St. Pope John Paul II on Fatima

When Pope John Paul II visited Germany in November 1980 he held a meeting with around 300 people. He was confronted with three questions which were:

1. Do you agree with the receiving of the Holy Eucharist in the hand?

2. What happened to the third secret of Fatima?

3. What is the future of the Catholic Church?

His answers were:

1. "No I do not agree. However my predecessors gave the hand receiving of the Holy Eucharist to some countries. I am not going to revoke the privilege."

2. "I and the Popes before me did not reveal the third secret of Fatima because we did not want to make the people give up and say "then what is the use to continue living". Furthermore, we did not want to create a sensationalism in the news media. Regarding the third secret of Fatima every Christian should know the following: Continents will disappear beneath the oceans. Whole Nations will be destroyed from moment to moment." 

3. The future of the Catholic Church is the following:

a) "The Church shall be greatly persecuted. Where the martyrs of the past are nothing compared with those of the future. This is the weapon (the Rosary) that the Christian must use against the terrible future. Not to stop what shall happen but, but, but perhaps to soften what is predicted to happen." 

b) "... the chastisements cannot be averted, it is too late... the die was cast. The chastisements can be mitigated by praying the Rosary."

On 13 May 1981, Pope John Paul II was seriously wounded. He missed two bullets aimed at his skull as he bent down to look at a medal of Our Lady of Fatima worn by a young girl in the crowd. In the recuperating room he read everything he could about Fatima, and he reread the Third Secret.

While recovering from his surgery due to the gun shot, the Pope stated that:

"... in these months, I have come to understand that only solution to all problems of the world, the deliverance from war, the deliverance from atheism, and from the defection from God is the conversion of Russia. The conversion of Russia is the content and meaning of the message of Fatima. Not until then will the triumph of Mary comes."

On 13 May 1982, Pope John Paul II publicly thanked the Blessed Mother for saving his life, during his visit to Fatima.

 

The Spiritual Testament of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI

The Holy See releases the Spiritual Testament of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, dated 29 August 2006.

My spiritual testament

When, at this late hour of my life, I look back on the decades I have wandered through, I see first of all how much reason I have to give thanks. Above all, I thank God Himself, the giver of all good gifts, who has given me life and guided me through all kinds of confusion; who has always picked me up when I began to slip, who has always given me anew the light of his countenance. In retrospect, I see and understand that even the dark and arduous stretches of this path were for my salvation and that He guided me well in those very stretches.

I thank my parents, who gave me life in difficult times and prepared a wonderful home for me with their love, which shines through all my days as a bright light until today. My father's clear-sighted faith taught us brothers and sisters to believe and stood firm as a guide in the midst of all my scientific knowledge; my mother's heartfelt piety and great kindness remain a legacy for which I cannot thank her enough. My sister has served me selflessly and full of kind concern for decades; my brother has always paved the way for me with the clear-sightedness of his judgements, with his powerful determination, and with the cheerfulness of his heart; without this ever-new going ahead and going along, I would not have been able to find the right path.

I thank God from the bottom of my heart for the many friends, men and women, whom He has always placed at my side; for the co-workers at all stages of my path; for the teachers and students He has given me. I gratefully entrust them all to His goodness. And I would like to thank the Lord for my beautiful home in the Bavarian foothills of the Alps, in which I was able to see the splendour of the Creator Himself shining through time and again. I thank the people of my homeland for allowing me to experience the beauty of faith time and again. I pray that our country will remain a country of faith and I ask you, dear compatriots, not to let your faith be distracted. 

Finally, I thank God for all the beauty I was able to experience during the various stages of my journey, but especially in Rome and in Italy, which has become my second home.

I ask for forgiveness from the bottom of my heart from all those whom I have wronged in some way.

What I said earlier of my compatriots, I now say to all who were entrusted to my service in the Church: Stand firm in the faith! Do not be confused! Often it seems as if science - on the one hand, the natural sciences; on the other, historical research (especially the exegesis of the Holy Scriptures) - has irrefutable insights to offer that are contrary to the Catholic faith. I have witnessed from times long past the changes in natural science and have seen how apparent certainties against the faith vanished, proving themselves not to be science but philosophical interpretations only apparently belonging to science - just as, moreover, it is in dialogue with the natural sciences that faith has learned to understand the limits of the scope of its affirmations and thus its own specificity. For 60 years now, I have accompanied the path of theology, especially biblical studies, and have seen seemingly unshakeable theses collapse with the changing generations, which turned out to be mere hypotheses: the liberal generation (Harnack, Jülicher, etc.), the existentialist generation (Bultmann, etc.), the Marxist generation. I have seen, and see, how, out of the tangle of hypotheses, the reasonableness of faith has emerged and is emerging anew. Jesus Christ is truly the Way, the Truth, and the Life - and the Church, in all her shortcomings, is truly His Body.

Finally, I humbly ask: pray for me, so that the Lord may admit me to the eternal dwellings, despite all my sins and shortcomings. For all those entrusted to me, my heartfelt prayer goes out day after day.

Benedictus PP XVI

Benedict XVI on Saint Benedict

"The name Benedict also evokes the extraordinary figure of the great 'patriarch of western monasticism,' St. Benedict of Norcia, co-patron of Europe with Cyril and Methodius. The progressive expansion of the Benedictine Order which he founded exercised an enormous influence on the spread of Christianity throughout the European continent. 

For this reason, St. Benedict is much venerated in Germany, and especially in Bavaria, my own land of origin; he constitutes a fundamental point of reference for the unity of Europe and a powerful call to the irrefutable Christian roots of European culture and civilization." 

Benedict XVI, 1st General Audience, April 2005.