Pilgrim Pope Travels to Fatima, Invites Church to Prayer, Penance and Purification

'...attacks against the Pope or the Church do not only come from outside; rather the sufferings of the Church come from within, from the sins that exist in the Church. This too has always been known, but today we see it in a really terrifying way: the greatest persecution of the Church does not come from enemies on the outside, but is born from the sin within the church, the Church therefore has a deep need to re-learn penance, to accept purification, to learn on one hand forgiveness but also the need for justice.'

FATIMA, Portugal (Catholic Online) - During the praying of the Angelus on Sunday in Rome, just prior to his departure, Pope Benedict XVI said these words to the faithful gathered with him: "In the heart of this Marian month, I will have the joy of going in the forthcoming days to Portugal. I will visit the capital, Lisbon, and Porto, the country's second city. The principal objective of my trip will be Fatima, on the occasion of the 10th Anniversary of the Beatification of the two little shepherds, Jacinta and Francisco. "For the first time as Successor of Peter I will go to that Marian Shrine, so dear to the Venerable John Paul II. I invite everyone to accompany me on this pilgrimage, participating actively with prayer: with only one heart and one soul we invoke the intercession of the Virgin Mary for the Church, in particular for priests, and for peace in the world." The anticipation surrounding this papal pilgrimage has been focused on the need for repentance and conversion within the Church in the continuing aftermath of the sexual abuse crisis. This call to ever deepening conversion is the heart of the message of the Fatima apparition. Fr. Federico Lombardi, Press spokesman for the Vatican, held a Press Conference of May 5 in preparation for the Papal visit. In that conference he announced that Pope Benedict XVI will deliver an "intense message" when he arrives at the shrine of Our Lady of Fatima. The Pope has already begun using the pilgrimage as a vehicle for delivering a significant pastoral message at this critical time in the history of the Church. As a first installment, we present below a spontaneous response which he gave on the flight to Portugal. On May 13, 1981, the anniversary of the 1917 Fatima apparition, his predecessor, the Venerable John Paul II was shot while visiting the Shrine dedicated to the Mother of the Lord. His life was spared, miraculously. The late Pope credited the intercession of the Virgin Mary for the merciful intervention which spared his life and enabled him to continue to serve the Church until the Lord called him home on April 2, 2005. As a sign of his gratitude and devotion, Pope John Paul II asked that one of the bullets used in the attack be set in the crown of the statue of Our Lady of Fatima. The attack occurred on May 13, the  date of the most significant apparition. At the request of Pope John Paul II, then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) wrote a substantial letter concerning the theological  significance of the Fatima message for our time. While on the plane the Holy Father answered several questions from the Press Corps. In response to a question on the contemporary significance of the message of May 13, 1917 apparition of Our Lady to the three shepherd children, the Pope made some significant comments which we present in full for our global readership: *************** Q: Thank you. Now we come to Fatima, which will be the spiritual culmination of this trip. Holy Father, what meaning do the apparitions of Fatima have for us today? When you presented the Third Secret of Fatima in a press conference at the Vatican Press Office in June 2000, many of us and other colleagues asked if the message of the secret could be extended, beyond the assassination attempt against John Paul II to other sufferings of the popes. Could the context of that vision also be extended to the suffering of the church today, for the sins of the sexual abuse of minors? "First of all, I want to express my joy to go to Fatima, to pray before Our Lady of Fatima, and to experience the presence of the faith there, where from the little ones a new force of the faith was born, and which is not limited to the little ones, but has a message for the whole world and all epochs of history, and touches history in its present and illuminates this history. In 2000, during the presentation, I said there is a supernatural impulse which does not come from the individual imagination but from the reality of the Virgin Mary, from the supernatural, that impulse which enters into a subject, and is expressed according to the possibilities of the subject. "The subject is determined by his or her historic, personal, temperamental, situation. Therefore, supernatural impulse is translated according to the subject's possibilities to see, imagine or express it. But in these expressions, formed by the subject, a content is hidden, that goes beyond, goes deeper. Only in the passage of time is the true depth, that was clothed in this vision, revealed to us, only then is it possible for concrete people. "Here too, beyond this great vision of the suffering Pope, which we can initially circumscribe to John Paul II, other realities are indicated which over time will develop and become clear. Thus it is true that beyond the moment indicated in the vision, one speaks about and sees the necessity of suffering by the Church, which is focused on the person of the Pope, but the Pope stands for the church, and therefore sufferings of the Church are announced. "The Lord told us that the Church will always be suffering in various ways, up to the end of the world. The important point is that the message, the answer of Fatima, it not substantially addressed to particular devotions, but is the fundamental response: permanent conversion, penance, prayer, and the three cardinal virtues: faith, hope and charity. Here we see the true, fundamental response the Church must give, which each of us individually must give, in this situation. "In terms of what we today can discover in this message, attacks against the Pope or the Church do not only come from outside; rather the sufferings of the Church come from within, from the sins that exist in the Church. This too has always been known, but today we see it in a really terrifying way: the greatest persecution of the Church does not come from enemies on the outside, but is born from the sin within the church, the Church therefore has a deep need to re-learn penance, to accept purification, to learn on one hand forgiveness but also the need for justice. "Forgiveness is not a substitute for justice. In one word we have to re-learn these essentials: conversion, prayer, penance, and the theological virtues. That is how we respond, and we need to be realistic in expecting that evil will always attack, from within and from outside, but the forces of good are also always present, and finally the Lord is stronger than evil and the Virgin Mary is for us the visible maternal guarantee that the will of God is always the last word in history."

Start the New Year with Prayer | Light your Free Virtual Prayer Candle

---

'Help Give every Student and Teacher FREE resources for a world-class Moral Catholic Education'