Don’t know about you, Tom, but I don’t think the Third Secret has been fully revealed, if at all. So, once again, I reject Salza’s use of Fatima as a defense against heretics in Rome.

As a matter of fact, I think the first two Secrets were warning us of heretics in Rome, past and present, who have hidden / are hiding the third Secret. I don’t think Our Lady was joking when she set the 1960 deadline; do you?

Our Lady did say that in the end, Her Immaculate Heart will triumph. Look around you: abortion is legal almost universally, homo marriage soon will be, government suppression of the Catholic Church in “democracies” and “republics”. What do you think Our Lady meant when she said, “in the End“?

Today’s times make Sodom and Gomorrah look like a Bing Crosby Christmas movie.

Bishop Guglielmone wrote:

The Catholic Church in the United States has enjoyed a long and fruitful relationship with the BSA … [emphasis added]

Yah, the USCCCP is full of fruits.

‘It’s the beginning of the end’: gay scout vote only first step in demise of scouting, say leaders

by John Jalsevac

DALLAS, TX, May 24, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Parents, scouting leaders and pastors are warning that yesterday’s vote to allow openly gay youth to join the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) is likely only the beginning of a much more fundamental transformation of the scouting organization.

In a statement following the vote Jonathan Saenz, the president of Texas Values, the group behind the Save Our Scouts initiative, charged the BSA leadership with having “willingly opened the door to allow homosexual advocates to overrun an organization that stands for a code of morality that these intolerant advocates reject.”

“The BSA is a private organization, but it has chosen to place sex and politics above its timeless principles, and the BSA will ultimately fail because of this change,” he said. “We will next see aggressive attacks on any BSA units that dare to stand for God and religious liberty, as those that seek to change the BSA will not tolerate these current BSA principles, either.”

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, agreed.

“Boy Scout delegates capitulated to strong-arm tactics and abandoned the timeless values that have served the organization well for more than 100 years,” he said. “It is clear that the current BSA leadership will bend with the winds of popular culture, and the whims of liberal special interest groups. There is little doubt that God will soon be ushered out of scouting.”

The new policy was passed yesterday by 60 percent of the 1,400 delegates at the BSA’s annual convention in Dallas, Texas. While a ban again openly gay scout leaders remains in place, those who oppose the change say they don’t expect that surviving ban to remain in place for long.

Brian Brown, president of the National Organization for Marriage, described yesterday as a “sad day” for Scouts.

“They have succumbed to political pressure and abandoned their historic roots in what will prove to be a failed attempt to appease gay activists and corporate donors,” he said. “Unfortunately, what they have done is said to the world that their oath no longer means much. Their decision to admit openly gay scouts will end up sexualizing the organization. I am certain that having changed their policy on homosexuality, it’s only a matter of time before courts order them to admit homosexual scout leaders.”

Brown predicted that the new policy will lead to the short-term fragmentation, and long-term demise of BSA.

“Countless thousands of churches will very likely pull their sponsorship rather than endorse homosexuality, and the entire organization will begin to collapse,” he said. “All of this is happening, not because of a true grassroots demand of gay youth to be part of the organization, but by an orchestrated political effort by gay activists who want to punish any group or organization that does not embrace homosexuality.”

“It’s the beginning of the end for what once was one of America’s noblest organizations,” he said.

Rabbi Yehuda Levin, an Orthodox Jewish leader who often functions as a spokesman for the Rabbinical Alliance of America and the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the U.S. and Canada, said gay scout leaders isn’t far down the road.

“Anyone who believes that this decision is a compromise, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you,” Levin told LifeSiteNews.com. The rabbi said that for the past half-century, homosexual activists have successfully sought incremental gains in pursuit of their ultimate goals. “It is really now a foregone conclusion that within several years there will be open homosexual scout leaders,” he said.

David Cortman, senior counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), made a similar observation. “Those promoting the agenda to change what the Boy Scouts have always been won’t rest until there is complete acceptance of any sexual preference for both leaders and members,” he said. “With its decision today, BSA has rejected its freedom to promote and practice the values that have served to shape our nation’s boys into leaders for the last century.”

However, Rabbi Levin suggested that concerned scouting families and leaders may yet be able to take their lemons and turn them into lemonade. Yesterday’s vote, he said, “affords the opportunity for a schism, a positive schism. In other words, we can still see victory snatched from the jaws of this movement, this anti-God, anti-family movement, if a sizable percentage of the Boy Scouts now leave that organization, and form their own organization.”

“This would be a positive thing,” he said.

Such an idea isn’t unprecedented. The Assemblies of God, a Pentecostal denomination that has already started its own scouting group called Royal Rangers, said that while it agrees with BSA that “we need to demonstrate compassion and welcome those who are struggling with sexuality issues,” this should not be done “in a way that condones such behavior, which is what the new BSA policy does.”

The denomination said it expects that there will be a “mass exodus” away from the scouting organization, and offered the Royal Rangers as one possible alternative.

Other denominations such as the Seventh-Day Adventists (Pathfinders) and the Southern Baptists (Royal Ambassadors) also have their own scouting organizations.

However, there are also rumblings that a broader effort to present a values-based alternative to the Boy Scouts is already in the works. John Stemberger – the founder of OnMyHonor.Net, a coalition of parents, scoutmasters, Eagle Scouts, and other scouting leaders who opposed the new policy – announced yesterday that he and other leaders have already resolved to create a new character development organization for boys.

A meeting to kickstart the new organization has been scheduled for next month in Louisville.

“We grieve today, not because we are faced with leaving scouting, but because the Boy Scouts of America has left us,” said Stemberger. “Its leadership has turned its back on 103 years of abiding by a mission to prepare young people to make ethical and moral choices. ”

“Instead, it is embarking on a pathway of social experimentation that we believe will place at risk the very youth the organization is entrusted to serve, while rendering as hollow the tenets of the Scout Oath,” he said. “Many of us find that unacceptable, and we have a desire to explore how we might serve families and young people at the highest standard originally intended by Scouting’s founder, Robert Baden-Powell.”

I guess the Committee is going to pitch a tent, put four 17-year-old poofters and two 13-year-old impressionable boys inside and “study” what happens, right?

sexual activity outside of marriage is immoral

How mealy-mouthed. St. Peter Damian, pray for us!

the Archdiocese of Denver will continue to allow parish-chartered Scouting organizations

Of course. They can rape your sons in the sacristy and now at camp, too. Why anyone stays in the Novus Ordo, I’ll never understand.

He applies Our Lady’s revelation at Fatima that “the Holy Father would have much to suffer” (but not “lose his office for heresy”) to the current crisis in the Church, and he says that without any knowledge of Her appearance or messages at Fatima “Pope Benedict XV providentially promulgated law that would prevent people from saying the forewarned crisis was so bad we no longer have a Pope.”

In the middle of one of Tom’s references is the statement “The question of whether a Pope can be a heretic is by no means settled doctrine, having no magisterial teaching as its backing.” Isn’t Vatican I rather clear in declaring the perpetuity and fidelity of the papacy? The Council declared that Our Lord’s prayer for St. Peter, that his faith fail not, includes each successor to the throne.

To my mind, Ven. Pius IX was led to provide us that teaching precisely because there would come a day when it would appear that Peter’s faith had failed. We’ve been there for quite awhile.

And, in case I haven’t made my state of mind clear enough, I am NOT a BLEEP!

Ain’t never been. A’in’t now. And ain’t never gonna be, neither. No how!

My point in bringing this Apostolic Constitution up ( and it was news to me insofar as I had not actually seen the document, before today ) was how it struck me as a perfectly sensible, traditional and thoroughly Catholic document which certainly speaks to the crisis of today as clearly as any other I’ve ever seen on what to make of the horrific decline in both content and expression that has come out of the Vatican since the 1960s.

It’s been mostly gibberish, to put it nicely. That is the product of mush-minded men of the very sort St. Pius X warned the Church about, and before him, a long line of very sound-thinking, holy popes, as well.

Now, have these same “mush-minded men of the very sort St. Pius X warned the Church about” been REAL popes. Yes.

And so was some 14 year old centuries ago who, the minute he was told he had been elected pope, ran down the corridors yelling, “I am Christ! I am Caesar!” til somebody with a brain grabbed the little punk and told him to shut up – but, oh, so very respectfully, no doubt. Well, he quit. Then came back. Quit again. And came back a third time.

Point? Like in politics, even real jerks could be, and were, popes.

Counter-point? Fortunately, that’s rare and many popes have been godly, even unto sanctity.

My point? Although, not lately…. or, at least it would seem. Although, I do think, even though he is an opponent of traditionalists, that Benedict is the most popely pope we’ve had (WYD aside, oh, and the Blue Mosque and all those synagogues aside, oh, and the circus performers, too, and… oh, never mind. I still like him, anyway).

As for over- or under-estimating what we’re supposed to do regarding them, beside praying for their CATHOLIC intentions ( another matter altogether if you scan some of the ones that relate to ecumenism ) and sincerely wishing for them good health and wisdom, as least since 1958 and up to this moment, I find that I have fewer and fewer ideas about that.

CWN – May 24, 2013

Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia has declared May 24 to be a special day of prayer and penance “as a Christian response to the Kermit Gosnell trial and conviction.”

“The recent trial and conviction of the Philadelphia abortion doctor, Kermit Gosnell, for killing three babies born alive, manifested in yet another vivid way the horrific details of the abortion culture that confronts the Gospel of Life,” the archdiocese said in a statement. “Christians have no option but to respond with prayer and penance in reparation for these crimes against the sacredness of human life, especially in the womb. The battle for the protection of human life is equally a spiritual battle as it is culturally, socially and politically.”

Additional sources for this story: See www.catholicculture.org/news/headlines/index.cfm?storyid=17969

By CHARLOTTE ALLEN
5/23/13
online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324787004578495711470936512.html

On May 12 Pope Francis officially canonized more than 800 male Catholic residents of the southern Italian port of Otranto, who in 1480 were beheaded en masse for refusing to convert to Islam after their city was invaded and captured by a Turkish Muslim fleet. The making of the new saints was a vivid reminder of something that many people, including historians, prefer to gloss over: the pattern over the centuries of Islamic persecution of Christians that continues to this day in many Muslim-majority lands.

In a 2006 lecture at the University of Regensburg, Pope Benedict XVI quoted a remark about Islam made by the 14th-century Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaiologos: “There you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as [the Prophet Muhammad's] command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” Benedict’s medieval quotation about forced conversions (the same issue at stake in the Otranto beheadings) reportedly provoked a fatwa against Benedict in Pakistan, church burnings and bombings in the West Bank and Gaza, threats of jihad from al Qaeda, and the murder of a nun in Somalia.

Benedict’s quotation also provoked tut-tuts from Catholic intellectuals: The liberal Catholic magazine Commonweal pronounced the pope’s remarks “ill-conceived.” Benedict eventually apologized, saying the text did not “in any way” express his “personal thought.”

Meanwhile, secular historians have argued that the Otranto victims weren’t really martyrs in the sense of dying for their faith. They were political prisoners executed for rebelling against their new masters. The same academic fate has befallen the ninth-century martyrs of Cordoba, 48 men and women publicly decapitated when most of Spain was under Muslim rule.

The Cordoban emirate of that era, called Al-Andalus, has been lavishly praised by modern historians as a model of tolerant coexistence, in which Muslims, Christians and Jews lived peacefully while the arts and letters flourished. This even though the Christians, the vast majority of the population, had seen their churches destroyed, were required to pay an annual poll tax as infidels, and as non-Muslim djimmis were treated (along with Jews) as second-class citizens under Shariah law.

In Cordoba, Christians were under relentless social pressure to change religions, or at the very least to accommodate quietly to reality. So most historians these days describe the Cordoban martyrs either as secular nationalist revolutionaries or as suicide-seekers who deliberately insulted the Prophet Muhammad in their personal quests for heavenly glory or expiation for their sins.

In truth, the crimes for which the Cordoban martyrs were executed—typically they were accused of blasphemy and apostasy for converting to Christianity—bear a striking resemblance to the “crimes” against Shariah for which Christians are becoming martyrs or near-martyrs today in Muslim lands.

In the new book “Persecuted: The Global Assault on Christians,” Paul Marshall, Lela Gilbert and Nina Shea chronicle the brutal treatment of Christians by communist governments, as in China and North Korea. But the book’s overwhelming focus is on Islamic regimes, which either officially or unofficially through government-sanctioned mob violence campaigns to exterminate or drive into exile those who regard Jesus Christ as their savior.

The stories are hair-raising. The book recounts how the Arab Spring in Egypt has generated a wave of Coptic-Christian church-burnings and (among other violent deaths) the gang-murder of a 17-year-old boy in 2011 because he had a cross tattooed on his wrist.

One of the authors, Ms. Shea, meets with a convert to Christianity in Saudi Arabia, Hamoud Bin Saleh al-Amri, who describes being arrested repeatedly for his beliefs over the past decade and put in prison, where for months at a time he was “severely mistreated and threatened with harm to his family.”

Many of the book’s stories come from Iran. In 2007 the Iranian government arrested and tortured Mohsen Namvar for baptizing a Muslim who wanted to become a Christian. The following year, Mr. Namvar was arrested again “and so severely tortured that he continued to suffer fever, severe back pain, high blood pressure, uncontrollable shaking of his limbs, and short-term memory loss,” the authors report. Mr. Namvar and his family fled to Turkey, where Christianity is severely restricted but Christian converts aren’t punished.

In a recent article for National Review Online, Ms. Shea, who directs the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom, wrote about a May 5 church-bombing that killed 10 people in Nigeria, where Christianity has recently edged out Islam as that country’s majority religion.

So perhaps the pope making saints out of the hundreds of brave men who six centuries ago gave up their lives rather than experience forced conversion to Islam will remind cynical secular historians that the religious fanatics aren’t always the people who die for their faith. Sometimes the fanatics are the people who kill them.

Ms. Allen has a Ph.D. in medieval and Byzantine studies and is the author of “The Human Christ: The Search for the Historical Jesus.”

How in the the heck did Pope St. Pius X follow suit behind Pope Benedict XV?

P.S. Our Lady commanded that the Third Secret of Fatima was to be revealed by 1960; so Salza can’t use Fatima has his excuse for material heretics since then.