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A Secret Unveiled

When he made public the final secret of the message conveyed by the Virgin Mary to
three Portuguese children in 1917, Pope John Paul II made it clear why he credits Our Lady of Fatima with preserving him from an assassin’s bullets.

A May trip by Pope John Paul II to the famous Marian shrine at Fatima—the 92nd foreign visit of this pontificate—was bound to generate worldwide interest. The papal visit was scheduled for May 13: the feast of Our Lady of Fatima, an occasion which annually draws tens of thousands of pilgrims to the shrine. The Holy Father had made it clear that this would be a personal pilgrimage for him, too; he has frequently given evidence of his special devotion to the Virgin of Fatima. But this trip would include another special occasion: the beatification of two of the three children to whom the Virgin Mary appeared in 1917.

All those factors combined to draw an unusually large group of pilgrims, estimated at 600,000 or more, for the May 13 ceremonies. But the Pontiff made the occasion all the more memorable when he decided to unveil the famous “third secret of Fatima.”

That secret—which had previously been revealed only to the Pope, his predecessors, and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith—had been the intense subject of speculation among Catholics for 40 years. Many rumors had circulated, suggesting that the “third secret” contained the Virgin Mary’s warning about the end of the world, or some other cataclysmic event. In fact, the secret involves a vision of an assault on a Pope. That vision appears to foretell the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II himself on May 13, 1981.

The Pope asked Cardinal Angelo Sodano to read a message to the congregation at the end of the beatification ceremonies. That message, delivered in Portuguese, explained the third secret in general terms. Cardinal Sodano announced that the complete text of the third secret would soon be made available by the Vatican, together with a commentary produced by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

The secret includes a vision of a “bishop dressed in white” who is caught up in a battle against an atheistic system that oppresses the Church. That bishop “falls to the ground, as if dead, after a volley of gunfire.” Sister Lucia dos Santos, the sole surviving Fatima seer, has confirmed that the “bishop dressed in white” is the Pope.

Since surviving the attempt on his life—which occurred on the feast of Our Lady of Fatima—Pope John Paul II has repeatedly said that he believes the Virgin Mary is responsible for his survival. Months after the assassination attempt, when he was visited in Rome by the Bishop of Leiria-Fatima, the Pope gave the Portuguese bishop the bullet which had passed through his body. The bishop—acting on his own initiative, but obviously influenced by the Pope’s frequent public expressions of thanksgiving to the Virgin—had the bullet mounted in the crown that adorns the famous statue of Mary in the Fatima shrine.

On the eve of the Pope’s departure for Portugal, security officials were again preoccupied with the Pontiff’s safety. Portuguese police spokesmen announced that they were trying to determine the whereabouts of Juan Fernandez Krohn, a former priest who had lunged at the Pope with a bayonet during a previous papal visit to Fatima. Krohn had been arrested, tried, and convicted of the attempted assault, and had served a six-year prison sentence. After his release he had been expelled from Portugal, and had settled in Belgium. But shortly before the Pope made his trip, officials took note of the fact that Krohn had left his Belgian home.

The police disclosed that they had enlisted the help of Interpol and other European police forces as they sought to locate Krohn. But they also stressed that their interest was purely precautionary. “We would like to know where he is, that is all,” a police spokesman said.

If the police ever located Krohn, they did not announce their success. (In any case, such an announcement would have been buried under the avalanche of stories regarding the Pope’s unexpected revelation.) And the trip passed without any untoward incident.

Arriving in Portugal in the afternoon of May 12, the Pope was welcomed at the airport in Lisbon by Portuguese President Jorge Sampaio. After a short helicopter ride to Fatima, he was greeted there by tens of thousands of pilgrims who had come to the shrine for the feast and the beatification ceremonies.

When the Popemobile arrived at the Fatima shrine itself, the crowd cheered enthusiastically, and the noise subsided only when the Holy Father knelt before the statue of the Virgin Mary. After a few minutes of silent prayer, the Pope saluted the crowd, saying: “It is a great joy for me to come to this blessed place.”

The Pope did not participate in the candlelight procession to the shrine, which is an annual tradition on the eve of the feast. But after an evening’s rest, he returned to the shrine for the beatification ceremonies on the morning of May 13. Just prior to the ceremony, the Pope met privately with the third seer, Sister Lucia, who is now a 93-year-old Carmelite nun living in Coimbra, Portugal.

The Pope told the massive congregation that the feast day of the newly beatified Francesco and Jacinta Marto would be observed on February 20, the day when Jacinta died in 1920. He also reminded the congregation of the “intense spirituality” of the young seers, and the fervent prayer which led to their “true mystical union with the Lord.”

“The message of Fatima is an appeal to conversion,” the Pope said in his homily. “In her motherly solicitude, the Blessed Virgin came here, to Fatima, to ask men not to offend God any more. It was a mother’s sorrow that obliged her to speak.”

After the first wave of stories about the content of the third Fatima secret, journalists in Rome began to ask questions about the timing of the revelation. Why had the Pope waited so long to disclose the Virgin’s message, they asked?

In an interview with the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, Cardinal Sodano responded by pointing out that the Fatima message involved “the popes of the 20th century.” Now that the century had concluded, he explained, the Holy Father saw no reason to delay public disclosure. Also, he said, in light of historical developments, “the symbolic visions contain nothing that is now mysterious.”

Pope John Paul II read the third secret shortly after his election, the cardinal continued. But perhaps because the message takes the form of a symbolic vision, he was not particularly preoccupied by that message until after the assassination attempt of May 13, 1981. At that point, however, the Pontiff immediately recognized the relevance of the vision, and gave credit to the Virgin Mary for preserving his life.

Joaquin Navarro-Valls, the spokesman for the Holy See, added some new insights when he explained why Pope John Paul had chosen not to release the secret himself, but to allow Cardinal Sodano to make the dramatic announcement. The reasons for that decision, he said, were twofold. First, the Pope felt a measure of personal reserve about publicizing the message, since he himself is clearly a protagonist in the prophetic vision. Second, he wished to make a formal announcement from the Holy See—thus the official statement read by the Secretary of State—while still clearly preserving the understanding that the Fatima message concerns a private revelation, rather than a definitive statement of Church teaching.

A few Roman journalists pushed their questions further, suggesting that perhaps the Pope had decided to reveal the third secret because he was tying up loose ends, preparing for his own departure from office. But the Pope’s spokesman laughed off all speculation about a papal retirement. Navarro-Valls remarked: “In the 17 years that I have worked for the Pope, I have never heard him make the slightest allusion to that subject.”

The Secret Revealed

The following is the text of the statement read by Cardinal Sodano at the close of the beatification ceremonies in Fatima:

At the conclusion of this solemn celebration, I feel bound to offer to our beloved Holy Father John Paul II, on behalf of all present, heartfelt good wishes for his approaching 80th birthday and to thank him for his significant pastoral ministry for the good of all God’s holy Church.

On the solemn occasion of his visit to Fatima, his Holiness has directed me to make an announcement to you. As you know, the purpose of his visit to Fatima has been to beatify the two “little shepherds.” Nevertheless he also wishes his pilgrimage to be a renewed gesture of gratitude to Our Lady for protection during these years of his papacy. This protection seems also to be linked to the so-called “third part” of the secret of Fatima.

That text contains a prophetic vision similar to those found in Sacred Scripture, which do not describe with photographic clarity the details of future events, but rather synthesize and condense against a unified background events spread out over time in a succession and a duration which are not specified. As a result, the text must be interpreted in a symbolic key.

The vision of Fatima concerns above all the war waged by atheist systems against the Church and Christians, and it describes the immense suffering endured by the witnesses to the faith in the last century of the second millennium. It is an interminable Way of the Cross led by the popes of the 20th century.

According to the interpretation of the “little shepherds,” which was also recently confirmed by Sister Lucia, the “bishop clothed in white” who prays for all the faithful is the Pope. As he makes his way with great effort towards the Cross amid the corpses of those who were martyred (bishops, priests, men and women religious and many lay persons), he too falls to the ground, apparently dead, under a burst of gunfire.

After the assassination attempt of May 13 1981, it appeared evident to his Holiness that it was “a motherly hand which guided the bullet’s path,” enabling the “dying Pope” to halt “at the threshold of death.” On the occasion of a visit to Rome by the then-bishop of Leiria-Fatima, the Pope decided to give him the bullet which had remained in the jeep after the assassination attempt, so that it might be kept in the Shrine. At the behest of the bishop, the bullet was later set in the crown of the statue of Our Lady of Fatima.

The successive events of 1989 led, both in the Soviet Union and in a number of countries of Eastern Europe, to the fall of the Communist regime which promoted atheism. For this too his Holiness offers heartfelt thanks to the most holy Virgin. In other parts of the world, however, attacks against the Church and against Christians, together with the burden of suffering which they involve, tragically continue. Even if the events to which the third part of the secret of Fatima refers now seem part of the past, Our Lady’s call to conversion and penance, issued at the beginning of the 20th century, remains timely and urgent today.

The Lady of the message seems to read the signs of the times—the signs of our time—with special insight. The insistent invitation of Mary most holy to penance is nothing but the manifestation of her maternal concern for the fate of the human family, in need of conversion and forgiveness.

In order that the faithful may better receive the message of Our Lady of Fatima, the Pope has charged the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith with making public the third part of the secret, after the preparation of an appropriate commentary.

Let us thank Our Lady of Fatima for her protection. To her maternal intercession let us entrust the Church of the Third Millennium.

Sub tuum praesidium confugimus, Sancta Dei Genetrix!. Intercede pro Ecclesia Dei! Intercede pro Sancto Patre Iohanne Paolo II! Amen.