From May to October, 1917, three young Portuguese shepherds, Lucia Abobora dos Santos and her cousins Jacinta and Francisco Marto, claimed to have witnessed an apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary. On July 13 Mary is supposed to have entrusted three secrets to the young visionaries. Two of the secrets were revealed in 1941 in a document written by Lucia to assist with the canonization of her cousins, while the third was to remain secret, although the bishop of Leira commanded Lucia to put it in writing and to present it to the Pope. Lucia herself chose the 1960 date for the secret to be revealed, because she said she thought "by that time it will be more clearly understood".

The first secret was a vision of Hell:

Our Lady showed us a great sea of fire which seemed to be under the earth. Plunged in this fire were demons and souls in human form, like transparent burning embers, all blackened or burnished bronze, floating about in the conflagration, now raised into the air by the flames that issued from within themselves together with great clouds of smoke, now falling back on every side like sparks in a huge fire, without weight or equilibrium, and amid shrieks and groans of pain and despair, which horrified us and made us tremble with fear. The demons could be distinguished by their terrifying and repulsive likeness to frightful and unknown animals, all black and transparent. This vision lasted but an instant. How can we ever be grateful enough to our kind heavenly Mother, who had already prepared us by promising, in the first Apparition, to take us to heaven. Otherwise, I think we would have died of fear and terror.

The second included Mary's instructions of how to save souls from Hell and reconvert the world to Christianity:

You have seen hell where the souls of poor sinners go. To save them, God wishes to establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart. If what I say to you is done, many souls will be saved and there will be peace. The war is going to end: but if people do not cease offending God, a worse one will break out during the Pontificate of Pius XI. When you see a night illumined by an unknown light, know that this is the great sign given you by God that he is about to punish the world for its crimes, by means of war, famine, and persecutions of the Church and of the Holy Father. To prevent this, I shall come to ask for the consecration of Russia to my Immaculate Heart , and the Communion of reparation on the First Saturdays. If my requests are heeded, Russia will be converted, and there will be peace; if not, she will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church. The good will be martyred; the Holy Father will have much to suffer; various nations will be annihilated. In the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph. The Holy Father will consecrate Russia to me, and she shall be converted, and a period of peace will be granted to the world.

Due to the long delay in revealing the third secret, all manner of theories circulated in the Church. Some claimed that it spoke of nuclear war, the deposition of the Pope, the assassination of a Pope, or the replacement of a Pope by an imposter. Finally, during a visit to Portugal for the beatification of the visionaries Francisco and Jacinta (Lucia was still alive), Pope John Paul II announced through his Secretary of State, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, that he had decided to make the text of the third secret public. A few months later, the text was released by the Vatican, together with a discussion of the meaning of the text.

After the two parts which I have already explained, at the left of Our Lady and a little above, we saw an Angel with a flaming sword in his left hand; flashing, it gave out flames that looked as though they would set the world on fire; but they died out in contact with the splendour that Our Lady radiated towards him from her right hand: pointing to the earth with his right hand, the Angel cried out in a loud voice: 'Penance, Penance, Penance!'. And we saw in an immense light that is God: 'something similar to how people appear in a mirror when they pass in front of it' a Bishop dressed in White, 'we had the impression that it was the Holy Father'. Other Bishops, Priests, men and women Religious going up a steep mountain, at the top of which there was a big Cross of rough-hewn trunks as of a cork-tree with the bark; before reaching there the Holy Father passed through a big city half in ruins and half trembling with halting step, afflicted with pain and sorrow, he prayed for the souls of the corpses he met on his way; having reached the top of the mountain, on his knees at the foot of the big Cross he was killed by a group of soldiers who fired bullets and arrows at him, and in the same way there died one after another the other Bishops, Priests, men and women Religious, and various lay people of different ranks and positions. Beneath the two arms of the Cross there were two Angels each with a crystal aspersorium in his hand, in which they gathered up the blood of the Martyrs and with it sprinkled the souls that were making their way to God.

Pope John Paul II believed that the text refers to the failed assassination attempt by Mehmet Ali Agca on May 13, 1981, against him. He notes that this was the feast day of Our Lady of Fatima, that he'd kept himself conscious on the ride to the hospital by concentrating on her, and had indicated repeatedly that he believes that the Virgin Mary spared him from death. "It was a motherly hand that guided the bullet's path." In thanksgiving, he traveled to Portugal to have the bullet mounted in the crown of the image of Our Lady of Fatima.

Despite the revelation by the Vatican, many persons claim that only part of the secret was revealed or that a completely falsified secret was revealed. The main argument for this lies in the refusal of the Popes to reveal the secret, even though most Catholics believed that the secret was commanded to be revealed no later than 1960 -- not simply suggested by Lucia as an appropriate date. The non-revelation of the secret caused a lot of controversy for the subsequent 40 years from 1960, and it was assumed that somehow revealing the secret would be even more controversial or have some negative effect. Some speculated that the secret might criticise the reigning Pope (who would be therefore natually shy from revealing it), or that it might heavily criticise Russia (something that would be controversial during the Cold War). Instead, the secret as revealed is arguably much less controversial and specific then any of the other writings of the Fatima seers.

To understand the Third Secret, we have to look at Lucia's personal psychology. She was an intensely private person by nature. She said later she would never have spoken to anyone about the visions if chatty Jacinta had been able to keep quiet. In the book Encountering Mary, author Sandra Swartz documents Lucia's predicament in regard to the third secret. She seems not to have been asked by Mary to keep the prediction to herself, but to have wished to do so for reasons of her own. When authorities began inquiring about it, she asked and got Mary's permission to write it down, but wanted to be sure she also had the permission of her superiors. This is very important to Catholic religious, who are supposed to obey their superiors as they would obey God himself. Finally, seriously ill with influenza -- the same disease that had killed her cousins -- she wrote the secret, sealed it and gave it to the Bishop of Leiria on January 3, 1944.

(On a side note, it can rather convincingly be argued that even the conditions outlined in the Second Secret have not yet been fulfilled. While mainstream Catholicism holds that the blessing of the world, including Russia, by Pope John Paul II, in 1984 sufficiently fulfilled the conditions, the promised 'period of peace' is still not arrived; indeed, inter-religious struggle seems to reach new heights at the beginning of the 21st century. Compare the view by many evangelical Christians that this rather indicates the return of Christ in the spirit of Christian eschatology.)

External Links

• Vatican website's text of the three secrets, together with analysis by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and scanned images of the original documents.