, and then simulated a strip show, tossing his clerical collar into the crowd."
' The US bishops collectively have selected "Father Jim Gill, SJ – the priest and psychiatrist who counseled Fr. Denis (now Denise) Brennan into having a sex change operation – to train sex counselors to work in seminaries."
It was such as these who oversaw the production of the notorious 1997 Pastoral Letter Always Our Children: "a milestone for the sexual revolutionaries in the U.S. hierarchy and their efficient operatives in the bureaucracy, the culmination of their decades-long campaign to promote homosexuality and change Catholic attitudes towards perversion, an agenda that opened with the 'new catechetics' in the very early 1960s, when unsuspecting Catholic school children would be groomed to be participants in a sexual revolution few knew was coming." Released by a Committee of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, a chapter is given over to exposing the movers and shakers behind this pro-homosexual Pastoral, which makes a mockery of Church teaching by failing to mention sin and not counselling against involvement in same-sex relationships. One decent bishop commented that it's hasty release before the full body of bishops had a chance to discuss it was "disgusting – typical of the criminal activity they [Amchurch] engage in."
This episcopally depraved and, indeed, "criminal" attitude was embodied in the five American bishops who resigned in the 1990s amidst allegations of paedophilia, whose life and times along with other wicked perverts are related in the chapter "Bishops in Trouble" (the fiendish Bishop Ferrario of Honolulu, who died of AIDS, has a defining chapter to himself). In this context, one can comprehend the episcopal protection afforded dissolute groups like the aforementioned NACDLGM and readily believe that their agenda, as Likoudis states:
… is nothing but institutionalised pedophilia: the targeting of those weak and dysfunctional dioceses headed by ineffectual or functionally absent-or-abdicated bishops which are dominated by radical feminist nuns, priests, and lay bureaucrats who leave defenseless the Catholic children in parishes, schools and families.
To extend the analogy of a pedophiliac syndrome in Amchurch, just as a pedophile has to deceive or seduce a parent, and frequently uses pornography and small gifts to groom his child victims to accept his sexual molestations, so the institutional pedophile desensitizes individuals through institutionally imposed K-12 sex education programs in schools and catechetical programs, leaving them easy prey for a perverse movement whose motto is "Recruit, Recruit, Recruit" or "sex before eight or it's too late." (Most chilling is this motto-borrowing from NAMBLA, the North American Man Boy Love Association; NAMBLA's sole mission is to advocate the legalization and acceptance of grown men having sex with young boys.)
The 'Godfather'
Likoudis suggests that it was "between 1957 and 1966 that homosexuals, pedophiles and other perverse persons in the priesthood rose to prominence in the Church, certainly in the United States and Canada, and began carefully plotting and promoting a sexual liberation agenda that would take Catholics by surprise." Central to understanding all of this is the co-ordinating role of the late Cardinal Joseph Bernadin of Chicago, the 'godfather' of these morally dissolute Amchurch prelates and "trusted ally of all those various social, political and cultural forces promoting sexual libertinism."
Universally revered by Modernist icons like Archbishop Rembert Weakland and Cardinal Basil Hume, some of Bernadin's best friends were among the most depraved clerical abusers in America. In one of the many hushed up legal cases involving this sinister figure, "seminarians in Winona, Minnesota, had accused Bernadin and three other bishops of participating in sexual/satanic rituals at the seminary. Among the facts that the plaintiffs in that case marshaled for their suit: Bernadin was frequently accompanied by Steven Cook." A former seminarian, Steven Cook had accused Cincinnati priest Ellis Harsham "of numerous coercive sexual acts against him [in the mid-70s], and then delivering him to Bernadin, then archbishop of Cincinnati, for the same purposes." Conveniently for Bernadin, this case was also dropped and he spun an international media image of the defamed bishop mercifully forgiving his troubled accuser. But Cook never retracted his charges or said they were inaccurate. The subsequently revealed and separate Winona seminary accusations support the truth of his testimony.
The mutual protection and episcopal elevation of priests within this inner sanctum - "Bernadin's Boys" - explains much about the present Amchurch hegemony and the underlying malevolence of the abuse saga: involving bishops, archbishops and cardinals recruiting homosexual priests, repeatedly sheltering clerical sexual predators in Catholic parishes, moving them from diocese to diocese and covering up their crimes.
Amchurch Opportunists
Lest anyone think that after the media frenzy of the past few years the worst is behind us, the author indicates that Amchurch shows no sign of slowing down. In fact, they have used the abuse scandals to their own advantage, to "demoralize faithful Catholics and deconstruct the traditional understanding and practice of the Faith. […] [I]n the 15 years since I reported on my first sexual abuse case in the priesthood," he writes, "sexual scandals have become more egregious, the legal tactics more bare-knuckled, the payoffs larger, while Amchurch's leaders only accelerate their educational agenda to advance the cause of sexual liberation."
Dissident Call to Action groups like "Voice of the Faithful" have also emerged to take advantage of lay outrage, passing themselves off as faithful advisors to the US bishops but ignoring the key issue of homosexual abuse of children and looking to "democratise" the structures of the Church for their own liberal ends. And while the bishops continue to court both these Modernists and the very Kinseyan secular humanists who fuelled clerical sexual abuse in the first place [see "Sue the 'Experts'" by Paul Likoudis, CO, October 2002], orthodox Catholic leaders still struggle to get a hearing from Shepherds who, consciously or not, to greater or lesser degrees, have given up their hearts and minds to Liberalism.
Insights and Solutions
In the final chapter "Trying to Make sense of it All" and the "Afterword", Likoudis provides many important insights, including a fascinating summary of the life and work of Swiss psychologist and anti-Catholic bigot Carl Jung. The devastating impact of his theories and concepts, which have achieved "overwhelming dominance in Catholic educational and formational institutions," cannot be exaggerated. And when this Jungianisation is allied with the pervasive Liberalism which has penetrated and enveloped the Church, both the moral confusion of Catholics in general and homosexual and paedophiliac abuse among the clergy in particular become less perplexing. Likoudis quotes from the English Bishops' superb Pastoral Letter of December 1899, "The Church and Liberal Catholicism," which stated presciently that when Liberalism infects the Catholic Church:
"Faith becomes tainted, moral virtue becomes relaxed, and, in the process of time, Liberalism in religion invades the whole mind until, like their leaders, many of the faithful are thought to be alive when they are dead."
Within a century, this spiritual death has all but snuffed out the Faith in their beloved England.
Likoudis ends by listing several principal actions required for reform, as suggested by Father Paul Shaughnessy, S.J., in his landmark article "The Gay Priest Problem" published in the November 2000 Catholic World Report. They include:
' "an explicit policy" that will forbid homosexuals from entering seminaries;
' restoring simplicity to priestly life ("Physical comfort is the oxygen that feeds the fires of homosexual indulgence");
' the laity demanding high standards from their priests, "starting with the simple demand that the parish priest always appear in his clericals when he is outside the rectory," and using their chequebooks "as a carrot and stick… Don't be silent partners in corruption."
But before all of the above, it is proposed first and foremost that Rome must "require heads on platters"! While at the same time, no man should be named a bishop "unless he has a track record as a head-cracker and has cleaned up problems of sexual wrongdoing, by dismissing gay seminarians or seminary faculty, for example, or by getting rid of miscreants at a university chaplaincy."
Fatima
Which takes us back to temporal and spiritual dictators. Well might the Holy Father and the Vatican wring their hands and issue endless statements about Iraq (at last count John Paul alone had issued 75!): it's a convenient distraction from the real war – the one they have steadfastly refused to wage against Modernist weapons of Mass destruction being wielded by apostate bishops who are slaughtering souls the world over. For if Amchurch Comes Out confirms in grim detail what our experience and instincts have always told us - that the clerical abuse problem is actually a homosexual network problem - ultimately, like every serious analysis of our chronic condition written in the past 35 years, it all reduces to an episcopal problem: "…the principal reason why the action necessary to solve the gay problem won't be taken," wrote Father Shaughnessy in Catholic World Report, "is that the episcopacy in the United States is corrupt (…) [it] has lost the capacity to do its own housecleaning." Ditto for England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Germany, Holland, Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand et.al.
If corrupt Western episcopates have 'lost the capacity to clean house,' however, it is simply because Rome is equally incapacitated. Hence this universal revolt against Catholic doctrine and morality - publicly enacted in the sort of episcopally-sanctioned horrors recorded in Amchurch Comes Out - has been allowed to fester unhindered for more than a generation. As Father Wilson writes in his Foreword, it is "a tragedy which has been wholly unnecessary and, frankly, one which could certainly have been addressed many times over. That it has not been addressed," he concludes, "well, I cannot say that this is inexplicable, but the explanations which suggest themselves are very dark."
The authors of The Devil's Final Battle concur with that dual assessment: dark forces preventing remedial action. But they consider the problem and solution at a far more elemental level. The whole sordid postconciliar mess within the Church, as well as temporal strife like 9/11 and the Iraq war, could have been easily avoided, they postulate, if only the Pope had consecrated Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, as specifically requested by Our Lady at Fatima in 1917. This consecration (in conjunction with the associated request for Communions of Reparation on the first Saturday of each month) is the ultimate and exceedingly simple remedy to the present woes of both the Church and world. That it has not been undertaken, it is argued, is down to "something deeper and darker than worldly politics" and the machinations of Vatican diplomats. In other words, it is not about anything as shallow as Vatican Ostpolitik or as ludicrous as ecumenical fears of offending the Russian Orthodox Church by naming Russia as the object of the consecration. It has to do with the fact that everything Fatima stands for - belief in heaven, hell, purgatory, penance, apparitions, miracles, prophecies etc. - is a dangerous affront to the Modernist postconciliar Church promoted and sustained by the most influential Cardinals in the Vatican.
Scary Predicament
Chief among them is the all-powerful and (very) spooky arch-Modernist Secretary of State, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, who presides over every Vatican dicastery including the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, thanks to the restructuring of the Roman Curia carried out in the mid-60s by his Masonic predecessor Cardinal Jean Villot. Sodano and his liberal clique have thus sought to "close the book on Fatima as a politically incorrect expression of traditional Catholic belief." And in particular, they have conspired to conceal full disclosure of the Third Secret of Fatima because the contents of that secret "as understood in the traditional Catholic sense," contend the authors, "cannot coexist with decisions made since the Second Vatican Council, decisions which they unswervingly carry out, to change the entire orientation of the Catholic Church. This change of orientation would (if it were possible) convert the Catholic Church from a divine institution that directs its earthly activity toward the eternal salvation of souls, to a mere co-participant with human organizations in the building up of a utopian world 'brotherhood' between men of all religions or no religion at all."
The Communist-Masonic infiltration of the Church which accompanied the relentless Modernist pursuit of this consummate Masonic agenda (orchestrated by the likes of Sodano) is well summarised and superbly integrated with the history and subversion of the Fatima message.
Now, we all know that the Vatican insists that the Pope's 24 March 1984 consecration of the world to the Immaculate Heart fulfilled Our Lady's request. They also claim that the entire Third Secret was disclosed at the press conference held on 26 June, 2000, when they released a text describing a vision in which the Pope (a "bishop dressed in white") is killed by a band of soldiers who shoot him down while he is kneeling at the foot of a large wooden cross atop a hill, after having traversed a half-ruined city filled with corpses, followed by the execution of many bishops, priests and laity. It is a measure of the grave divisions, tensions and endemic mistrust in the Church today that millions upon millions of Catholics either believe the Holy See is certainly dissembling and lying on both counts or remain extremely sceptical or at least a little wary and undecided about the veracity of its claims. Even Vatican stalwart Mother Angelica publicly proclaimed her doubts on 16 May 2001, nearly a year after the above press conference. "As for the Secret," she declared on Mother Angelica Live, "well I happen to be one of those who thinks we didn't get the whole thing… There, you know, that's my opinion. Because I think it's scary."
After reading The Devil's Final Battle, I concur!
Third Secret
This work, which Father Paul Kramer and the editorial staff of The Missionary Association have deftly stitched together from "a compilation of some of the more important writings and speeches on Fatima in recent years," covers far too many aspects of the alleged Fatima cover-up and accompanying decomposition of the Western Church and the world to treat in this review. But let us look briefly at the case for doubting the full disclosure of the Third Secret, the rational basis for which might surprise many, as it did the present writer who found himself revising his facile dismissal of Third Secret conspiracy theorists.
During the 13 July 1917 apparition in the field known as the Cova da Iria, having shown the three children the terrifying vision of the damned souls in Hell, which is considered the first part of the Secret of Fatima, Our Lady confided to them this second part of the Secret, as recorded in Sr. Lucy's diaries:
You have seen hell where the souls of poor sinners go. To save them, God wishes to establish in the world devotion to My Immaculate Heart. If what I say to you is done, many souls will be saved and there will be peace. The war is going to end; but if people do not cease offending God, a worse one will break out during the reign of Pius XI. When you see a night illumined by an unknown light, know that this is the great sign given you by God that He is about to punish the world for its crimes, by means of war, famine, and persecutions against the Church and of the Holy Father.
To prevent this, I shall come to ask for the Consecration of Russia to My Immaculate Heart, and the Communion of Reparation on the First Saturdays. If my requests are heeded, Russia will be converted and there will be peace statement; if not, she will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church. The good will be martyred, the Holy Father will have much to suffer, various nations will be annihilated. In the end, My Immaculate Heart will triumph. The Holy Father will consecrate Russia to me, and she will be converted, and a period of peace will be granted to the world. In Portugal the dogma of the Faith will always be preserved etc. Do not tell this to anybody. Francisco, yes, you may tell him.
It is this phrase at the end of the first two parts: "In Portugal the dogma of the Faith will always be preserved etc." which represents the beginning of what has come to be known as the Third Secret. "The incomplete phrase, ending in 'etc.', appears in Sister Lucy's fourth memoir of the apparitions. It clearly introduces a heavenly prediction, containing further words of Our Lady not recorded, about the state of adherence to Catholic dogma in the church at large, distinguished from Portugal in particular, where the dogma of the Faith will always be preserved."
The logical inference here is that countries other than Portugal will lose the Faith. Accordingly, it has been commonly accepted that the Third Secret relates to the apostasy we are now witnessing in the Church, especially in the abhorrent form of clerical sexual abuse scandals and episcopally-sponsored perversion. Moreover, this view has been declared or suggested by many impeccable witnesses, not least by Sister Lucy herself. In a published interview with Father Fuentes on 16 December 1957, just after confirming that it was indeed through Russia that "many nations will disappear from the face of the earth" and stating that "the devil is in the mood for engaging in a decisive battle against the Blessed Virgin," she said:
"That which afflicts the Immaculate Heart of Mary and the Heart of Jesus is the fall of religious and priestly souls. The devil knows that religious and priests who fall away from their beautiful vocation drag numerous souls to hell… The devil wishes to take possession of consecrated souls. He tries to corrupt them in order to lull to sleep the souls of laypeople and thereby lead them to final impenitence."
These remarks are consistent with so many others made by Sister Lucy over the years, as in letters written in the early 1970s to two of her priest-nephews and other Religious where she referred to churchmen "fooled by false doctrine"; to a "diabolic disorientation" afflicting "so many persons who occupy places of responsibility" in the Church; to "priests and consecrated souls" who "are so deceived and misled" because "the devil has succeeded in infiltrating evil under cover of good… leading into error and deceiving souls having a heavy responsibility through the place which they occupy … They are blind men guiding other blind men."
Father Joaquin Alonso, for sixteen years the official archivist of Fatima, also deduced that the Third Secret clearly referred to dogmas becoming "obscure and even lost altogether" outside the Church in Portugal and that it was very possible that it spoke of "more concrete references to the internal struggles of Catholics or to the fall of priests and religious. Perhaps it even refers to the failures of the upper hierarchy of the Church." While in March 1990 Cardinal Oddi told an Italian journalist that the Third Secret "has nothing to do with Gorbachev. The Blessed Virgin was alerting us against apostasy in the Church." And Cardinal Ciappi, former papal theologian to Paul VI, John Paul I and John Paul II, stated in a personal communication to an Austrian Professor: "In the Third Secret it is foretold, among other things, that the great apostasy in the Church will begin at the top" (i.e. in the Vatican itself).
Then there is Pius XII's famous linking of the Fatima message to apostasy in the Church, which always bears repeating. While serving as Secretary of State under Pius XI, he said:
I am worried by the Blessed Virgin's messages to Lucy of Fatima. This persistence of Mary about the dangers which menace the Church is a divine warning against the suicide of altering the Faith, in Her liturgy, Her theology and Her soul… I hear all around me innovators who wish to dismantle the Sacred Chapel, destroy the universal flame of the Church, reject Her ornaments and make Her feel remorse for Her historical past.
Cover-up
Suffice to say that against numerous testimonies such as these, and despite the Vatican's own reference in 1960 to "the words which Our Lady confided to the children as a secret," the aforementioned vision-text released in June 2000 (based on Sister Lucy's Third Memoir), contains no words of Our Lady at all, and demotes the phrase "In Portugal the dogma of the Faith will always be preserved etc." (from the more complete Fourth Memoir) to a disregarded footnote in the rambling Vatican commentary on the vision-text. This commentary, which its authors Cardinal Ratzinger and his offsider Mgr. Bertone indicate as representing the (obviously non-binding) interpretation of Cardinal Sodano, conveniently omits any hint of the rampant apostasy in the Church, let alone its roots in high curial places, and consigns the Fatima message in general and the Third Secret in particular to the historical dustbin.
Contrary to the benign and dismissive Sodano/Ratzinger/Bertoni take, however, it is suggested in The Devil's Final Battle that the published vision might signify the end result of the catastrophic loss of faith we are experiencing: "The Pope and remaining hierarchy are being hunted down and killed outside the half-ruined city of Rome, perhaps (we can only speculate since the words of Our Lady are missing) after a nuclear holocaust. This indeed fits perfectly with Cardinal Ratzinger's admission in 1984 that the Third Secret relates to 'dangers to the faith and the life of the Christian, and therefore of the world.' On the figurative level, the corpses surrounding the Pope as he walks haltingly toward the hill where he is executed by soldiers would represent the victims of apostasy, and the half-ruined city the condition of the Church during this time of apostasy."
The immediacy and urgency of this plausible interpretation is far from the official Vatican line – the Sodano Party Line, as it were – that Fatima is now done and dusted. "The decision to make public the third part of the 'secret' of Fatima," Mgr. Bertone pontificates, "brings to an end a period of history marked by tragic human lust for power and evil." This patently ridiculous assessment of our genocidal world is made even sillier when you consider that, according to Our Lady Herself, it was the consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary which was to usher in an era of peace, not publication of the Third Secret! Cardinal Ratzinger, too, distinguished himself in this corporate effort to seek closure on Fatima by equating the Pope's escape from death in 1981 with the depiction of the dead Pope in the vision! The Cardinal also managed to misrepresent the traditionally received meanings of both devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary and the triumph of the Immaculate Heart. But perhaps most revealingly of all:
The only Fatima "authority" Cardinal Ratzinger cites is Father Edouard Dhanis, S.J., a modernist Jesuit who spent years casting doubt on the prophetic elements of the Message of Fatima concerning Russia. Father Dhanis claimed these elements of the Message were pious inventions of Sister Lucy. Father Dhanis refused to study the official Fatima archives or consult other private documents made available to him in order not to have to withdraw his false thesis. In keeping with Father Dhanis' errors, which reduce Fatima to generic piety with no prophecy of future events, Cardinal Ratzinger's portion of the commentary concludes by asserting that all that remains of the Message of Fatima is prayer and penance.
This is most curious. Not just because Fr. Dhanis is also one of the authors of the heretical Dutch Catechism(!), but in view of Cardinal Ratzinger's preference for a notorious Modernist and Fatima debunker over the testimony of Father Alonso, the scholarly archivist appointed by the Bishop of Fatima to prepare the critical and definitive study of Fatima. Fr Alonso's works, consisting of over 5,000 documents in 24 volumes and the result of 11 years work, have been almost entirely negated by the anti-Fatima brigade since their completion and preparation for the press in 1975. The first heavily edited volume was not published until 1992. The second volume, even more heavily edited, was finally released in 1999. The other 22 volumes remain unpublished to this day.
Two Texts
At this stage, readers might be surmising that the June 2000 vision-text released by the Holy See is dismissed by the authors of The Devil's Final Battle as a forgery. There is certainly plentiful evidence of forged documents, most concerning purported letters from Sister Lucy, but it is argued most persuasively and plausibly that the explanation for the wordless vision-text is due to the existence of two documents containing the Third Secret.
When, after months of unspeakable anxiety which prevented her from putting pen to paper, Sister Lucy finally wrote down the Third Secret in January 1944, at the request of Our Lady and under obedience to the Bishop of Fatima, it was done in the form of a letter which she placed in a sealed envelope. She then placed the envelope in a notebook and personally delivered it by hand to a local Bishop who in turn took it straight to the Bishop of Fatima. That the secret placed in the envelope was written on a single sheet of paper is confirmed by Sister Lucy herself and numerous others, including Cardinal Ottaviani, former Prefect of the Holy Office, who read the secret, and Bishop Vernancio, Auxiliary Bishop of Fatima, who held the envelope containing the Secret up to the light and saw that it was written on "an ordinary sheet of paper with margins on each side of three quarters of a centimetre." All are agreed that it was not very long, about 20-30 lines.
In contrast, the Vatican's vision-text is written on four sheets of paper with no margins and consists of 62 lines of text. The vision articulated in this text, it is submitted, is a "safer" part of the Third Secret which Sister Lucy wrote in the notebook, perhaps during her period of anxiety, which she sent to the Bishop together with the sealed envelope containing the concrete explanation of the vision in the words of the Virgin Herself. Many facts and factors are adduced to support this explanation for the mysterious discrepancy between the Vatican's 62 line wordless vision-text and Sister Lucy's approximately 25 line letter to the Bishop of Fatima.
For instance, since it is an established fact that the 25 line letter was transferred to the papal apartment within a month of arriving in Rome in April 1957, where it is stored in a little safe, it would seem that what was placed in the Secret Archives of the Holy Office was the 62 line vision-text (i.e. the four pages of text from Sister Lucy's notebook). This would explain why the Vatican claimed that the Pope first saw the Secret while recovering in hospital in 1981 after his shooting, while the papal spokesman stated that the Pope read the Secret within days of assuming the papacy in 1978. The apparent contradiction can only be explained by the existence of two documents: the Pope read the one-page document held in the privacy of his papal apartment soon after assuming office in 1978, and then in July 1981 read the 4-page document sent to him from the Holy Office Archives describing the vision of the "Bishop dressed in white."
It is also emphasised, however, "that one cannot discount the possibility that the text in the envelope has been lost or destroyed and that it may, in fact, never be produced."
True Colours
As an indication of precisely where the Vatican's priorities lie and the murky waters they are treading nowadays, one particular incident deserves mention. It happened right after Fatima had been "gently debunked" (as the Los Angeles Times rightly put it) at the 26 June 2000 press conference: "The very next day Mikhail Gorbachev was seated as a guest of honor between Cardinals Sodano and Silvestrini at a Vatican 'press conference.' … It was called to celebrate one of the key elements of the Church's new orientation: Ostpolitik, the policy of 'dialogue' and accommodation with Communist regimes (including Red China) that persecute the Church." And - wouldn't you know - press questions were not permitted at this press conference!
"Evidently," the authors continue, "the Vatican wanted to be sure that no one bucked the Party Line with any questions about Fatima, or why the Vatican was honoring the likes of Mikhail Gorbachev, a man who admits he is still a Leninist and whose tax-free foundations are promoting the use of abortion and contraception to eliminate four billion people from the world's population. […] Could there be a more dramatic demonstration of the fundamental opposition between the Church of all time and the Church of the Adaptation [to the times]? On June 26, 2000 Our Lady of Fatima was shown the door, Her heavenly message audaciously censored and revised by men who would dare to consign it to oblivion. Then, a day later, Mikhail Gorbachev entered the Vatican to celebrate the Church's new orientation, as implemented by the late Cardinal Cassaroli and by his successor, Cardinal Sodano."
The Consecration
If, as the book asserts, the Sodano-controlled, Ostpolitik-fixated, ecumenically-obsessed Vatican cannot be trusted to tell the truth about the Third Secret for fear of exposing themselves as major protagonists in the current apostasy, what are we to make of its claim that the 25 March 1984 consecration of the world to the Immaculate Heart has been accepted by Heaven? - a claim enforced by an instruction issued from the Vatican around 1988 (doubtless by Sodano) telling everyone to stop pestering the Holy Father about the Consecration of Russia. "An order came from Rome," recalled Fatima devotee Father Caillon, "obliging everyone to say and think: 'The Consecration is done. The Pope having done all that he can, Heaven has deigned to agree to this gesture'." Accordingly, many Fatima Apostolates which had always maintained that the Consecration had not been done suddenly changed tack and acquiesced in the Sodano Party Line.
However, all manner of Vatican obfuscation, dissembling, defamation, inconsistency and contradiction is presented to demonstrate that their compromise consecration of the "world," rather than "Russia" as Sister Lucy has always insisted, may only have been "'accepted' in the same sense as the 1942 Consecration by Pius XII, which shortened WWII even though it did not fulfill the request of Our Lady of Fatima." Might it not be that "while what was 'accepted' might confer some benefit on the world, it would not be the period of world peace that the Virgin of Fatima promised if her precise request were honored?"
The definitive response to that query would seem to be the state of the world in general. But it also turns on the fact that we have not yet seen "the total, integral conversion of Russia to the one true Church of Christ, the Catholic Church" - as Father Alonso confirmed had always been Sister Lucy's plain and simple understanding of Our Lady's promise if "Russia" was named as the object of the consecration. Many categoric and emphatic quotes are provided from Sister Lucy over the years in this regard, such as:
"What Our Lady wants is that the Pope and all the bishops in the world shall consecrate Russia to her Immaculate Heart on one special day" [interview with historian William Thomas Walsh, 15 July 1946]; "Make it known to the Holy Father that I am always awaiting the Consecration of Russia to My Immaculate Heart. Without the Consecration, Russia will not be able to convert, nor will the world have peace" [Our Lady to Sister Lucy, May 1952, ten years after Pius XII's Consecration of the world]; "In replying to your question, I will clarify: Our Lady of Fatima, in Her request, referred only to the Consecration of Russia" [handwritten letter from Sister Lucy to Father Umberto, 13 April 1980]; "In the act of offering of May 13, 1982, Russia did not appear as being the object of the consecration… From this consecration we can expect some benefits, but not the conversion of Russia" [referring to John Paul II's renewal of Pius XII's 1942 consecration, during an interview with the Papal Nuncio on 19 March 1983].
To those of little faith who find it fanciful in the extreme to envisage a simple ceremony consecrating "Russia" to the Immaculate Heart making any difference whatsoever to our troubled Church, Russia in particular or the world in general, the authors recount the miraculous outcome of the consecration of Portugal to the Immaculate Heart by the bishops of Portugal in 1931. This is such a remarkable and telling event in the context of the whole Fatima controversy, that we have reprinted the full summary details following this review.
Deadly Delay
The dreadful personal cost to the hierarchy of not carrying out the Consecration was spelt out by Our Lord Himself during August 1931 in Rianjo, Spain, where Sister Lucy was praying for the conversion of Europe, Portugal, Spain, Russia and the world. Our Lord spoke to her, indicating how her prayers consoled Him, and then issued the following prophetic rebuke and merciful promise:
"Make it known to My ministers that given they follow the example of the King of France in delaying the execution of My command, that they will follow him into misfortune. It will never be too late to have recourse to Jesus and Mary."
On 17 June 1689, the Sacred Heart of Jesus had commanded the King of France, Louis XIV, to consecrate France to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. But the King and his confessors and their successors ignored the command. One hundred years later to the day, on 17 June 1789, King Louis XVI was stripped of his power by the Third Estate and eventually executed by the Masonic revolutionaries. In this light, the shooting of the "bishop in white" in the half-destroyed city littered with corpses in the Vatican's vision-text can be seen as the massacre of Christ's "ministers," the Holy Father and bishops (along with perhaps half the human race) due to their "delaying the execution" of Our Lord's command to consecrate Russia.
Cardinals Sodano, Ratzinger & Co. also need reminding that it was not the first time Jesus had raised this matter. A few years earlier, on 13 June 1929 at the novitiate of the Dorothean Sisters in Tuy, Spain, He had already said to Sister Lucy:
"Like the King of France, they [the Pope and bishops] will repent and do it [the Consecration], but it will be late. Russia will already have spread its errors throughout the world, provoking wars and persecution against the Church; the Holy Father will have much to suffer."
In this regard, Father Kramer has said elsewhere that "Louis XVI delayed the consecration of France to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, until after he was deposed and incarcerated, and no longer in a position to be able to carry out the solemn act. He unsuccessfully attempted to comply with the Lord's request, but he was unable to do so, and he therefore suffered the tragic consequences. It seems that the pastors of the Church will come to believe and take seriously Our Lady's request for the consecration of Russia only after the massacre of the Pope and his prelates will have taken place. It will be too late for those who will have perished by the violence of the godless, but it will not be too late [as Our Lord said at Rianjo] for Heaven to intervene and save the world from annihilation through the intercession of the Immaculate Mother of God."
Conclusion
With a compelling mixture of hard facts, strong circumstantial evidence and reasoned analysis, the authors relentlessly compile their case for the prosecution. Pope Angelo I and his dictatorial Vatican cohorts - who have prevented Sister Lucy from speaking for herself, ruthlessly crushed all opposition to their Modernist agenda and provided no satisfactory answers (when they have bothered to respond at all) to a multitude of reasonable queries and objections - are charged with "a crime beyond calculation." In light of the seismic consequences of not fulfilling Our Lady's requests, the tangible sense of impending global disaster and our present ecclesiastical state as depicted in Amchurch Comes Out, it is no idle charge. As with my earlier damning comparison of Saddam and our tyrannical prince bishops, it is all about that proper supernatural perspective voiced by Bishop Amaral of Fatima, apropos the Third Secret, during a speech in Austria on 10 September 1984: "The loss of faith of a continent," he declared, "is worse than the annihilation of a nation."
Accordingly, the resignation of Angelo Sodano is called for, along with the resignations of 'conservative' conspirators Joseph Ratzinger, Castrillon Hoyos and Tarcisio Bertone. Lest this surprise anyone, bear in mind these prophetic words of Father Frederick Faber, preached at the London Oratory at Pentecost, 1861:
"We must remember that if all the manifestly good men were on one side and all the manifestly bad men were on the other, there would be no danger of anyone, least of all the elect, being deceived by lying wonders. It is the good men, once good, we must hope good still, who are to do the work of anti-christ and so sadly to crucify the Lord afresh… Bear in mind this feature of the last days, that this deceitfulness arises from good men being on the wrong side."
Among the list of "remedies to which the faithful are entitled", the authors include: the full disclosure of the Third Secret, a Vatican-led call for daily recitation of the Rosary, promotion of the Five First Saturdays, reestablishment throughout the Church of devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary and, of course, the Consecration of Russia.
Whatever the final judgement of each reader on the weight of evidence presented, if only a fraction of the information and analysis offered in The Devil's Final Battle were true (not to mention ongoing scandals like the recent Cardinal O'Brien leg-up), we would still have more than reasonable grounds to fear what is going on at HQ. Mother Angelica thinks "its scary." So do I. And so too will many more after reading this impressive, systematic review of the parallel deconstruction of Fatima and the Faith – all of which underlies the diabolic symptoms of decay recorded in Amchurch Comes Out.
But let us thank God that these complementary works are so frightening. Because at this eleventh hour, shock treatment is the last best hope for the mass of apathetic faithful; the comfort-zone Catholics snoozing like the Apostles at Gethsemane while the Body of Christ is bloodied before them, and episcopal worldlings sell out their Master yet again.