In a recent interview, establishment Catholics make their latest in a long line of dishonest, ham-fisted, and feeble attempts, which have originated from the Vatican on down, to obscure and withhold key truths about the Third Secret of Fatima.<\/p>\n
During John Paul II\u2019s reign, an apparently truncated, dubious version of the Third Secret was released which has aroused immediate suspicion and controversy ever since.\u00a0 Letters and communications from the late visionary, Sr. Lucia, have been scrutinized.\u00a0 Papal pronouncements and accounts of conflicting Vatican prelates have been analyzed. Through the work of the late Fr. Nicholas Gruner and Chris Ferrara at the Fatima Center, and in more recent years, the prescient Vaticanista, Antonio Socci, the inconsistencies and questions surrounding the Third Secret of Fatima have continued to mount, despite official efforts to put them to rest.<\/p>\n
In a stunning reversal this past May, Cardinal Burke called for the Pope to consecrate Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary regardless of the fact that the Vatican has maintained for years that it had already been performed. \u00a0Perhaps that is why, at the respectable Catholic World Report<\/a> last week, Kevin Symonds uses the occasion of his new book, On the Third Part of the Secret of Fatima, <\/em>to level what amounts to a high-sounding, arrogant, and empty smear of Fr. Gruner, Ferrara, Socci, and the careful work of many other experts over these past few decades.<\/p>\n Does the Vatican fear a growing awareness that they have been irresponsible regarding Our Lady\u2019s requests?\u00a0 Today, Chris Ferrara was kind enough to respond to our questions:<\/p>\n \u00a0***<\/strong><\/p>\n Canon 212:<\/strong> In an interview at the Catholic World Report, Kevin J. Symonds makes an attempt to debunk Fatima \u2018conspiracy theories\u2019.\u00a0\u00a0 Symonds says his book is written to address the work of Abb\u00e9 Georges de Nantes, Fr. Nicholas Gruner, and Antonio Socci on the Third Secret, calling it \u201can attempt at providing a critical assessment of some contentious points that are generally common to all three.\u201d\u00a0 They bring you in later as a \u2018Fatima controversialist.\u2019\u00a0 \u00a0What is your view of the book?<\/p>\n CF:\u00a0 <\/strong>That Symonds is very good at puffery.\u00a0 His \u201cattempt a providing a critical assessment\u201d makes almost no effort to address, much less actually refute, the overwhelming evidence for the existence of a text in which the Blessed Virgin explains the meaning and historical context of the enigmatic vision of a \u201cBishop dressed in White\u201d who is executed on a hill outside a devastated city filled with the dead.<\/p>\n I have read the Kindle edition of the book from digital cover to digital cover and, having expected much more, was amazed at how little of substance Symonds has to say on the controversy.\u00a0 Hundreds of pages, including appendices and footnotes, dwell on a few peripheral points while the substance of the case, which my own book summarizes here<\/a>, is never addressed.<\/p>\n Canon 212:<\/strong> Did you work closely with Fr. Gruner over the years?<\/p>\n CF:\u00a0 <\/strong>To say the least.\u00a0 I daresay I was as close to him as any person outside his immediate family.\u00a0 His death was devastating to me.\u00a0 During the gathering to commemorate his life and work, I \u201clost it\u201d during my remembrance of him and was led, weeping, away from the stage.<\/p>\n Canon 212:\u00a0 <\/strong>Symonds says that, \u201cliterature from Father Gruner and the Abb\u00e9 de Nantes struck me as being an enclosed circle that was given credibility by the journalistic clout of Antonio Socci.\u201d This characterization reminds me of Pope Francis\u2019s dreaded \u201cclosed in\u201d Catholics.\u00a0 Why does Symonds find it necessary to smear his scholarly opponents as a small group of wild-eyed ranters?<\/p>\n CF:<\/strong>\u00a0 Because he has no case.\u00a0 Thus, he employs the tried-and-true demagogic tactic of insults and demonization.\u00a0 Symonds poses as a sober and objective scholar of the controversy but is in fact a shameless apologist for the Vatican account of the Secret which, to quote Antonio Socci, \u201cleaks water from every part.\u201d<\/p>\n Let me give you one very telling example of how this self-promoting \u201cFatima scholar\u201d is actually a Fatima cover-up artist. During my recent debate with Symonds, I confronted him repeatedly with the undisputed existence of an envelope containing a text pertaining to the Secret on which Msgr. Loris Capovilla, personal secretary to John XXIII, wrote his own name, the name of the cardinals who had read its contents, and the dictation of Pope John that he would leave the contents to his successors to judge, after which Pope John suppressed the Secret rather than revealing it in 1960 as the Catholic world expected.<\/p>\n That envelope, whose contents were originally kept in a wooden safe in the papal apartment during the reign of Pius XII, was later found in a writing desk in Pope John\u2019s bed chamber called Barbarigo (because it was the very desk of Saint Gregorio Barbarigo).\u00a0 The vision published in 2000, on other hand, was maintained in what was then the Holy Office archive.\u00a0 The \u201cCapovilla envelope\u201d was reopened by Paul VI, after Capovilla informed him of its location in the Barbarigo desk, and then resealed after Paul, like his predecessor, declined to reveal the contents.<\/p>\n The Capovilla envelope has never been produced. Unable to explain its non-production during the debate, Mr. Symonds finally declared to the audience that it doesn\u2019t exist! But it most certainly does exist, as confirmed in detail by Capovilla during a televised interview presented by none other than Cardinal Bertone, Sodano\u2019s successor as Vatican Secretary of State, with Capovilla even specifying the number of drawers in the Barbarigo desk where the envelope was kept. I discuss these facts here<\/a>.<\/p>\n What sort of \u201cFatima scholar\u201d denies the existence of evidence whose existence is undeniable?<\/p>\n Canon 212:\u00a0 <\/strong>Symonds claims to have debunked much of the \u2018circumstantial evidence\u2019 that Fatima conspiracy theorists have been using.<\/p>\n CF:<\/strong>\u00a0 But this is laughable.\u00a0 He has debunked nothing. Nor does his interview with CWR give the least indication of what he has \u201cdebunked.\u201d It\u2019s all puffery.\u00a0 Symonds has a few opinions on what he<\/em> thinks some<\/em> of the evidence means, and he calls for \u201cfurther study.\u201d That\u2019s it!\u00a0 Yet the neo-Catholic commentariat now hails him as the great debunker of \u201cFatima conspiracy theories.\u201d<\/p>\n Symonds has only a shallow grasp of this deeply fact-intensive controversy.\u00a0 His book and the interview do not even begin to address the mountain of evidence summarized in my book,\u00a0 which the Fatima Center has made available for free online<\/a>, and which, by the way, was endorsed by no less than the late papal nuncio to the United States, Archbishop Pietro Sambi<\/a>.<\/p>\n As Archbishop Sambi said to Robert Moynihan concerning my book: \u201cAnd in the end, we are all after the truth, aren\u2019t we?\u00a0The truth is the important thing…\u201d Not, apparently, for Symonds.<\/p>\n Canon 212:\u00a0 <\/strong>Symonds refers to a 2013 biography by the Carmelites of the convent of St. Teresa in Coimbra. What do you make of the biography\u2019s account that Sr. Lucia was advised to only reveal part of the third secret, or that she had held back out of a sense of reluctance?<\/p>\n CF:\u00a0 <\/strong>The 2013 biography is one of several smoking guns that reveal the existence of an explanation of the published vision by the Blessed Virgin herself.\u00a0 Even Symonds concedes this, yet he contends, ludicrously, that the Mother of God did not wish us to have her explanation.\u00a0 No, she left behind a riddle to be decoded by Cardinal Sodano and his ridiculous \u201cinterpretation\u201d that the vision of a Pope being executed outside a devastated city filled with the dead signifies John Paul II not<\/em> being killed by a lone assassin in the intact City of Rome.\u00a0 Give me a break.<\/p>\n Canon 212:<\/strong> In your work, did Sr. Lucia strike you as the type to withhold a supernatural message from the Mother of God out of a caution or doubt?<\/p>\n CF:\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong>That question answers itself.\u00a0 The claim is laughable.<\/p>\n Canon 212:<\/strong> Symonds calls Fr. Gruner\u2019s case regarding the Third Secret, \u201carguments made for sensational propaganda of scandal and Vatican intrigue, real cloak-and-dagger stuff, that played upon the sympathies of Catholics\u2026\u201d Is this fair?<\/p>\n CF:<\/strong>\u00a0 These are the lazy insults of a man without a serious argument, playing to the grandstand.<\/p>\n Canon 212:<\/strong> Symonds characterizes your thinking this way: \u201cChris prefers the hermeneutic of suspicion and conspiracy with the rhetoric of a lawyer. A theological lens would serve him better.\u201d\u00a0 Your comment?<\/p>\n CF:\u00a0 <\/strong>More insults in place of reasoned debate.\u00a0 But, being a lawyer, I am used to this cheap shot.\u00a0 When you are debating someone without an argument, he can always denounce you for being a lawyer.\u00a0 Boo. Hiss. That is about the level of Symonds\u2019s \u201cFatima scholarship.\u201d<\/p>\n Canon 212:<\/strong> Have you been in an adversarial posture with the Holy See on Fatima for so long that you have lost objectivity, as Symonds maintains?\u00a0 Would an extended agreeable posture clear your mind?<\/p>\n CF:\u00a0 <\/strong>Having no real reply to the evidence, Symonds piles on the insults, this time by way of amateur psychoanalysis.\u00a0 The papal nuncio to the United States praised my book because it presents a vast quantity of evidence in an orderly and reasonable way.\u00a0 It is Symonds who lacks objectivity, as we see with his absurd attempt to deny the existence of the undeniably existent Capovilla envelope.<\/p>\n Canon 212:<\/strong> Symonds maintains that when, in 2010, Pope Benedict stated the Third Secret concerns \u201crealities involving the future of the Church, which are gradually taking shape and becoming evident<\/em>\u2026 sufferings of the Church [that] come precisely from within the Church, from the sin existing within the Church,\u201d which \u201cis something that we have always known, but today we are seeing it in a really terrifying way<\/em>\u201d he really meant only events in the 20th<\/sup> century. Your comment?<\/p>\n CF:<\/strong>\u00a0 Just as the Capovilla envelope \u201cdoesn\u2019t exist\u201d because Symonds doesn\u2019t wish it to exist, the words \u201ctoday\u201d and \u201cfuture realities\u201d mean, for him, the past. Any nonsensical claim will do when it comes to defending the Vatican\u2019s account at all costs\u2014while posing as an objective \u201cFatima scholar.\u201d<\/p>\n Canon 212:<\/strong> What do you make of the previously unknown, undated letter from Sr. Lucia to Paul VI?\u00a0 Does it reflect your understanding of the Third Secret? Do you doubt its authenticity?<\/p>\n CF:<\/strong>\u00a0 Another bit of unintended humor from Symonds. He trumpets this letter to Pope Paul, warning of a \u201cdiabolical revolt\u201d in the Church, as if it were some breakthrough discovery by him.\u00a0 For goodness sake, it was on public display in the Sister Lucia museum in Coimbra,<\/em> and he got to see only the one page on display.<\/p>\n I have no reason to doubt its authenticity. I haven\u2019t even seen it. But then it only says what Sister Lucia said to numerous others in oral and written remarks.\u00a0 Moreover, here is yet another bit of evidence for the existence of a text in which Our Lady predicts this \u201cdiabolical revolt,\u201d of which there is no indication whatsoever in the vision of \u201cthe Bishop dressed in White\u201d standing alone.<\/p>\n Canon 212:<\/strong> In studying Fatima, Symonds calls for \u201chumility and openness to God\u2019s grace, whereas sensationalism stokes the very distrust of the Church that runs absolutely contrary to the message of Fatima.\u201d<\/p>\n CF:\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong>It is Symonds who indulges in sensationalism, presenting himself as the voice of reason in this controversy, contributing nothing of real substance to the debate, while hurling gratuitous insults at people who have done years of serious work he clearly has not taken the trouble to understand in any detail much less \u201cdebunk.\u201d \u00a0Read his insult-laden interview with CWR and decide for yourself if it evinces \u201chumility.\u201d\u00a0 It is always wise to be wary of people who publicly proclaim that other people need to be humble.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In a recent interview, establishment Catholics make their latest in a long line of dishonest, ham-fisted, and feeble attempts, which have originated from the Vatican on down, to obscure and withhold key truths about the Third Secret of Fatima. During John Paul II\u2019s reign, an apparently truncated, dubious version of the Third Secret was released …<\/span> Read More →<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[748,2946,2947,912,2944,873,2364,918,2932,2949,1419,2945,2943,2948],"class_list":["post-11414","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-antonio-socci","tag-bishop-dressed-in-white","tag-capovilla","tag-cardinal-burke","tag-catholic-world-report","tag-chris-ferrara","tag-consecration-of-russia","tag-fatima","tag-fatima-conspiracy","tag-fatima-letter","tag-fatima-third-secret","tag-fr-nicholas-gruner","tag-kevin-j-symonds","tag-sister-lucia"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11414","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11414"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11414\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11429,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11414\/revisions\/11429"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11414"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11414"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stumblingblock.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11414"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}