c. 2000 Religion News Service
VATICAN CITY _ The Vatican made public Monday (June 26) the full text of the long-guarded third secret of Fatima, describing it as a prophecy in 1917 of the suffering the church and the world would face in the 20th century and of the attempt to assassinate Pope John Paul II.
But Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the Vatican’s highest authority on doctrinal issues, said in a commentary that the vision of death and destruction three young Portuguese shepherds saw was not the forecast of an inevitable future but rather a call to mankind to seek repentance and salvation by exercising free will.
The publication of the brief text that Lucia dos Santos, the only survivor among the children, wrote in 1944 ended decades of speculation that the Vatican had withheld her account of the vision because it foretold the doom of humanity.
“Insofar as individual events are described, they belong to the past,” Ratzinger said. “Those who expected exciting apocalyptic revelations about the end of the world or the future course of history are bound to be disappointed.”
The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, headed by the German cardinal, also issued a 43-page booklet in half a dozen languages containing a reproduction of the original text handwritten in Portuguese, its translation, Ratzinger’s commentary and additional background.
The publication followed the dramatic disclosure by Cardinal Angelo Sodano, Vatican secretary of state, on May 13 of the general contents of the prophecy. Sodano spoke at the shrine of Fatima in Portugal exactly 83 years after the shepherd children saw their first vision and 19 years after Turkish terrorist Mehmet Ali Agca shot and seriously wounded John Paul in St. Peter’s Square.
Sodano, acting at the pope’s request and after the pontiff had beatified Francisco and Jacinta Marto _ who died at ages 11 and 10, respectively, of influenza _ said that they and Lucia, their cousin, had seen a vision of the persecution of the church and of Christians in the 20th century and the apparent death of a “bishop clothed in white _ under a hail of gunfire.”
The Vatican delayed publication of the full, unedited text for over a month to allow Ratzinger to write a commentary on its symbolic content and doctrinal significance.
Lucia, now a 93-year-old Carmelite nun, wrote that in their third vision of the Madonna on July 13, 1917, the children saw an angel with a sword spouting flames, which died out when they came in contact with the Madonna just below.
“The Angel cried out in a loud voice: `Penance, Penance, Penance!”’ she wrote in a sometimes ungrammatical manner. “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.”
As the figure in white kneeled at the foot of the cross, “he was killed by a group of soldiers who fired bullets and arrows at him,” Lucia wrote, adding that the soldiers also killed all the others climbing the mountain.
“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,” she wrote. An aspersorium is a vessel for holding holy water sprinkled in blessings during religious ceremonies.
Ratzinger described the vision as an “inner perception” in which the children’s souls were “touched by something real, even if beyond the senses.”
They had a “private revelation,” as opposed to the “public revelations” that God made through the Bible and the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, the cardinal wrote. He said while public revelations demand the faith of all Catholics, a private revelation is considered “a help to faith.”
“The text contains a prophetic vision similar to those found in the sacred Scripture, which do not describe photographically the details of future events but synthesize and compress against a single background faces which extend through time in an unspecified succession and duration,” Ratzinger said. “As a result, the text must be interpreted in a symbolic key.
“The vision of Fatima concerns above all the war waged by atheistic systems against the church and Christians, and it describes the immense suffering endured by the witnesses of the faith in the last century of the second millennium,” he said.
“It is an interminable `Way of the Cross’ led by the popes of the 20th century.”
In an introduction to the booklet, Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone, secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said Lucia’s only manuscript, written on Jan. 3, 1944, was turned over to the congregation in 1957. Lucia wrote a request on the sealed envelope that it not be opened until after 1960.
At a meeting with Bertone on April 27 to prepare for the publication of the text, the nun said she “fixed the date because I had the intuition that before 1960 it would not be understood, but that only later would it be understood,” the prelate said.
John XXIII, who was pope in 1960, decided not to unseal the envelope, and Paul VI read the prophecy in 1965 but ruled against its publication, Bertone said. He said John Paul II requested and read the text for the first time only on July 18, 1981, more than two months after he was shot.
“When, after the attempted assassination on 13 May 1981, the holy father had the text of the third part of the `secret’ brought to him, was it not inevitable that he should see in it his own fate?” Ratzinger said in his commentary. He noted the pope later said it was the hand of the Virgin Mary that deflected the bullet from his vital organs.
The cardinal said the pope and his advisers took the “prudent decision” to continue to withhold the text because they felt they needed “time for reflection” after the attempt on the pope’s life.
Vatican sources said the collapse of communism in 1989, the beatification of the shepherd children and the pope’s 80th birthday on May 18 helped to pave the way for publication.
Ali Agca, the papal assailant who was extradited to Turkey on June 13, claimed after he was sentenced to life in prison that he had been hired by Bulgarian agents acting for the Soviet KGB to kill the Polish-born pope, presumably because of John Paul’s support for the Solidarity free labor union in Poland.
Later, Ali Agca contended he was the unknowing tool of divine providence, but Ratzinger said this was not possible.
“The purpose of the vision is not to show a film of an irrevocably fixed future. Its meaning is exactly the opposite: it is meant to mobilize the forces of change in the right direction,” he wrote.
“Therefore we must totally discount fatalistic explanations of the `secret,’ such as, for example, the claim that the would-be assassin of 13 May 1981 was merely an instrument of the divine plan guided by providence and could not therefore have acted freely or other similar ideas in circulation. Rather, the vision speaks of dangers and how we might be saved from them,” he added.
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Ratzinger said that in the vision, the city symbolizes human history as creativity and social harmony but also destruction, and the mountain and the cross represent the search for salvation.
The bishop in white represents popes from Pius X to John Paul II, who “shared the sufferings of the century and strove to go forward through all the anguish along the path which leads to the cross,” he said.
“The church’s path is thus described as a `Via Crucis,’ as a journey through a time of violence, destruction and persecution,” Ratzinger said. “The history of an entire century can be seen represented in this image.”
But, he said, the vision, “so distressing at first, concludes with an image of hope” because the angels gathering the blood of the dead show that “no suffering is in vain, and it is a suffering church, a church of martyrs, which becomes a sign-post for man in his search for God.”
In the first two visions, which Lucia described in 1941, she said the Virgin Mary showed the children the torments of the damned in hell. She told them that World War I would soon end but, in what appeared to be a warning of the impending Russian Revolution, she said that unless Russia was consecrated to her immaculate heart, as John Paul has since done, there would be “wars and persecutions of the church.”
DEA END POLK
