Did Pope St. Pius X prophesy Pope Benedict XVI's martyrdom?

When he was installed as Pope on April 19, 2005, the Holy Father requested our prayers. "Pray for me, that I may not flee for fear of the wolves. Let us pray for one another, that the Lord will carry us and that we will learn to carry one another." 

On April 9, 1993, Our Lady told Father Gobbi that Jesus' passion "is being renewed by you, my beloved children.  And so I have called you time and again to enter, by your consecration, into the Gethsemane of my Immaculate Heart.  This is in order to form you for your priestly immolation and to give you the strength to go forward without fear to the Calvary of your martyrdom, close to me, the sorrowful Mother, who has begotten you beneath the Cross upon which my Son Jesus has been put to death.  The time of your painful passion has now arrived.  You too will be persecuted and stricken, rejected and condemned, imprisoned and killed.  But do not let yourselves be seized with apprehension or fear.  I am close to you, as I was beneath the Cross.  I am at your side at the hour of the painful passion which is being renewed by you, my beloved ones, because today also it is beneath the cross that I am fulfilling my role as Mother of the new times, which are coming to birth from your painful suffering."

The Church is approaching Calvary.  The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches us that, "Before Christ's second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers.  This persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth will unveil the 'mystery of iniquity' in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth.  The supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh." (CCC, 675).


We are now in the final hour before the bloody persecution.  The Church finds herself surrounded by many enemies.  Even now the Man of Sin readies himself to enter the world stage openly.  Pope St. Pius X, the Pope of the Eucharist, while giving an audience for the General Chapter of the Franciscan Order in 1909, fell into a mystical trance and prophesied:

"I have seen one of my successors, of the same name, who was fleeing over the dead bodies of his brethren.  He will take refuge in some hiding place; but after a brief respite, he will die a cruel death.  Respect for God has disappeared from human hearts.  They wish to efface even God's memory.  This perversity is nothing less than the beginning of the last days of the world."

While in a mystical trance, Pope St. Pius X observed a time when many people would desire to "efface even God's memory."  An accurate description of our own time.  And who is this successor on the throne of Peter who will possess the same name as Pius X and who will have to flee Rome, eventually facing "a cruel death"?  Only time will tell.  But it should be noted that Pope St. Pius X was born Giuseppe Melchiorre Sarto on June 2, 1835.  Pope Benedict XVI was born Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger on April 16, 1927.  Giuseppe is Italian for Joseph.

Now is the time for the entire Church to prepare for persecution the likes of which the Church has never seen.  In the words of Father Charles Arminjon: "..this persecution will be the most severe and violent of all because it will be inspired not by superstition or fanaticism, nor by a blind attachment to the worship of idols...It's purpose will not be to assuage pride, or to satisfy an unbridled lust for power...It will be a persecution inspired solely by hatred of God, in which God and His Christ will be directly challenged, and its sole objective will be the extermination of the divine kingdom, the complete annihilation of Christianity and of all positive religion." (The End of the Present World and the Mysteries of the Future Life, pp. 63-64).

Cardinal Cushing and the Kennedy Myth

In a piece for The National Post entitled, "The Kennedy myth - and why we believed it," Robert Fulford writes, "William Manchester, who died on Tuesday at the age of 82, gave the title One Brief Shining Moment to the last of his three books about John F. Kennedy. Camelot, the musical that contained those words, opened the year Kennedy was elected, but while he was alive no one connected his presidency and the Knights of the Roundtable. It was only after his assassination that his widow introduced this theme. She told journalist Theodore White that her husband had hoped his era might resemble King Arthur's as depicted on Broadway, a time of magic and nobility.


That notion, which JFK may have mentioned only briefly, was rushed into Life magazine by White and then repeated endlessly. It gave the Kennedy administration a trademark and a mythical dimension that have survived all revelations of scandal. When it first appeared in print it sounded vain and foolish, but it was ironically appropriate. King Arthur's time exists as 6th-century folklore reinvented by fiction writers. And Kennedy as the public knew him was also largely fictional, the finest political legend fabricated in modern times, devised by Kennedy and his band of helpers, paid and volunteer.

The obituaries depicted Manchester as an honest popular historian, but on the subject of his old friend Kennedy, he wrote like a press agent. His Portrait of a President, in 1962, demonstrated (as Tom Wicker said in The New York Times) that the portraitist was 'smitten' and 'gazed upon the subject with loving eyes,' finding redeeming beauty in every flaw.

In 1967 Manchester's book on the assassination, Death of a President, involved him in a dispute with Jacqueline Kennedy over what should be said about the family and about their antipathy to JFK's successor, Lyndon Johnson. But it contained nothing to upset anyone who considered Kennedy a great man. Nor did One Brief Shining Moment, in 1983, another product of Manchester's adoration.

It's often said that TV made Kennedy hugely popular, but at the time, still photos and books seemed more important. Kennedy kept a talented photographer on staff and always looked good in stills (unlike John Kerry, who sometimes looks unpleasantly vulpine in his photos). Meanwhile, a series of books expanded Kennedy's legend and funnelled material to thousands of journalists.

Everyone seemed anxious to sustain the legend. Reporters, cultivated and flattered by Kennedy, seem to have desperately wanted his approval. They became guardians of his privacy, as he defined it. His secrets were safe with them.

Every detail of his life, large or small, required editing. A philanderer of epic appetites, he appeared in print as a solid family man.

The world wasn't allowed to know he smoked cigars (they symbolized the old-fashioned politics he was allegedly replacing) or that he needed reading glasses. More important, he and his doctors hid the fact that he was terribly ill and heavily medicated during much of his adult life. They all successfully presented him as healthy, youthful and vigorous, a man whose worst problem was an unreliable back.

Aside from Manchester, the authors who provided the basis for Kennedy worship were Theodore White, Arthur Schlesinger, and Ted Sorenson.

White's 1961 best-seller, The Making of the President, portrayed JFK and all his followers as intelligent, high-minded, and witty. Schlesinger, the historian who served on Kennedy's staff, wrote a brilliant and enthusiastic memoir, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House. Ted Sorenson, the chief speech-writer, wrote Kennedy, covering the same territory. Together they set a tone that lasted for 15 years.

These were works of hagiography, written by the pious for the pious, received with the same respect given to lives of saints. Kennedy appears in all of them as a man of bravery and honour, facing terrifying problems with high principles.

Literary people especially admired those qualities, and liked to hear that Kennedy read books. Norman Mailer, who went to the Democratic convention in 1960 as a reporter for Esquire, was the most surprising and (at the time) most famous of his idolaters. He acknowledged that Kennedy's political ideas were ordinary, but he was so excited by Kennedy's presence that he admitted doing his "best to write a piece which would help him to get elected."

In a much-admired article, Superman Comes To The Supermarket, Mailer wrote about him with urgency and romantic admiration. He argued that Kennedy was not only intelligent, attractive and highly composed ("he carried himself with a cool grace which seemed indifferent to applause") but also profound, an American in the great tradition of self-defining adventure. Later, in a moment of honesty never approached by the other Kennedy celebrants, Mailer called that piece "an act of propaganda."

Much of the world fell as hard for Kennedy as Mailer did.

Certainly I was an unabashed JFK admirer, like most people I knew at the time. Why did we believe in this elaborate fiction? For the usual reason. We wanted to believe. We embraced, perhaps for the first and last time in our lives, an ancient ideal of virtue, wisdom and beauty embodied in one great leader. Foolish thinking, of course, but not entirely ignoble."

Fulford doesn't delve into the matter, but the truth is that numerous priests and Bishops were also anxious to sustain the legend and to weave a hagiography which portrayed Kennedy as a man of virtue and even a martyr.  In a live Boston radio broadcast which aired on April 21, 1964, Richard Cardinal Cushing said, "I would prefer imprisonment and death under a slave state than membership in an organization [and here he was referring to the John Birch Society] which has branded a martyred President of the United States as a Communist.  If it is true that two members of this society called my nearest and dearest friend, the late John F. Kennedy, a Communist, they and their associates owe the people of all nations who loved him and who will never forget his tragic death a profound apology.  If it is also true that these two members of the Birch Society identified me with such an incredible remark, I cannot dignify them with an answer save to say - shame, shame, shame for attempting to blight the character and mar the memory and distort the image of a martyr..."

Now granted that certain members of the fringe John Birch Society had inappropriately referred to Kennedy as a Communist.  But for Cardinal Cushing to depict JFK as a "martyr" is equally revolting.  The Catechism teaches us that, "Martyrdom is the supreme witness given to the truth of the faith: it means bearing witness even unto death.  The martyr bears witness to Christ who died and rose, to whom he is united by charity.  He bears witness to the truth of the faith and of Christian doctrine.  He endures death through an act of fortitude..." (2473).  And paragraph 2474 cites St. Ignatius of Antioch (Ad Rom. 4, 1: SCh 10, 110) as saying that, "Neither the pleasures of the world nor the kingdoms of this age will be of any use to me.  It is better for me to die [in order to unite myself] to Christ Jesus than to reign over the ends of the earth.."

Contrast the attitude of St. Ignatius of Antioch [a true martyr] with that of John F. Kennedy.  Again, in Cardinal Cushing's words, "As for the martyred President Kennedy personally, I liked the way he got ahead of it all.  He gave his honest opinion: 'Here I am.  This is what I believe, and I am a Democrat who is a Catholic.  I am not a Catholic running for office.  I am the nominee of the Democratic Party.  I happen to be a Catholic.  I am responsible for my conduct in that religion, but as President of the United States I am obligated to the Constitution.'  He had courage, he had confidence; his election has clarified a lot of false thinking." (Cushing of Boston: A Candid Portrait, by Joseph Dever, p. 211).

Kennedy was the very antithesis of Ignatius of Antioch.  One rejected the pleasures of this world and chose to unite himself with Christ Jesus rather than seek earthly power and to sacrifice himself for his Catholic faith.  The other lived a life of unbridled lust and put politics and earthly power before his Catholic faith.

Cushing's hagiography of an unfaithful Catholic is nothing less than embarassing and scandalous.  But by no means unique.  So many, as Fulford reminds us, bought into the lie. 

More on Stuart Reid and what it means to be a Christian...

"Wherefore the Church does in every place, because of that love which she cherishes towards God, send forward, throughout all time, a multitude of martyrs to the Father; while all others not only have nothing of this kind to point to among themselves, but even maintain that such witness-bearing is not at all necessary." (St. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, Bk. 4, Chap. 33).

When Mr. Stuart Reid over at The Catholic Herald [an English Catholic newspaper] wrote a piece somewhat critical of the new website Protect the Pope, I responded by refuting his arguments. One concern I had was Mr. Reid's assertion that, "Catholics may one day be persecuted as Jews once were, in which case they will have two choices: either to be brave and die as martyrs or to deny their religion and join their persecutors. The Jews of the Holocaust had no such choice."

I responded to this statement by writing, "This says much about his level of faith. For the authentic Christian, there is no choice. We cannot abandon Christ."

Now Mr. Reid has written that, "Mr. Melanson should sit down in a darkened room and have a little think. One of the key beliefs of Christianity is that we have free will: No free will, no Christianity. For the authentic Christian therefore there is the choice I outline...but the Jews of the Holocaust had no such choice...They could not stop being Jews.."

Now, I never denied the reality of free will. But our free choices have consequences. This point was addressed by Peter [a regular reader of this Blog], who wrote:

"No serious Catholic would consider that a real choice Mr. Reid. Our Catholic identity is deeper than you would acknowledge. Just as Jews cannot 'stop being Jews,' the authentic Christian cannot 'stop being Christian.' We don't put on our faith and take it off as a coat. Baptism imparts a sacred character. If we use our free will to reject Christ, then we place our salvation in peril. Maybe that's a choice for you. For those of us who are Catholic in more than name, it is not."

Through Baptism, the Christian is made an adoptive member of the divine family. Which is why, "When we cry, 'Abba! Father!' it is that very spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God." (Romans 8: 15-16). Just as families live together, so the three Divine Persons dwell in those have received the gift of faith and who are faithful to it: "Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them." (John 14: 23).

Martyrdom bears witness to faith. The martyr prizes heavenly glory more than any other good, even life itself. To choose to abandon the Catholic faith and Christ Jesus to avoid martyrdom would mean placing limits on fidelity to the Lord Jesus. Which is why I wrote, "For the authentic Christian, there is no choice." The authentic Christian will not abandon the Lord Jesus or His Mystical Body which is the Church. He or she will not set limits on his or her fidelity to the Divine Master.

As Peter so eloquently put it: "We don't put on our faith and take it off as a coat." We do not abandon our Divine Family to avoid persecution or even death. Instead we keep His Word and hold onto it at all costs. Even unto death.

Pope John Paul II was preparing the Church for Calvary...

In his book "Rise, Let Us Be On Our Way," Pope John Paul II was really calling upon the Church to ready itself for Calvary. He wrote, "Beginning with Abraham, the faith of each of his sons represents a constant leaving behind of what is cherished, familiar, and personal, in order to open up to the unknown, trusting in the truth we share and the common future we all have in God. We are all invited to turn toward the God who, in Jesus Christ, opened Himself to us, 'breaking down the dividing wall of enmity' (Eph. 2:14) in order to draw us to Himself through the Cross. In Jesus Christ we see: fidelity to the Father's call, an open heart for everyone He meets, a constant journeying that provides 'nowhere to lay his head' (cf. Matt. 8:20), and finally the Cross, through which to attain the victoryof the Ressurrection. This is Christ - who goes forward boldly, allowing nothing to stand in his way until all is accomplished, 'until He ascends to His Father and our Father' (cf. John 20:17), the One Who is 'the same yesterday, today, and for ever' (cf. Heb. 13:8).

Faith in Him, then, is a ceaseless opening up to God's ceaseless overtures into our world, it is our movement towards God, Who for His part leads people towards one another....When 'His hour' had come, Jesus said to those who were with Him in the Garden of Gethsemane, to Peter, James, and John, His closest disciples: 'Rise, let us be on our way' (cf. Mark 14:42). Not only He must 'be on his way' to fulfill His Father's will: they, too, must go with Him....Even if these words indicate a time of trial, great effort, and a painful cross, we must not allow ourselves to give way to fear. They are also words of peace and joy, the fruit of faith. On another occasion, to the same three disciples, Jesus said: 'Rise, and do not be afraid!' (Matt 17:7). God's love does not impose burdens upon us that we cannot carry, nor make demands of us that we cannot fulfill. For whatever He asks of us, He provides the help that is needed." (pp. 214-215).

Why was our beloved Holy Father writing these words at this present time in our history? To prepare the Church for Calvary. Our Lady told Father Gobbi that, "The hour of Calvary has arrived for the Church, called to offer herself in holocaust and to be immolated on the cross of her bloody martyrdom...The hour of Calvary has arrived for you, my beloved ones, because you have now entered into the conclusive time of the great tribulation. As Mother, I am leading you each day to the fulfillment of your priestly immolation." (Message 519).

We read in 675 of the Catechism: "Before Christ's second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers. The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth will unveil the 'mystery of iniquity' in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth." And in 677: "The Church will enter the glory of the kingdom only through this final Passover, when she will follow her Lord in his death and Ressurrection.."

This is the reality which we Christians must prepare for through prayer.

Photo above is of Blessed Miguel Pro, S.J. It was the final shot which killed him and sent him to the Lord Jesus. I am blessed to have a relic containing a piece of his coffin which I obtained from the late Ann Ball, a Catholic author who worked promoting his cause.