First, it may be useful to quote from a definitional source for conspiracy compiled prior to the era of political correctness; the following quote was taken from the Centennial Edition (1916) of Crabb’s English Synonymes, found on page 173: “A conspiracy is a general intelligence among persons united to effect some serious change: the ruling and natural idea in this word is that of unanimity and concert in the prosecution of a plan.”

Christopher A. Ferrara has written both an intriguing and exasperating book, published in 2008, and provocatively entitled: The Secret Still Hidden: An Investigation into the Vatican Secretary of State’s personal campaign to conceal the words of the Virgin Mary in the Third Secret of Fatima.  Ferrara, President and Chief Counsel for the American Catholic Lawyers Association, is a widely published writer who boldly charges that Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican’s Secretary of State, has repeatedly lied deliberately to wrongfully hide the actual truth about the Third Secret.  The exact text of which has been wrongly suppressed for what some people, perhaps, assume are prudential reasons involved in a plan of suppression of the truth.

Nonetheless, a prominent former and adamant denier of this campaign of silence, another Italian named Antonio Socci, has also denounced this alleged incredible coverup done by Cardinal Bertone; each has, moreover, publicly accused the other of actually lying; and, all of that is basically the central core of the book, with the other matters covered as being of only secondary importance to the nature of this work.

For those completely uninitiated in such normally abstruse matters, it is highly important to state that in Portugal, in 1917, the Blessed Virgin Mary (BVM) had appeared, at the Cova da Iria in Fatima, to three children and gave to the eldest of them, Lucia dos Santos, certain secret information.  The first two secrets have been thoroughly revealed to the world, as far as is known, or as far as can be known.  But, the Third Secret is held in extremely hot dispute, as to if it has been ever all totally and unreservedly given out to the world, as per the explicit instructions of the Holy Mother of Christ.  It is related to the extremely well-documented miracle that had happened there.

The Third Secret concerns the momentous murder of a future pope, dying within a ravaged city, and, apparently, the horrible destruction of most of the world, among other shocking matters, if Russia is not fully consecrated properly to the BVM in terms of its accepting the Roman Catholic Faith.  For those interested, it is a rather powerful and ongoing dispute that will not simply go away, regardless of how many major and minor attempts are made to assure the faithful that everything is now fully known; also, it is irritatingly said, by Church authorities, that Russia was, in fact, duly and correctly consecrated.

So, here is where all of the main dispute comes to a critical head, with both sides set firmly against each other, in this terrific dispute, that substantively constitutes its own kind of publishing industry by now.  Surely, as those in opposition claim, if Russia was completely and properly consecrated as requested by the Most Holy Virgin, how come that country is still a degenerate cesspool obviously run by a militaristic and nationalistic oligarchy — when it ought to have been, already, converted to Catholicism?   

And, this type of consideration points to most of the problems involving the problematic matter of what is or is not truly a conspiracy.  One must come to believe, it is assumed, that all the consecutive popes since the 1960s, John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul I, John Paul II, and now Benedict XVI, have all been involved in concertedly covering up this issue involving the nondisclosure of the totality of the Third Secret.  It sounds too much as if it is a conspiracy lasting, by now, over 40 years.

At least 95% of what has been written about the main topic of this article, however, is pure junk.  Almost all or everything that can be supposedly written or what has been written on conspiracies is caught up in the interminable conundrum of everlasting contradiction; to wit, if what is being written and spoken about and, moreover, even so carefully, meticulously documented to an extreme degree is even essentially true, then how could it reasonably or rationally be called information about an assumed (secret) conspiracy?  

Too many people, tremendous numbers of them by now, already know about it.   On the political and ideological level, another example can be readily given for appropriate illustration.  An author, e. g., of one such typical book, covering the Bilderbergers, Trilateralists, Illuminati, Free Masons, Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), etc., openly admitted to his readers that he cannot answer the obvious and insightful question as to why the conspiracy has not ever silenced or killed him already. 

Perhaps, he is really just an infamous agent provocateur who — now get this — deliberately creates an informational kind of distraction, obfuscation, and disinformation campaign for then better hiding the reality behind the supposed conspiracy that conceals the real conspiracy, as with getting at the heart of a true onion.  (Ha!  Ha!)   Now, that would seem to explain everything, of course.  

One could simply cite, among others, A. Ralph Epperson’s The Unseen Hand: An Introduction to the Conspiratorial View of History to get a rather comprehensive overview of all sorts of varied implications and complex ramifications, directly and indirectly, that are supposed to be interrelatedly involved, in one way or another, for centuries.

But, Benjamin Franklin, who had a vast amount of sophisticated diplomatic and extensive international experience of political and related realities of a rather high caliber, had wisely, famously, and correctly noted how it was possible for three people to keep a secret, meaning, he said, if two of them were dead. 

[On the other hand, should, e. g., South Carolina’s Gov. Mark Sanford become the next President of the United States — and be yet unable to both reasonably and thoroughly explain his secret absence of 5 days — then many conspiracy theorists will say that he got the “approval” after secret meetings with the Free Masons, Trilateralists, Bilderbergers, the Institute, CFR, etc.  Any such unusual stuff, involving major political figures, easily and quickly feeds the conspiratorial stomach.  Or, alternately, was he kidnapped temporarily by space aliens (as many other people will believe)?  And, yet others, will proclaim that the lusty escapade he claimed he had was really just a mere “cover story” to hide the conspiratorial truth.  This whole paragraph is a deliberate and contemporary illustration of how extreme and to what lengths believers will go when the only “truth” acceptable concerns alleged conspiracies.]

Another easy refutation, however, of about 95% of (bizarre) conspiracy theories is that very few, if any, are entirely or truly original.  The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and other such infamous, filthy, and anti-Semitic literature still is so widely circulated, including in the Middle East, of course.   Many, and sometimes it even seems to be most, of these incredible and literally amazing theories also refer back to the assumed and ultimate source of the supreme center of control, of all or almost all worldwide conspiracies, as leading, in vicious terms of anti-Catholic bigotry and stupidity, finally to the Vatican, of course. 

In the USA, from time to time, there were actually Protestant books written of how, for example, a tunnel was supposed to be planned that would have ended up being dug so that it would connect Vatican City to the White House. 

Not unexpectedly, therefore, almost all conspiracy theories and allegations of supposed conspiracies have rightly and properly been refuted and repudiated; this has been done by all decent and fair-minded human beings, possessed of rational intelligence, who did not have their minds stupidly warped by such nonsensical garbage, parading as esoteric knowledge, of certain secret doings and activities threatening mankind at large.  Such absurd diatribes and profoundly extended invectives have, deservedly and thoroughly, been totally unmasked as the tedious and insipid nonsense that they all do obviously represent in an unqualified manner. 

Both deluded and self-deluded people produce and believe in such ugly stuff because, among other reasons, it puffs them up in thinking that they have acquired this inside and special knowledge of how the world really works; for others, they do feel a certain sense of comfort knowing that (outside) people can be informed about what is truly happening, in this world, beyond the mere surface appearances; some feed upon this material as, e. g., just a convenient way to justify further their own paranoia by rationalizing it, by pointing to books, magazines, etc. that explain these supposed things to the public.

They then tend, on the whole, to feel mostly or generally superior to their unenlightened neighbors, friends, colleagues, etc. who are plainly ignorant of or, perhaps, deny mostly or completely any or all such allegations or innuendos of there being conspiracies or one great conspiracy that, thus, grandly explains all  the other minor (and usually, somehow or other, related) ones.  Thus, because so much greatly repetitious, tedious, excessive, etc. literature covering conspiracy theories and things related to the existence of such talked about agencies of destruction, subversion, etc. exists, few intelligent people bother to ever read more than one book or article on the subject; and, no one ought to blame them.

It ought not, therefore, to be ever really surprising since it does not take any conspiracy to simply realize that rich/wealthy people and/or powerful/influential people normally wish to remain rich/wealthy and/or powerful/influential during their entire lifetimes; most of them, by extension, seek to insure that their own descendants, if at all possible, remain entirely within the charmed circle of that tiny minority of people, throughout all of recorded history, who have been at or near the top of the social/power pyramid that has always and will always exist in one form or another.

This is meaning, of course, as long as many human beings seek, tirelessly and ruthlessly, to gain great amounts of money, power, etc. in this (fallen/imperfect) world. 

On the other hand, there is the remaining 5% and less of matters discussed that do and have been related to things involved with genuine conspiratorial matters that truly make up for the other vastly predominant majority of publications that would have been considerably better if they had been put to a better use, for good toilet paper.  A clear exception to the usually vastly idiotic stuff that refuses to be honestly classified as fiction is such a magnificent book, as it is surely and without question, that was written by Whittaker Chambers: Witness.  Yes, Virginia, there … were Communists; there were these real and evil conspirators in America and elsewhere who were sincerely and actually doing the bidding of the Soviet Union, as is witnessed, later in time, by the Venona Papers and much else.        

So, it is actually possible that conspirators and conspiracies can exist, though the Anglo-Saxon mind denies such things in general, as the reverse image of the (European) Continental mind that tends to affirm these things as being real.   For instance, Dr. James H. Billington’s Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith detailing revolutionary movements from the 18^th into 20^th century reveals, e. g., that most such revolutionaries had thought of themselves as committed conspirators definitely involved in dedicated conspiracies; this was seen, for instance, in the Carbonari who had willingly conspired on behalf of trying to form a united Italy. 

Christopher Ferrara’s book may have, however, reached into a strange middle ground between hard-core conspiracy and a Vatican hierarchy that may have been and, in some ways, still is just inadequate to the task of modern public relations practices in terms of certain needed openness.  He makes no concession to sheer human incompetence and believes that all that has and is happening is actuated by harmful design and sinister plan to deliberately delude the Catholic masses into supposedly believing that which is plainly not true. 

Admittedly, the vain and preposterous excuses merely tendentiously given for withholding the true text are simply stupid, lame, insincere, laughable, or all combined.  The purported, e. g., fear of giving scandal is notably always absurd as compared to the forever greatest scandal of when St. Peter, the first Vicar of Christ on earth, the first Pope, had, in fact, fully denied ever knowing Jesus three times during the Redeemer’s trial; moreover, the greatest horror or rendering of fear among the Catholic faithful cannot be any revelation about a world disaster as compared, e. g., to the actual act of deicide, the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ Himself.  More than all that, it is known, as per Christianity, that the truth is what makes men free, not its suppression.

Meanwhile, The Secret Still Hidden eagerly presents the curious reader with a dozen well-documented chapters, covering over 320 footnotes within 248 pages, and possessing five quite detailed appendices with photographs, illustrations, and copies of letters in strong support of the thoroughly argued thesis; this is besides a bibliography and related suggested reading; it is, in short, a proper tribute to his abilities as a lawyer to put together a rather damning kind of legal brief covering his contentions of intended ecclesial fraud that has gone on now for over 40 years. 

This is because, according to Ferrara, Socci, and others, the actual words, as an unadulterated text, have not yet been made properly public fully regarding the Third Secret, which is directly contrary, of course, to the contention, made on June 26, 2000 by the Vatican, that the entire text was, in fact, released.  Such was elaborately reconfirmed, by Cardinal Bertone in 2007, through his own book and quite public announcements done in firm support of the Vatican’s repeated affirmations in this important matter. 

In any event, should Ferrara be basically correct in his critical observations and well-argued objections, then the world is, indeed, in grave peril due to the wrongful actions and inactions of the Church’s hierarchy in not being forthcoming with the fullness of the truth in this matter.  But, whether or not an actual conspiracy exists concerning the Third Secret is a problematic question that poses yet more questions instead of needed answers.  This Catholic lawyer’s book, however, acts as a needed and profound primer on this subject that ought to be seriously read by any concerned parties. 

On the other hand, at the very least, some (feeble-minded) conspiracy theorists will be so excitedly delighted to learn that, yes, the Vatican is, again, the (supposed) ultimate conspiratorial source behind a contemporary conspiracy, assuming it to be one, of course.