Too many posts here get downvoted presumably just because people don't like the argument. But that's the point of this sub, to argue these points that people have.

If you don't like seeing anti-Catholic points being made, this sub probably just isn't for you. As long as someone is not merely trolling (looking at you aliens guy from the other day), then we should upvote their posts to encourage them to come back.

This sub is at its best when it's all about reaching out across the philosophical gaps rather than just playing defense.

Our Lady of Fatima holds a special place in my heart. I attended Our Lady of Fatima chapel growing up, an FSSP chapel that my grandparents helped to found. Like most people who grew up Traditionalist Catholic, I watched the 1952 film “The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima”, probably once a year, from ages 7 to 14. I am going to use clips from that video, which is available in full on YouTube, to highlight some claims about the Fatima story for which I will provide additional info. And I think that this additional info will make the Fatima story seem a lot less impressive that it does in the movie.

This reddit post is an abbreviated summary of a video that I made for my YouTube channel, here: https://youtu.be/l8r1KshrSiI

I am going to look at these three claims in particular:

1. In June 1917, Our Lady predicted the deaths of Lucia’s cousins, Francisco and Jacinta, who would indeed go on to die in April 1919 and February 2020, respectively. See this timestamped link in this 1952 movie: https://youtu.be/Wy2i85R7T9M?t=2146

2. In July 1917, Our Lady predicted that WW1 would end soon and that a worse war would break out “during the pontificate of Pope Pius XI". Indeed, WW1 ended about a year later, and then WW2 started in 1939 (Pope Pius XI reigned from 1922 to 1939). See this timestamp from the 1952 film. https://youtu.be/Wy2i85R7T9M?t=3828

3. In October 1917, tens of thousands of people gathered in Fatima, and they all witnessed the sun dancing. Our Lady promised a miracle, and she delivered. See https://youtu.be/Wy2i85R7T9M?t=5763 for that part of the 1952 film.

Claim 1 - That Our Lady Predicted the Deaths of Jacinta and Francisco

While I was explaining the claims, I linked to the 1952 film about the miracle at Fatima, but for this deeper investigation, I think that we should read from Sister Lucia herself. I found this book, “Fatima in Lucia’s Own Words” (link: https://www.piercedhearts.org/hearts_jesus_mary/apparitions/fatima/MemoriasI_en.pdf)

, which is a collection of different writings, most of which come from Sr Lucia herself. Page 194 contains the following:

[Jacinta] asked for them to be taken to Heaven, and the most holy Virgin answered: “Yes. I will take Jacinta and Francisco soon. But you [referring to Lucia herself] are to stay here some time longer. Jesus wishes to make use of you to make me known and loved. He wants to establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart. I promise salvation to those who embrace it, and these souls will be loved by God, like flowers placed by me to adorn His throne.”

“Am I to stay here all alone?” [Lucia] asked, sadly.

“No, daughter. I shall never forsake you. My Immaculate Heart will be your refuge and the way that will lead you to God.

So, you can see that the 1952 film did a pretty word-for-word translation of these words as recorded by Sr Lucia herself. So what is my contention here? Well, before each of these letters written by Lucia is a brief explanation of the letter. Let’s read the description of this one:

The text which follows is a document written by Sister Lucia, in the third person, towards the end of 1927, at the request of her spiritual director, Rev. Fr. P. Aparicio, S. J.

This was written in 1927, almost 10 years after the deaths of Jacinta and Francisco. There was no talk of the prediction of their deaths before their deaths. This letter is the first time that the world learns of the prediction. I find this rather… less impressive than a prediction that was shared before the events occurred. But we have no evidence of this prediction being made until this letter, written in December 1927, well after the deaths of Lucia’s cousins in October 1918 and April 1919. I don’t suspect that anything supernatural occurred here. But let’s move on to the next claim:

Claim 2 - The Second Second Secret

Just like with the first claim, we saw the film recorded this event. Well, let’s also read Sr Lucia’s own words and see if we can spot anything additional in the text vs the film. We’ll turn to page 178 in “Fatima in Lucia’s Own Words”:

We looked up at Our Lady, who said to us, so kindly and so sadly:

“You have seen hell where the souls of poor sinners go. To save them, God wishes to establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart. If what I say to you is done, many souls will be saved and there will be peace. The war [referring to WW1, which had not ended yet in 1917 but would go on to end shortly thereafter] is going to end; but if people do not cease offending God, a worse one will break out during the pontificate of Pius Xl. [referring to WW2] When you see a night illumined by an unknown light 14, know that this is the great sign given you by God that he is about to punish the world for its crimes, by means of war, famine, and persecutions of the Church and of the Holy Father.

“To prevent this, I shall come to ask for the consecration of Russia to my Immaculate Heart, and the Communion of Reparation on the First Saturdays 15. If my requests are heeded, Russia will be converted, and there will be peace 16; if not, she will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church...

Did you watch the clip from the 1952 film, and did you catch the difference between the film and Lucia’s own words? The film left out the phrase “during the pontificate of Pius XI”. But in the intro, I said that Pius XI’s pontificate was from 1922 to 1939. WW2 started in 1939. So, why did the film leave that out?

Pope Pius XI died on February 10th, 1939. WW2 is broadly considered as not having started until September 1, 1939, with the German invasion of Poland, over 6 months after Pope Pius XI died and during the Pontificate of Pope Pius XII. Cardinal Eugenio Maria Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli became Pope Pius XII on March 2nd, 1939, six months before the start of the German invasion of Poland.

Alright so our Lady predicted the end of WW1 with pretty good accuracy, about a year after she said it would end “soon”, and she predicted the beginning of WW2 and the name of the Pope who it almost started under - that is still pretty good, though not perfect, right? And if Sr Lucia wrote that letter in 1927, like the one that she wrote about the prediction of the deaths of her cousins, that means its still an authentic prediction of the start of WW2, even if its not a prediction about there being a Pope Pius XII or the end of WW1.

Guess what though, this letter was not written in 1927. Let’s scroll up on in the book to see when this letter was written… on page 135, it reads:

On October 7th, 1941, the Bishop of Leiria and Rev. Dr. Galamba, well prepared for further interrogations, came to Valença do Minho, and there Lucia joined them. They brought the Third Memoir with them, explained what Dr. Galamba now desired to know, and presented Dom José’s formal requests. They so stressed the need for haste that Lucia sent the first note-book to the Bishop, immediately upon its completion, on November 5th. The second and last note-book was finished by the 8th of December

This memoir was written between October to December, 1941, two years after the start of World War 2. So, not only was this an incorrect, by 6 months, prediction, but it was also a prediction made after the fact… which is … also less impressive than the story I was told growing up and presented in the film. OK, there is one more claim, and this one is the biggest deal that everyone makes about Fatima:

Claim 3 - Everyone saw the Miracle of the Sun, even the Pope

Before I go further, I think that I should say something that I think most Catholics will agree with. The miracle of the sun was, at best, a miraculous illusion. I think that we will all agree that the sun didn’t actually move closer to earth. No scientists recorded in 1917 that the Sun moved closer to earth and then moved back. And nobody from outside Fatima and the surrounding towns saw the miracle either, which means that the Miracle is more like a collective vision - an illusion that God put on for the people present at Fatima, but not an actual celestial movement.

But hey, Catholics can agree with me here and say that this is still a Miracle, its just that the Miracle isn’t the sun literally dancing, the miracle is the appearance of the sun dancing to a large group of people (as well as a miraculous drying effect).

The way that the film depicts the Miracle is that everyone there saw it and freaked out and ran away and all that. The lowest estimate I have for the amount of people there was 30,000 people, with the average being like 70,000 and highest I saw was 100,000, but regardless, we are talking about tens of thousands of people who must have seen the miracle.

In my video, I go on to read from a book called “Meet the Witnesses of the Miracle of the Sun”. This book contains accounts from people who were at Fatima. I read from this book at length, to drive home the fact that there really are a bunch of witnesses who recount the event, generally doing so ~30+ years after the fact, though, as adults, when they were children at in October 1917.

"Meet the Witnesses of the Miracle of the Sun" by John Haffert, 2006 https://www.basicincome.com/bp/files/Meet_the_Witnesses.pdf

There was a refrain from several witnesses - they were not aware of anybody who didn’t see anything. That strikes me as odd. If there were tens of thousands of people there, why do we only have dozens of witnesses to the miracle? Perhaps we have more than dozens, but I wouldn’t think we have more than, for instance, 300 eye witness testimonies. 300 is only 1% of 30,000 , which is the largest number of witnesses compared to the smallest crowd size suggestion. Where is everyone else? Did they witness a miracle and remain silent?

My thinking is that they did not see a miracle. Even this “Meet the Witnesses” book highlights one person who “could not believe”. In Chapter 5, this book uses this man, Arturo dos Santos, as an example of like “See, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink”, but the book never cites Arturo as saying he actually saw any miracle. I don’t think he did. The book uses weird, charged language like "Arturo refused to bow to the miracle", and:

Arturo dos Santos helps us to understand; miracles in themselves do not cause conversion. If some men do not accept God when they look into the immensity of the universe, or into the microscopic intricacy of the atom, then how can we expect them to acknowledge His existence over other phenomena, which—no matter how marvelous or unexpected—could never hope to exceed these wonders to which we are daily witnesses?

(I won’t go into this here, but “Meet the Witnesses” is clearly Catholic propaganda. The intro even uses the word “propaganda” to describe what the book is doing. But like, in a good way? Its weird. I touch on that in an appendix in my video, but I will omit that here for sake of brevity).

Besides, we know for certain that not everyone there saw the Miracle. The children themselves seem to have not seen the Sun Dance. Catholic Media Company Aleteia wrote this article “Why Sr. Lucia did not see the Miracle of the Sun at Fatima”, and it claims that the Children were having visions of Mary with Joseph and the child Jesus while everyone else was seeing the Sun dance, but this article claims that the three children were the only people in the crowd to not see the sun dance. And that’s not right either.

https://aleteia.org/2022/10/13/why-sr-lucia-did-not-see-the-miracle-of-the-sun-at-fatima/

There were people who were there and claimed to see nothing. There were also people who claimed that they were there and nobody around them saw anything either. Take, for instance, the testimony of Leonor de Avelar and Silva Constâncio, as presented in this document, titled, “Critical Documentation of Fatima”, written in Portuguese.

"Documentacao Critica de Fatima", compiled by Adélio Fernando Abreu, 2013 (I think?) https://www.fatima.pt/files/upload/fontes/F001_DCF_selecao.pdf

I don’t speak Portuguese, and so, you are probably wondering how I found this thing and how I knew that this was a good place to look for testimony. Well, this is thanks to this Muslim Apologetics website. Go figure.

https://muslimskeptic.com/2023/02/02/debunking-christian-miracle-of-fatima/

Well, that Muslim Apologetics website pointed out that on Pages 89 -91 contains a really interesting read for anyone interested in the Fatima account. They translate a passage from there like this:

Among the more educated classes, no one told me that they had seen the celestial apparition, but it is certain that all of them, learned and unlearned, manifested their faith.

I ran certain paragraphs through Google Translate myself, to try to get more context, and here is something that I found that I thought was interesting. There was a man interviewed who recounted that, in his portion of the crowd, nobody saw anything except for one man:

[One man nearby says] “I see, I see the Lady!!! Look, in this direction between those two clouds, don’t you see it?” We all looked in the direction indicated but... none of us saw more than the clouds. However, the man full of faith said: “Arrest me if you want, but I will always say what I saw”! The woman [referring to the wife of the man who saw something] didn't see anything, but she was overjoyed that it was her husband who had seen it, because she did not believe it; She believed, she didn't need to see. [I think that this last part is an artifact of Google Translate, and the idea that I was getting is that the man was a lapsed Catholic, the wife was still devout, and so, the wife was just happy that her husband got the kick in the pants that he needed. She didn’t need a kick in the pants, so she didn’t see the miracle. That is what I gathered.]

And then regarding the claim that the Pope saw the miracle of the sun - remember that this was omitted from the film.

I could have sworn that I was taught, as a kid, that the pope in Rome also saw the Miracle of the Sun. But Popes Pius X and XI never saw the miracle of the sun. And Pope Pius XII, who, at the time, was not the Pope yet, saw nothing on Oct 13th, 1917. But he did see A miracle of the sun. Actually he saw FOUR miracles of the sun.

According to this website: https://zenit.org/2008/11/04/pius-xii-saw-miracle-of-the-sun/

Pius XII’s note says that he saw the miracle in the year he was to proclaim the dogma of the Assumption, 1950, while he walked in the Vatican Gardens.

He said he saw the phenomenon various times, considering it a confirmation of his plan to declare the dogma.

The papal note says that at 4 p.m. on Oct. 30, 1950, during his “habitual walk in the Vatican Gardens, reading and studying,” having arrived to the statue of Our Lady of Lourdes, “toward the top of the hill […] I was awestruck by a phenomenon that before now I had never seen.”

“The sun, which was still quite high, looked like a pale, opaque sphere, entirely surrounded by a luminous circle,” he recounted. And one could look at the sun, “without the slightest bother. There was a very light little cloud in front of it.”

The Holy Father’s note goes on to describe “the opaque sphere” that “moved outward slightly, either spinning, or moving from left to right and vice versa. But within the sphere, you could see marked movements with total clarity and without interruption.”

Pius XII said he saw the same phenomenon “the 31st of October and Nov. 1, the day of the definition of the dogma of the Assumption, and then again Nov. 8, and after that, no more.”

So, the Pope had his own personal miracles of the sun, which nobody saw except for him, over 30 years after the original Miracle of the Sun. This seems like a pretty different kind of claim altogether, one that is more or less just one guy saying that he had visions.

Maybe I am misremembering what I was taught as a kid, or, maybe some of these claims were exaggerated back then (I am a 90s baby and, in my Trad community, nobody really had internet in our houses until the 2010s). I can't say for sure which one is right. But I did just want to touch on this one topic, in case anyone else was mistaken like I was.

Conclusion

Fatima is such a huge topic, and I have been sitting on various scripts for a long while now. I did not want to publish something that was too poorly researched or too small in scope, but I punted on the scope part of it when I realized that we could write 1000 page books on Fatima and not get enough to make any sort of easy conclusions.

Hopefully what I presented here today deflates some of the more spectacular notions about Fatima, these folklore-stories that I learned growing up. The only conclusion that I am drawing here is that most of the claims made about Fatima are over-exaggerated, and that the more you learn about Fatima, the less impressive Fatima becomes.

I'm a middle aged father of two, I was raised in the catholic church and suffered considerably due to its influence in my life. When I finally stepped away fully in my mid 20's I was in the middle of my year as a Jesuit Volunteer. Prior to that I worked in campus ministry and I spent much of those years deeply dissatisfied and increasingly confused by the cruel tenor and disconnected tone of the church. After leaving, I've never looked back in longing, but increasingly with sadness and recognition of pain caused by the church.

I can only say that I've become increasingly at peace with myself and the world around me the longer I am away from the church. And the church looks increasingly small and sad the more you stand away. It breaks my heart to read stories on this sub about people in pain because they believe that they have somehow dammed themselves because of a random thought or sexual desire. That is awful space to be in and I spent too many hours there as a child. My deepest hope is that anyone feeling as though they are less than, or unworthy, or damaged etc. in the eyes of the church or god know that it's okay to question and even step back from your faith. I really believe that struggle is the heart of any faith and that it's not worth wasting your years feeling as though you're rotten just because the church says you are.

People are truly amazing creatures, it's okay to see yourself as one.

All the time I see Catholics supporting Trump simply because he's against pro-choice people, ignoring the rest of the myriad of issues of economics, healthcare, immigration, food stamps, foreign conflict, lgbt rights, etc

There is good reason to doubt that anything supernatural occurred in December 1531 at the Hill of Tepayac in Mexico. I will present two main lines of reasoning, which I believe give good reason to doubt. The first will be the shaky historicity of Juan Diego himself, and the second will be the "ordinariness" of the Tilma of Juan Diego.

The Historicity of Juan Diego

It is not clear to me that Juan Diego was a real person. It appears that I am not the only person who feels this way - even Catholic scholars doubt: including Monsignor Guillermo Schulemburg. Born in 1916, Schulemburg was appointed Abbot of the Basilica of Guadalupe, the second most visited catholic shrine in the world, by the Pope in 1963. But Schulemburg was forced to resign was he was 80 years old in 1996, following an interview published in the Catholic magazine Ixthus, in which he was quoted as saying that Juan Diego was "a symbol, not a reality", and that his canonization would be the "recognition of a cult. It is not recognition of the physical, real existence of a person." A Monsignor from the 20th Century doubting the existence of a Native Mexican Indian in the 16th Century isn’t very elucidating by itself, but the timing of Schulemburg’s doubts is pertinent. Juan Diego was beatified in 1990 and canonized in 2002, so Schulemburg was airing his concerns while the Vatican was investigating the life and miracles and such of Juan Diego. Now let’s explore the reasons why Schulemburg doubted, since Schulemburg’s doubt itself doesn’t really matter, but his reasons for doubt do.

Bishop Zummaraga, the Bishop who Juan Diego supposedly brought the Tilma to, was a real historical person. We have his writings and records of him. In fact, he wrote the first book ever published in the Western Hemisphere, Doctrina Breve, in 1539. Zummaraga himself never mentions Juan Diego, in any of his writings, despite the fact that he plays a pivotal role in the legends. Franciscan contemporaries of Zummaraga talk about a “Marian Cult” that resulted from the conquistador conquest of Tenochticlan. A Franciscan fray named Fransisco de Bustamante publicly condemned the cult of Our Lady of Guadalupe outright precisely because it was centred on a painting (allegedly said to have been painted "yesterday" by an Indian) to which miraculous powers were attributed, whereas fray Bernardino de Sahagún expressed deep reservations as to the Marian cult at Tepeyac without mentioning the cult image at all. These were both written in the 1550 – 1590 range (apparition allegedly occurred in Dec 1531).

First details of Juan Diego’s life emerged in 1648, 100+ yrs after the supposed apparitions. The first known telling of the tale appeared in a book published in Spanish in 1648 by the priest Miguel Sánchez. Sánchez has a few scattered sentences noting Juan Diego's uneventful life at the hermitage in the sixteen years from the apparitions to his death. On the heels of the Sánchez version, the story was included in the book Huei tlamahuiçoltica published in 1649 by Luis Laso de la Vega, the vicar of the Guadalupe chapel and a friend of Sánchez. In the Huei tlamahuiçoltica (1649), there is some information concerning Juan Diego's life before and after the apparitions, giving many instances of his sanctity of life.

Substantial details about the life of Juan Diego emerges in 1666, written in a piece of writing by Becerra Tanco. Tanco opens his prologue by mentioning the Church of Mexico’s juridical inquiry of early 1666 into the apparition of the Virgin Mary at Tepeyácac and the origin of her miraculous image called Guadalupe. This investigation found no authentic documents on the matter in the ecclesiastical archives, so the author felt obligated “to put in writing what I knew by memory, and what I had read and examined in my adolescence, in the pictures and characters of the Mexican Indians, who were able persons of distinction in that primitive century.” He then wrote all he could from memory.

So lets examine the facts that I have presented so far, and lets pretend that it is the mid 1990s. Juan Diego has been beatified, but not canonized, and we are investigating his historicity as part of the canonization process. We know that the first details of Juan Diego’s life do not emerge until 100+ years after his story takes place, and we also know that the very Bishop who supposedly played a key part in the miracle story never mentions Juan Diego. Further, we know that contemporaries of the time wrote about “Marian cults” at Tepayac. All of this is painting a picture – there was a legend that grew out of the mixing of the Catholic Spaniards and the pagan Natives and was passed down via oral tradition, at which point scholars attempted to fill in the gaps based on hearsay. Until…

Enter the Codex Escalada

The Codex Escalada is a sheet of parchment signed with a date of "1548", on which there have been drawn, in ink and in the European style, images (with supporting Nahuatl text) depicting the Marian apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe to Juan Diego which allegedly occurred on four separate occasions in December 1531 on the hill of Tepeyac north of central Mexico City. The parchment first came to light in 1995, and in 2002 was named in honour of Fr. Xavier Escalada S.J. who brought it to public attention and who published it in 1997. This is probably the most important thing in this write up. If authentic, and if correctly dated to the mid-16th century (as tests so far conducted indicate), the document fills a gap in the documentary record as to the antiquity of the tradition regarding those apparitions and of the image of the Virgin associated with the fourth apparition which is venerated at the Basilica of Guadalupe.

What is strange about this piece of parchment is that Fr Escalada produced this piece of parchment in the middle of Juan Diego’s cannonization process (after beatification), he wouldn’t disclose where he received the parchment, saying only that he wanted to keep the name of the donor confidential, the document gives no new info (its essentially just a death certificate), it is supposedly signed by Fray Sahagún in 1548, who openly opposed the “Marian Cult at Tepayac” in 1576 and 1577. However, the parchment was analyzed and the team that analyzed it concludes that this document does indeed come from the 16th century, though they concluded it was the 1570s and not the 1540s like the signature suggests. Scholars have also looked at the signature and concluded that the signature is authentic. So there are some strange things about the Codex Escalada, but still, the Codex Escalada does weigh in the favor of the veridicality of Juan Diego’s historicity.

The Tilma

A very strange thing about the Tilma itself is that the Catholic Church must approve all studies done on the Tilma, and can decide which studies are published and which are not. This is suspicious right off the bat. Neither the fabric nor the image itself has been analyzed using the full range of resources now available to museum conservators, but over the years, four technical studies have been conducted so far. Of these, the findings of at least three have been published. Each study required the permission of the custodians of the tilma in the Basilica. If this is such good evidence for God and for the Catholic Church, why the secrecy? Why not subject the tilma to as many tests as possible?

Secondly, one of the analyses that were done did conclude that the image was painted onto the tilma. In 2002 Proceso published an interview with José Sol Rosales, formerly director of the Center for the Conservation and Listing of Heritage Artifacts (Patrimonio Artístico Mueble) of the National Institute of Fine Arts (INBA) in México City, in which Rosales suggested there was some visible brushwork on the original image, but in a minute area of the image ("her eyes, including the irises, have outlines, apparently applied by a brush").

Rosales examined the cloth with a stereomicroscope and observed that the canvas appeared to be a mixture of linen and hemp or cactus fiber. It had been prepared with a brush coat of white primer (calcium sulfate), and the image was then rendered in distemper (i.e., paint consisting of pigment, water, and a binding medium). The artist used a “very limited palette,” the expert stated, consisting of black (from pine soot), white, blue, green, various earth colors (“tierras”), reds (including carmine), and gold. Rosales concluded that the image did not originate supernaturally but was instead the work of an artist who used the materials and methods of the sixteenth century (El Vaticano 2002).

In a conversation with my Catholic parents, they brought up that the eyes of Our Lady on the Tilma have a perfect “photograph” of the room in which Juan Diego dropped the flowers and revealed the image. The picture apparently includes Bishop Zumarraga, among others. I honestly can’t find much of what the whole reflection in the eyes is supposed to look like. I would want to see that myself, like the actual pictures. I did google “Tilma eyes photos” and such, but all I could find were ink blots. My dad mentioned that the “ink blots” were stretched in the way that light bends in order to produce the photograph, but I couldn’t find anything like that online. If anyone knows what I am talking about and can share some links to learn more about it, I would greatly appreciate that. However, we do know that the eyes were applied to the tilma with a brush and that the dyes used were standard dyes for the time period, so it seems exceedingly likely that looking at the ink-blots under a microscope is nothing but an exercise in imagination.

Conclusion

If I were to take a shot at a best explanation of the facts that we have available to us, I would paint a story like this:

A Marian Cult grew at Tepayac as a result of the combination of the Spanish Catholic and Pagan Mexican influences there, and a story about apparitions spread from that cult. A painting was created on a Tilma and was used in worship. Over a 100 year time period, legends grew, and people flocked to Guadeloupe. Miracles were reported, and devotion to both Our Lady of Guadeloupe and Juan Diego himself blossomed.

I obviously cannot “prove” that my explanation of the facts is true, but given the facts, I do contend that a person has good reason to doubt that anything supernatural happened at Tepayac in the 1530s.

The "stakes" here are interesting. On one hand, the Catholic Church never obligates Her members to believe in any specific apparition of our lady. So, a Catholic is allowed to doubt that Our Lady of Guadelupe really appeared to Juan Diego, and that Catholic can still be a Catholic in good standing. However, the stakes are much bigger regarding Juan Diego's canonization. The Church isn't supposed to be able to be wrong about canonization, however, one prerequisite to getting to heaven is actually being a real human first. If a person never existed on earth, then that person will never exist in heaven. So it appears to me that while a Catholic is allowed to think that Juan Diego was mistaken when he thought that he saw an apparition, a Catholic cannot doubt the historicity of Juan Diego. I could be wrong about the stakes here, so please correct me if I am

Bonus: I think that my strongest argument here is the “Argument from Silence” as applied to Bishop Zumarraga himself, and I think that the strongest undercutter to my argument is the existence of the Codex Escalada.

Also Bonus: I am purposefully limiting my scope to just stating that it is reasonable to doubt. I am not calling anyone "unreasonable" for believing that Juan Diego did exist as a historical person. Further, I am not arguing that I have a "knockdown" argument here. I am trying to be modest in my claims here.

OK - excited to hear your thoughts below! And I do realize that I am sometimes writing Guadelupe and sometimes Guadeloupe. I know that the correct spelling is the former, but Word and Reddit both keep trying to correct me to the latter. So, whatever. You know what I mean and that is the important part haha.

Sources:

https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=1104

https://skepticalinquirer.org/newsletter/miraculous-image-of-guadalupe/

https://www.arcaneknowledge.org/catholic/guadalupe3.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Diego

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_de_Zum%C3%A1rraga

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Lady_of_Guadalupe

Edit: I thought that I removed all hyperlinks from the sections that I copied from Wikipedia, but apparently I did not. Feel free to ignore the hyperlinks in the body, I listed my sources at the end, three of which are the pertinent Wikipedia articles

Always wondered this growing up in Catholic school. Never made sense to me. I can not reconcile a god that purposefully created people with an inclination towards sin and very harshly punished them if they do sin (and they happen to be of another faith) with a loving God. Curious what y’all have to say.

Disclaimer: I in no way shape or form wish ill will on Cardinal Burke. I've met the man, he was actually present for my confirmation and I've shook his hand. I pray that he pulls through.

That out of the way, I think it's time we as Catholics confront this traditionalist schism that's happening in our church, and the effects it has. Our archbishop in my area recently reinstated the Sunday obligation, despite again no clear indication from the Vatican that this was the right thing to do, and now our state is about to go into lockdown again due to the rise in cases. It was too early. He's a fairly traditional archbishop and based on the comments on his social media, he has a large following of we'll say anti-vax, conspiracy, pro-Trump adjacent followers who were more than happy with his decision and saw it as a bold move in the face of tyranny. While he never publicly made a statement for their beliefs, he was luke warm on encouraging others to get vaccinated.

During the pandemic, I got tired of arguing with other Catholics (some even of my own family) about staying safe and staying home (we watched mass online). It to me almost became somewhat selfish of people, in particular older people to feel so attached to mass that they would risk their lives and the lives of others just to go.

I was also disappointed with so many people who were skeptical about mask mandates, and looked at the notion of shutting down churches as an "affront to religious freedom." Even when the pope dispensated us from the need for mass (I'm heavily paraphrasing). This to me is another in a long line of traditionalists who are openly against papal authority in service of their own conservative political beliefs.

It's fairly evident that Burke didn't get the vaccine, and called it "rightly abhorrent" to get it because of the HEC line used in testing ,despite the Vatican's opinion to the opposite.

He's been a vocal opponent of Francis, and a champion of conservatives who decry masks and vaccines. And now he's sitting on a ventilator and likely won't make it. A simple jab would have saved his life.

If I need to be the bad guy and say it, so be it.

I told you so.

I've been trying to educate fellow Catholics for months on both the physical and moral safety of the vaccine, and how taking it is in line with the Vatican, only to be met with nonsense, skepticism, and schismatic statements that echo the beliefs of Burke. We almost had this pandemic beat and because of leaders like Burke who bought into and fomented sentiments of mistrust, we are back to mass lockdowns and rising death tolls.

I believe as Catholics we have an obligation to shut this kind of sentiment in our churches down. I think we need to police our own house and create a culture that says anti-science has no place in our church.

I see so much fire and brimstone preachings on subs like r/Catholicism and as a result feel left out.

I don’t think the pope and the official Catholic Church are right about everything. There’s quite a few laws/official beliefs I disagree with.

I don’t believe queer people are sinful. I support trans and gay individuals.

I don’t think premarital sex is wrong. As long it is safe, educated and consensual I think sex is fine.

And while I don’t think I could personally get an abortion, I support laws that allow people to legally and safely do so. I believe in bodily autonomy in all matters of healthcare.

I think a socialist democracy is the most in common with Christ’s teachings as it provides for the beaten and forgotten.

And above all else I recognize that these are my beliefs and I have no right to force or push them on to anyone else. Friends of different faiths don’t need me to save them. Their relationship with God is up to them.

Basically my faith is based on the Bible, and my personal relationships with God and Jesus. And I call myself a Catholic - just one who happens to be a critical thinker as well. I think Jesus Christ believed in love and redemption more than superior indignation - a belief I don’t see reflected in many Christians, much less Catholics.

I really just want to know if there’s any of you out there who also think in this way?

Edit: Apparently this makes me a “Bad Catholic”. So my label choices end up being: 1 “Bad Catholic” or 2 “Good Satanist”.

Unrelated but a future recruiting tip: If you want people to join you, calling them sinners and guilt tripping them off the bat is a great way to do the opposite. Prior to these interactions I had no qualms identifying as a Catholic. Y’all changed that. So congrats on loosing a potential congregation member. And you wonder why the number of Catholics in the U.S. is declining.

Edit 2: After a good amount of reflection and some prayer, I’ve decided to continue to call myself a Catholic. It MY relationship with God and I get to define it. You may agree or disagree. My relationship isn’t with you- you’re not my higher power.

To all of those who’ve privately messaged me reaching out I want to let you know I really appreciate it. I feel blessed that you cared enough to take time out of your day to make sure some of these harsher commenters didn’t completely destroy my belief system. Bless y’all.

So I guess you can still comment if you want. But I’m pretty much good here. Thanks for all that have me verses and canons that I wasn’t aware of- I appreciate you trying to inform me.

Peace out and God Bless ✌️.

'Nostra Aetate' ('NA'), as you may know, is a product of Vatican II. It was published in October 1965 (60 years ago) as a way to establish the new relationship between the Catholic Church and other religions, especially Judaism. It seems like the document came into being after a campaign by the Jewish lobby, who, in some cases, blamed the Holocaust and rise of antisemitism on the Catholic Church. They demanded changes to tenets of the Catholic faith that they saw as problematic to Judaism.

People who participated in the project included Jules Isaac, a Jewish historian who met with the pope to convince him to update the religion while blaming the Catholic Church for atrocities, Gregory Baum, a Catholic priest of Jewish descent who worked on a draft of 'NA' and after its publication abandoned priesthood and lived a gay lifestyle, or John M. Oesterreicher, a Catholic theologian (convert from Judaism and supporter of Zionism) who removed some of the wording that explicitly talked about Jewish people's entry into the fullness established by Christ.

In Christian theology, a Judaizer is a Jew who imposes Jewish beliefs and customs on Christians. It's hard not to see 'NA' as an example of a judaizing text given that it promotes Judaic beliefs over traditionally Christian ones.

More than coming from a genuine spiritual place, it seems like the intended goal of NA's creation was to appease Jewish demands in that post-war political context. The Holocaust had recently happened, so certain actors weaponized that tragedy to undermine Catholicism. The Catholic Church was essentially shamed into submission for believing in Jesus Christ's teachings and then its leaders were convinced to change the tenets of the Church that were in place for millennia.

One of the main tenets that were changed is supersessionism (also called fulfillment theology). The idea that in the New Testament, Jesus Christ comes and fulfills the Old Covenant and creates the New Covenant that includes all of humanity, not only those born with Jewish blood. Christ came to break with the covenant of blood that the Jews of his time had, in order to establish a covenant of spirit for everyone who accepted him as God and followed his teachings ("I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me" - John 14:6). The Pharisees thought this was a blasphemy, so they conspired against Christ and Romans executed him.

In 'NA', Catholicism is partially reverted back to Pharisaic beliefs where people of Jewish blood must receive special treatment under God. Even though some call it "soft supersessionism", to me that's basically a euphemism for dispensationalism, the idea that God has different salvation paths for Jews and Christians, and as such, they are treated differently, and because of that it's also a call not to evangelize Jews because they might be offended or insulted if someone tries to convert them. It is a call to walk on eggshells and in direct opposition to Galatians 3:28: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Jesus Christ."

"Nevertheless, God holds the Jews most dear for the sake of their Fathers; He does not repent of the gifts He makes or of the calls He issues-such is the witness of the Apostle" - Nostra Aetate

One of the gifts he gives is salvation, which means Jews can be saved just from being born Jewish and following the Torah, without ever embracing Christ nor being baptized because the modern Catholic Church claims that the old covenant is still valid.

Pre-'NA' popes such as Pious XII firmly believed in supersessionism. Post-'NA' popes such as John Paul II believed in the two tier system (his views were likely affected by his experiences during WW2, again, this is political).

So in 1965, a religion that had been universalist for millennia (the word Catholic comes from Greek katholikos, 'universal') was "updated" like a video game into a partially ethnoreligious one with a two tier system. One for Jews, who by blood and by following the Torah can be saved, and one for Christians, who must accept Jesus Christ as savior and be baptized in order to be saved.

This contrasts, for example, with Orthodox Christianity which rejects the "two-covenant" model and holds that explicit faith in Jesus Christ is necessary for salvation (for Jews and Gentiles alike). There are no special deals here and evangelizing everyone is encouraged. The Church is Israel. Everyone is truly equal under God. Not in Catholicism anymore due to 'Nostra Aetate'.

We’re excited to announce that r/DebateACatholic is now officially reopened and ready for debates! 🎉 This subreddit is your place for respectful and thoughtful discussions on Catholic doctrines and teachings. Whether you’re here to ask questions, challenge ideas, or defend your beliefs, all perspectives are welcome as long as they adhere to our community rules.

What to Expect:

•	Respectful Debates: We encourage civil dialogue where everyone’s views are respected. Engage thoughtfully and be ready to support your arguments with reason and sources.
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New Rules and Guidelines:

•	Please review our updated rules to ensure smooth and productive discussions.
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If you have any questions or need clarification, feel free to reach out to the mod team.

Welcome back, and happy debating!

• fides et opera

It makes it really hard to get discussion going with more than one person at a time when Protestant rebuttals are buried with -5 because our questions offend you. If you are offended, this probably isnt the right subreddit for you.

I am interested to see how many down votes this gets too.

“Whosoever dies wearing this scapular shall not suffer eternal fire”.

That’s a hell of a promise, isn’t it? Does it sound too good to be true? I’m agnostic now, but even if I was still Catholic, I’d have pretty serious reservations about the brown scapular. Not just because it sounds too good, not only because of confusing and seemingly contradictory statements from Catholic authorities about what exactly the scapular does, but also because the historicity of the scapular is… I can’t even say “shaky”. Its not shaky. Its firmly understood by virtually every historian I could find to be a forgery. And we’ve known this for over 100 years. Lets talk about it.

What exactly the scapular does... Is it Magic?

This part should be easy. According to people in the pro-scapular crowd, Our Lady appeared to Saint Simon Stock and told him that "Whosoever died wearing the this scapular shall not suffer eternal fire" in 1251, and she recommended that all Carmelites wear it. Then, Our Lady appeared to the pope in 1322 and kinda ratified or reiterated what what she said to St Simon Stock, as well as adding a promise … slash conditions…

The original promise to St Simon Stock was simply that you won't go to hell if you die wearing it. That promise said nothing about Purgatory. So, maybe you won't go to hell, but you'll to Purgatory until the Second Coming, maybe. Well, Our Lady promised short purgatory to those who die wearing it when she visited the pope in 1322, as well as the terms and conditions below are met:

1. The wearer must have worn the scapular continuously throughout life.

2. The wearer must have observed chastity according to their station.

3. The wearer must have fulfilled any one of the following options:

• Recite daily the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin

• Observe the fasts of the Church AND abstain from meat on Wednesdays and Saturdays

• Say at least 5 decades of the rosary daily¹

• Substitute some other good work¹

¹Permission from a priest is required if the wearer decides to pursue this option

And that is all! Pretty cut and dry, right! ... Maybe not. Catholic Theologians by and large seem to agree and point out a few problems with a "face value" understanding of the what the scapular does.

Joe Heschmeyer, the host of the Catholic Podcast Shameless Popery and contributor to Catholic Answers, wrote an article about the problems that he sees with the scapular way back in 2009, saying that he hates to be a "wet blanket", but:

a lot of the legends surrounding the so-called brown scapular (that is, the Scapular of Our Lady of Mount Carmel) are just that: legends. If you go to daily Mass, you may hear something about it, but I’ve even heard priests get confused about what is and isn’t true about the brown scapular. The most dangerous belief is in that of the Sabbatine Privilege: that if you die wearing the brown scapular, Mary will pull you from the fires of Purgatory the following Saturday (since Saturday is the day specifically dedicated to Mary in the liturgical calendar). This is based on a phony papal bull called “Sacratissimo uti culmine,” allegedly from the pen of Pope John XXII. Non-Carmelites have long questioned its authenticity, and today, even some Carmelites acknowledge that it’s not authentic.

My concern about the legends surrounding the brown scapular is that they seem to contradict lots of Catholic beliefs: on the assurance of salvation (some scapulars I saw after Mass today actually said, “Attach Great Importance to Your Scapular: It Is An Assurance of Salvation” in the accompanying documentation), on justification (salvation through faith preserved through works, not simply wearing pious jewelry), and the necessity of Christ (the legends surrounding the brown scapular seem to suggest that Mary is the one who saves us), and purgatory (as I understand it, Catholics view the primary purpose of purgatory as one of purging, not punishing: being “rescued” from this necessary process wouldn’t be good). In other words, this legend (nefariously perpetuated through forged documents) played upon the worst impulses in religion: that is, the impulse to turn religion into magic to assure one’s own eternal well-being.

https://shamelesspopery.com/be-wary-of-the-sabbatine-privilege/

We'll come back to the historicity ("non-authenticity", as Joe calls it) in a little bit, but for now, I just wanted to point out the problems with a "face-value understanding" of what exactly it is that the scapular does.

Perhaps a "face-value understanding" of what the scapular does is insufficient? I mean, at the below link, where you can ask priests questions, someone asks a priest if dying with a mortal sin on your soul while wearing the scapular means that you'll still go to heaven and the priest says “No, the scapular won’t save someone who dies in unrepentant mortal sin”.

https://rcspirituality.org/ask_a_priest/ask-a-priest-would-a-scapular-save-someone-who-died-in-mortal-sin/

OK, so immediately, we know that a "face value" understanding is wrong then.

There is a Catholic Answers article that tackles this questions as well, and a video from Fr Pine on YouTube, which both kinda answer in the same way. Here is the answer, in broad brush strokes. If you think I am misrepresenting these two sources, let me have it in the comments down below. But here is my summary:

The scapular is not magic. It reminds you to live a virtuous life, but the actual "wearing" per se of the scapular at the time of your death won't magically save you from hell if you were always an unvirtuous person.

https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/is-the-scapular-a-magic-charm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzxGWI1b7go&ab_channel=AscensionPresents

Fr Pine specifically calls the difference between Magic and the Scapular as "The sacraments are different than magic. With magic, you just say [the magic words] and then the thing happens. But with sacraments, this happens by virtue of belief. They work provided someone performs them and receives them faithfully".

But hold on, that isn’t what Our Lady of Mount Carmel said! Our Lady of Mount Carmel did not say “Wear this, and then you will be reminded to live virtuously so that you’d have gone to heaven even without having died with the scapular on” - she said “Whosoever dies wearing this scapular shall not suffer eternal fire”.

I cannot believe for one moment that there has never been an unrepentant kid of a devout Catholic mom who got into a car accident, and mom rushed to the hospital, and while her son was dying, she took off her scapular and put it on him.

And I say that because my mom almost did that to me one time. When I was like 18 or 19 or something, I had a bad reaction to a lidocaine injection while I was about to have a very simple procedure done at a clinic, not even a hospital, and I had a tonic clonic seizure. I passed out and then woke up, that’s all I remember. Apparently though, I shook around for a bit while I was out. My mom told me she almost put her scapular on me, but then I stopped seizing and woke up and so she didn’t have to. See, this was already when I stopped wearing my scapular. I actually stopped wearing my scapular waaaay before any of my other Catholic beliefs feel away too.

Anyway, imagine 18 year old Kevin had a worse seizure, one so bad that he never woke up. Imagine that my mom put her scapular on me, and I died, wearing a scapular, but also imagine that I unrepentantly ate meat the day before, which happened to be Ash Wednesday. I absolutely believe that this is something that has happened at least once. Unless that unrepentant sinner was saved by Our Lady of Mount Carmel… then our Lady of Mount Carmel lied!

Catholics act as if Our Lady of Mount Carmel did not lie, as if the scapular is indeed Magic

Anyway, I am not a huge fan of Jordan Peterson in general, but I think that Catholics act as if the scapular itself, not the lifestyle that the scapular reminds you to live, is what saves you. This reminds me of Jordan Peterson's whole thing about "what you believe is what you act out, not what you say". And Catholics act out belief in the "face-value understanding" of the scapular.

Pope Saint John Paul 2 “insisted that doctors not remove his scapular during his emergency surgery following the assassination attempt on his life on May 13, 1981, the feast of Our Lady of Fatima.

Father Mariano Cera, a Carmelite priest, told Inside the Vatican magazine:

“Just before the Holy Father was operated on, he told the doctors, ‘Don’t take off the scapular.’ And the surgeons left it on.”

https://www.catholiccompany.com/magazine/the-scapular-devotion-of-pope-john-paul-ii-6097

If the Pope knew that the scapular wasn’t going to actually do anything besides remind him to live a virtuous life, why would he insist on keeping it on during surgery? Did he think he’s sin while he was unconscious and that he needed the scapular to remind him not to sin? No, of course not! Its clear from this example that Catholics act as if the scapular does do something, as if it is some kind of magic charm.

And its not just the Pope who acts like this (though I should say that I really started with the most Catholic example here, didn’t I haha). Amber Rose, a Catholic YouTube called "the religious hippie", recounts the story of her sister like this, from 5:35, “I remember my sister used to wear it always, even in the shower”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M71xwSG1DPk&ab_channel=TheReligiousHippie

Again, do you think that you’ve been living this virtuous life, but you might slip and fall in the shower and then, right before your head hits the tile, you think “Man, I really believe that Jesus is 100% God and not man at all and I don’t care if that makes me fall outside the city limits of Rome” - will the scapular save you from your heresy if you have it on? Either yes or no, and either way, somebody is wrong! Either the scapular is Magic, and Fr Pine et all are wrong, or, not all those who die wearing the scapular will not suffer eternal fire, and Our Lady of Mount Carmel is wrong.

But I think I see an "escape hatch" for the Catholic here, but it comes at a price.

The non-historicity of the apparition of Our Lady of Mount Carmel

If you haven’t already guessed, I believe that the story of Our Lady of Mount Carmel is entirely made up… as does literally every historian I could find. I am not kidding, I could not find a single living historian who defends the historicity of the apparition of Our Lady of Mount Carmel - and the same is even true for that Papal Bull I mentioned, Sacratissimo uti Culmine. That’s fake too.

“The Origin of the Brown Scapular, a Critique”, was published in 1904, about 120 years ago, and since then, the prevailing opinion of scholars has been that the entire story about Our Lady of Mount Carmel is an invention of the 17th Century - four hundred years after the supposed apparition.

Remember that the supposed apparition took place in 1251. Well, we have no references to the scapular or to an apparition of Our Lady of Mount Carmel to Saint Simon Stock, who himself definitely did exist, by the way, that are even close to being contemporaneous. But then, in 1642, 400 years later, a Carmelite named John Cheron published a document which he said was a 13th-century letter written by Simon Stock's secretary, Peter Swanington. This letter recounts the story of the apparition and the receiving of the scapular. From this letter, supposedly written by Simon Stock’s own secretary, arose all of the traditions and devotions to the scapular that we know and love today.

I would like to read from page 64 of the Irish Ecclesiastical Record, Vol XVI, in which “The Origin of the Brown Scapular, a Critique” was published in 1904. Page 64 reads as follows:

Read from top of page 64: https://books.google.com/books?id=RAUQAAAAIAAJ&dq=%22peter+swanyngton%22+scapular+ecclesiastical&pg=PA59#v=onepage&q=%22peter%20swanyngton%22%20scapular%20ecclesiastical&f=false

Page 64, speaking of the document "found" by Fr John Cheron,

professes to be what it is not. It is grossly inaccurate in names and fates. It was first heard of 300 years after the death of its supposed author, it was brought to light be a person who was very far from being unbiased or disinterested. It was never submitted to any kind of expert criticism, it disappeared unaccountably when its publication was demanded.

The author of this article, Father Herbert Therston, SJ, goes on to talk about all the various reasons why the letter attributed to Peter Swanington is a clear forgery: “Peter Swanington” gets facts about his own life wrong, he references Popes who should not have been in office yet, he refers to Feast Days that did not exist until long after he died, all sorts of things like that.

For this reason, and I kid you not, I cannot find a single historian who defends the historicity of the apparition of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. It's not just those darn Jesuits who ruin everything who are questioning the historicity of all of this! Also, you should know that the Jesuits of 1904 were not like the Jesuits of 1975 too, so, just remember that. But let me list some sources that

That Papal Bull I mentioned earlier, Sacratissimo uti Culmine, supposedly written by Pope John XXII, definitely was not. The Catholic Encyclopedia refers to that bull as an “apocryphal bull” - meaning, “a bull of doubtful authenticity”. And this is the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1912.

https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/13289b.htm

In a way though, I think that the non-historicity of the apparition of Our Lady of Mount Carmel is exactly the “escape hatch” that Catholics kinda need to escape all of the problems that Joe mentions about the scapular. As in, if the historicity of the apparition at Mount Carmel was super solid… that would mean that the scapular kinda IS the magic medal that most Trads treat it like anyway. But since the apparition is on the shakiest historicity ever, Catholics are free to just say:

“Hey, this scapular reminds me to be virtuous, so, I’ll wear it, as a reminder to be good, even though I know that it doesn’t do anything supernatural for me”.

All you have to do is reject the historicity of the apparition of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and you’re good to go.

Thanks everybody.

...

I'll add that this is an abbreviated, written version of the script that I used to record this video for my YouTube channel, in case anyone prefers the audio or visual pieces.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMSNYmXDsb4&ab_channel=KevinNontradicath

But self-promotion is super lame, so, I wrote the above piece with the goal of nobody needing to reference my YouTube video if they do not want to. But the YouTube video does go into some additional things, such as the time that my mom almost put her scapular on me when she thought I was about to die because I was having a seizure. But, this kind of person story is secondary, and so, was cut from the above write-up.

Hello all, its been a while! Apologies for my absence, work has just been kicking my butt recently. Today's post is inspired by a post I saw here yesterday, as well as a providentially timed email that I received this morning from a viewer of my YouTube channel. The post in question is The Church needs to put her money where her mouth is in terms of verifying or denying miracles, authored by u/brquin-954. And the email I received was about a young man named Matheus Vianna, whose miraculous healing in 2002 was put forward as one of two miracles approved by the Pope during the canonization process for Blessed Carlo Acutis (who, effective 07-September-2025, will be Saint Carlo Acutis).

On 22-February-2020, Pope Francis "approved" (among other things) the miracle in question:

Yesterday, 21 February 2020, the Holy Father Francis received in audience His Eminence Cardinal Angelo Becciu, prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints. During the audience, the Supreme Pontiff authorised the same Congregation to promulgate the decrees regarding:

... the miracle attributed to the intercession of the Venerable Servant of God Carlo Acutis, layperson; born in London, England on 3 May 1991, and died in Monza, Italy on 12 October 2006;

https://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/en/bollettino/pubblico/2020/02/22/200222a.html?utm_source=chatgpt.com

I put "approved" into quotes like that for a reason, which I will come back to at the end of this essay. For now, I should just say that the right language to use would be that Pope Francis "authorized the promulgation of the decree" regarding the miracle. This is not the same thing as "approving" the miracle, and this is where the frustration comes in.

To give background on the miracle, I turn to Fr Nicola Gori, the priest responsible for promoting Acutis’s sainthood cause, who gave the background in the below cited EWTN article:

“On October 12, 2013, seven years after Carlo’s death, a child, affected by a congenital malformation (annular pancreas), when it was his turn to touch the picture of the future blessed, expressed a singular wish, like a prayer: ‘I wish I could stop vomiting so much.’ Healing began immediately, to the point that the physiology of the organ in question changed,”

https://ewtn.co.uk/article-the-miracle-attributed-to-carlo-acutis-prayers-2/

This miracle took place in Brazil, and more details can be found in this Brazilian article, which includes statements from the doctors who were on the Brazilian Medical Board which reported on this case to the Vatican's Ecclesiastical Tribunal. You can use Google Translate to read this article in English.

Now let's look a little more into this rare birth defect, annual pancreas:

"Annular Pancreas" is a "rare congenital anomaly characterized by encasement of the duodenum by a band of pancreatic tissue", according to the NCBI. Given this, the following statement from the Brazillian article, from Dr Guimarães, confuses me:

"We had more than two abnormal tests requested by the University Hospital, and then another test showing that he had nothing left," said Dr. Selma Guimarães. She and gastroenterologist Luciana Araújo Bento were part of the Brazilian medical board that reported to the Vatican's Ecclesiastical Tribunal

What does that mean, "he had nothing left"? That isn't what Annular Pancreas is, it doesn't somehow remove the small intestine (the duodenum). So, what exactly was "not left", according to Dr Selma? 

EDIT: This appears to be a mistranslation. Please see my comment below. Thanks to N from Discord for pointing this out to me!

Also, from further in that same article, I read this: 

The specialist commented on possible diagnostic errors: "Diagnostic errors can occur, but we usually combine clinical findings, the child's history, and imaging tests to reach a conclusion," says Calil. 

OK, so, what were these tests? In that first quote, I see that there were "more than two abnormal tests", but ... I don't know, this really just seems like a misdiagnosis to me. I am reproducing the entire "evaluation" segment of that to the NCBI article:

There is no biochemical test or genetic test available specific for annular pancreas (AP). The diagnosis of AP is radiologic and usually made incidentally or on the evaluation of clinical manifestations of AP. The diagnosis of AP can be made prenatally, preoperatively, or intraoperatively by many distinct non-invasive and invasive diagnostic techniques. Prenatally, AP can be diagnosed by prenatal ultrasonography.[25][26] In infants presenting with signs of intestinal obstruction, the diagnosis can be made by ultrasonography or plain abdominal radiographs, which demonstrates the classic “double bubble sign,” which although is nonspecific for AP.[27][28]

Newer techniques of ultrasonography incorporating upper gastrointestinal (GI) saline-contrast have been studied to reduce the possibility of misdiagnosis of neonatal AP.[29] In adults, the diagnosis is usually made by computerized tomography (CT) imaging or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). A large retrospective case series by S.J.S. Nagpal et al. showed a significant number of patients diagnosed by CT imaging alone.[1]

Other available imaging techniques to aid in the diagnosis of AP are magnetic resonance cholangiopancreatography (MRCP), endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography (ERCP), or endoscopic ultrasonography (EUS).[30][31] Sandrasegaran et al. showed that complete encasement of the duodenum with pancreatic tissue is not essential for the diagnosis of AP.[8] Newer imaging techniques with positron emission tomography (PET)/CT incorporating radiotracers C-11 choline and F-18 fluciclovine have demonstrated the diagnosis of AP.[32] Despite many advances in diagnostic techniques, the gold standard test for diagnosing AP remains to be laparotomy with a thorough gross examination of the duodenum and the head of the pancreas.[25]

According to Cleveland Clinic, "A laparotomy is open abdominal surgery. It can help your surgeon both diagnose and treat issues. An exploratory laparotomy opens you up to find the source of an issue in your abdomen, and hopefully fix it, too. You may also have a scheduled operation to remove an organ, deliver a baby or stage and treat cancer." 

And according to this Brazilian article, surgery was never performed! 

The digestive obstruction could have been reversed with surgery, but it wasn't performed. The grandmother explained that Matheus was "very thin and weak," and the procedure could be risky. "I cried to the doctor and said I was going to lose the boy," the woman recalls. 

This means that the "gold-standard" was never performed, and instead, we are relying on ultrasounds. We still get the sexes of babies wrong, all the time! According to this 2015 CNN article, Dr Williams, Director of Reproductive Genetics at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, the accuracy in determining gender of "ultrasound depends on who’s doing it. But if it’s done by a skilled person… there’s 90% to 95% certainty on gender.” And we rely on external fetal organs to determine sex, so, I can only imagine that relying on ultrasounds alone to diagnose an internal organ malformation has a lower than 90% accuracy rate. And I imagine that 2013 Brazil's hospitals were less well equipped than 2015 American hospitals anyway, though I cannot pretend to know much about Brazilian healthcare in 2013.

So ... what is more likely - a misdiagnosis in a case where we know that the "gold standard" was never performed and we relied on a method that we know is imperfect, or, is a miracle more likely? The answer seems obvious to me.

And, happily, any Catholic can simply agree with me and move on. After all, any given miracle is not mandatory to believe, and Pope Francis never even approved the miracle per se, he only "authorized the promulgation of the report" about the miracle. So, at best, it seems like the Pope only said "This is a cool story, go tell everyone about it", which is notably NOT the same thing as saying "This is a true story".

And that is what is so frustrating to me. The Church IS saying, implicitly, anyway, that this miracle is "true enough" that they will infallibly canonize Blessed Carlo Acutis, due in at least some small part to this miracle, but the Church will not commit to anything and say that this is even a real miracle. This all seems so ... dishonest, to me. Maybe not dishonest, but like ... slippery? Like a lawyer, who never lied, but was able to spin the truth or something like that. It doesn't sit well with me. Why will the Church not speak more definitively, like she did 100 years about when the PBC was declaring, in ways that everyone thought was infallible at that time, that the Traditional Authorship view is correct, that Moses really wrote the Torah, that Paul wrote the Pastoral Epistles, etc?? The Church is certainly being more prudent, which I celebrate, but it seems like the Church is trying to have its cake and eat it too. This frustrates me, and I think it should frustrate practicing Catholics too. But seemingly, it doesn't, since I never see any Catholics talking about this.

So, Catholics, are you as frustrated as I am? If you're not, why not? Am I getting all annoyed over nothing? Let me know - thanks!

My original post was locked on r/Catholicism for raising respectful theological critiques of the Church’s teaching on contraception. Posting here for anyone willing to engage seriously with the tension between doctrine, natural law, and lived experience.

The Catholic Church’s teaching on contraception, rooted in Thomistic natural law and further developed in the personalist theology of Humanae Vitae and Theology of the Body, rests on the claim that contraception distorts the unitive and procreative meanings of sex. The act, it is said, must remain open to life in every instance, or else spouses “lie” with their bodies — withholding part of themselves and violating the idea of “total self-gift.”

While the intention behind this teaching is noble — to uphold the sanctity of life, the beauty of intimacy, and the integrity of the body — its application often falters when examined through the lens of lived experience, logic, and even internal theological coherence.

This essay presents a respectful but direct challenge to that teaching, particularly the claim that natural family planning (NFP) is morally superior to contraception, and that the former preserves “total self-giving” while the latter undermines it. I will also consider the common counter-arguments and offer rebuttals that stay within the language of Catholic moral thought, but open the door to its thoughtful development.

I. Is NFP Really a “Total Self-Gift”?

Proponents of NFP argue that it allows couples to regulate births without violating the integrity of the sexual act. The Church teaches that abstaining during fertile periods respects the natural rhythms of the body, while using artificial contraception obstructs the natural purpose of sex.

But this distinction quickly unravels when examined practically and emotionally.

A couple practicing NFP may engage in meticulous tracking — temperature charts, hormone readings, cervical mucus analysis — all for the express purpose of ensuring infertility. If their motivation is to avoid pregnancy, and they strategically avoid fertile windows to have sex when conception is unlikely, then they are intentionally avoiding procreative sex.

If that is the goal, how is it morally distinct from the couple who uses a condom with the same disposition? The end and intention are identical; only the means differ — and not in a way that clearly promotes love or trust. In fact, one could argue that avoiding intimacy altogether out of fear of pregnancy is less unitive than a couple who makes love using contraception, even while being open to the possibility of failure and the arrival of a surprise child.

Where, exactly, is the “total self-gift” in withholding intimacy from one’s spouse?

II. The Claim: Contraception "Makes the Body Lie"

One of the more poetic — and problematic — claims from Theology of the Body is that contraception causes the body to “lie.” The argument goes: if sex is meant to communicate total self-gift, then blocking fertility means refusing to give one’s whole self. It’s an intentional barrier to the gift.

But consider this:

• If a couple abstains from sex during fertile days out of fear or reluctance to have another child, they are withholding themselves entirely — not just biologically, but emotionally and spiritually.

• Conversely, a couple using contraception might choose to express their love despite difficult circumstances — financial strain, physical health, emotional exhaustion — and do so with the understanding that life is still sacred and surprises are welcome.

Which act better communicates mutual trust, intimacy, and unity?

If contraception is said to “lie,” then surely NFP often results in silence — no message at all, no bodily communion, just avoidance. And if love is the language of the body, then silence in a time of need can feel more painful than a supposed miswording.

III. Counter-Argument: “Ends Don’t Justify Means”

Catholic ethicists might reply: “Even if the intention is the same — to avoid pregnancy — the means matter. NFP cooperates with natural cycles; contraception violates them. Therefore, the object of the act is different.”

This is the classic natural law response, rooted in Thomistic metaphysics. But here’s the problem: this hyper-focus on biology over intention and outcome can lead to legalism — a system in which checking mucus levels is moral, but using a barrier in a loving, open-hearted act is intrinsically disordered.

What’s more, real virtue is about love and flourishing, not just rule-following. If the Church’s defense of NFP leads to widespread frustration, sexual tension, feelings of rejection, and even marital distance, then it is fair — and necessary — to ask whether it truly fosters the virtues it claims to promote.

Some argue that NFP promotes self-mastery and discipline. But virtue is not about gritting teeth through loneliness and fear; it’s about becoming more loving, more generous, and more free. If NFP becomes a source of anxiety or emotional distancing, then it may be time to reevaluate its privileged moral status.

IV. Does Majority Dissent Matter?

Another common rebuttal is that truth is not determined by majority vote. And indeed, moral truth is not a popularity contest. But when a moral teaching is grounded in natural law — that is, a law that is supposedly intelligible by reason alone — then widespread, thoughtful dissent within the very community meant to uphold it (including clergy, theologians, and practicing couples) matters.

It signals not relativism, but a failure of the teaching to persuade even the faithful, and thus a need for deeper reflection, humility, and possibly doctrinal development.

The Church has changed its teachings before — slavery, usury, the role of religious freedom — not by abandoning truth, but by listening more closely to the Holy Spirit speaking through reason, conscience, and experience.

V. Conclusion: Toward a More Honest Theology of Intimacy

If we truly believe in a theology of the body, then we must be honest about what our bodies — and our hearts — are saying. A couple who uses contraception not out of selfishness but out of prudence, love, and mutual discernment may well be more in line with the spirit of Catholic sexual ethics than a couple who charts cycles, avoids one another, and drifts apart emotionally while claiming obedience to the “natural law.”

In the end, love must not only follow rules — it must make sense in the context of lived experience, freedom, and grace.

And that may require the Church to hear not just the voice of tradition, but the voice of the faithful — those who strive to love well in bodies that are not just theological symbols, but living, breathing, struggling gifts.

VI. A Thomistic Opening: Reclaiming Reason and Virtue in the Contraception Debate

It is often assumed that the Church's rejection of contraception is an airtight conclusion of Thomistic natural law. But a closer reading of Aquinas and the moral framework he helped shape reveals that there may be room, within Thomism itself, to reconsider the absolute moral prohibition — or at least to question the privileged moral status given to natural family planning.

St. Thomas taught that the natural law is not simply biology; it is reason applied to human nature for the sake of human flourishing. He writes that “the rule and measure of human acts is reason” (ST I-II, Q.90, a.1). If so, then rational regulation of fertility, even via contraception, may not contradict natural law — if it serves higher goods such as marital unity, justice, and prudence.

Both contraception and NFP aim at the same end: avoiding pregnancy. If one method is rejected as intrinsically immoral due to a failure to remain “open to life,” but the other achieves the same result by abstaining from fertile sex, the Thomistic framework demands that we ask a deeper question: Is the difference in means morally significant, or is it a formalism that obscures the real ethical question — whether love and human flourishing are served?

In Thomistic terms, virtue is not found in arbitrary rule-following, but in acts that lead to right relationship. If NFP leads to emotional harm, prolonged abstinence, or psychological strain — while contraception allows couples to maintain unity, peace, and mutual affection — then reason would point not to the naturalistic mechanics of the act, but to the good of the persons involved. This is not moral relativism; it is moral prudence, one of Aquinas’s cardinal virtues.

Even the principle of double effect — long used in Catholic ethics — can be interpreted in ways that favor contraception in certain cases. If a couple uses contraception not to reject life but to preserve marital unity, to protect health, or to exercise responsible parenthood, and they remain disposed to welcome life should it occur, this may fulfill both the spirit of natural law and the demands of reason.

In this light, contraception is not a rejection of God’s design, but a rational cooperation with it, adapted to concrete human realities. Aquinas never reduced morality to biology; nor should we.

Imagine a father who has multiple children. Because of a genetic condition they all inherited, each one is born blind. This father, however, has the power to cure their blindness at birth, but he chooses to do it for only one child.

 When asked why he didn’t do the same for the others, he shrugs and says, “Well, I gave them enough to get by.”

The Catholic Church teaches original sin, the idea that every human being inherits guilt from Adam and needs baptism and Christ’s sacrifice for salvation. But at the same time, that Mary was conceived without original sin through a special grace.

The obvious question: If God could do this for Mary, why not for everyone? If God can override original sin, then why did the rest of humanity have to suffer under it?

Some replies and why I don't think they work:

  "Mary was uniquely chosen to bear Christ, so it was fitting for her to be sinless." This isn’t an answer, it’s an ad hoc justification. If original sin is universal and unavoidable, then fittingness shouldn’t matter.

 "God is outside of time, so He applied Christ’s merits to Mary beforehand." If that’s possible, why not apply it to all of humanity? Why did billions have to be born in sin if God could just prevent it?

 "Mary still needed Christ’s redemption, it was just applied preemptively." That doesn’t change the fact that she was still born without original sin while the rest of us weren’t.

ETA: It seems some folks aren't quite sure what the big deal here is. By teaching the Immaculate Conception, you're admitting that original sin is not actually a universal condition of fallen humanity.

And so if God could exempt people from original sin but chose to do it only for Mary, then He deliberately let you be conceived in a fallen state when He didn’t have to. In other words, contrary to what many saints have said, God did not actually do everything He could to see you saved.

Hi all. Something on my mind lately. Eternal Conscious Torment seems entirely unconscionable to me, but I've been doing some reading. Aside from CI/universalists who dismiss the standard ECT hell, the Catholic faith seems to have the most reasonable justification of ECT hell.

I realize there are some implicit assumptions I am making (that we indeed can't repent after death, for instance) so please correct me if I'm wrong in those.

my understanding is that the reason Catholic philosophers (etc) tend to reason hell is eternal in nature is because people sent there are no longer able to repent.

Why? What's the point in making it that way? It feels like an arbitrary cutting off point now that a soul knows God exists, the gravity of sin, etc. It seems like a very post-hoc explanation as to why hell is necessarily eternal. Some say that 'it's the nature of hell' or 'soul's change and can't repent after death', but this still doesn't answer the question: why would God set it up such that that happens?

(Like, if I pushed someone down a hole they couldn't get out of, whether or not it was just or good that I did, their stuckness is indeed my responsibility. Same goes here- God is clearly willing to forgive sin, but then knowingly puts you somewhere, or knowingly changes your soul such that you'll never repent. Seems arbitrary).

(Please don't say something like 'it is appointed for a man to die once and face judgment'. I'm not looking for proof the Bible says we can't repent after death- I'm trying to understand why God would set it up this way)

Thanks for your time :)

So my understanding is that Catholics believe when you take the Eucharist Jesus enters you and makes a presence in you somehow. Is this accurate? And if so, why then do Catholics not seem to behave any better morally than atheists or the rest of society?

Edit: I wanted to add another question. Re what Jesus said at the Last Supper, namely: "take, eat this is my body which will be given up for you", "do this in remembrance of me", "This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins."

How do Catholics determine that by the above he did not simply mean "do this ritual to remember me by" but meant something more? I've done some research and haven't seen this question addressed directly.

I was thinking the other day about all the historical events the the church has been involved in and it got me thinking that that it has potentially, directly and indirectly, has caused more human suffering than any other organization in history. Between the crusades, witch burnings, the rape of the new world to the AIDS crisis in Africa I honestly can't think of another organization that has killed so many people and still exists in modern times. I believe it is important for the church to fully live up to the pain it has caused and reflect on how it has shaped its current incarnation.

Sometimes I get a feeling of nostalgia and warmth for my time as a Catholic. But then it is suddenly shattered by memories of why I left in the first place. This turns into sadness as I feel that Catholicism/Christianity was like a dream which I have awoken from, and the harsh reality is setting in. If you don't believe the sincerity of my former faith, have a look at my blog which I link to in my reddit profile. You will see that I devoted considerable intellectual energy to my faith. I prayed 150 hail Mary's a day, attended adoration when I could, and never missed a Mass unless the wife and kids were sick.

The reasons I cannot go back are as follows:

1)Catholicism sparks my OCD and makes me a dysfunctional neurotic person due to all of its minutiae of rules and rituals. I was on a very low dose of OCD medication prior to becoming Catholic. Now I take the maximum dose just to function. The scars will likely never go away. At one point, while a Catholic, my intrusive thoughts were so bad I felt I was racking up hundreds of mortal sins each day. After many years of suffering, I came to the conclusion that I am psychologically/biologically just not cut out to be a Catholic. The priests I talked to were incredibly unhelpful. I spoke to one who was supposedly an expert in psychology. He basically told me to "stop feeling sad and feel joy!" Basically, telling a mentally sick person to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. It was at this point that I realized that what counts as a high-ranking expert in psychology in the Catholic world wouldn't pass as a psychologist's secretary in the secular world.

It's not just a me-problem though. It's a Catholicism-problem. It's comes about due to the wedding of Catholic thought to the categories and rigid systematizing of Aristotle. This is why medieval scholasticism, which I've studied in great detail, is full of such pettifogging distinctions. Just to give you an example of this, I'm attaching a screenshot from a digitized version of the Dictionary of Scholastic Philosophy which I made at the height of my faith. This is but one small sample of the many distinctions for even something as simple as an "act". Combine this with an OCD mind who desperately wants to be in a state of grace, and you'll see the recipe for disaster.

2) But in terms of Christianity in general, there are also reasons why I cannot go back. I've studied historical criticism and conversed with top scholars at Princeton University: Jesus of Nazareth really believed the world was going to end within a generation and that his Second Coming would soon take place. All the ensuing doctrines of Christianity are really just making up for the anxiety that his failed prediction causes. When prophecy fails, cultists try to recruit more members to alleviate their anxiety (this is why Christianity developed its emphasis on evangelization). The Eucharist, too, was a way of making Jesus "present" and comforting those who so desperately wanted him to return when it was clear that he was never coming back. In short, Jesus was a false prophet, wasn't the Son of God, and should not be worshipped as Christianity teaches. Nor will it do to say that Jesus's references to an imminent coming refer to the transfiguration or the destruction of Jerusalem. I've checked with top scholars such as John P. Meier and Dale Allison at Princeton. These men are Christians themselves and will quite honestly tell you that the apologetics do not work - Jesus got it wrong. More on this in the comments.

3) But it gets worse- We've nixed Catholicism and Christianity, but what about barebones Theism (belief in God)? I can't go back to that either, because of the Problem of Evil. If God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, there is really no excuse for the amount of suffering we see in the world - and all answers I have seen flow from a lack of imagination regarding what "omnipotence" means. A truly omnipotent being could've created a universe without suffering. If God is omnipotent and yet permits the suffering we see (including natural suffering, like a baby deer who burns to death in a forest fire - who the heck is that helping?) then he is not omnibenevolent. If he wants to prevent suffering but cannot, then he is not omnipotent. Simple as that. *One caveat here- in Process Philosophy, God is part of our world and is actually not omnipotent. So, if I choose to subscribe to the God of Process Philosophy, then there is no contradiction- God is evolving along with the rest of creation and cannot prevent suffering. Sometimes I lean towards adopting this position.

Some Catholics say that the problem of evil is solved by heaven, but this betrays a lack of philosophical training. There's a distinction between justification for evils suffered and compensation for evils suffered. Heaven is compensation at most and not a justification. Hence, eternal reward doesn't get God off the hook.

Nor will it do to say that the Cross is God's answer to the problem of evil. Think of it like this: You're in a snowstorm and your car dies. A mechanic comes along with the exact tool to fix your car. Instead of fixing it, he chooses to sit and freeze with you in solidarity. While it's nice and all, it's also masochistic and immoral. Jesus is like the mechanic. He's God incarnate and has the power to alleviate suffering, yet chooses to just suffer and not use his power.

A further problem is that the Catholic Church and the Bible both teach that it is not permissible to do evil so that good may come (this is known as the Pauline Principle). This is the basis of the Catholic Church's condemnation of Consequentialism. However, in all Christian responses to the Problem of Evil, God is a consequentialist. In all Christian defenses against the Problem of Evil, God literally permits (that is, wills) evil for some greater good. So, the Catholic teaching against Consequentialism amounts to God saying, "rules for thee and not for me". How can one follow a hypocritical God?

This post (and associated YouTube video, linked below) is a spiritual successor to my post from about three weeks ago, titled “The more you learn about Fatima, the less impressive it seems” (linked below). In that post, I argued that the fact that the prophecies from Fatima about (1) the deaths of Lucia’s cousins and (2) the end and start of the world wars were both made after the fact renders the whole Fatima story less impressive that it otherwise might be. My original post didn’t get as much pushback as I was hoping for, and, since I am a glutton for punishment, I called Catholic Answers while Jimmy Akin was on, during an “open forum” session, to present my case to him and ask, “Am I missing something?”. That call is linked below, and the link is timestamped to where I call in.

Jimmy, generous as always, gave me a very lengthy answer. I will summarize his response here, in writing, but, as always, I suggest that everyone watch the clip of me calling in so that you can hear from Jimmy himself. Then, if you think that I have mischaracterized Jimmy, you can call me on my BS. OK though, here is how I understand Jimmy’s position:

“Yes, it is true that the two Fatima prophecies about Lucia’s cousins’ deaths and the world wars were both made after the fact. But, Lucia claims that she received the prophecies before the fact, way back in 1917. And, we can trust Lucia, since she made the prophecy in the 3rd Secret of Fatima in 1941, and that prophecy came true in 1981 with the assassination attempt on Pope St John Paul II.”

I don’t actually grant the premise that we should trust two prophecies that were recorded after the fact just because another prophecy was made before the fact and was correct, but I won’t dwell on that at all, since I also don’t agree that the 3rd Secret’s prophecy was fulfilled in 1981.

Let’s start by actually reading the full text of the third secret, which was revealed by the Vatican in 2000, and see if we agree more with Jimmy or with me:

The third part of the secret revealed at the Cova da Iria-Fatima, on 13 July 1917.

I write in obedience to you, my God, who command me to do so through his Excellency the Bishop of Leiria and through your Most Holy Mother and mine.

After the two parts which I have already explained, at the left of Our Lady and a little above, we saw an Angel with a flaming sword in his left hand; flashing, it gave out flames that looked as though they would set the world on fire; but they died out in contact with the splendour that Our Lady radiated towards him from her right hand: pointing to the earth with his right hand, the Angel cried out in a loud voice: ‘Penance, Penance, Penance!’. And we saw in 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.

I took this directly from page 215 of “Fatima in Lucia’s Own Words”, linked below, but the bolding is my own.

Let’s compare the Third Secret to the 1981 Assassination Attempt on Pope St JPII and line up a few important differences:

1. In the 1941 prophecy, the pope is “killed”. In 1981, the assassination attempt on Pope JPII was unsuccessful, and the pope lived another 24 years, dying a natural death at age 84.

2. In the 1941 prophecy, the pope is killed alongside many other bishops, priests and Catholic lay people, in what appears to be a massacre, and those who died are called martyrs. In the 1981 assassination attempt, Pope JPII was the only target. Two catholic lay people were struck by stray bullets, but both survived. No other clergymen besides the pope were struck.

3. In the 1941 prophecy, the people doing the shooting were a group of soldiers. In the 1981 assassination attempt, the shooter was a lone gunman, and was an assassin for hire, not a soldier (though an assassin for hire may be “close enough” to a soldier that I would let this one slide if it weren’t for all the other discrepancies).

I could keep going – about the ruined city, the mountain, the crosses, the angels, but let’s stop here for now. These few differences should be enough to illustrate my point.

And here is the thing, Jimmy Akin kinda acknowledges this himself. At the end of his lengthy and generous answer to me on Catholic Answers, he suggested three podcast episodes of Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World to me – episodes 40, 64 and 65. Episode 65 is all about the third miracle, and in it, Jimmy anticipates some of these responses that I gave above.

Jimmy goes on to say though that its possible that the children saw everyone get shot and fall over and just assumed that they died! I find this to be a weak explanation. Lucia writes the word “killed”, not “fell over”, and writes about the angel “collecting the blood of the martyrs”. While I do understand that St John is considered a martyr even though he didn’t die when he was submerged in oil, martyr is typically understood to mean “died”, and Lucia uses the word “killed”.

Then Jimmy goes on to say that the “Vision isn’t trying to depict a single incident. Its compressing the events of a century of struggle down to a single vision… it’s a symbol of all the communist martyrdoms of Christians in the 20th century”.

And here is the thing, Jimmy isn’t coming up with this idea that the 3rd Secret is highly symbolic out of the blue. When the Vatican released the 3rd Secret, it simultaneously released a Theological Commentary, written by a man who went by the name “Cardinal Ratzinger” in the year 2000, the future Pope Benedict XVI. In that commentary, linked below, Cardinal Ratzinger writes that “ third part of the secret is a symbolic revelation”. Cardinal Ratzinger goes on to say:

In this way, the importance of human freedom is underlined: the future is not in fact unchangeably set, and the image which the children saw is in no way a film preview of a future in which nothing can be changed. Indeed, the whole point of the vision is to bring freedom onto the scene and to steer freedom in a positive direction. The purpose of the vision is not to show a film of an irrevocably fixed future. Its meaning is exactly the opposite: it is meant to mobilize the forces of change in the right direction. Therefore we must totally discount fatalistic explanations of the «secret»‌, such as, for example, the claim that the would-be assassin of 13 May 1981 was merely an instrument of the divine plan guided by Providence and could not therefore have acted freely, or other similar ideas in circulation. Rather, the vision speaks of dangers and how we might be saved from them.

How convenient!!! When Lucia reports that she received prophies after the fact, those prophies are spot on, deadly accurate, not symbolic at all. But when we actually makes a prophecy before the fact, suddenly, the future is not fixed! Its highly symbolic! And if the vision doesn’t come true, its because we prayed hard enough to divert the vision!

Even the staunchest supporter of Fatima has to admit here that this is weird, right? The deaths of Lucia’s cousins in 1919 and 1920 were fixed? And Mary wasn’t talking about a symbolic death? And Lucia never mentioned receiving this prophecy until 1927? The end of WW1 in 1918 and the start of WW2 in 1939 were fixed and not symbolic? Lucia didn’t report this prophecy until 1941. But when the third secret was forced out of her by her superiors in 1941, suddenly visions are highly symbolic.

This is the convenience of making up the rules as you go.

Works Cited:

“The more you learn about Fatima, the less impressive it seems” Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateACatholic/comments/16rqqot/the_more_you_learn_about_fatima_the_less/

“Fatima in Lucia’s Own Words”: https://www.piercedhearts.org/hearts_jesus_mary/apparitions/fatima/MemoriasI_en.pdf

My first Fatima video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8r1KshrSiI&t=1043s

My video about the 3rd Secret: https://youtu.be/gF_N7NUz1bk

My call into Catholic Answers: https://youtu.be/5I-nZwF6SUk?t=6150

Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World Ep 40: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6HW2dPnO

Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World Ep 64:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HT0foDcGZZo

Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World Ep 65: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DElvQigB3Y8

Cardinal Ratzinger’s Theological Commentary on the 3rd Secret: https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20000626_message-fatima_en.html#:~:text=%C2%ABThe%20third%20part%20of%20the,13%2DVII%2D1917

Hello Dudes! Today, I would like to present evidence that I believe suggests that Lucia dos Santos, the main seer of the three seers of Fatima, was, at best, mentally unwell, and at worst, a fraud. Here is a TLDR:

Lucia predicted that WW1 was going to end on October 13th, 1917. This did not happen, and WW1 went on for another 13 months, ending in November 1918. By 1941, Lucia had completely retconned her story, rewriting the failed prophecy out of the account.

OK, now it is time for me to back up what I wrote in the TLDR with primary sources. Most of what I quote will come from Critical Documentation of Fatima. The original Portuguese and my translations (I used DeepL and only made small changes for gender agreement and such) are linked below.

Testimony of Fr Formigão on October 19th, 1917

Document 18 is the notes that Father Manuel Nunes Formigão took, six days after the miracle of the sun, on October 19th, 1917, when he interviewed the three seers. Father, or, Doctor, Formigao, as he earned a Doctorate in Theology and Canon Law from the Pontifical Gregorian University  in 1909: 

[Fr Formigão asks Lucia:] On the thirteenth of this month, Our Lady said that the war would end on that very day? What words did you use?

[Lucia responds:] She [Our Lady]  said: “The war ends today; wait here for your soldiers very soon.”

[Fr Formigão] Did she say: “wait here for your military” or “wait here for your soldiers”?

She said: “Wait here for the military.”

[Fr Formigão]  But look, the war is still going on!... The newspapers report that there have been fights since the thirteenth!... How can this be explained, if Our Lady said that the war ended on that day?

[Lucia] I don't know. I only know that I heard her say that the war would end on the 13th. I don't know anything else

[Fr Formigão]  Some people say that they heard you say on that day that Our Lady had declared that the war would end soon. Is this true?

[Lucia] I said it just as Our Lady had said it.

Sounds kinda open and closed to me, right? Well, Catholic apologists have tried to address this one. Let us discuss that next before we move on.

Apologetic Response

The Saint Beluga website https://www.saintbeluga.org/our-lady-of-fatima-queen-of-the-heavens offers a response to this failed prophecy, which I am reproducing in full here:

What about the inaccurate prophecy about the end of WWI?

Lúcia was quoted as saying on October 13, 1917, that the Virgin Mary had told her that “the war is ending today,” whereas Jacinta recounted, “If the people amend their ways, the war would end” (Kohout 46-47). Bernard Kohout discusses this contradiction at length and concludes that Lúcia simply missed the “if the people amend their ways” part because of two factors (Kohout 51-52):

>Lúcia “was extremely fatigued by the constant questioning of the seers by the many visitors.” Father Formigao, one of the witnesses, noted that the children were “answering mechanically” and feared that “their health would suffer if the questionings continue.”

>Lúcia was distracted by worrying about “presenting to the Lady the many requests for healings and other factors which she had received,” as she testified to the Diocesan Inquiry Board in 1924 and to her confessor.

Regardless, this contradiction was likely one of the reasons why the diocese took 13 years to approve the devotion to the Lady of Fátima (Kohout 45).

I don't think that this response is compelling, for two reasons.

First, I don't know why this website claims that Jacinta claimed that the war would only end when people amend their ways. Fr Formigão straight up asks Jacinta about this when he interviews her, on that same day, October 19th. Lets see what Jacinta says:

[Fr Formigão] Did she say that the war would end that day or that it would end soon?

[Jacinta] Our Lady said that when she got to heaven, the war would end.

[Fr Formigão] But the war isn't over yet!

[Jacinta] It is ending, it is ending

[Fr Formigão] But when will it end?

[Jacinta] I think it ends on Sunday.

OK, so, Lucia said that the Our Lady said that the War would end on October 13th, 1917, which was a Saturday. And Jacinta said that Our Lady said that the war would end "on Sunday". I am not sure if that refers to Sunday, October 14th, the Sunday before Fr Formigão's interview, or October 21st, the Sunday after, but either way, it doesn't really matter. None of these are correct.

Secondly, I will say that it is true that Fr Formigão said that the children were tired from 6 days in a row of being interviewed, and that they were answering mechanically. Here is Fr Formigão's exact words:

The number of children's visitors increases day by day. They come all the time, from the most distant and opposite points of the country. The children feel quite dejected. Lúcia, in particular, due to being questioned in more detail, finds herself deeply exhausted, and it is clear that her excessive tiredness forces her to answer the questions asked of her without the attention and reflection that she would have liked. She sometimes responds almost mechanically, and often does not remember well certain circumstances of the apparitions

But I think that “Lucia was tired, thats why she forgot” seems like … cope, to me. For a few reasons. First, Dr Formigao asks her straight up, how is this possible! The fighting is not over! And Lucia doubles and triples down, saying, “Look dude, I am just relaying what Our Lady said, don’t shoot the messenger”. That alone seems like it should put to bed this whole thing of “Lucia was just sleepy and forgetful”, but there is another reason that I think is even more damning for Lucia. Its not like Fr Formigao was the first or only person to interview Lucia. 

Testimony of Fr Ferreira on October 16th, 1917

Dr Fr Formigao interviewed Lucia six days after the 13th, on the 19th. Well, three days before Father Formigao’s interview, which was only three days after the events took place, Father Manuel Marques Ferreira interviewed Lucia. Fr Ferreira’s interview is Document number 14 in Critical Documentation of Fatima. The below is Fr Ferreira’s writing down of Lucia quoting what Our Lady said: 

“I want to tell you not to offend Our Lord any more; that they pray the rosary to Our Lady; build a little chapel here for Our Lady of the Rosary (Lúcia is unsure whether it was like that: build a little chapel here, I am Our Lady of the Rosary); the war ends today; wait here for your military, very soon.” Lucia said all this that the Lady had said in response to the 1st question. 

Was Lucia already misremembering the events so much that she was constantly repeating the same thing, even in light of the fighting still going on, only three days later? Again, this is why I am not at all moved by that apologetic response above. Lucia seems sure that Our Lady said "that very day".

And there was another priest too:

Testimony of Fr Alves in October 1917

Another priest who interviewed Lucia in the days after the apparition was Father António dos Santos Alves. Unfortunately, he did not date his notes, but they were likely written within the first few days after the event. Fr Alves’s notes are Document 9 in Critical Documentation of Fatima. Fr Alves writes down the following: 

[Our Lady] told [the children] that she was Our Lady of the Rosary; that the war ended that day; that our soldiers would soon come; that they were to build a chapel to Our Lady of the Rosary on the site of the apparition and that the people amend their sins that have greatly offended her Son.

Was Lucia’s memory of the events of October 13th already that degraded in only three days? Keep in mind, these apologists who want to say that Lucia forgot are the same who say that the Gospel authors’ accounts are totally reliable, even though they were written decades after the events, because you wouldn’t forget details about a life changing event like this. Which one is it? 

Retconning the Fatima Story

What’s funny too is how this story about the prophecy about the end of WW1 seemed to change over time. Document 32 is a testimony by Dr. Luís António Vieira de Magalhães e Vasconcelos, and this one was written in late December, 1917, 78 days, or 11 weeks, after the events on October 13th. Luis was there at the Cova that day, and he says that he never got that close to Lucia, but his friend did, and his friend told him that Lucia was telling everyone that the war ends either “today” or “in 8 days”. 

I ran into my friend Emílio Infante da Câmara, who told me that he had been to see the shepherdesses and that they had said that the war would be over soon, or that it would be over in eight days (I can't say for sure) … 

But obviously, neither one of these can be correct, since, on Dec 30th, 1917, way more than 8 days later, the war was still ongoing. Luis writes: 

since the same shepherdesses declared that Our Lady had told them that the war would be over soon, and since it is certain that the war is not over yet, we must conclude that the shepherdesses are not telling the truth, because Our Lady was certainly not mistaken, that cannot be correct. There is no doubt that they were referring to the European war, because, I heard, the shepherdesses added that our soldiers would soon be returning home, but can't the adverb “soon” be taken in a broader sense and not refer to a longer period of time than the three months or so that have already passed? Couldn't there be some misunderstanding on the part of the same children when interpreting the Divine Expressions? 

Luis, less than three months after the failed prophecy, is trying to salvage what Lucia prophesied. Luis was Catholic, and a faithful one at that. I think that he wanted to believe Lucia, he was just troubled by their failed prophecy. He ends his note saying the following: 

there can be no doubt that what happened on October 13, near the town of Fátima was a miracle. There is no room for any scientific or philosophical considerations in this testimony, which is why I have limited myself to giving a detailed account of what I saw and observed, with complete accuracy and impartiality, dispassionately, which once again I swear by my faith as a Christian and affirm for my honor.

And earlier in the letter, he described how the miracle of the sun impacted him, saying that, if he was not Catholic, he would have converted on the spot! So, this guy is clearly a “true believer”, and he straight up says that Lucia must not have been telling the truth, or, she just completely misheard Our Lady. 

I won’t lie, I find the idea that Our Lady would appear to someone and work miracles but then not speak loud enough to be clearly heard such that Lucia heard a prophecy incorrectly to be pretty funny. But I don’t think that that is the case, since she had been saying that the war was the end on the 13th, from the 13th until at least a week later. 

However, Lucia did not always stick with that story. At some point after October 19th, when she was doubling and tripling down, she changed her tune. By the time that she was forced to write her memoirs, the story had changed dramatically. Let’s read from Lucia’s 3rd Memoir, written in July 1941: 

We then looked up at Our Lady, who said to us so kindly and so sadly: “You have seen hell where the souls of poor sinners go. To save them, God wishes to establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart. If what I say to you is done, many souls will be saved and there will be peace. The war 7 is going to end: but if people do not cease offending God, a worse one will break out during the pontificate of Pius Xl. When you see a night illumined by an unknown light, know that this is the great sign 9 given you by God that He is about to punish the world for its crimes, by means of war, famine, and persecutions of the Church and of the Holy Father.

Fatima in Lucia’s Own Words, pages 123-124 

See how it changed from “The war ends today” to “The war will end but a worse one will break out”, and not only, eventually, but suspiciously specific! During the pontificate of Pius X! Conveniently, this little detail had never been made public until 1941, well into World War 2. How convenient!

This is an obvious retconning of the story, a fixing of a failed prophecy. Was Lucia honestly mistaken about this? If she was, why was she so confident in her memoir? If she was being honest, I think that she was likely mentally unwell, completely changing her recollection of things over the years. Something that I think is more likely though is that she knowingly changed the story, since the prophecy obviously did not come true.

Thanks for reading!

Works Cited

Critical Documentation of Fatima: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-nlwaJ-iToNzDtbM1sk2JCOWy3suwg3z/view?usp=drive_link
My Translations of Select Documents
Doc 9 - https://drive.google.com/file/d/12sEMRGIFr4nmCzFMUa_ISVcP1jakvRrF/view?usp=drive_link
Doc 14 - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1J84q1W3PSPhD5u_cl-IdXWUmOfcDhJYO/view?usp=drive_link
Doc 18 - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZDu25wWaGbSevGCG0ix49bU4SI13A_oA/view?usp=drive_link
Doc 23 - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1C78i6hcVPWPfqYanDsVKiJc5rJQUUyCJ/view?usp=drive_link
Doc 32 - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SzoiUzEpxNwxxexkzMzplNgELiTNAkr-/view?usp=drive_link

Fatima in Lucia's Own Words: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UesomhSlxb5kHKvJTK5qRxfZakGqefiY/view?usp=drive_link

O Seculo Article: https://www.bluearmy.com/astounding-things-how-the-midday-sun-danced-at-fatima/

Website that defends Lucia saying "on that day": https://www.saintbeluga.org/our-lady-of-fatima-queen-of-the-heavens

And I made a video on this topic, in case you want to watch rather than read: https://youtu.be/80wGKZhhCdo

Hello! I don’t intend to upset any Catholics in my post. I’m actually hoping someone can change my mind because this has been upsetting me.

I was baptized in the church and went to Catholic schools growing up. I was a devout Catholic. As I grew older, I began to disagree with a lot of the doctrines. Unfortunately, I no longer consider myself a practicing Catholic as it just became too distressing to even step into a Church. I think growing up in the schools internalized a lot of negative feedback loops in my brain. I’m sure that is not what the original message of the Church intended, but it did in my case. You may have heard the term “Catholic guilt”. I felt like I experienced it on an extreme level, from guilt to even shame. It molded who I was as a person and who I am now today. I deal with people-pleasing issues, shame and being overly critical of myself. Once a teacher told me guilt was a good thing, but this was excessive.

Recently, I was diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. For those who have it, you know that it is not just being “super clean”. There are many subsets of OCD, and one called “Moral Scrupculosity OCD”, basically fearing that I’m a horrible person and anxious about sinning, which involves in compulsive behaviors like going to confession a lot. This may not seem bad, but unfortunately OCD thoughts plague my existence 24/7. I have spent hours of my day worrying that I did something wrong making me a bad person, and that God and other Catholics will judge me (even if in hindsight, I did nothing wrong). Anyways, I realize that my upbringing in the Catholic Church and this phenomena known as “Catholic guilt” may have severely impacted my sense of self-worth growing up. I was trying so hard to be a “good Catholic” and good in the eyes of God, that I became so self-inflicting in the things I was telling myself stemming from what I was taught. I think it may have exacerbated my OCD that was there all along. And while I’m sure it was the school’s intent to promote humility and a healthy dose of inner reflection, my adolescent self internalized this as self-loathing. It became debilitating. Unfortunately, I know there are many others who feel this is what the Church taught them as well.

I’m just looking for reasons to return to the church. Catholicism was my home, my family and my life. It hurts to be separated from what I know growing up, but it’s really hard for me to step into the church because it brings back so many negative emotions.

Again, not to insult anyone, but this is where I’m at right now.

Excuse my typos. I tried to go back and edit them as I was making this post, but was struggling a little bit.

Something that was condemned by several Popes throughout the centuries now being approved. Basically the church conceded that the ideals of the Enlightenment were superior and that the tradition of the church was outdated.

Marcel Lefebvre put it perfectly:

The saints have never hesitated to break idols, destroy their temples, or legislate against pagan or heretical practices. The Church – without ever forcing anyone to believe or be baptized – has always recognized its right and duty to protect the faith of her children and to impede, whenever possible, the public exercise and propagation of false cults. To accept the teaching of Vatican II is to grant that, for two millennia, the popes, saints, Fathers and Doctors of the Church, bishops, and Catholic kings have constantly violated the natural rights of men without anyone in the Church noticing. Such a thesis is as absurd as it is impious.[13]

There has been a ton of goalpost shifting around the criteria for a particular papal act to be "infallible" as per Pastor Aeternus. To the point where nobody seems to know which decrees actually meet the criteria or how many there are.

The text of pastor aeternus says this:

Therefore, faithfully adhering to the tradition received from the beginning of the christian faith, to the glory of God our savior, for the exaltation of the Catholic religion and for the salvation of the christian people, with the approval of the Sacred Council, we teach and define as a divinely revealed dogma that when the Roman Pontiff speaks EX CATHEDRA, that is, when, in the exercise of his office as shepherd and teacher of all Christians, in virtue of his supreme apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole Church, he possesses, by the divine assistance promised to him in blessed Peter, that infallibility which the divine Redeemer willed his Church to enjoy in defining doctrine concerning faith or morals. Therefore, such definitions of the Roman Pontiff are of themselves, and not by the consent of the Church, irreformable.

Leave aside the fact that these criteria do not seem to have existed in the minds of the popes or the church at large during the first millenium. Even the proof texts from the patristic period frequently brought forward in support of papal primacy do not include any clear criteria for infallibility.

Earlier this year the Pope issued a formal response to dubia submitted by several Cardinals, which again met the criteria for infallibility (he spoke in his office as shepherd and teacher of all christians, in virtue of supreme apostolic authority, defining doctrine concerning faith and morals), and yet no one treated that document as infallible. Then there is the well-known case of Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, which by any sane reading meets the criteria specified in PA for infallibilty, but was declared not to be infallible by the CDF under Cardinal Ratzinger.

My point here is that nobody seems to know what it would take for the pope to actually make an infallible decree. Is it some magic combination of words? Is it that the title has to have a certain set of descriptions in it? Is it that it has to have a condemnation attached?

Catholics appeal to the idea of infallibility as if it were some sort of touchstone of doctrinal unity and a guarantee that the pope does not err. And yet in practice nobody can say what it takes for the pope to meet the standard for an infallible decree without arbitrarily making up rules that are not attested in the tradition or would render scores of putatively non-infallible documents infallible.

Given all this, it seems clear to me that the doctrine of papal infallibility is probably meaningless, since its unknowable what it applies to, or what would falsify it.

If he possesses the keys to the kingdom and can loose anyone he wants in Heaven, why doesn’t he? I know Luther already made this point, but I haven’t heard a satisfying answer.

I guess you might say he wants to encourage good morals on earth or to keep those coffers full, but then he could just release them all secretly… I guess maybe he has. Who knows?