Musician Pedro Barroso is the first signatory of a petition hoping to block the Pope’s visit to Fátima next year.
Designed to coincide with the centenary celebrations of the ‘sightings of the Blessed Virgin’ by three young shepherd children, the visit will simply perpetuate a farce, says the “Against giving credence to the ‘miracle’ of Fátima” petition – addressed to the Bishop of Leiria, Patriarch of Lisbon and Portuguese Episcopal Conference.
Drawn up in October and signed by journalists, a lawyer, an engineer, two anthropologists, a polytechnic professor and a former CGTP union leader, the petition claims that the “so-called miracle of the three shepherds is authentic hocus-pocus”.
Anyone who researches the story “will easily be able to see the way the events were “contrived, planned and framed” between “initial doubt and subsequent complacency of the Catholic Church” in an “era of massive cultural darkness” and “rustic ignorance”.
“What we really think”, Barroso has since told Lusa, “is that in visiting Fàtima the Pope will give credence to a situation that started with a lie and which today is essentially a business”.
Given that this description could be used in a much wider context, Barroso appears to concede that the Pope will come anyway, as he continued his conversation with Lusa saying the Pontiff “is in a corner which probably doesn’t have an easy exit”.
Thus the petition is more to “attract Pope Francis’ attention”, he said.
Pope Francis should bring a whip with him, the well-known performer continued “like Jesus Christ, when he ran the merchants out of the temple, as this has turned into a circus for opportunists of all kinds”.
