What a pathetic article Fr. Jean Michel Gleize has written in his pitiful attempt to debunk the secret of La Salette. "Rome will lose the faith and become the seat of the Antichrist" is in Melanie's unpublished letters kept in the Vatican archive, and is essentially what was revealed in the third secret of Fatima, read by Pius XII to Cardinal Samuel Stritch (and others), read by Malachi Martin after John XXIII opened and read it in 1962; announced by Cardinal Oddi and Cardinal Ciappi; revealed by Our Lady to Padre Pio, and corroborated by the message of Akita (where it was revealed that the Church will be betrayed by a false pope).
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Cardinal Henry Edward Manning explained the defection of Rome to false paganized religion in 1861, and Pope Leo XIII foretold it in his long prayer to St. Michael: «Behold the Church, the Spouse of the Immaculate Lamb, filled with bitterness and inebriated with gall by the most crafty enemies; who have laid impious hands on all that is most sacred. Where the See of the most blessed Peter and the Chair of the truth, was constituted as the light of the nations, there they have set up the throne of their abominable impiety, so that the shepherd being struck, the sheep may be dispersed.» What this essentially means is that "Rome (i.e. the Vatican) will lose the faith and become the seat of the Antichrist."
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Cardinal Manning elaborated essentially this same idea in his 1861 book of 96 pages, and summed it up saying: “The apostasy of the city of Rome from the vicar of Christ and its destruction by Antichrist may be thoughts very new to many Catholics, that I think it well to recite the text of theologians of greatest repute. First Malvenda, who writes expressly on the subject, states as the opinion of Ribera, Gaspar Melus, Biegas, Suarez, Bellarmine and Bosius that Rome shall apostatize from the Faith, drive away the Vicar of Christ and return to its ancient paganism. ...Then the Church shall be scattered, driven into the wilderness, and shall be for a time, as it was in the beginning, invisible; hidden in catacombs, in dens, in mountains, in lurking places; for a time it shall be swept, as it were from the face of the earth. Such is the universal testimony of the Fathers of the early Church.” (Henry Edward Cardinal Manning, The Present Crisis of the Holy See, 1861, London: Burns and Lambert, pp. 88-90.)
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The expression "the City of Rome" was then in 1861 like saying "the Vatican" today: it was still rightfully belonging papal sovereignty and not a separately occupied territory from the Vatican before 1849 -- but Rome was the central hub of government of the Pontifical State, (with its administration at the Quirinal Palace in the heart of Rome), as the Vatican City State similarly has its administration inside Vatican City today, and Rome only became a juridically separate territorial jurisdiction under the sovereign rule of Italy with the Lateran Treaty in 1929. The text of Leo XIII's prayer makes it clear that to say "Rome will lose the faith" in 1846 or in 1861 was like saying today, "the Vatican will lose the faith" -- which is essentially and explicitly revealed in the third secret of Fatima, as we know from those who read it or heard it, and related its content to others. However, the defection of Rome (including the Vatican) is not a matter of mere "private revelation" -- Cardinal Manning, a scholar of great erudition testified to the fact that the ancient Fathers and the greatest theologians taught this doctrine in unison -- which is a certain proof that this doctrine pertains to the ordinary and universal magisterium of the Church, and is therefore included in the deposit of revelation and must be believed with divine and Catholic faith.