The secrets of Fatima, can be reconciled to a loving God (theodicity)?

Jose said

I do not believe God, having in His hands the life and suffering of all these people, allowed this terrible punishment because his Pope did not obeyed him.​

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Jose, do you believe there is a Hell filled with millions of once beautiful angels who now will suffer for all eternity for disobediance to God?​

 

I know I am drawing on several appereances of Our Lady,
Fatima, Akita, Medjugorje and am focusing on
"Pray for your priests"
"It will be too late"
"there will no longer be pardon for them"

Could it be that what these 3 statements means there will come a time when there so few priests left after a major event ( not sure exactly what) that the faithful will not be able to acess the sacarement of confession?

"Fire will fall from the sky and will wipe out a great part of humanity, the good as well as the bad, sparing neither priests nor faithful"

Or just perhaps the statement is what it is. There will be a punishment from God and wipe out a large part of humanity... and those who are waiting for a Warning ( the Warning) from God and that is why it will be too late. Meaning the punishment happens before the Warning or before the start of the secerts.

 

I think I did not make mypoint sufficiently clear. I do not doubt that much of the evil in the world is coming from the bad use of our free will. But I cannot understand, and neither believe,that after the revelations was closed God is requesting in privat revelation to a Pope to consecrate Russia to the Virgin and, if not, he will punish humanity. Sorry but this is not the God I believe in. And that, Mac, is independent of souls going to hell (separation from God for ever) because of their sins.

I do not understand neither how this fit with the theological issue of God and the problem of evil I developed earlier.

 

And what about the approved apparition of Akita? Do you doubt these?

"My dear daughter, listen well to what I have to say to you," Mary allegedly told the Japanese nun. "You will inform your superior. As I told you, if men do not repent and better themselves, the Father will inflict a terrible punishment on all humanity. It will be punishment greater than the deluge, such as one will never have seen before. Fire will fall from the sky and will wipe out a great part of humanity, the good as well as the bad, sparing neither priests nor faithful. The survivors will find themselves so desolate that they will envy the dead. The only arms that will remain for you will be the Rosary and Sign left by My Son. Each day recite the prayers of the Rosary. With the Rosary, pray for the pope, the bishops, and the priests."

 

After the terrible punishment of WWII now.. another one in less than seventy years?
Sorry but I do not beleive this comes from my Father.


I think I posted enough for today

 

All punishment is conditional - the story of Sodom & Gomorrah is a good example -

First Abraham asked if the Lord would spare the cities if fifty righteous people lived there. The Lord said yes. Boldly, Abraham kept bargaining down, until God agreed not to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah if even ten righteous people lived there. But --!

Abraham interceded before God to appease Divine Justice.

How much greater is our Lady interceding before the Heavenly Father to appease Divine Justice in our times?How merciful is our God that we would have been spared the holocaust of WW2 had Russia and the world been consecrated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Obviously, enormous graces would have been bestowed upon the world had the Divine command been obeyed.

Portugal was transformed after it was consecrated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary in the 1930s. Likewise some are calling for Ireland to be consecrated because it faces great evils of abortion and abominable marriage:

http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/com...art-of-mary-the-same-can-happen-with-ireland/

 

Jose, look at history and what took place in Frace in 1789.

That took place because the King of France did not consecrate France to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

Now look at Fatima, it was requested that Russia be consecrated and it was not done. Now who is at fault? look again at what Jesus said in 1931,

"Make it known to My ministers given that they follow the example of the King of France in delaying the execution of My command, like him they will follow him into misfortune."​

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It will be the same as the King of Frace only this time I believe it will be the priesthood that suffers the same fate as the King of France.​

Maybe thats is why it will be too late ...and why we must pray for our priests.. and possibly why there will no longer be pardon for sins. There will be no priesthood left for the sacrament of confession. ​

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I don't think Mary was alluding to WWII at all. This is just my opinion, but it seems clear to me , that the worse war, the war to spread communism started in 1941 when the Russians joined the allies to defeat Hitler. Yes, Hitler was bad, but Stalin and Mau were much worse. By allowing the Russians to be our allies, we became complicit in their errors during the war, and for a time after.

All Catholics have responsibility for not following her request for First Saturdays, requested only after man had made machines that would make them mobile enough to do this without too much hardship, with Catholic schools that never taught students to pray the rosary, with bishops and papal advisers who were afraid of offending communists or didn't trust in the protection of Our Lady.

Doesn't that answer the questions and make more sense?

 

Jose I think the problem is how we personally understand the relationship between God, Man, "punishment", "allows", "causes".
How we connect those concepts/words depends on our own personal attitudes to authority and how our own parents brought us up.

I suggest there is a spiritually more mature understanding of such phrases that you may have only partially "clicked to".
Padraig hinted at this when he said "I don't think its a matter of God kinds raining down thunderbolts. Its more a matter of actions having consequences.God gives us freewill. If he took away the consequences of our freewill, then by definition there would be nothing free about it."

I note that you wisely use the phrase "God allows...punishment" rather than "God punishes..." which already shows a mature spirituality that sees beyond athropromorphisms (ie God is like an angry human father).

However I believe even this falls short of ther further step Padraig invites us to go.
That is, if there is any "punishing" at all it is really us punishing ourselves. What goes around comes around. If God decides now and then not to save us from the consequences of our own actions he is hardly "punishing us" or even "allowing us to be punished." As the story of the day labourers in the market-place tells us, if an employer decides to stop overpaying some and not others he is hardly being unjust!

The Catholic Catechism of the Church is very clear on this point:
"These two punishments [eternal and temporal] must not be conceived of as a kind of vengeance inflicted by God from without, but as following from the very nature of sin." (1473)

I would say this is exactly what the Buddhist concept of "karma" also hints at.

I believe we all need to keep reminding ourselves that popular understanding as well as prophetic imagination/statements (especially those translated from Spanish/Portugese culture) cannot be taken on face value most of the time. They are often allegorical or symbolic and often not literal.

Further, relevent to this thread in general, my understanding is that no one has to accept what the Popes Cardinals might personally believe (and "forced" Lucia to also believe) re interpretation/fulfillment of particular prophecies (eg Fatima).

Re the 2000 statement re "close of Fatima and the 3rd Secret" (http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/c...on_cfaith_doc_20000626_message-fatima_en.html) it seems evident that Cardinal Ratzinger had to toe the party line and tried his best to subtely indicate he himself was not totally convinced the matter was closed.

 

Mac I would dispute the "once beautiful angels" bit. They were never that beautiful (though more beatiful than Adam before the Fall).
When the angels were created they did not exist in Heaven (i.e. with/in God).
So the "beauty" you refer to is really only the lesser natural beauty of raw angelic nature (which the fallen angels largely still possess).

Therefore the righteous angels who held firm under the "test" (that God put before them all) now live in God and display a divine beauty that is incomparable to that merely natural beauty of the fallen angels.

 

It is well known that WWII, was the "greater war" that Mary foretold at Fatima. WWII started during the reign of Pope Pius XI, when Hitler invaded Austria in 1938. There has never been a greater war than WWII.

 

Wow, not sure where you did your study on angels, but Lucifer was one of the most beautiful of the angels God created in his image and likeness. If the angels were not in "heaven", where did St. Michael kick them out of, earth, purgatory or hell? Scripture tells us "they fell from the heavens". They were not in the beatific vision of God, but they surely were in heaven. And where do you get that the fallen angels still possess "natural beauty of raw angelic nature"? I've read several books on angels and have never read anything this bizzar.

 

It was taught to me as a child that if a man met Lucifer before his fall, he would of bowed down and adored him mistaking him for God , so great was his power and beauty. But perhaps thats just child catechism.

 

I was under the impression he was "convinced" by the then secretary of state Cardinal Agostino Cacciavillan

 

Archangel Michael brought yesterday the message of Our Lady of Akita (1973), an apparition approved by the Church.

This brings again up again the theological problems I was talking about. Padraig does not believe it is God raining down thunderbolts. Blue Horizont also prefers an interpretation where God does not punish directly and the punishment is inflicted to us as part of a kind of sin's economy where the sinner receives the logical punishment for his acts. I also believe that our sinful acts have bad and undesirable consequences not wanted by God and that turn against ourselves, being the ultimate situation the eternal separation from God. Something that it is neither wanted by God but that He cannot avoid without the repentance of the sinner. But this is not what we learned from Fatima and, now, Akita.

The language used by our Lady does not leave much room for interpretations. God directly is going to punish humanity and, supposedly, He already did by means of WWII because the consecration did not take place. The secret of Fatima was not even given to the public until 1941. So, there was not much one could do to avoid it.

But only 28 years after this terrible punishment the Lady appears again and announces another one even greater than WWII, where "Fire will fall from the sky and will wipe out a great part of humanity" as a punishment directly coming from God, our Father.

Even if this fire is human made (nuclear attack), it is presented as a new threat from Heaven due to our sins, a direct action from God to punish humankind.

This does not fit with the Revelation and the Theology of salvation by which Christ has taken the sin of the world and died for us in an act of satisfaction that none of us could have done by himself. He took the consequences of our sins, His act calmed the wrath of the Father. The death of Christ speaks against these threats supposedly coming fro Heaven.

The second point of theological relevance is the possibility, opened here, that God could, if He wishes, minimize or ameliorate the "consequences" of our sins and the deserved punishment by repentance or by a single ritual act as a consecration. That implies that God is able to alleviate the evil in the world and the natural and logical question is why does He allow the suffering of the innocent children? A terrible argument commonly used by atheists. But as we understand and have been taught, the problem of evil is a logical consequence of the Fall of man and God is not able, after man was expelled from Paradise and "converted" into a vulnerable creature, to keep suffering and evil away from us.

The third and last point is the sense of this "divine punishment" but I leave this for a next post.

 

Mac,
I do not know if the Virgin appeared in Fatima, Akita etc... those were private apparitions and revelations, and there is no way I can find out. But even if She did, it does not necessarily implies that all been said by the seers has a divine origin. I remain skeptical and the Church does not oblige me to accept those private revelations as true. Doubting, being skeptical, is not something God is condemning in anyways. This is part of our nature, that is why we have a brain and it is not contrary to Faith. The point is what has to be believed and what can be questioned.

 

Is it "divine punishment" or is God just removing His hand of protection?

 

Either way means a direct action from God.

 

Maybe I'm wrong but one seems to be direct and one is indirect.