[UPDATE: The Vatican has responded to this story with a direct denial attributed to Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI himself. You may read their statement and our response to it here.]

Today, on the Feast of Pentecost, I called Fr. Ingo Dollinger, a German priest and former professor of theology in Brasil, who is now quite elderly and physically weak. He has been a personal friend of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI for many years. Father Dollinger unexpectedly confirmed over the phone the following facts:

Not long after the June 2000 publication of the Third Secret of Fatima by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger told Fr. Dollinger during an in-person conversation that there is still a part of the Third Secret that they have not published! “There is more than what we published,” Ratzinger said. He also told Dollinger that the published part of the Secret is authentic and that the unpublished part of the Secret speaks about “a bad council and a bad Mass” that was to come in the near future.

Father Dollinger gave me permission to publish these facts on this High Feast of the Holy Ghost and he gave me his blessing.

Father Dollinger was ordained a priest in 1954 and served as secretary of the well-respected bishop of Augsburg, Josef Stimpfle. In God’s providence, I met this bishop once when I was not yet a Catholic, and I was deeply touched by his humility, warmth and welcome. He invited me to visit him once in Augsburg. When I was in the process of conversion, I did reach out to him, but then, to my chagrin, I discovered that Bishop Stimpfle had already passed away. (He is greatly missed.)

Father Dollinger was himself also involved with the German Bishops’ Conference’s discussions concerning freemasonry in the 1970s at the end of which came the statement that freemasonry is not compatible with the Catholic Faith.

He later taught moral theology at the seminary of the Order of Canons Regular of the Holy Cross which belongs to the Opus Angelorum. Bishop Athanasius Schneider, auxiliary bishop of Astana, Kazakhstan, is member of that same Order of Canons Regular of the Holy Cross. Most importantly, Father Dollinger had Padre Pio (d. 1968) as his confessor for many years and became very close to him. Dollinger is also personally known to one of my beloved family members.

This sensitive information pertaining to the Third Secret, which has been circulating among certain Catholic groups for a few years now, has now been personally confirmed to me by Fr. Dollinger himself, at a time in history where the Church seems to have fallen into a pit of confusion. It might help explain, at least in part, why we are where we are now.

Importantly, it shows the loving mercy of the Mother of God to warn us and to prepare her children for this battle that the Church now finds herself in. In spite of the decision of those in responsible places within the Church, She has made sure the fuller truth would still be revealed and spread.

This information also might explain why Pope Benedict XVI, once he had become pope, tried to undo some of the injustices that are directly related with this Dollinger revelation, namely: he freed the Traditional Mass from its suppression; he removed the excommunication of the bishops of the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX); and lastly, he publicly declared in 2010 in Fatima: “We would be mistaken to think that Fatima’s prophetic mission is complete.” He also added these words in an interview during his airplane flight to Fatima:

As for the new things which we can find in this message today, there is also the fact that attacks on the Pope and the Church come not only from without, but the sufferings of the Church come precisely from within the Church, from the sin existing within the Church. This too is something that we have always known, but today we are seeing it in a really terrifying way: that the greatest persecution of the Church comes not from her enemies without, but arises from sin within the Church, and that the Church thus has a deep need to re-learn penance, to accept purification, to learn forgiveness on the one hand, but also the need for justice.

With this statement, Benedict XVI effectively contradicted his own earlier words of June, 2000, where he had stated:

First of all we must affirm with Cardinal Sodano: ‘… the events to which the third part of the ‘secret’ of Fatima refers now seem part of the past’. Insofar as individual events are described, they belong to the past. Those who expected exciting apocalyptic revelations about the end of the world or the future course of history are bound to be disappointed.

All these actions of Pope Benedict XVI show that he must have known, in his conscience, that he somehow had to correct certain injustices and confusing ambiguities of the recent past. He defended the traditional Mass, he gave back dignity to the SSPX, and he re-inserted the importance of the Fatima message. Additionally, he also tried to deal with the mystery of Vatican II, although, it seems, in too vague of a manner.

In this context, it might be worth mentioning that my husband and I were both together told by a priest who had met privately with Pope Benedict XVI that Pope Benedict himself considers Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre “to be the greatest theologian of the 20th century.” My husband and I both vouch for having heard these exact words directly from this priest — words which were allegedly spoken by Pope Benedict in the context of the pope’s proposal to re-introduce Marcel Lefebvre’s teaching more widely into the Catholic Church.

While we contemplate the gravity of the cumulative omissions and delays concerning the actual release of the full Third Secret, and when heaven had asked us to do it – namely, not later than 1960 – we are grateful to the Holy Ghost that He has seemingly made possible now this affirmative telephone conversation today on the Feast of Pentecost. May the true message of Fatima – together with the recent revelations of Fr. Brian Harrison and Dr. Alice von Hildebrand about what it also contains – spread far and wide and thereby help free all faithful Catholics from any bondage to half truths and deficient loyalties. May we all freely and fully adhere to the full Truth of the Message of Mary’s Mercy – which will surely, under grace, help to set us free!