Tag Archives: Prophecy

Prophecy and the Third Part of the Secret of Fatima

Bible, End Times, Mary, , ,

Tomorrow marks the 100th Anniversary of the third appearance by Our Lady to the children in Fatima, Portugal.  It was during this visit that Our Lady disclosed to the children what has become known as the “Three Secrets.”  The first two of these secrets included a vision into hell, a prediction of World War II and the spread of Communism.  The third secret remained hidden and was not disclosed until the year 2000.  At the end of the Mass of Beatification for two of the visionaries, Jacinta and Francisco Marto, Cardinal Angelo Sodano announced its release.  He mentioned that the time was ripe partly because “the events to which the third part of the ‘secret’ of Fatima now seem part of the past.”  This has not stopped many people from claiming otherwise, insisting on all kinds of apocalyptic interpretations and creating much controversy.

Shortly after Cardinal Sodano’s statement, the then Head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, issued a Theological Commentary on the Message of Fatima  hoping to shine some light upon the third vision the children saw.  The Cardinal began by affirming Cardinal Sodano’s assertion saying,

“[I]nsofar as individual events are described, they belong to the past. Those who expected exciting apocalyptic revelations about the end of the world or the future course of history are bound to be disappointed. Fatima does not satisfy our curiosity in this way, just as Christian faith in general cannot be reduced to an object of mere curiosity. What remains was already evident when we began our reflections on the text of the “secret”: the exhortation to prayer as the path of “salvation for souls” and, likewise, the summons to penance and conversion.”

Despite such a lucid statement, many still insist that the vision is pointing to something yet to happen even going so far as to insist that the Church is hiding something.  There are certainly a number of psychological reasons why a person might do this, but there are those whose insistence comes from a misunderstanding about the nature of prophecy.  Cardinal Ratzinger anticipated this aspect of it and spoke briefly about prophecy in hopes that some of the mistaken views could be put to rest and the focus could be placed on the message itself.  It is in this spirit that we should examine what the future Pope Benedict XVI had to say and supplement it with St. Thomas Aquinas’ explanation of prophecy.

St. Thomas Aquinas and Prophecy

In addressing the charism of prophecy in the Summa (ST II-II, q.173, art. 2), St. Thomas speaks of three different ways in which a prophetic vision is conveyed.  There is the ordinary vision in which something is presented to the exterior senses.  Second, there is an interior perception.  Finally there is a mystical vision that occurs without images.  Regardless of the means by which the vision is conveyed, there is always a subjective element to it. St. Thomas says that “whatever is received, is received according to the mode of the receiver” (ST IA q.75, a5).  What he means by this is that although a person may receive light from on high, how they receive it and how they explain it is based upon their own capacity and experience.

Applying this to what we know of Fatima we can say that the vision was neither the first (only the children could see it) nor could the third (because Sr. Lucia describes it using images).  Through process of elimination we can conclude that the prophetic vision the children received would have been through an interior perception.  What this means is that the vision as Sr. Lucia describes it, even though it is authentic, uses images drawn from her imagination and memory.  This, by the way, is similar to what we see with St. John in the Book of Revelation.  Many of the images as he describes them are based on images that were familiar to him, especially things he had seen on Patmos (like the sea of glass).  In any regard, Sr. Lucia received an impulse from above that is then translated by her interior senses so that she can receive the message.

A thought experiment will make this more understandable.  When I say to you the word “telephone,” you cannot think of a telephone without drawing up an image in your imagination.  This telephone is likely drawn from something in your own memory.  In that way it is completely unique to you and if you began to describe it, it would like be very different from the image I had in mind when I said the word.   In this way, the vision as Sr. Lucia describes it describes is the product of her own imagination and memory.  Again, this is not to suggest that it is made up, only that the images themselves are drawn from her imagination.

Any interpretation has to factor how the prophetic light is received in because it is not like she has seen something on TV or a picture on a wall.  She has received a light and her imagination has attempted to match the light she received.  Of course, it is a prophetic light that is always beyond our natural capacity to know (St. Thomas says of prophecy that it  “first and chiefly consists in knowledge, because, to wit, prophets know things that are far removed from man’s knowledge” (ST II-II, q.171, a.1)) and thus much more complicated than my simple telephone example.  In other words, it is not the vision that matters so much as the interpretation, that is the explanation of what the actual light that was received consisted in.  This is why when asked by Cardinal Sodano whether the interpretation of the vision was correct, Sr. Lucia said she had been given the vision but not the interpretation.  She said it was up to the Church to interpret it, but once she was shown the interpretation she thought it corresponded with what she had seen.

Not only do we tend to focus too much on the vision itself, but we forget another important aspect of a truly Catholic understanding of prophecy.  Most tend to think of prophecy as a foretelling of future events, but the Catholic understanding of prophecy is broader than this. As Cardinal Ratzinger says in his commentary, “prophecy in the biblical sense does not mean to predict the future but to explain the will of God for the present, and therefore show the right path to take for the future.”  By overly focusing on the “prediction” piece of the vision, we can miss the message.

The Vision

With these principles in mind, we can turn to Sr. Lucia directly in her explanation of what she saw in the vision.  Just after seeing an angel with a flaming sword crying out “Penance, penance, penance!” at which point Sr. Lucia saw

“an immense light that is God: ‘something similar to how people appear in a mirror when they pass in front of it’ a Bishop dressed in White ‘we had the impression that it was the Holy Father’. Other Bishops, Priests, men and women Religious going up a steep mountain, at the top of which there was a big Cross of rough-hewn trunks as of a cork-tree with the bark; before reaching there the Holy Father passed through a big city half in ruins and half trembling with halting step, afflicted with pain and sorrow, he prayed for the souls of the corpses he met on his way; having reached the top of the mountain, on his knees at the foot of the big Cross he was killed by a group of soldiers who fired bullets and arrows at him, and in the same way there died one after another the other Bishops, Priests, men and women Religious, and various lay people of different ranks and positions. ‘Beneath the two arms of the Cross there were two Angels each with a crystal aspersorium in his hand, in which they gathered up the blood of the Martyrs and with it sprinkled the souls that were making their way to God.’”

 

Cardinal Ratzinger offers the following points of interpretation based on similar Biblical images:

  • The angel with the flaming sword on the left of Mary represents the threat of judgment looming over the world, just as we see in Book of Revelation—a particularly apt image as today man “himself, with his inventions, has forged the flaming sword.” The image shows the power that stands opposed to the force of destruction—the Mother of God and the seriousness with which we ought to respond to the call to penance
  • The mountain and city symbolize the arena of human history and how man is in great peril of bringing about his own destruction—the cross transforms destruction into salvation
  • Time is presented (the entire century is represented) in a compressed form, just as history is directed towards the Cross. It would be a century of a great suffering for Christians. Martyrs and even the Pope himself (“The good will be martyred; the Holy Father will have much to suffer; various nations will be annihilated.”  It is as Ratzinger says a “Via Crucis of an entire century”

Viewed through a wider-angled lens, prophecy is meant not primarily to clear up the incurable human blindness of the future, but the curable blindness of the present time.  This is why it is so important not to get caught up in controversies surrounding the secrets and lose focus on the prophetic message of Fatima.  While it is clear that the events depicted have come to pass, the prophetic nature of the message has not passed.  The events were signs pointing to both the events themselves, but also, and primarily to the overall message of Fatima which is to become a people of both profound penance and dedication to the will of God through an imitation of Mary’s spirit of fiat (that is the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart).  The events not only add credibility to the authenticity of the message, but also are signs through the suffering of the martyrs (the extreme form of Penance) and the Bishop dressed in white who cheated death through his dedication to the Immaculate Heart—his spirit of fiat exemplified through his episcopal motto, Totus tuus.  As we recall this important Centenary, we can echo the thoughts of Pope Benedict that the events have passed while also saying “we would be mistaken to think that Fatima’s prophetic mission is complete.”   Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us!

 

 

Why Many of the Jews Remained Veiled to Jesus

Eucharist, Holy Spirit, Scripture, , ,

In his Second Letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul laments that the Jews of his day suffered ignorance regarding the identity of Christ because “their minds were hardened; for to this day, when they read the old covenant, that same veil remains unlifted, because only through Christ is it taken away.  Yes, to this day whenever Moses is read a veil lies over their minds; but when a man turns to the Lord the veil is removed” (2 Cor 3:14-16).  One can imagine the Christians in Corinth struggling to understand how the Jewish people, steeped as they were in the Sacred Scriptures of the Old Testament, failed to see how all the prophecies find their fulfillment in Jesus.  The Corinthians are not alone in this, many of us often wonder how the Jews could miss this.

In his writings on the Antichrist, Blessed John Henry Newman has an extensive discussion on biblical prophecy in which he articulates an important principle: “It is not ordinarily the course of Divine Providence to interpret prophecy before the event.”  Newman is referring specifically to what the role of prophecy is in God’s plan.  Although prophecy is often (but not always) directed towards some future contingency, this does not mean that it is akin to being able to clearly predict what is going to happen.  If it were simply to tell everyone what is going to happen in the future, then it would seem that it should be marked by clarity.  Instead we find that prophecies are often obscure.  Prophecy, rather than being primarily for prediction, instead has the purpose of building up the body of believers (c.f 1Cor 12:10).  Its obscurity makes it impossible for those who lack the illumination from the same Spirit that inspired the prophecy to understand it.  With the gift of hindsight and illumination, it seems to us that the Old Testament prophecies concerning the coming of the Messiah are very clear.  But we need only see how much help the first Christians needed (the road to Emmaus and Matthew’s explicit mentioning of which actions fulfilled which prophecies) to see just how difficult this was.  It is only when Our Lord comes to sweep away the clouds of obscurity by opening their minds to the Scriptures that they understood it (Lk 24:45).

There is another practical reason as well that made it particularly difficult and it has to do with the nature of the Messiah.  All too often we over-generalize and say “the Jews were expecting a political Messiah and Jesus came to usher in a different kind of kingdom.”  In an age where we make everything political this offers a clean explanation.  Most of the Jews were expecting that the Messianic Age would follow right on the heels of the Messiah (c.f. Acts 1:6) and when that didn’t happen it shattered many people’s expectations.  But to label their expectations as “political” does not quite capture what they meant.

The difficulty and the obscurity came in trying to somehow reconcile these different views.  We know that they are all true, but one can imagine how difficult it would be to wed them together yourself.  What often happened is that different schools opened up in which one chose only one of them at the expense of the others.  We are often very jealous of our ideas so that once they are challenged we reject everything that doesn’t agree.

Broadly speaking there were six different sets of prophecies concerning the future Messiah:

  • New Adam—based upon the promise in Gn 3:15 of the Seed of the Woman who would crush the head of the Serpent and a promise of a restoration of Eden (Is 11:1-10, Ezekiel 36:33-38)
  • New Moses—based upon Moses’ prophecy that God will raise up a “prophet like me” (Dt 18:1-17). In this way the Jews were awaiting a New Exodus into a New Promised Land, a theme I have written about previously.
  • Son of David, “Son of God”—this is most clearly laid out in Jesus’ discussion with the Pharisees about their understanding of the opening verses of Ps 110 when Our Lord asks them about the nature of the Messiah as David’s offspring(c.f. Mt 22:41-46).
  • Son of Man—the Messiah is described by Daniel as “one like a son of man” who comes not from the earth but “with the clouds of heaven” (Daniel 7:13-15).
  • Suffering Servant—Daniel prophesies that the Messiah will be “cut off” or put to death as an atonement for sin, reconciling it with Isaiah’s Suffering Servant. Jesus reconciles this with the previous one by saying “the Son of Man came to serve, not be served and give Himself as a ransom for many” (Mt 20:28).
  • Priest of the Order of Melchizedek—this Priest will be a “priest forever of the order of Melchizedek” (Ps 110:1-4), offering the same sacrifice as the Davidic kings did (2Sam 6:13-17).

Although we might easily reconcile these different views of the Messiah now, it was a tremendous challenge for the early Christians and their Jewish counterparts.  It was especially difficult to   The Book of Hebrews, written around 65 AD was composed mainly as a reference for tying all of these strains together.

The final obstacle for the Jews was the Crucifixion.  Although there are some very obvious parallels between the Passover Lamb and Our Lord (e.g. timing, “not a bone shall be broken”, etc), the Crucifixion itself could be an insurmountable obstacle.  It was for the punishment of criminals and would have appeared to be nothing like a sacrifice.  To all appearances, Jesus was a failure and a blasphemer.  Except for one small thing.  He actually called His shot this night before.  What makes the Crucifixion recognizable as the Sacrifice is the Institution of the Eucharist the night before. It is God who institutes each of the covenantal sacrifices and gives them their meaning. He is the One who appoints the priest, the victim and the manner of sacrifice.  It was God Incarnate Who did all those things prior to the event.  Not only does the Crucifixion give meaning to the Eucharist, it is the Institution of the Eucharist by which Our Lord assigns meaning to His death on the Cross.