Brother François de Marie des Angesof the Little Brothers of the Sacred Heart

THE WHOLE TRUTH

ABOUT FATIMA

VOLUME IV

JOHN PAUL I,THE POPE OF THE SECRET

translated by Timothy Peter Johnson

Front cover:

Pope John Paul I. (photo Vittoriano Rastelli/Corbis)

A few days after his election to the sovereign pontificate, John Paul I confided to Msgr. Pierre Canisius van Lierde, his Vicar General for Vatican City, «You see, Monseigneur, I am always smiling but, believe me, deep down I am suffering.» (L’Osservatore Romano, October 8, 1978)

Back cover:

It is a grace to know and to penetrate the mysterious visions of the Third Secret of Fatima which, in the guise of biblical figures, are like a parable of the events through which we are living.

«The Bishop dressed in white», the good shepherd whom the three shepherd children saw on July 13, 1917, climbing up to the Cross, there to be put to death, corresponds so well to our Albino Luciani. With profound joy we discover his growing devotion to Our Lady of Fatima, right up to the time of his providential conversation of July 1977 in the Coimbra Carmel with Sister Lucy, who revealed to him his vocation…

Scandalous, on the other hand, is the opposition of Popes John XXIII, Paul VI and John Paul II to Our Lady’s requests, descending so far as to falsify the thinking of Heaven’s messenger from 1989. Her negative judgements on the acts of consecration of the world pronounced by John Paul II are here attested by indubitable witness statements.

One will also discover in this book, thanks to unpublished documents, the “secret” that explains the victorious struggles and perseverance of President Salazar: he had received from the seer of Fatima a heavenly message concerning “divine politics” in the Land of Holy Mary.

Sister Lucy’s correspondence, when put in context and related to the themes of the Secret, allows us to discover the riches of her soul. It is always sanctifying to read her salutary warnings. What zeal! As for her last book, Calls from the Message of Fatima, published on December 8, 2000, it was officially presented as her “testament”. But is it really? That is a question we will attempt to answer.

Certainly Sister Lucy manifests by her virtues, notably her heroic humility and patience, that she is an authentic messenger of Heaven: her revelations are divine, and we shall see Our Lady’s marvellous promises fulfilled.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

VOLUME IV

JOHN PAUL I, THE POPE OF THE SECRET

FOREWORD

INTRODUCTION• The Secret of Fatima of July 13, 1917. • The authenticity of the manuscript published on June 26, 2000 by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Ch. 1. THE IMMACULATE VERSUS THE ANGEL• Msgr. Venancio’s appeal, on May 17, 1960, to the Catholic bishops of the whole world. • The days of prayer of October 12 and 13, 1960. • Nikita Khrushchev disarmed? • The first scene of the Third Secret. • Exegetical and historical commentaries. • The Angel’s threefold call to penance. • Sister Lucy’s pressing recommendations to her correspondents. • The seer’s conversations with William Thomas Walsh, John Haffert, Msgr. da Louis Palha, and Father Fuentes. • Shut off in the Coimbra Carmel.

Ch. 2. 1960: THE PARTING OF THE WAYS• The bloody persecutions in East Europe, Asia and Africa. • The realization of the scenes in the Secret. • Cardinal Roncalli in Fatima. • John XXIII, his true character. • The Pope buries the Secret. • Cardinal Ottaviani understands its contemporary relevance: his speech on January 7, 1960. • The Abbé de Nantes’ report, in his Letter of January 1, 1960: the mental perversion of progressivism. • John XXIII commits the Church to Ostpolitik. • His pacifist and internationalist utopia. • The chastisement of the pastors.

Ch. 3. VATICAN COUNCIL II AND THE FATIMA REVELATIONS• The petitions of the Council Fathers for a consecration to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. • Paul VI’s speech of November 21, 1964. • From the opening of Vatican II, two contradictory spirits. • The Council’s silence on communism. • John XXIII’s secret commitments. • The petitions for the condemnation of communism. • John XXIII and Paul VI against Mary Mediatrix. • The amalgamation of the schemas on the Church and on the Virgin Mary. • Chapter VIII of Lumen Gentium. • The cultus of the Virgin Mary devalued. • The «large city half in ruins», strewn with «corpses».

Ch. 4. THE DOGMA OF THE FAITH IS PRESERVED IN PORTUGAL• The «steep mountain». • The catechism of Fatima. • The fruits of the pilgrimage. • The renewed belief of the Portuguese in the Immaculate Conception. • The devotion of the Rosary propagated thanks to Fatima. • A recognised liturgical prayer? • The perseverance of the Portuguese. • Sister Lucy’s statement. • Appendix 1: Sister Lucy’s short treatise on the Rosary. • Appendix 2: Lucy’s letter to Father Pasquale on the Rosary.

Ch. 5. DIVINE POLITICS IN THE LAND OF HOLY MARY• The victory of the democracies and the plot against Salazar. • Sister Lucy and the elections of November 18, 1945: divine illumination given to Salazar. • The President’s combat against Christian Democracy. • The inauguration of the monument to Christ the King. • The Bishop of Porto sanctioned. • Cardinal Cerejeira and the Letter on the Sillon. • The defence of the overseas provinces. • Sister Lucy’s advice. • The pastoral letter of the Portuguese bishops, April 1961. • December 1961: the invasion of Goa. • The warnings of Sister Lucy, Salazar and the Abbé de Nantes. • Salazar in conflict with Paul VI. • The unhappy slide of the Portuguese elites. • April 25, 1974: the Carnations Revolution. • Saved from the direst peril by the consecration to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. • Appendix: President Salazar’s devotion for Our Lady.

Ch. 6. SISTER LUCY’S PATIENCE• Jubilee of May 13, 1967: Paul VI’s visit to Fatima. • The meeting of Paul VI and Sister Lucy. • The Pope’s homily and attitude. • The seer’s devotion for the Holy Father. • Her letter to Pope Paul VI. • Heaven’s messenger reduced to silence. • Her patience. • Her correspondence with Mother Martins, and Fathers Pasquale, Gonçalves and Valinho. • Lucy and the dogma of the faith. • Father Dhanis’ promotions. • Our Lady’s messenger rehabilitated by Father Alonso. • The official expert’s works and conclusions. • Msgr. do Amaral’s disastrous decision. • Paul VI faces the Blue Army. • The Ostpolitik of Msgr. Casaroli. • Cardinal Mindszenty’s protest. • The Third Secret responds to the appeals of the confessors of the faith.

Ch. 7. ALBINO LUCIANI, THE ELECT OF MARY’S HEART• The «Bishop dressed in White»: exegetical commentaries by the Abbé Georges de Nantes and Brother Bruno. • Albino Luciani, the image of the Good Shepherd. • Humilitas, the motto of the young bishop of Vittorio Veneto. • His devotion for Saint Pius X, for Our Lady of Fatima. • 1962: confronted with financial scandals. • The takeover of the Banca cattolica del Veneto. • Patriarch of Venice: his defence of dogma. • Recourse to the Immaculate Mediatrix. • Appendix: Cardinal Luciani’s homily on the Rosary.

Ch. 8. PATRIARCH LUCIANI’S MEETING WITH LUCY• Homily at Saint Mark’s Basilica, for the sixtieth anniversary of the apparitions. • July 10, 1977: pilgrim to Fatima. • July 11, 1977: his providential conversation with Sister Lucy. • His opinion of the seer. • The mysterious prophecy: the evidence of his entourage and close relations. • Appendix: Cardinal Luciani’s article: In Fatima... with Sister Lucy.

Ch. 9. JOHN PAUL I, VICTIM POPE• The presentiment of his election. • His agony at the conclave of August 1978. • The iucunditas. • A spontaneous Catholic renaissance. • Catechist Pope. • The Council’s legacy. • The Immaculate, the star of his pontificate. • His confidential remarks to Don Pattaro. • His determination to consecrate Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. • Scathing criticisms. • His conflicts with prelates in the Curia. • The Abbé de Nantes’ intuitions on the causes of his sudden death. • The Vatican’s financial embezzlements. • John Paul I’s good health. • His royal coup. • His day on September 28, 1978. • Assassinated? • Cardinal Villot’s intrigues. • An autopsy refused. • Priest and victim like Jesus Christ. • Appendix 1: Critical examination of the Vatican note concerning David Yallop’s revelations. • Appendix 2: The conversion of Metropolitan Nikodim.

Ch. 10. «THEY ARE DELAYING THE EXECUTION OF MY REQUEST.»• Msgr. Wojtyla, disciple of Cardinal Wyszinski? • The request for the consecration of Russia and the orientations of John Paul I’s pontificate. • The assassination attempt of May 13, 1981. • The reading of the Third Secret by John Paul I. • Theological objections against the consecration of Russia? • The nuncio’s parlour meeting with Sister Lucy on March 21, 1982. • The Pope in Fatima on May 12-13, 1982: his conversation with the seer; • his preaching and his act of offering of the world. • Lucy’s parlour meetings with Msgr. Hnilica; • with the Nuncio; • with Mrs. Pestana. • The act of offering of the world on March 25, 1984 did not respond to Our Lady’s request. • The Abbé de Nantes’ intuitions concerning the Third Secret. • The encyclical Redemptoris Mater. • The interfaith meeting in Assisi. • The Revolutions in the East. • The travesty of Our Lady’s promises. • The Pope in Fatima, May 13, 1991. • Appendix 1: The act of offering of March 25, 1984. • Appendix 2: Unjustified cautions against private revelations.

Ch. 11. THE FALSIFICATION OF LUCY’S TESTIMONY• Sister Lucy’s replies to Fathers Jongen and Pasquale, to Sister Marie-Abigail, and to D. Teresa da Cunha. • Her view of the act of March 25, 1984: indubitable testimonies. • Sister Lucy sequestered? • Her “new” declarations from 1989. • «Pope John Paul II is forcing Lucy...» • Apocryphal or authentic letters? • The specific mission of Our Lady’s messenger. • Her obedience. • “Messenger of her superiors”? • The fabrications of Father Fox and Carlos Evaristo. • The seer’s excellent health. • Her fifth and sixth Memoirs. • Appendix: Sister Lucy’s apocryphal letters.

Ch. 12. SISTER LUCY’S TESTAMENT?• Calls from the Message of Fatima. • Stirring calls to conversion. • Sister Lucy’s zeal and rich mystical life. • Grave omissions. • The principles laid down by John Paul II in his homily of May 13, 1982. • The specific message of Fatima passed over in silence. • The patience of an authentic emissary of God.

Ch. 13. FALSE AND TRUE SECRET• The processes of beatification of Francisco and Jacinta. • John Paul II’s homily in Fatima on May 13, 2000. • The bogus Secret: Cardinal Sodano’s communication. • June 26, 2000: the disclosure of the Third Secret. • The Roman dossier entitled The Message of Fatima.• Msgr. Bertone’s omissions. • Cardinal Ratzinger, disciple of Dhanis. • The Cardinal’s apriorisms against the Fatima public revelation. • Sensible or imaginative visions? • Recapitulation of the scenes in the Secret: the parable of the events we are living through. • Sister Lucy and the Bishop dressed in White. • The Church of martyrs. • The wasting away of the hierarchical Church. • The promise of the triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. • Jacinta’s visions. • Aiding the dénouement of the Fatima drama.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL LIST

TABLE OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FOREWORD

N June 1981, after having preached a retreat in Brittany on the Fatima revelations¹, our Father Superior, the Abbé Georges de Nantes, entrusted a member of his community, Brother Michel de la Sainte Trinité, with the task of taking his study forward in a scientific and exhaustive manner, in a work that presented the apparitions and requests of Our Lady as well as the relevance of Her message to our times; in short, Everything about Fatima. Brother Michel immediately set to work on this monumental study which well deserved its title: The Whole Truth about Fatima. The first volume, entitled Science and the Facts, appeared in March 1983; the second volume, The Secret and the Church, in January 1984; and the following volume, The Third Secret, in July 1985.

The Portuguese specialists on Fatima immediately recognised the value of this summa. The late Canon José Galamba de Oliveira († September 25, 1984), an adviser and friend of the Bishop of Leiria, Msgr. da Silva, as also of his successor, Msgr. Joao Venancio, wrote to Brother Michel on September 27, 1983: «Your work, I believe, is the most serious historico-critical study on Fatima to be written to date in answer to the attacks published in Portugal and abroad against the reality and significance of the Apparitions and the Fatima message. I congratulate you on this, and I hope it will be a real revelation about Fatima for many of the French, both laity and priests, and also for some of the bishops.» While visiting Canon Galamba in Marrazes, Portugal, on February 13, 1984, Brother Michel gave him a copy of his second volume. A few weeks later, this zealous servant of Our Lady, who had contributed so much to making known Her revelations and requests, sent him his warm congratulations: «Your work seems to me like a small encyclopaedia on Fatima. May it have a wide circulation in France…»

Father Antonio Maria Martins († April 1997), a Portuguese Jesuit, expressed his total admiration and enthusiasm to our Brother on October 30, 1984, after reading his first two volumes: «Your impressive work, The Whole Truth about Fatima, testifies to a very wide culture, an ardent love for the Immaculate Heart of Mary, a meticulous investigation that is ideal for refuting the principal attacks against Fatima, and, in addition, a remarkable effort to relate and interpret the history and message of the Cova da Iria, Pontevedra and Tuy.»

The work that Brother Michel thus accomplished, before he left our community to consecrate himself to the hermit life in Chartreuse, was highly original compared to that of the historians who preceded him, such as the late Fathers da Fonseca and Barthas, for the history of Fatima had been greatly enriched and enhanced since they wrote their books. In the 70’s, Fathers Martins dos Reis and Antonia Maria Martins had published in Portugal a number of previously unpublished documents, including many letters from Sister Lucy to her Jesuit confessors. These writings of the last surviving seer of Fatima allowed the revelations of Pontevedra and Tuy to become much better known. Furthermore, Brother Michel drew heavily on the studies of Father Joaquin Maria Alonso, a Spanish Claretian of indisputable learning and an apostle of devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. In 1966, the Bishop of Leiria, Msgr. Venancio, had officially entrusted him with the task of establishing a complete critical history of the apparitions and message of Fatima. In 1974, at the end of eight years of labour, the first volumes of his monumental work, Fatima, Texts and Critical Studies, were ready for publication; this was said to be imminent, but then it was suddenly deferred by the new Bishop of Leiria-Fatima, Msgr. Alberto Cosme do Amaral. We will return to the consequences of his unfortunate decision, which was approved by a commission of Portuguese university professors. Nevertheless, the official expert, while working on his vast critical study, even up to his death which fell on December 12, 1981, made known the essence of his works in numerous papers.

In his third volume, our Brother Michel de la Sainte Trinité presented and developed Father Alonso’s thesis on the likely content of the third part of the Secret, a solidly argued thesis based on patient investigation.

We will see and we will understand the reasons why the Virgin Mary asked for the Secret to be divulged to the world in 1960. Its revelation at that time would have facilitated the accomplishment of the great divine design of grace and mercy for our time.

That Our Lady should have desired its disclosure after a long period of waiting, was also a marvel of divine wisdom, ensuring that Fatima would be better known. Father Messias Dias Coelho remarked on this in 1959: «A secret is a psychological stimulant. It is normal that a secret should intrigue us and, in the present case, how useful this has been! How many people would not even have heard of Fatima, if this stimulant had not existed? Had Our Lady not desired us to think about it, why would She have asked for silence only on the content of the letter and not on its existence? She ought to have concealed everything, and particularly the date by which She wanted the Secret to be published. One may therefore think that this method of secrecy was an act of ingenuity by the Mother of God to draw our attention to something extremely significant for our wellbeing.²»

The publication of the authentic text of the Third Secret, by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on June 26, 2000, revealed that neither Father Alonso nor Brother Michel had succeeded in discerning its full content. No one had discovered this.

Now that we have the grace of knowing, in all truth, the literal content in its all divine richness and transcendence, we can, in the school of the Abbé de Nantes, comment on and explain these visions which illustrate, develop and clarify the prophecies of the Second Secret.

These heavenly warnings have dominated the world’s history since 1917. Our Father Superior has constantly demonstrated and taught this: «The words of the Most Blessed Virgin to the three children of Fatima explain our history and enlighten our future, and events faithfully follow the line traced out for them in advance.³» That is why, little by little, he came to regard Fatima and devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary as more important than any other divine work.

«The Sacred Scripture», he explains, «and all the prophecies relating to the last times of the world, to the coming of the Antichrist, to the universal apostasy and the coming in glory of the Son of Man, are certainly sufficient, and indeed more than sufficient, to preserve us in fidelity and hope until the end. But for God, ten thousand years are as a single day, and if we knew nothing more about our distressing and terrible times, we would not know exactly what line to take, whether to wait in silence and be crushed in our turn, or to fight back and prepare for the renaissance of the Church. We would be missing something, perhaps? But now that we have it, we feel the opportuneness, the grace, the wonder, the prodigious aid of this other new, contemporary, precise, indubitable, miraculous and marvellous revelation from Heaven, which suffices to fix our path and to set us upon it with an incredible energy, with a tremendous happiness that is not of this world: it is the unique and extraordinary Message of Our Lady, yes! of our Queen, Mother of the Most Holy Rosary, the ultimate secret of Her Immaculate Heart at Fatima […].

«Our hope is in Our Lady of Fatima, because the whole work of the salvation of the world must come from Her, through the wish of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, for the suppression of the powers of hell and the divine glory of this Immaculate Heart, which is, of all the works of Infinite Love, the first and the last, the miracle that is Mary!⁴»

Endnotes

(1) The recording of the lectures given at this retreat (S 48, “Tout sur Fatima”, duration: 9 hrs 30 mins) can be obtained from the Contre-Réforme Catholique (Maison Saint-Joseph, 10 260 Saint-Parres-lès-Vaudes). It will also be possible to listen to the lectures of a new updated version given at the Pentecost 2000 Conference (PC 61, “Le Secret de Marie. Fatima 1917-2000”, duration: 8 hrs 30 mins).(2) “Le Secret de Fatima”, L’Homme nouveau, November 22, 1959.(3) La Contre-Réforme catholique au XX^e siècle (CRC) no. 151, March 1980, p. 9. (4) Lettre à la Phalange, no. 48, August 13, 1994.

Foreword

Introduction

1. The Immaculate counters the Angel

2. 1960: The Crossroads

3. Vatican II and the revelations of Fatima

4. In Portugal the dogma of the faith is preserved

5. Divine politics in the land of Holy Mary

6. Lucy's patience

7. Albino Luciani, the elect of Mary's Heart

8. Patriarch Luciani meets Sister Lucy

9. John Paul I, the pope of the holocaust

10. "They are delaying the execution of My demand"

11. The falsification of Sister Lucy's evidence

12. Sister Lucy's testament?

13. False and true Secret

Bibliography

Table of Illustrations

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

“THE Secret is made up of three distinct things, two of which I am now going to reveal”, indicated Sister Lucy in August 1941, in her Third Memoir. “The first was the vision of Hell […]. The second relates to devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.¹”

The seer had received permission from Heaven to disclose these two first parts of the Secret in 1927, but she would not do so before receiving a formal order from her superiors, and so she bided her time until 1941. As for the third part, she was not asked to write it down until the end of 1943.

Although divided into three elements like this, it is still one single Secret, revealed in its entirety by Our Lady to the three little shepherds at the apparition of 13 July 1917. It is therefore indispensable, before presenting its third part, to recapitulate the Secret as a whole.

We will quote the first two parts following Sister Lucy’s Third and Fourth Memoirs, dated respectively 31 August 1941 and 8 December of the same year. Then we will read, with great profit, a brief but magisterial commentary by our Father. Finally, we will reproduce the third part of the Secret, taken from Lucy’s manuscript, dated 3 January 1944, a facsimile of which was published in Rome by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on 26 June 2000. The three subtitles are ours.

FIRST SECRET:
THE VISION OF HELL

“Our Lady opened Her hands once again, as She had done during the two previous months. The rays [of light] seemed to penetrate the earth, and we saw as it were a sea of fire. Plunged in this fire we saw demons and souls [of the damned]. These were like transparent burning embers, all blackened or burnished bronzed, having human form. They were floating about in this fire, lifted up by the flames that issued from within themselves, along with clouds of smoke. They fell back on all sides, like sparks in huge fires, without weight or equilibrium, amid cries and groans of pain and despair that were horrifying to hear and made us tremble with fright. (It must have been this sight which caused me to let out the great shriek of pain heard by the people around me). The demons could be distinguished by their terrifying and repellent likeness to frightful and unknown animals, black and transparent like burning coals.

“This vision lasted but an instant, thanks to our good Mother in Heaven who, at the first apparition, had promised to take us to Heaven. Were it not for that, I believe we would have died of fear and terror.”

SECOND SECRET:
THE DEMANDS OF THE IMMACULATE HEART

“Terrified, and as if to beg for help, we looked up at Our Lady who said to us so kindly and sadly:

“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 am going to 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 in the reign 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 against the Church and 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, provoking wars and persecutions against 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 will be converted and a period of peace will be granted to the world.

“In Portugal, the dogma of the faith will always be preserved, etc. [sic]²”

These first two parts of the Secret, so dense and rich in content, were learnedly explained and commented on in the second and third volumes of The Whole Truth about Fatima. To reacquaint oneself with this theological, mystical and spiritual study, and to grasp the extraordinary significance of the Fatima revelations which define the clauses of a “new covenant”, one must reread our Father’s editorial for January 1992, entitled “The Light under the Bushel: this Adorable Secret, our unique Hope”³. Here are a couple of extracts:

“We must confess, we must proclaim, that what has guided us over these last thirty years and more in our careful observation of world events, is the great revelation of Fatima of 13 July 1917, a light buried under the bushel of the so-called ‘new evangelization’. For it was on that day that Our Lady proposed to us a covenant between Her Son Jesus Christ and humanity, a covenant that is the daughter of the new and eternal covenant sealed for ever in the Blood of the Lamb and in the indefectible faith of His Church-Spouse, the true daughter of Abraham and the legitimate holder of the promises made to him.

“It is a contractual covenant, an unequal treaty, where little is demanded of the creature and much promised, provided that it be faithful to its Saviour and devoted to the Mediatrix of this treaty, assiduous in satisfying all Their demands and faithful in this service. The conditions are minimal! and in exchange, peace on earth and glory in Heaven will be our reward.

“In order that the whole world might believe, everyone who went to Fatima on 13 October 1917 saw with their own eyes the ‘dance of the sun’ – or as I prefer to call it ‘the fall of the sun’ – and its extraordinary reinstatement, at the very last second, just as it was about to burn up the earth. Those who did not witness it, like ourselves for example, learned sufficient from those who did see it to believe in it just as much. ‘Now, one cannot not believe in it’, said Maria Rosa, Lucy’s mother, who until then had firmly opposed her daughter’s visions – fancy her daughter seeing the Blessed Virgin! – ‘because no one can lay their hand on the sun.’

“Therefore this century’s affairs are conducted from On High by God according to our commitment to this covenant, just as the fortunes of the Hebrew people depended on their faithfulness to the Mosaic Covenant, and just as the blessings and misfortunes of Christendom, particularly of France ‘the Church’s eldest daughter’, were the result of their fidelity or failings towards the law of Jesus Christ, their Head and mystical Spouse. This may seem like madness to some on account of their blindness and hardness of heart, but for every good Catholic it is clear and satisfying.

“Therefore, it is what we have done with God’s demands communicated through the Virgin Mary at Fatima on 13 July 1917 that must prepare us for what God is going to do with us now. The world events we learn of through our radios and newspapers can but verify these divine lights, notwithstanding all the blind and deaf manipulators of world opinion who would contradict them.”

The Abbé de Nantes then went on to comment on the central prophecy contained in these first two parts of the Secret, which expresses the essence of what Our Lady came to teach us at the Cova da Iria:

“To save the souls of sinners who are going to Hell, God wishes to establish in the world devotion to My Immaculate Heart.”

“What a moving revelation this is! The desire of God’s Heart therefore, in this particularly perilous century, is to save the souls of poor sinners. Yet, in the Holiness of His justice and mercy, He must call upon the whole Church spread throughout the world to contribute to this salvation through the means He has Himself decreed in accordance with His good Will and pleasure, namely a huge increase in universal devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Her whom He also wished to make the messenger of this demand and thus place Her before Him as His own Queen and mistress!

“Although classified by specialists among ‘private revelations’, a divine wish of this kind has its true place amongst the sovereign and primary laws to which the Church must consent and entirely submit. It is a matter of the Divine Will revealed to the world, in the most striking manner, through His incomparable ambassadress, the Immaculate Virgin Mary, and backed up by the most astounding miracles and prophecies in modern history. It involves the salvation of multitudes of poor sinners already destined for damnation, and is therefore a duty of fraternal charity of the very first order! Ultimately, it concerns the establishment of a devotion that is undoubtedly dearer than any other to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and which He wishes to see promoted even before His own, namely the devotion to the Immaculate Heart of His divine Mother!

“Therefore the eternal salvation of us all, our prosperity, our peace, our progress in grace and holiness here below, will be assured by Divine Power in response to our fidelity to this new work, or on the other hand they will be obstructed, compromised and confounded by our refusal.

“Let us first give satisfaction to God in that which He has told us is most close to His Heart, and then all the rest will follow! That is why the whole Church should, after the disclosure and publication of this secret, have fervently embraced devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. But this has not been the case. Well may Our Lord Jesus Christ, with great sadness and severity, tell this ‘rebellious and adulterous generation’ on the Day of Judgement: ‘I wanted to save poor sinners from eternal Hell, I wanted to see you honour My Mother so that you might touch My Father and so obtain every mercy. But you, you wicked people, without love or respect for God, without love or compassion for your neighbour in danger of damnation, without a care even for your own salvation and your immediate wellbeing! you would have none of it, you did nothing about it! Well, go now yourselves into the eternal fire there to meet the souls you did not wish to save, as far away as possible from My Mother whom you refused to honour, you unnatural children!”

“If what I am going to tell you is done, many souls will be saved and there will be peace.”

“A marvellous, comforting and delightful prospect! And yet, having mentioned it, Our Lady immediately moves on without stopping because She knows in the light of God that people will not do it, and She defers until later, in Her beautifully ordered speech, that which She must demand and which She knows how to secure, at the very end, in such a manner that we will then obtain this peace and this salvation. We will remember in the meantime – a meantime of nearly a century! – that a door of grace had been opened and will remain open until such time as we are willing to approach it, and then, at last! all enter in.⁴”

Having taken stock of the extraordinary character of the Secret of 13 July 1917, a document without equal in the whole of Church history, a divine oracle without precedent, which reveals to us the thoughts and the Heart of our Heavenly Father, as well as His great design of grace and mercy for our time, we may now read its third part.

THIRD SECRET:
THE PURIFICATION OF THE CHURCH UNDIVIDED

“J.M.J.

“The third part of the secret revealed on 13 July 1917 at the Cova da Iria in Fatima.

“I write in obedience to You, my God, who command me to do so through his Excellency the Most Reverend Lord Bishop of Leiria and through Your Most Holy Mother, who is also mine.

“After the two parts which I have already explained, we saw, to the left of Our Lady and a little higher up, an Angel with a flaming sword in his left hand; it flashed and gave off flames that looked as though they would set the world on fire; but they were extinguished on contact with the brilliant light that Our Lady radiated against them with Her right hand: the Angel, pointing to the earth with his right hand, called 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.’

“Several other Bishops, Priests, men and women Religious were climbing a steep mountain, at the top of which there was a large Cross of rough-hewn trunks as of a cork-tree with its bark; before reaching there, the Holy Father passed through a large city half in ruins and, half trembling and with halting step, afflicted with pain and sorrow, he prayed for the souls of the corpses he met on his way; having reached the summit of the mountain, falling on his knees at the foot of the large 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 Bishops, Priests, men and women Religious, and various lay people, men and women 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.

“Tuy 3-1-1944.”

In August 2000, two months after the publication of this document, the Abbé de Nantes observed: “Almost immediately after it became known, the text of the Third Secret formed the object of some atrocious disputes. Explanations of the most absurd kind, highly insulting to the Virgin Mary, were published, many of them, it has to be said, in response to certain theories marked by a very unenlightened devotion.⁵”

These disputes bore on the authenticity of the manuscript and they continued over the course of the following years. Clearly it is essential to start by making an impartial survey of these controversies.

It is clear that both internal and external criticism of the document provide convergent indications and even proof of its authenticity. Father Fabrice Delestre demonstrated this in his article, “Some remarks on Sister Lucy’s text published on 26 June 2000”⁶. What one finds distinctly indicated in this manuscript, in regard to the place and date of its authorship no less than to the august persons who ordered Lucy to write it down, corresponds well to what we knew of the Third Secret before its publication. Moreover, its content agrees with what the seer revealed in 1941 in her Third Memoir: it concerns something that is “distinct” from the preceding part. “Distinct” by its nature, and not, as the experts had supposed, by its themes.

Let us retain two remarks by Father Delestre. The manuscript published on 26 June contains at least ten spelling mistakes. This is because Sister Lucy writes certain words in a phonetic fashion, that is to say as they are pronounced in the spoken language. One comes across these identical mistakes in her four Memoirs, “which clearly shows that it is the same person who wrote these different texts”.

Furthermore, the seer had used in other circumstances the comparison of the mirror to refer to the light of God. Thus, regarding the apparition of 13 June 1917, she had replied to Father José Pedro da Silva in July 1947: “We saw in this light which we felt to be God, something like how we see ourselves in a mirror.⁷” It is not surprising, therefore, that Sister Lucy also employed this comparison, with the same clumsy expression, in the Third Secret⁸.

But let us move on to the objections of those who received this manuscript with scepticism. It is advisable to present them accurately and to study them rigorously. The result of this detailed criticism will be to render stronger and even incontestable the demonstration of its authenticity.

Certain religious affairs writers, surprised and put out by the contents of the Third Secret, claimed that it had not been fully revealed by the Roman authorities: “On 26 June, we were presented with a truncated Third Secret, deliberately amputated from its first part consisting of Our Lady’s words, which alone permit a correct and authentic interpretation of the vision presented to us.⁹”

Facsimile of the first page of the Third Secret of Fatima published by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, on 26 June 2000, in its pamphlet The Message of Fatima.

The title of the document, penned by Sister Lucy, is wholly unambiguous: “The third part of the secret revealed on 13 July 1917 at the Cova da Iria in Fatima.” In the second sentence, Sister Lucy specifies the context of the visions: “After the two parts which I have already explained, we saw, to the left of Our Lady”… So all the words of the Immaculate preceding the visions belong to the first two parts of the Secret, revealed by Sister Lucy in 1941, in her Third and Fourth Memoirs.

Now, the majority of the arguments advanced by those who maintain this theory are drawn from the works of Father Alonso, of Brother Michael of the Holy Trinity, and from our own writings, notably from the abridged version of the first three volumes of The Whole Truth on Fatima, published in 1991¹⁰. But as the Third Secret truly remained a secret within the Church until its official publication, some of our surmises and hypotheses were erroneous.

That is why, since 26 June 2000, it is necessary to re-examine the sources of each of the statements of the experts, if one wishes to retain only the reliable facts about the Secret. Failing which, the accumulation of so much divergent and at times contradictory information can only lead to some unlikely theories.

For instance, according to Andrew M. Cesanek¹¹, the Third Secret has partially been concealed by the Roman prelates. According to him, it was written on two different but complementary manuscripts: one, dated 3 January 1944, is meant to describe the visions, the other, written on 9 January 1944 and now kept hidden in the Vatican, is meant to report the words of the Virgin Mary. Cesanek bases this theory on the contradictions between what we affirmed in Fatima, joie intime, événement mondial, and what the Roman prelates revealed on 26 June 2000. As an example, take the date of the Secret’s transfer from Leiria to Rome in 1957. We mentioned one date: 16 April 1957. Mgr Bertone, in the pamphlet of 26 June, gives another: 4 April 1957. Cesanek thereby concludes that there exist two documents. A more impartial assessment would have commenced by examining the sources of the two historians to see if one of the two had published incorrect information. Now, the date that we gave, following Father Alonso, is certainly faulty, for the latter did not have access to the Holy Office archives, whereas Mgr Bertone consulted them himself and there found precise and certain information.

The fourth and final page of the manuscript of the Third Secret. The last three lines, as well as the indication of place and date, are very close together, the interline spacing having been reduced by half. It seems that Sister Lucy did not want to start a new page because she had come to the end of her text.

Several spelling mistakes can be found on this page, mistakes identical to others found in her Memoirs: for example, on the third line joelhos (knees) is written with a u: juelhos, as in her Second Memoir (Documentos de Fatima, p. 114 and 118) or in her Third Memoir (ibid., p. 222).

Following Father Alonso and Brother Michael, who based themselves on the evidence of Mgr Venancio¹² and Cardinal Ottaviani, we had believed that the Secret was written on a single sheet of paper and took up about twenty-five lines. But there existed some divergent evidence: Mgr Loris Capovilla, the former secretary of John XXIII, had stated that the Third Secret occupied “four or five small page”¹³, and he spoke the truth! The manuscript facsimile shows that it is written on four small pages, probably the rectos and versos of two sheets, and that it counts no less than sixty-two lines.

Certain critics have gone so far as to maintain that the manuscript published on 26 June 2000 was a total forgery.

For example, Laurent Morlier claims that the authentic Third Secret consists, not of visions, but of Our Lady’s words. Admittedly the cornerstone of his argument is a quote from Lucy, taken from a work by Canon Barthas, but the phrase has been taken out of context: “ ‘In the documents of the canonical process, there is mention of the Secret for the first time during Lucy’s interrogation at the 1924 inquiry. Describing the apparition of 13 July, Sister Lucy declared: Then the Lady confided to us a few short words (palavrinhas), advising us to tell them to no-one, only to Francisco.” So here, comments Morlier, there is no possibility of mistake since Canon Barthas records in his work the precise Portuguese term used by Sister Lucy during this official interrogation of 1924: palavrinhas, i.e. words.¹⁴” Morlier’s interpretation is fallacious. The Third Secret is not at issue. Twelve lines further on, Canon Barthas¹⁵ clearly indicates that these palavrinhas are those of the second part of the Secret, revealed to the world in 1942. In the course of this interrogation of 1924, Sister Lucy spoke neither of the third part of the Secret, nor of its first part, namely the vision of Hell¹⁶.

In the final analysis, a meticulous examination of the testimonies and documents allows one to make the following observation: at no time did Lucy, nor any of the Popes who read the Third Secret, personally state that it contained words of Our Lady. So much is the case that an expert, Father Joao de Freitas Alves, envisaged in 1967 that it might just as well consist of visions than of words of the Most Blessed Virgin¹⁷.

Those who deny any authenticity to the manuscript published by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith base their arguments on an hypothesis that Father Alonso had believed decisive for discovering the contents of the Third Secret. The official expert had presumed that Our Lady’s prophecy, “In Portugal the dogma of the faith will always be preserved, etc. (sic)”, a prophecy revealed by Sister Lucy for the first time in her Fourth Memoir, in 1941, was the first sentence of the Third Secret¹⁸. Now this was an error, one of Father Alonso’s rare errors. This promise concerning Portugal is the last sentence of the second part of the Secret¹⁹.

It is noteworthy that Sister Lucy stated in her Fourth Memoir what she was about to disclose: “With the exception of that part of the Secret which I am not permitted to reveal at present, I shall say everything.²⁰” Now, what Heaven had not yet permitted her to reveal was the Third Secret. She would only put it into writing later, and we know under what circumstances: even after having received from Mgr da Silva a formal order to write it down, she could not bring herself to do so. She would only manage it after receiving confirmation of this order, on 2 January 1944, from the Virgin Mary Herself. In short, it is not surprising that, three years earlier, in 1941, she had disclosed nothing of the Third Secret, something quite “distinct”²¹ from the preceding part, as she said.

We recall, however, that she had declared in 1943, six months before writing down the Third Secret, that “in a certain fashion she had already told it”. How can we explain such an affirmation? Like this:

She had already revealed that her mission was to remind the world of the necessity of doing “penance”²². She had already described the visions of the Holy Father with which Blessed Jacinta had been favoured and about which Lucy had said to Jacinta, “Don’t you see that that’s part of the Secret?²³”

Moreover, she had “in a certain fashion already told it” since, in its third part, the Secret, as we shall see, resumes the prophecies of the preceding part in symbolic form.

It is noticeable that Cardinals Ottaviani and Ratzinger²⁴, who had had the privilege of reading the Secret, revealed several of its themes, the former in 1967, the latter in 1984.

In the course of his talk of 11 February 1967²⁵, Cardinal Ottaviani clearly had present in his mind the visions that would be revealed on 26 June 2000, since he declared: “We have here a sign which is as though veiled, it is not a language which is completely manifest and clear.²⁶” What is more, he partially revealed the content of these visions by twice referring in his speech to a mysterious call to “penance” and by also alluding to other elements of the Secret, as we shall see further on²⁷.

To understand the Secret, we must use the interpretative key given by Sister Lucy in her letter of 12 May 1982 to Pope John Paul II:

“The third part of the Secret refers to Our Lady’s words: ‘If not, Russia 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.’ (13 July 1917)

“The third part of the Secret, which you are anxious to understand, is a symbolic revelation which refers to this part of the Message, conditioned by whether we accept or not what the Message itself asks of us: ‘If my requests are heeded, Russia will be converted, and there will be peace; if not, she will spread her errors throughout the world, etc.’ Since we did not heed this appeal of the Message, we see that it has been fulfilled, Russia has invaded the world with her errors. And if we have not yet seen the complete fulfilment of the final part of this prophecy, we are going towards it little by little with great strides.²⁸”

Thus the visions of the Third Secret are in relationship to the words of the Virgin that precede them: they describe, in an allegorical form, the divine promises, and above all the chastisements that are tied to the refusal of the Church’s highest authorities to satisfy Heaven’s demands.

Thanks to the exegetical and theological commentaries published by the Abbé de Nantes and his disciple, Brother Bruno of Jesus, we will discover that these visions apply biblical symbolism to the events of our time, from 1917 to our present day and beyond to our future, events predicted by the Most Blessed Virgin.

In the course of this account, we will encounter with wonder the central figure in the Secret, namely this mysterious “Bishop dressed in White”.

Need we recall that, before the apparitions of 1917, the three seers were quite unaware of who the Holy Father was?

“We did not know”, Lucy would confide to Father Jongen in 1946, “what the words king, pope or Pius XI meant.²⁹”

Now, on 13 July 1917, having heard Our Lady speak three times to them of the “Holy Father”, they had “the impression”, as they beheld the visions of the Secret, that they were in fact seeing “the Holy Father”: this “Bishop dressed in White”, appearing “in an immense light which is God”, was he!

Shortly afterwards, recounts Lucy, “two priests came to interrogate us and recommended us to pray for the Holy Father. Jacinta asked who the Holy Father was. These good priests explained to us who he was, and how much he needed prayers.

“Jacinta then asked me: ‘Is he the same one I saw weeping, the one Our Lady spoke about in the Secret?’

“‘He is’, I replied.

“From that moment we never offered God any prayer or sacrifice without addressing him a petition for His Holiness.³⁰”

We will identify the Pope whom the three seers of Fatima beheld on 13 July 1917: it is Albino Luciani, our good Shepherd, or at least, not to prejudge the future, let us say that Albino Luciani will appear to us as the figurative of the Pope of the Secret. For the prophecy may still wait to be fulfilled, in the future, in a more literal manner. We will learn to know, to love and to venerate him. We will admire the virtues that predestined him to become Mary’s chosen one and to die as a victim of expiation, killed by his brothers.

By contrast, we will note with dread that his predecessors and his successor on the See of Peter have adopted quite another attitude towards the revelations of Fatima. That is because, ever since 1917, the message of the Virgin of the Immaculate Heart has brought about within the Church, at every degree of the hierarchy, a revelation of hearts. Our Father has repeatedly warned us of this:

“To believe in the events and messages of Fatima has become a token of predestination; whereas to reject Fatima is a terrifying sign of reprobation. Those who believe are the object of a grace that puts them in a good position to please the Virgin Mary and to experience the joys of Heaven […]. Our eternal destiny hangs, therefore, on these four little pages of the Secret. From the standpoint of reason and of the great movements of thought down the centuries, it counts for little. Or, to put it better: it is very simple. And yet: very mysterious. From the standpoint of the heart, what is at issue is our trust in God, our whole devotion and our love of the Virgin Mary. After the appeal of Christ, ‘I thirst!’, here we have the appeal of His divine Mother, urging us with insistence to love Her Heart because this is what God wishes.³¹”

As we discover and meditate on the unfathomable riches of the Secret of Mary’s Heart, each will thus be interiorly solicited to respond to our divine Mother’s appeal. Such is the incomparable grace offered to us by our most merciful Heavenly Father.

1. Mémoires de soeur Lucie, Vice-Postulaçao dos Videntes, Fatima, 1991, p. 108.

2. Toute la verité sur Fatima, volume 1, p. 224.

3. CRC n^o 279, January 1992, p. 1 sq.

4. CRC n^o 279, January 1992, p. 2.

5. CRC n^o 369, August 2000, p. 1.

6. Nouvelles de Chrétienté, n^o 78, Nov-Dec 2002.

7. Ibid, p. 15.

8. Here is a word-for-word translation of the sentence in the Secret: “And we saw in an immense light which is God: ‘Something like how people see themselves in a mirror when they pass in front’ ”…

9. Bulletin Saint-Jean-Eudes, n^o 56, June 2000, p. 2.

10. Fatima, joie intime, événement mondial, 2^nd edition CRC, 1993, 455 pages.

11. The Fatima Crusader, n^o 64, summer 2000, p. 3 sq.

12. One recalls how in 1957 Mgr Venancio believed he could make out, inside the two envelopes containing the Secret, a single sheet of paper whose size he noted: 11.25 cm by 17.25 cm (Aura Miguel, Le secret de Jean-Paul II, Mame-Plon, 2000, p. 182). The manuscript facsimile, published on 26 June 2000, shows that the pages of the Secret were indeed of these dimensions.

13. Conversation between Mgr Loris Capovilla and Marco Tosatti, La Stampa, 20 October 1997.

14. Laurent Morlier, Le troisième Secret de Fatima publié par le Vatican le 26 juin 2000 est un faux, published by D.F.T., 2001, p. 47; 118.

15. Barthas, Fatima, merveille du vingtième siècle, Fatima-éditions, 1952, p. 81.

16. Documentaçao critica de Fatima, vol, 2, published by Santuario de Fatima, 1999, p. 128, 141.

17. Joao de Freitas Alves, O segredo de Fatima, published by Reinado, 1967, p. 6.

18. Alonso, La vérité sur le secret de Fatima, published by Téqui, 1979, p. 16 and 55. Toute la vérité sur Fatima, vol. 3, p. 457 sq.

19. Regarding the manner in which one can interpret the etc. on which the second part of the Secret ends, cf. infra, p. 145.

20. Mémoires de soeur Lucie, p. 156.

21. Ibid., p. 108.

22. Ibid., p. 116.

23. Ibid., p. 114.

24. After having read the Secret, Cardinal Ratzinger extracted the following themes: “A radical call to conversion, the absolute seriousness of history, the dangers threatening the faith and life of the Christian, and therefore of the world. And also the importance of the last times.” He would come back to this later, in his book Conversation on the Faith, linking the “message of Fatima” to “the possibility of the imminent end of history”: “The Church, hearkening to the message of Christ delivered through Mary to our time, feels the threat of ruin to all and to each individual, and responds with a decisive conversion and penance.” (Toute la vérité sur Fatima, vol. 3, p. 553 sq.)

25. According to the transcription and translation published in the Documentation catholique, Cardinal Ottaviani did not say on 11 February 1967, regarding the Third Secret, “What the Virgin dictated to Lucy.” But he stated, “What the Virgin had asked Lucy to say.” (D.C., 1967, col. 542)

26. Ibid. col. 545.

27. Infra, chap. 2.

28. Facsimile of the manuscript in The Message of Fatima, published by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on 26 June 2000. Regarding this letter, cf. infra, p. 420.

29. “En visite chez Lucia”, Médiatrice et Reine, May 1946, p. 11.

30. Mémoires de Lucie, p. 35, 84, and 114. Sister Lucy added: “We had conceived such a great love for the Holy Father that when the parish priest one day told my mother that I should probably have to go to Rome to be questioned by His Holiness, I clapped my hands with delight, and I told my cousins: ‘Ah! what happiness, if I am going to see the Holy Father!’ And they wept tears in their sorrow: ‘We, we are not going, but we will offer this sacrifice for him.’” (ibid.)

31. CRC n^o 369, August 2000, p. 1.

* * *

CHAPTER I

THE IMMACULATE
COUNTERS THE ANGEL

IT was at the request of the Holy Office that the Bishop of Leiria, Mgr José da Silva, sent the Third Secret to Rome in 1957¹. His auxiliary bishop, Mgr Joao Venancio, had suggested that he open the envelope before relinquishing it and retain a photocopy of the Secret. Alas, as had already happened in 1944 when Sister Lucy had permitted him to read it, Mgr da Silva, through pusillanimity, categorically refused to acquaint himself with its contents.

Mgr Venancio handed the precious document to the Apostolic Nuncio to Lisbon, with immense regret, as though he had a premonition that Our Lady’s ultimate Secret would be ignored and despised in Rome.

Highly conscious of the extraordinary character of the Fatima revelations, it distressed him that they were not given more consideration by the theologians and authorities of Holy Church. In his letter of 30 December 1959, addressed to the Secretary of the ante-preparatory commission of Vatican II, he observed: “Generally speaking, it seems that among professional theologians and even a good number of the bishops there reigns the greatest contempt towards all private revelations. Is there not in this a fundamental contempt for God who has sovereign freedom in the dispensation of His gifts and in His manner of communicating with souls?²” An admirable protest, which was to remain unanswered.

THE DAYS OF PRAYER OF 12 AND 13 OCTOBER 1960.

After 13 May 1960, the new Bishop of Leiria³, Mgr Joao Venancio, noting that John XXIII had not published the Secret, took a courageous decision: without soliciting the authorisation of the Holy See, he made an appeal to all the bishops of the world, inviting them to organise days of prayer and penance on 12 and 13 October, in union with the pilgrims to the Cova da Iria, in a spirit of reparation and consecration to the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary. In this way he hoped to move Heaven, to contain the disappointment of the faithful and, by implication, to force the Vatican to abandon its silence. For the Pope had still not pronounced officially on the subject of the Third Secret⁴.

Here is the full text of the letter he sent to every Catholic bishop in the world:

“Fatima, 17 May 1960.

“Excellency,

“On this day of the first anniversary of Portugal’s official consecration to the Holy Hearts of Jesus and Mary, may one of your most humble brothers in the episcopate be permitted to address Your Excellency and present a request to you.

“As Bishop of Leiria, I am entrusted with the sanctuary of Our Lady of Fatima, and it is in commending myself on this title, and on this office which is so heavy for me, that I make so bold as to open my heart to you and to hope for your cooperation.

“The anxiety of the whole world before the fragility of peace and, even more so, the anguish that grips farsighted Christians before the menace of the expansion of communism, sufficiently explains the numerous appeals that come to me from every side, urging me to intensify the movement of prayer and penance born at the Cova da Iria, especially in view of the conversion of Russia and peace.

“Still swayed by the powerful emotion of the spectacle of the immense penitent crowd that gathered at Fatima last May 13^th, and more conscious than ever, for my part, of the responsibilities which His Eminence Cardinal Lercaro recalled that day to all the pilgrims in his homily; faced with such a clear message given by the Most Holy Virgin forty-three years ago, I have resolved to ask the people of my diocese, and the other pilgrims who will come to Fatima next October 12 and 13, for a special effort of prayer and penance, in view of a more perfect return to God.

“I ask all those who can really do so to finish the pilgrimage on foot, to recite the Rosary for at least the last few kilometres, and to spend the entire night from the 12^th to the 13^th adoring the Most Holy Sacrament, in reparation for numerous sins, a cause of affliction to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Heart of Our Sorrowful and Immaculate Mother.

“But how could the intervention alone even of a million pilgrims, burdened with their own spiritual miseries, sufficiently compensate for the great evil that is triumphing in the world, and the indifference of a multitude of Christians themselves, who neglect to have recourse to the Saviour and His Holy Mother?

“Hence it occurred to me to solicit the help of my brothers in the episcopate. Perhaps it will seem to you opportune, Excellency, to pass on my humble request to your people, and to suggest to them similar exercises of prayer and penance, in union with all the pilgrims of Fatima. In this way, next October 12^th and 13^th would be genuine world days of prayer and penance, to obtain the triumph of the cause of God.

“At Fatima, as Cardinal Lercaro recalled, Our Lady crowned the centuries-old history of Her merciful interventions by asking that the world, evil though it is, be consecrated to Her Immaculate Heart, and particularly Russia, whose errors are spreading everywhere and whose persecutions cause anguish to the Church.

“May we not hope that bishops, priests and the faithful everywhere, joining with one heart and renewed fervour in the consecration already accomplished by the Sovereign Pontiff, will contribute to removing the obstacles that may have prevented these solemn acts from obtaining their full efficacy for the conversion of Russia, so dear to the Mother of God, and the attainment of a genuine peace?”

“I would be very grateful to Your Excellency, should it not appear inconvenient to you, if you would entrust somebody with the task of sending me, for the common edification, a small report of what may have been done along these lines in your diocese.

“May Your Excellency deign to pardon the simplicity with which I have let my heart dictate this letter, and accept my sentiments of profound respect and complete union in the Hearts of Jesus and Mary.

“John, Bishop of Leiria.⁵”

This letter by Mgr Venancio was a profession of faith in the indubitable authenticity of the revelations of Fatima, whose extreme importance for the salvation of the world in peril he affirmed. One may regret, however, that he did not accurately represent Heaven’s request⁶ regarding the consecration of Russia:

“Let the Holy Father deign to make, and order the bishops of the Catholic world likewise to make, a solemn and public act of reparation and consecration of Russia to the Most Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, and let His Holiness promise, in return for the end of that persecution [in Russia], to approve and recommend the practice of the reparatory devotion.⁷”

At least Mgr Venancio had let it be understood that the Church had not done everything necessary to satisfy Our Lady’s demands and to obtain Russia’s conversion.

About three hundred bishops replied to his appeal. This was scarcely fifteen per cent of the world episcopate. Nevertheless their letters indicated that, in numerous countries, people would unite themselves with the ardent supplications of the pilgrims at Fatima. “Support came from all sides”, noted the Abbé Richard. “I can signal out San Salvador, Columbia, Nicaragua, Cuba, Argentina, Peru, Venezuela, Mexico, Ireland, Canada, the United States, Rhodesia, Australia, South Africa, India, Reunion Island, Lebanon, the ex-Belgian Congo, Cayenne, Gabon, Madagascar; France, Cambrai, Bayeux, Lille, and the missionary or exiled bishops of China and elsewhere.⁸”

In the Cova da Iria, the ceremonies of October 12 and 13 took place under a terrible storm, as though Heaven itself wanted to impose a harsh penance on the faithful.

“On the evening of 12 October”, recounted Father Simonin, “the torch procession took place in driving rain. The bad weather continued all through the night. On the morning of the 13^th, during the Mass of general communion, celebrated at 6:30 by the Cardinal Patriarch of Lisbon at the high altar in the basilica, the storm redoubled its violence and the wind seemed to want to carry everything off with it, while the rain lashed the pilgrims who had failed to find room in the basilica or in the outside galleries. Nevertheless forty-eight thousand of the faithful, many of whom had stayed up all night in prayer, exposed to the rain and the wind, received Communion inside the basilica and on the drenched esplanade.

“At 9:30, a statue of Saint Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort, which now stands atop the basilica’s colonnade, was blessed and inaugurated by the Bishop of Leiria, in the presence of four hundred Belgian and Dutch pilgrims, headed by the Superior General of the Montfortians and Montfort Fathers of various nationalities, notably the Rev. Fr Hupperts and the teachers at the Montfortian Apostolic School, which has been running for several years at the Cova da Iria.

“Around 10 o’clock, the esplanade was already starting to fill up with pilgrims in compact groups, reciting the Rosary, now buffeted by a strong north-westerly wind which, happily, would little by little disperse the clouds. The sun finally appeared in a serene sky when the statue of Our Lady of Fatima left the Capelhina in procession to take its place, around 11 o’clock, near the basilica’s outside altar, at the top of the monumental flight of stairs. At that moment, one might estimate the number of pilgrims to have been around three hundred thousand or four hundred thousand. Many had come on foot, often in bare feet, and the first-aid post must have treated nearly fifteen hundred people whose feet had been injured by the long, rough journey to the Cova da Iria.

“The wind continued to blow violently right up to the end of the ceremonies, giving the officiants of the pontifical Mass a fair amount of trouble and disrupting the sound of the loud-speakers.

After the Eucharistic blessing of five hundred sick people, sheltered under one of the colonnade’s galleries, “all the prelates present renewed the consecration of the world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, using a formula composed by Pope Pius XII. The two cardinals and the bishops surrounding them gave their blessing to the crowd of pilgrims.⁹”

Those days of prayer and penance found no really favourable echo with the highest Roman authorities. However, the Immaculate Heart of Mary, as we shall see, was not insensible to the supplications and sacrifices of the pilgrims at the Cova da Iria and of the many faithful who, throughout the world, had united themselves to them.

NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV DISARMED?

Not without reason, in his letter of 17 May 1960, did Mgr Venancio reveal his alarm at the expansion of communism and the threats of war. At that time, it was becoming increasingly apparent that the foreign policy of peaceful coexistence inaugurated by the head of the Soviet government, Nikita Khrushchev, with all his propaganda trips abroad and the summit meetings he was advocating, were but a tactic to disarm and dominate the West. The aim of the political and economic struggle of the Soviet leaders remained unchanged: world hegemony by atheistic and persecuting communism.

The President of the USSR's Council of Ministers was engaged in an international war of nerves using, as his principal diplomatic weapon, his successful launches of satellites and intercontinental rockets. To reduce his adversaries to a state bordering on panic, he would alternate between declarations of peace and menacing speeches, passing successively from a reassuring détente to an alarming tension.

On 14 January 1960, he declared before the Supreme Soviet: “We already possess some fearsome weapons. Those we are working on are of unimaginable power. The Soviet army currently possesses weaponry and firepower unequalled to this day. If anyone were foolish enough to attack us, us or any other socialist state, we would be in a position to literally wipe him or the aggressors from the face of the earth.¹⁰”

During his journeys abroad, he would show himself smiling, welcoming and convivial, and then suddenly his face would harden and become terrifying. After his visit to France in the spring of 1960, the magazine Missi stated:

“Distant, disdainful and scowling, such was Khrushchev faced with the treasures of the cathedrals of Rheims and Rouen. In front of journalists, he made a highly out-of-place, not to say blasphemous, allusion to Our Lord. After having explained that Jesus Christ and he were in agreement on many points, since Jesus Christ was a kind of communist, he stated, as marking the profound rift between the two doctrines, that he disagreed with Christ when he said that one should hold out the left cheek when the right is struck: ‘For my part, when someone strikes my cheek, I hit out, I hit out and knock off his head.’¹¹”

The ambitions of the Chinese communists who sought to supplant the USSR in the struggle against American imperialism, their objections against the Soviet diplomacy of “peaceful coexistence” led Khrushchev to toughen his policy. When he revealed, at the beginning of May 1960, that a U-2 spy plane, belonging to the American secret services, had just been shot down over Soviet territory, it was in order to indulge in a public display of scandal against aerial espionage, to threaten the Americans with reprisals and to demand an apology from President Eisenhower. He thus torpedoed the Paris Conference on disarmament, which the “big four” were to take part in.

During the summer, pursuing his policy of nuclear threats against the United States, he allowed Fidel Castro to strengthen his communist dictatorship in Cuba¹².

In the autumn, he went in person to the General Assembly of the United Nations. When he failed in his attempt to obtain a debate on a plan for immediate disarmament, his retort, on Tuesday, 11 October, was aggressive and thunderous. Reporting on this session the following day, Le Figaro ran this page one headline: “On the day before leaving New York, new and noisy threats from Monsieur K: ‘It is necessary to disarm or to risk a conflict from which the USSR will emerge victorious’.”

Had not Khrushchev publicly declared to his adversaries that day: “Our patience is at an end […]. If war breaks out, it will affect the whole world. We are not afraid of war. If it is forced upon us, we will fight and we will win, whatever the sacrifices. But the casualties will be enormous and it is you who will bear the responsibility.

“If we continue the arms race, there will be war and we will win it, and many of you will no longer be here. You want to hear nice words, but you’re deluding yourselves. You don’t want to hear the truth and to wake up to the threat weighing on the world. If you want to compete with us in the arms field, we will beat you. Our economy is flourishing, we produce missiles like sausages, in a mass production line […]. The arms race will lead to a showdown and, in this war, we will crush you.”

Now, in this month of October 1960, at the very moment when their president was seeking to terrify the world, the Soviets suffered catastrophic setbacks to their aerospace and nuclear experiments. On 17 October, Le Figaro informed its readers: “Why has Monsieur K stayed behind in New York? Expectation of an unprecedented Soviet experiment in the field of missiles. Three attempts, three failures.”

The most tragic accident was going to occur several days later, on 24 October, at the Tyuratam base, near Baikonur in Kazakhstan. It was there that Marshal Mitrofan Nedelin, Commander in Chief of the Soviet Rocket Forces and Vice-Minister of Defence, met his death.

The scale of this disaster was revealed in 1965 by the publication of Notebooks of a Secret Agent, written by Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, a high ranking official in the Soviet Secret Services, who ended up working for the West. But, in the Soviet Union, it was only in 1989 that, for the first time, the truth about the death of Marshal Nedelin was published. In a long article published in the Russian weekly Ogoniok¹³, highly committed to perestroika, Alexander Bolotin described the appalling disaster from his personal memories and some disturbing evidence.

Here, summarised in riveting terms, are the circumstances of the disaster: “The Russians”, writes Christophe Courau, “were preparing to proceed with the first trial of the R-16 missile, a completely new rocket with a strictly military application, known by NATO as the SS-7. Once equipped with a nuclear warhead, the missile must represent the most state-of-the-art weapon in the Soviet strategic armament, which also possesses the Bomb […].

“On 23 October, on platform 41, everything was ready. Under the direction of Marshal Nedelin, Commander of the Force for Strategic Missiles, the members of the State Commission were all present. But the weather was not good and it was necessary to defer the launch until the following day.

“Now this series of delays, for this was not the first, was in danger of irritating ‘Monsieur K’.

“Thus it was that, on 24 October, around 18:30, the Marshal displayed his impatience with the teams responsible for filling the tanks. Everyone was under pressure and, in violation of the security procedures, Nedelin left the command bunker and sat on a wooden chair at the foot of the rocket, surrounded by his senior staff in order to assist with the final preparations. Some of them were aware of the danger, but there could no question of disputing orders, particularly as KGB agents had the job of ensuring they were carried out...

“Suddenly, at 18:45, there was an explosion. Gigantic balls of fire reduced the firing range and the spectators to ashes. The rescue squads were unable to intervene due to the heat of the fire. The few survivors, who sought to escape, became stuck in sheets of molten tar, were overtaken by the flames and died writhing in agony. The scene can be viewed on an archive film obtainable from Videocosmos.¹⁴”

To quote James E. Oberg, an American expert, a million pounds (around 450,000 kg) of kerosene and liquid oxygen were ignited that 24 October 1960, giving rise to a fireball that was visible hundreds of kilometres away.

“According to the witnesses”, continues Christophe Courau, “it seems that there was an initial delay in the rocket launch. The first stage ignition had not worked. Nedelin therefore demanded an immediate fix. But the Russian ignition system is very simple. Too simple. As soon as the first stage is fired up, a timer is set in motion in order to control the second stage ignition. And there is no way of stopping the launch process. A detail which, under the stress of the repair work, everyone seems to have forgotten. At the hour programmed, the second stage was effectively set in motion and everything exploded.

“It was Mikhail Kouzmitch Yanguel, the engineer in charge of the project, who informed Khrushchev of the disaster. He picked up the kremliouka (a special telephone connected to the Kremlin) to explain to the Soviet number one, who had only returned from the United States a week ago, the circumstances of the accident. Furious, the latter asked him by what miracle, he, the chief engineer, was still alive. Reply of the party concerned: ‘While everyone was on the platform, I wanted to smoke a cigarette and relax. I went down to the command bunker for a short while. The explosion happened just afterwards…”

“There still remained the necessity of concealing the accident from the Americans. The problem was that it was impossible to hide Nedelin’s death. So Pravda published a press release reporting the demise of the Marshal and his collaborators in an aeroplane accident. Now, the American U-2s which take off from Pakistan and land in Sweden, fly over the Tyuratam base. And the Americans spotted traces of the explosion.

“In the Pentagon, there was much speculation over the number of victims involved. In fact, one hundred and sixty-five people died, all of them military personnel. Fifty-five officers lie in a cemetery created on the outskirts of Leninsk, near the space centre. One may still see a monument erected in their memory. As for the soldiers and technicians, some of them were buried in a common grave at the base, while others were buried at Dniepropetrovsk, in Ukraine.

“It is said that if Khrushchev removed his shoe at the United Nations and banged his desk with it, it is because he was furious at this setback. But the incident at the United Nations took place on 12 October 1960, twelve days before the accident at Baikonur. In fact his outburst was motivated by another failure, that of the launch of the first probe to Mars, two days earlier. He had received the information just before leaving his lodgings to resume his meeting at the United Nations… where he intended to announce to the world a new success by Soviet science.”

According to Baudouin Huygens, Khrushchev was advised of this setback while the UN session was in full swing:

“A soviet marshal entered the USSR box and whispered a few words in the ear of ‘Monsieur K’. The latter turned red, then pale, became highly agitated, took off one of his shoes and rapped his desk violently several times with it. This extraordinary act created an incredible turmoil. The session president beat the gong and broke his hammer, but failed to restore order. ‘Monsieur K’ then got up and left the chamber, followed by his whole Soviet delegation, declaring, ‘The most important thing to have happened today is that the president’s hammer broke: it is the beginning of the disintegration of the United Nations.’

“The western intelligence services quickly came to know the facts and laughed scornfully at the hysterical fury of ‘Monsieur K’ who, at the United Nations, had been frustrated of the theatrical effect he intended to produce by revealing the scientifico-technical feat and the Soviet military power that ensued from it. The writer of these lines learned of the accident in 1961. But it could not be reported in the West, for the USSR would have able to deduce the origin of the ‘leaks’ and to intercept the channels used to transmit information to the free world.¹⁵”

It is remarkable that the Soviets suffered these reversals in Russia itself, precisely in October 1960, at the very moment when a large number of bishops and members of the faithful were addressing ardent supplications to Our Lady of Fatima for the peace of the world in great peril.

Clearly one must connect these grave setbacks suffered by the Soviet leaders with the days of prayer, penance and reparation organised by Mgr Venancio. The Most Blessed Virgin, touched by the devotion and sacrifices of Her children, disarmed, with the light emanating from Her right hand, the Angel of Extermination who was about to set the world on fire.

Thus was fulfilled, in 1960, the inaugural vision of the Third Secret, a vision that we are now going to meditate on in order to understand its marvellous riches, thanks to the exegetical, mystical and historical commentaries published by the Abbé de Nantes and by Brother Bruno of Jesus.

OUR LADY’S RADIANCE EXTINGUISHES
THE FLAMES OF THE ANGEL OF EXTERMINATION.

“After the two parts which I have already explained, we saw, to the left of Our Lady,…”

“The Virgin Mary”, remarks the Abbé de Nantes, “is always there, so humble, so retiring that one might forget about Her at the very moment when Her most secret thoughts are about to be revealed to us. Let us not take our eyes off Her.”

“... a little higher up, an Angel with a flaming sword in his left hand; it flashed and gave off flames that looked as though they would set the world on fire;”

This vision is linked to the prophecies in the second part of the Secret, to be precise to the announcement of the chastisements about to commence, and occurring, “in the reign of Pius XI”:

“When you see a night illumined by an unknown light, know that this is the great sign given to you by God that He is about to punish the world for its crimes, by means of war, famine and persecutions against the Church and the Holy Father.”

The Abbé de Nantes writes:

“Mistress of campaigns, Queen of battles because custodian of the divine powers, the Virgin Mary announces the Second World War even before the first one is over! She knows and declares in 1917 what will happen in 1938 because She is ‘from Heaven’! She knows how obstinate men are in defying God’s power and insulting Her, and this at the very moment when She is seeking to save them all. She knows that God will not tolerate it!

“On the morning of Wednesday, 26 January 1938, Western Europe recorded an unexplained atmospheric phenomenon, which formed the chief topic of conversation from Norway to Portugal, from England to Rumania, in North Africa and in America, from Canada to Mexico.” It was that “unknown light” announced on 13 July 1917, although astronomers insisted on describing it as an aurora borealis¹⁶.

Now, “this light of an unknown nature which looked like it was going to set the world on fire, on the night of 25 to 26 January 1938, was but the ‘glint’ of the sword of fire that the Angel held in his left hand. The vision of Hell taught us what the Devil’s fire is like. This latter vision teaches us that the angels of Heaven have themselves also received ‘swords of fire’ not only to defend the entrance to the earthly paradise (Gn 3.24) for example, but also to execute the chastisements decreed by God.

“Far from escaping into ‘the intemporal’, here we are caught up again in the anguish that has been ours ever since that warning of 1938, a warning which has never left us, knowing that we have still not obeyed the demands of the Blessed Virgin. Reading this text, which is neither in Greek nor Hebrew, everyone understands that this Angel, standing to the left of Our Lady, has only to make a gesture for the whole world to burn.¹⁷”

Brother Bruno’s commentary is highly biblical: “This Angel reminds us of the cherubim posted before the garden of Eden after God had cast out Adam: ‘He banished the man, and in front of the garden of Eden He posted the cherubs and the flame of a flashing sword to guard the way to the tree of life.’ (Gn 3.24)

“The Angel is placed near Our Lady, at Her service since the beginning of Sacred History (Gn 3.15), and right to the end: ‘Then, war broke out in Heaven: Michael and his Angels fought the Dragon. And the Dragon fought back with his Angels, but they were defeated and driven from Heaven.’ (Ap 12.7-8) From the Heaven where Saint John had just seen shining forth the great ‘sign’ of the ‘Woman’ clothed in the sun, crowned with stars and the moon beneath Her feet.

“It is he, Michael, the ‘Angel of Portugal’ who, in 1916, prepared the three seers for the apparitions of the Queen of the Angels. But he no longer performs the office of Angel of Peace, nor of Angel of the Eucharist, as in 1916, since he holds in his hand a sword.¹⁸”

This sword, remarks Brother Bruno¹⁹, represents the chastisement of those who hide their idolatry under Christian appearances: “The sword, the sword! It is sharpened and polished! Sharpened for slaughter, polished to flash like lightning…” (Ez 21.13-15)

“It flashed and gave out flames that looked as though they would set the world on fire;”

“The reason for this chastisement appears far more serious than it was at the very beginning since the salvation promised to our first parents was that Virgin who was to give birth to a Saviour. So, is the crime committed against Her, against Her Immaculate Heart, unforgivable? One would think one was beholding, in advance, the miracle of the sun falling upon the earth!

“So, after the flames of Hell contemplated in the first part of the vision of 13 July, will this same fire also ‘set the world on fire’? and create Hell on earth as a punishment for Pius XI’s refusal to act upon the demands of the Immaculate Heart of Mary?

“Yes, that is exactly what it did: by means of the Second World War, a war ‘worse’ than the first, but this time set alight ‘in the reign of Pius XI’, and by his own fault.²⁰” However, Our Lady exercises an extraordinary control over this fire:

“But these flames were extinguished on contact with the brilliant light that Our Lady radiated against them with Her right hand”…

Here the vision expresses with an unrivalled power the Mediation of Her who manifested Herself at the rue de Bac, rays of light streaming from Her merciful hands and spreading graces, She who would subsequently refer to Herself at Lourdes as ‘the Immaculate Conception’. On 13 October 1917, She would show the extent of Her dominion by shaking the sun with a gesture of Her hands and then arresting its fall.

“At Fatima, on 13 July 1917”, remarks Brother Bruno, “‘the brilliant light that Our Lady radiated towards the Angel’ therefore acted against his sword like ‘the shield of the Faith’ with which Saint Paul armed his Ephesians: ‘Always carry the shield of the Faith, so that you can use it to put out the burning arrows of the Evil One.’ (Ep 6.16) But here, ‘the burning arrows’ are those of an avenging fire, which does not come from the Evil One, but from the Angel of Extermination, the Angel of Judgment, a fire extinguished by the rays of glory which Our Lady radiated from Her right hand.²¹”

We can see an illustration of the vision, and even its initial fulfilment, when Portugal was preserved from the Second World War, owing to her national consecration to the Immaculate Heart of Mary on 13 May 1931. “There can be no doubt”, Cardinal Cerejeira stated publicly, “that it was due to the intercession of the Immaculate Heart of Our Lady that it pleased Providence to preserve us from the war, for which the invasion forces were already massing on the Franco-Spanish border.²²”

One recalls the ardent prayers of President Salazar in those dramatic hours²³. “When Hitler announced the day of his invasion of Portugal”, writes Father Fernando Leite, “our head of government spent the whole night on the telephone to Generalissimo Franco trying to convince him not to allow the German troops to pass through Spain, and, at the same time, he was continuously saying the Rosary. He spent the night with one hand on the telephone and the other on his Rosary. And the miracle happened. May we not be permitted to affirm, therefore, that we were saved from the war by the Rosary?²⁴”

The Virgin Mary would again intervene against the flames shooting from the Angel’s sword, a symbol of war, when Pius XII consecrated the Church and the world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, on 31 October 1942. This consecration would obtain the end of the war, as Lucy explained in a letter to the Bishop of Gurza on 28 February 1943: “The Good Lord has already shown me His contentment with the act performed by the Holy Father and by several bishops, although it was incomplete in respect of His desire. In return, He promises to end the war soon. The conversion of Russian is not for now.²⁵”

Any historian may observe that the months that followed this solemn act of consecration effectively marked the great turning point of the war, leading to a complete victory by the Allies²⁶.

Thus the Most Blessed Virgin Mary is all-powerful in extinguishing the avenging fire of the Angel of Extermination. How many times has She not intervened at the prayer of Her children, to preserve the world from the terrible chastisement of war or to arrest the threatening conflagration!

Such was the case in the month of October 1960, as we have previously described. But Her maternal intervention and protection were also manifest at other dramatic moments: in 1975, in Portugal²⁷, or again at the height of “deadline 1983”, when Western Europe was menaced by a Soviet invasion²⁸.

THE ANGEL’S THREEFOLD CALL TO PENANCE

Disarmed by the Immaculate, instead of setting fire to the world with the sword held in his left hand, “the Angel, pointing to the earth with his right hand, called out in a loud voice:

‘Penance, Penance, Penance!’”

Brother Bruno’s commentary is wholly inspired by the biblical symbolism: “In Chapter 8 of the Book of the Apocalypse, John sees and hears ‘an Eagle flying high overhead and calling out in a powerful voice: Woe, woe, woe to the inhabitants of the earth.’ (Ap 8.13) The ‘earth’ designates Palestine, the Holy Land, and is a figure of the Church.

“In Chapter 12, after the victory of Saint Michael the Archangel and his angels, a voice cries out in Heaven: ‘Woe to you, earth and sea, because the Devil has gone down to you in a rage, knowing that his days are numbered.’ (Ap 12.12)

“This is exactly what Sister Lucy said to Father Fuentes on 26 December 1957: ‘Father, the Devil is currently engaged in a decisive battle with the Virgin.’

“However, here it is not ‘woe’ that is announced to the earth (i.e. the Church) and to the sea (i.e. the world), but grace, in return for ‘penance’.²⁹”

“The Angel of Fatima speaks ‘in a loud voice’, like that of John the Baptist, ‘the voice of one who cries in the wilderness’ (Mt 3.3): ‘Do penance!’ (Mt 3.2) On pain of hell fire: ‘Every tree that fails to produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown on the fire.’ (Mt 3.10; Lk 3.9)

“When Jesus appeared, He said the same: ‘Do penance!’ (Mk 1.15; Mt 4.7), but He interposed Himself between the fire and sinners by ‘proclaiming a year of the Lord’s grace’ (Lk 4.19). Now, Jesus is the fruit of Mary’s virginal womb, and the ‘splendour’ that issued from Mary’s right hand, to counter the flashing sword in the Angel’s left hand, emanates from the Sacred Heart of this most loving Son.³⁰”

At the Cova da Iria, on 13 October 1917, immediately after the last apparition, Lucy gave voice to the Angel’s vibrant appeal which she had heard three months earlier.

While the crowd was still amazed and overwhelmed by the fall of the sun, relates Dr Carlos Mendès, “I took Lucy in my arms to carry her to the road. Thus, my shoulder became the first platform from which she preached the message that Our Lady of the Rosary had just entrusted her with. With great enthusiasm and great faith, she shouted: ‘Do penance! Do penance! Our Lady wants you to do penance. If you do penance, the war will end...’

“She appeared inspired... It was truly impressive to hear her. Her voice had a certain intonation, like the voice of a great prophet.³¹”

Now, that very evening, Canon Formigao questioned Lucy about the exact words used by Our Lady:

“‘Did She say She wanted people to do penance?’ – ‘Yes.’ – ‘Did She use the word penance?’ – ‘No. She said we must say the Rosary, correct our sins, and ask Our Lord for forgiveness, but She did not speak of penance.’³²”

We now understand, since the disclosure of the Third Secret, that it was the vision of 13 July which inspired Lucy’s words: her prophet-like intonation emulated that of the “Angel pointing to the earth”, i.e. the Church.

The Portuguese country folk, as soon as they began visiting the Cova da Iria, responded to Lucy’s appeal. Maria Carreira’s testimony is truly moving and must be reread: “Ah, what wonderful times those were for penance […]. People did so much penance and always with great joy.³³”

In his organisation of the pilgrimage exercises and ceremonies, Mgr da Silva changed nothing of its spirit or specific character. He wanted, on the contrary, to preserve these. Canon Barthas was edified by this:

“The Catholics of Portugal, who have such great love for the two little shepherds who have already departed for Heaven, take pains to imitate their zeal for penance. All those who have taken part but once in the pilgrimages for the thirteenth of the month know not how to express their admiration for the penitential character of these pious multitudes. Many pilgrims make their whole journey, or at least part of it, on foot. Before arriving at the Capelinha, great numbers of them cover the last few hundred metres on their knees or make the round of the Capelinha like this as many times as they have promised.³⁴”

“It is remarkable”, he went on to observe, “that the Portuguese people have understood the penitential character of Our Lady’s demands. It is an extraordinary sight these crowds of pilgrims travelling on foot along all the country’s roads, most of them barefooted, these parish or diocesan groups making pilgrimages over four days or more, feeding themselves only on bread and water, these members of the faithful kneeling in mud and even in water to receive Communion; these human masses of several hundreds of thousands of pilgrims, lying down under the heavenly vault for scarcely three or four hours before assisting at the two Masses, that of the general communion and that of the sick, for at least three hours, and taking part standing, either in the rain or the burning sunshine, etc.

“The good and pious bishop, Mgr José da Silva, the pilgrimage organiser, suffered horribly from leg ulcers originating from his imprisonment during the times of persecution. We heard him confiding to us: ‘I offer my sufferings for the Fatima pilgrimage, that it may always remain a pilgrimage of penance.’³⁵”

The threefold appeal of the Angel of Fatima complements and continues the message of the great nineteenth century apparitions. We remember the words of Saint Bernadette reporting those of Our Lady after the apparition of 24 February 1858: “Penance! penance! penance!” This must also be one of the themes of the secrets of La Salette. Questioned over their content, Pope Pius IX replied to the Rev. Fr Giraud: “You wish to know the secrets of La Salette? Well, here they are: ‘If you do not do penance, you will all perish!’³⁶” As for Cardinal Fornari, he said: “We have in our religion all that is necessary for the conversion of sinners, and when Heaven employs such means, the evil must be very grave.³⁷”

This continuity between these revelations was emphasised by Mgr da Silva in his pastoral letter for the canonical approbation of the Fatima apparitions, dated 13 October 1930: “The voice of Mary, which calls men to penance, is particularly raised at times of calamity, when Her children or nations, victims of their own ingratitude and sins, are about to perish, verifying the prophetic words, ‘I called and you would not answer’ (Is 65.12). This is what happened at La Salette, at Lourdes and, finally, at Fatima.

“In times past, Jeremiah had uttered this threat against the Hebrews in the name of Yahweh: ‘Presently I shall declare to a people and a kingdom that I will pluck it up, knock it down and destroy it; but if this people repents of its iniquity because of my threats against it, then I shall repent of the evil that I had intended to do it.’ (Jr 18.7)³⁸”

SISTER LUCY’S PRESSING RECOMMENDATIONS

Penance, as an element of the message of Fatima, is primarily linked to the first part of the Secret: the vision of Hell, which reveals the atrocious torments endured by the damned for eternity³⁹.

Sister Lucy warns us that, without a life of renunciation and sacrifice, none can save his soul or help his neighbour to salvation. Let us quote the letter she wrote to a seminarian who had doubts about his vocation, a letter published by Father Antonio Maria Martins with no indication of its date. One will remark not only the vigour of her exhortations due to the fact that she saw “souls falling into Hell as though into a whirlpool”, but also the wisdom of her advice:

“Consider in what state you would like to appear before God at the hour of your death, whether God sends you this rapidly or whether He grants you long years of life. If you would like to appear before the Divine Presence as a simple Christian, and if God wants nothing other from you, and if your director tells you that God wants nothing other from you, then I would advise you to go to your mother and to help her in the fields and to conduct yourself as a model Christian. There must also exist good people in the world.

“But if God makes you sense the contrary and if, at the hour of your death, you would be happier to appear before Him as a fervent missionary, surrounded by numerous souls saved by your intervention, then strive to conquer the temptation. The grace of God will not be lacking to you, nor the protection of your good Mother in Heaven.

“Otherwise, if you let yourself be conquered by the temptation, consider that you have taken the first step down towards Hell, and it will be difficult for you climb back up. No path to Heaven presents greater difficulties along the way than that of a missed vocation.

Sister Lucy in prayer before the Chapel of Apparitions during her pilgrimage to Fatima in May 1946 (photo Archives of the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Fatima).

After taking part in the ceremony for Lucy’s first vows on 3 October 1928, at Tuy, Canon Formigao, who had had a conversation with her that day, wrote: “Lucy of Jesus, in religion Sister Mary Lucy of Sorrows, a flower of the fields, now become a tender flower of the cloister, will truly be a lightning conductor raised above this unhappy land of Portugal, once the country of heroes and saints, in order to defuse the divine anger provoked by individual faults and collective folly, and to merit abundant and ever-renewed torrents of forgiveness, grace and mercy, for this bottomless pit of iniquities.” (Documentaçao critica de Fatima, vol. 2, p. 214)

“That is why, I repeat, follow the advice of your spiritual Father in everything, for God will grant him abundant light to tell you what He wants of you […].

“Do not let yourself be deceived. You will never find in the world the slightest spark of happiness that you will enjoy in the religious life. And, in the secular life, you will also have to struggle against countless temptations, certainly far more violent and more frequent, since, as Saint Peter warned us, the Devil prowls around us, like a roaring lion who wants to devour us. The passions, unchecked by the mortification continually practised in the religious life, are keener and occasions for sin offer themselves more frequently and more boldly. And, in one state of life as in the other, it is necessary to fight unto victory if one wants to be saved and not be exposed to the danger of falling into Hell.

“You still lack the strength that is given to us in the religious life by the example of so many saint companions who, in the fight, carried off the victory. I say in the fight, because all souls are troubled by the storms raised by our enemies. Of this I have certain proof in the countless letters that have come into my hands from people of every rank and position⁴⁰. Saint Paul himself admits that, after having been raised to the third Heaven, he still felt in himself a pricking to evil. Be not surprised at this, for Holy Scripture itself proves to us time and time again that the life of the just man is a spiritual combat.

“Hold fast to Our Lord who, out of love for us, also wished to suffer temptation. Embrace the means He left us to conquer it, that is prayer: stay awake and pray not to succumb to temptation.

“Have recourse with great confidence to our good Mother in Heaven for She wants to help you. Surrender yourself to Her Immaculate Heart and you will emerge victorious […].

Sister Lucy, making a pilgrimage to Valinhos, on 21 May 1946.

“Lucy was always gay and jovial”, stated Canon Formigao in the report of the canonical enquiry into the Apparitions, on 14 April 1930. “Today still, after her religious profession, her simplicity, her good humour, and the inner joy that beams from her face, enchant everyone who comes near her.” (Documentaçao critica de Fatima, vol. 2, p. 172)

On 21 May 1946, on her visit to Cabeço, Sister Lucy met a little girl, Florinda dos Anjos, driving a herd of sheep. The shepherdess was of the same age and size as her blessed cousin, Jacinta, at the time of the Apparitions

“Do not be surprised that I speak to you so much of Hell. It is a truth that it is essential to recall frequently at the present time, because people forget about it: souls fall into Hell as though into a whirlpool. So, do you not find all the sacrifices that must be made to avoid going there and to prevent many others from falling into it worthwhile?⁴¹”

Sister Lucy constantly returned to this theme in her correspondence. To a young male religious she wrote in 1942:

“Strive to snatch a great number, the greatest possible number of souls from Hell. To fall into it, yes, is a real disaster!... An eternity of misery which one may well lament in this life and in the next. The misfortunes of this world are at times great, and they fill us with fear and terror, yet everything passes like the grass in the fields, but eternity, the miserable eternity of so many millions and millions of souls, will never pass.⁴²”

Sister Lucy could never forget the affliction of her Most Holy Mother at the sight of so many souls falling into Hell. She told Father Umberto Pasquale⁴³ how struck and deeply affected she was by it:

“What most remains engraved in my mind and heart was the sadness of this Lady when She showed us Hell!

“If the vision of Hell had lasted an instant longer, we should have died of fear and terror. And yet there was one thing that impressed me even more, and that was the sorrowful expression on Our Lady’s face! Were I to live a thousand years, it would be for ever engraved on my heart.⁴⁴”

Sister Lucy, at Fatima, in front of the Chapel of Apparitions, in May 1946. Several years later, the seer would give very precise advice about constructing on the site of this modest chapel a “great” church, which, alas, has yet to be accomplished.

The Virgin Mary’s sorrow could only revive in Her faithful messenger’s souls a thirst for the salvation of souls.

When the saintly nun wrote, on 29 March 1942, to a fervent seminarian, whose vocation has since been confirmed, it was to encourage him in his life of sacrifice and to fan the flames of his apostolic zeal. Here is her letter:

“I was happy to hear your good news and to know that you had won a victory for Heaven. Use every means at your disposal to win many of them, a truly great number.

“There is a very great necessity to save souls, great numbers of souls, and to make reparation for so many numerous sins which are currently drawing down upon us so many numerous chastisements. Souls who should be the lightning conductors of nations and humanity, are in fact the magnet that is drawing Divine Justice down upon us, due to their carelessness, their lukewarmness and their pursuit of creature comforts. Never be of their number.

“Embrace a life of sacrifice and total self-denial for the sake of God and for souls, and you will be happy in this life and in the next. Be closely united with Christ crucified in order to rise with Christ glorified. Do not allow a single soul to be lost through your fault. Immolate yourself on the altar of the love of God, for His sake and for souls. Correspond to the elevated designs that God has upon you and rejoice in the practice of sacrifice. Aim for the heights of holiness and rest not when you have attained it. Manifest your charity and be grateful to the Lord for the graces He has granted you and pray for me.⁴⁵”

That same day, Sister Lucy wrote to a male religious:

“I ask our good Mother in Heaven that, if it be for the glory of God, She may free you from these headaches, but if God and our Mother in Heaven do not wish this, then be courageous in suffering with generosity on behalf of Him who was crowned with thorns out of love for us and in order to save us. Be happy to suffer with Him and for Him.

“Offer Him everything in reparation for the many sins which, at the present hour, are drawing down upon us so many and such great chastisements. God counts on chosen souls, but what if they should refuse!... It is not enough for a single soul here or there to immolate themselves. It is essential that the number fixed by God be complete. We are passing through the hour of Justice. If reparation and amendment are lacking, there will be chastisement, suffering and sorrow.⁴⁶”

It is true that Portugal was preserved at that time from war, but this “miraculous peace”⁴⁷ had to be merited by the conversion of souls and by expiation. To the “fervent seminarian”, the seer had written on 27 November 1940: “In your prayers, pray for me, pray for Portugal which is still so grievously offending God and our dearest Mother in Heaven. Let us hasten to obtain, through our poor sacrifices and prayers, its complete conversion.⁴⁸”

In August 1941, in her Third Memoir, Sister Lucy revealed “that the prayers and penances performed in Portugal had not appeased Divine Justice, because they had not been accompanied by contrition or conversion”⁴⁹. Canon Galamba was very struck by this: he understood that, even in Portugal, “penance had only been carried out in part”⁵⁰.

In this same document, she defined her mission as follows: “I believe that God simply wished to make use of me to remind the world of the necessity of avoiding sin and making reparation for offences against God through prayer and penance.⁵¹”

At the end of 1942, in answer to the Bishop of Gurza, her former confessor, who had recommended that she offer sacrifices for the black children of Africa, she replied: “I am ready to do so if Your Excellency recommends it; but to tell the truth, I do not feel interiorly moved by God to accomplish sacrifices for them. I feel called to sacrifice myself specially for our nation, perhaps because it seems to me that the crimes of rebellious hearts, who resist and despise divine graces, offend God more than the sins of the ignorant who do not love God because they do not know Him.⁵²”

One finds the themes of the Third Secret, notably the vibrant appeal to penance, in the letter the seer sent Father Umberto Pasquale on 1 November 1943. Sister Lucy had these very much in her mind as, two weeks earlier, Mgr da Silva had given her an order to write down the Secret. Here is her letter to this Italian Salesian, the novice master in Portugal, and such a devotee of Fatima that he was preparing a book on Her message.

“According to what you tell me, you were a little disappointed by His Grace’s very brief reply.

“His Most Reverend Excellency gave you a good reply and, speaking to me personally on 15 September regarding numerous requests of the same kind, he told me that he was obliged to resort to negative responses, for otherwise I would have to abandon the religious life and become a writer. God preserve me! Where would I find the education and ability necessary for that? I am but a poor woman, more and more ignorant of the things of the world, and I aspire to nothing but the things of Heaven, by God’s grace.

“But that you may no longer concern yourself about this, I will tell you that Our Lady, at the Cova da Iria, said nothing directly relating to this question. However, there is one detail on this subject to be found in the life of Jacinta.

“As you know, at the Cova da Iria, Our Lady complained of the numerous sins that so greatly offend God, and on more than one occasion She asked for prayer and penance in reparation. She required us to do penance and announced several punishments which would come about if men did not amend their lives. However, She did not speak of any particular kind of sin. But can anyone doubt that the sin of impurity is one of the principal sins that led Our Lady to speak to us with such bitter sorrow at Her final apparition? Or that it led Her to make this other request: ‘Pray! Pray much and make sacrifices for sinners, for many souls go to Hell because they have no one to make sacrifices for them.’

“These souls who are damning themselves for eternity are, without doubt, in most cases the victims of this poisonous leprosy which is currently infecting a large part of humanity. Is it not also true that, in the Old Testament, this was the sin that on several occasions provoked the chastisement of the Lord?

“Nevertheless, blinded by passion, men refuse to listen to the voice of God which cries out in their ears in so many different ways and by so many different means.

“I say that this voice cries out, yet Sacred Scripture and the Imitation of Jesus Christ say that God speaks in secret and solitude. Today it seems to me that the Lord does cry out, but that, even when He does so, He is not listened to. Do you not hear God crying out, calling men to voluntary penance by refraining from sin, to repentance and prayer that they may obtain mercy?

“This war spreading over the world like a chastisement of Divine Justice, does it not seem to you that it wishes to destroy mankind? But men, obstinate in evil, have no wish to change.

“Do we not hear the cry of God when the Pope challenges the world in so many different ways, asking men in their blindness to open their eyes to the light, to turn back to the straight and narrow and away from the road to perdition?

“Again, is it not God who cries out in the human heart by means of so many tragedies, famines and sicknesses, through the death, sorrows and troubles that tear it asunder, as though to say to every individual that this has all been caused by the sin of immorality?

“Oh! Who will obtain for us the grace that God be heard? The principal source of all the tears streaming down so many faces is found in sin; but even those who weep do not want to acknowledge this.

“I know not why I say these things. Of what goes on in the world, thank God, I know nothing and I am happy in my ignorance.⁵³”

After the Second World War, when the revelations of Fatima began to be known outside Portugal, Sister Lucy was frequently questioned about Heaven’s demands. She had already written down the Third Secret which remained sealed at the bishop’s house in Leiria. But it was not her mission to reveal it herself to the faithful. So she did not refer explicitly to the Angel’s threefold call.

In July 1946, she replied to the writer William Thomas Walsh: “People must say the Rosary, do penance, receive Holy Communion on the first Saturday of five consecutive months, pray for the Holy Father.⁵⁴”

At that time she was still able to talk about the devotion of reparation. She had not yet been forbidden to propagate it.

To Mother Henriette Malheiro, she wrote: “Thank you very much for your letter which gave me great pleasure, especially because of the love you show towards our dear Mother in Heaven. Yes, it is so necessary that loving souls make reparation for the many outrages inflicted on Her by Her ungrateful children, and that they seek to obtain for them a ray of light that may open their eyes to the truth and to the only thing that can make them happy.⁵⁵”

On 12 August 1946, John Haffert questioned her with a view to establishing the statutes of the Blue Army and fixing the obligations of its member.

“What is Our Lady’s principal demand?

– Sacrifice.

– And what do you understand by sacrifice?

– By sacrifice, Our Lady said that She meant the faithful accomplishment of each person’s daily duty of state.

– But isn’t the Rosary important?

– Yes, for we must pray to obtain the strength to be able to fulfil our daily duty.⁵⁶”

Sister Lucy had already explained to her spiritual directors⁵⁷, to Father Gonçalves for example, in her letter of 4 May 1943, what the penance requested by Heaven was: “Our Lord desires that souls be made to understand that the true penance He now desires and demands consists above all in the sacrifice that each must impose on himself in order to fulfil his proper religious and material duties.⁵⁸”

Referring, moreover, to Our Lady’s demands at Her first apparition and the graces she herself received on that 13 May 1917, Sister Lucy stated how salutary it is for souls to “drink from the cup of sacrifice”:

“When we accept the sacrifices that come our way each day, our life becomes a slow martyrdom which purifies us, raises us up into the supernatural life and prepares us to meet God, in that atmosphere of the presence of the Most Holy Trinity in us. There one finds spiritual riches beyond compare! Those who have understood this pass their life immersed in the Light: in that Light which is not that of the sun, nor of the stars, but which is the bountiful source from whence every other light emanates and receives its being. It is a living Light that sees and penetrates at the same time as it illuminates and renders visible what it wishes to display. It is the living Light of God!⁵⁹”

Favoured with wholly special graces, Sister Lucy was desirous, for her part, to lead a more mortified life by answering her first and divine vocation: to be a Carmelite⁶⁰. She opened her heart on this matter to Pope Pius XII, in 1947, when she directly asked him for permission to leave the Congregation of the Dorothean Sisters to enter the Carmel:

“Most Holy Father, I desire to live in greater austerity. I want to be less well known. I would love not to be surrounded by attitudes of veneration that fill me with confusion.⁶¹”

On entering her Carmelite cell for the first time, in Coimbra, on 25 March 1948, Sister Mary Lucy of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart would doubtless have had the impression of beholding one of the tableaux from the vision of the Third Secret again, namely the “large Cross of rough-hewn trunks” on top of the “steep mountain”.

Let us read what she confided to Father Gonçalves several years later, on 9 November 1954.

“Reverend Father Superior,

“I know not where this letter will find you, and I do not even know if you will still be there. But God willing, you will be.

“Our Reverend Mother told me that you had come to our convent doorway, but at such an awkward time that it was not possible to speak to you since we only have one parlour. You clearly saw that the family of a postulant about to enter had just arrived. It was a pity that you could not come back after that; I would have loved to have welcomed you, given you that were going so far away.

“But it is necessary that our immolation be complete, that all of us be marked with the sign of the Cross of the Lamb.

“Saint John said that he saw in Heaven a multitude which followed the Lamb everywhere. On earth, I think, the Lamb has a similar retinue which follows Him, bearing the standard of the Cross out of love, until the day that it is incorporated into the eternal phalanxes and sings the hymn of victory.

“I don’t know whether you ever entered one of the Carmelite cells. It’s a pity that you could not come on one of those occasions when the cardinals enter them and permit others to do so. You might then have seen what is its best ornament: a single large Cross of wood, standing out against the whiteness of the main wall.

“When I had the happiness of entering the Carmel, I was conducted to my cell and, on entering it, I gazed for a little while on the large bare Cross that opened its arms to me. Our Reverend Mother Prioress asked me:

– Do you know why this Cross here has no figure on it?

“And without giving me time to reply, she added:

– It is so that you may crucify yourself on it.

“What a beautiful idea, to be crucified with Christ! How it fills me with delight in the folly of the Cross! It is here that the secret of my happiness lies: no longer to love or desire anything, unless it be to love and to suffer out of love.⁶²”

Sister Mary Lucy of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart, separated from the world by the grills of her Carmel, did not however forget the message of Our Lady and the exhortation of the Angel.

Let us listen to the Dominican Bishop, Mgr da Louis Palha, Apostolic Administrator of Conceicao da Aragualo, in Brazil, recount his conversation with the seer, which probably took place at the end of the Forties:

Sister Lucy at Fatima on 13 May 1982.

The messenger of Heaven particularly cherished the name she had received when she took the habit at the Carmel in Coimbra, on 13 May 1948. “To speak truly”, she writes, “my real name is Mary Lucy of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart. Very often, almost always to abridge it, I simply sign myself ‘Sister Lucy’, but I must continue to be of Jesus, for that is my baptismal name, and what is most important for me is to belong totally to Jesus with fidelity and love, without reservation. And how I love what it signifies: ‘Star, light of Jesus and of the Immaculate Heart’. It is necessary to live in the light if we are to communicate it to the world and to make it shine in the darkness which envelopes it, in order that it may awake from the sleep of death and arise and live the life of Christ in faith, hope and love.” (private letter, quoted by Father Fernando Leite, Voz da Fatima, 13 April 1987)

“The providential meeting in Rome with Mgr Ferreira de Souza, Archbishop of Sisico and Director General of Charities, allowed me to obtain a letter of introduction addressed to the Mother Prioress of the Carmel.

“I cannot hide the emotion I felt on finding myself in the presence of her whom the maternal bounty of Mary, Queen of the Rosary, had chosen as the messenger of the many wonderful things contained in the apparitions of Fatima. ‘This is she, Sister Mary Lucy of the Immaculate Heart’, the Mother Prioress said to me, showing me with a gesture the nun kneeling at her side, right in front of me. Thinking only of the charge, of the office I fulfil in Holy Church, in the foreign missions, I gave them the blessing of the Rosary. They made me sit down. They remained kneeling.

“Sister Lucy appeared to be a person of enormous integrity, with a strongly defined personality, who knew what she wanted and what she was saying, and said it in a convincing manner, rather like a witness. I noticed that she had not so much an attitude of profound humility but rather something greater. It was the effortless simplicity, a charming kind of ‘supernaturalised nature’, that struck me so forcefully. There is something about simplicity that is more exquisite, more precious than humility. It does not give rise to any self-attention, any self-regard. It presents itself as it is, without any further argument, just as the Good Lord has made us.

“Having remarked that the Rosary I was wearing was the chain of my cross as Apostolic Administrator, Sister Mary Lucy did not let this pass without making an allusion to it, with joy, showing an interest that touched me greatly.”

Mgr Palha reported to her the words that Pius XII had said to him a few days earlier, when he received him in audience at Castel Gandolfo: “My son, there is only one thing necessary, holiness.” And Sister Lucy immediately took the occasion to speak of the message of Fatima: “The penance of the duty of state perfectly fulfilled, that is what Our Lady demands. There are souls who think of extraordinarily great mortifications, of self-flagellation, which they feel themselves incapable of, and consequently they lose heart. When Our Lady demands penance, She is talking of the exact accomplishment of one’s duty of state: that is where holiness lies.⁶³”

On 14 May 1953, Sister Lucy received an American, Martin F. Armstrong, in the Carmel parlour. It seems that he wanted to obtain a “special message” from her for the peoples of the United States. This made the mother prioress laugh, and even the seer it seems. “No”, she told him, “Our Lady has not communicated to me any special message for the people of the United States. She has never mentioned the name of your country.”

As Mr Armstrong was insistent, Sister Lucy, after a moment’s reflection, replied: “I have nothing to say that is extraordinary or sensational. And what I do have to say will not be judged very clever or popular, I fear. One of the things particularly asked for by Our Lady was modesty in clothing. It seems to me that there is not a lot of modesty in the lives of the women of your country. But modesty would be a good sacrifice to offer Our Lady. If the Catholics of your country could form a league to spread modesty in clothing, that would greatly please Our Lady.⁶⁴”

The correspondence of Sister Lucy already published shows that she constantly insisted on the necessity of penance, amendment and conversion. In a letter whose addressee and date are unknown to us, she emphasised the gravity, too often overlooked or neglected, of certain sins:

“Let us strive to avoid the sin of impurity, and we must employ every means in our grasp to achieve this. It is an offence to God and that should be enough for us to want to avoid it, and all the more so in that, of all the vices which the powers of darkness have incited in the world of sin, it is the most shameful and the most repugnant! The most shameful but not the most serious.

“Acts of injustice and a lack of charity towards the poor, widows and orphans, the ignorant and the powerless, are a thousand times more serious and offensive in God’s eyes, and yet people pay these no attention, whereas they should give them far more attention for they are often the beginning and the cause of the disorientation of a great many souls, leading them to plunge into the mire! How many times do those who stand up proudly against impurity, peacefully sleep the sleep of the unjust, laying their heads on the purse of Judas!!!

“Let us now see what Jesus Christ said and His manner of dealing with the Magdalene, the Samaritan woman, the woman taken in adultery, etc.: “Woman, has no one condemned you?” – “No one, Lord.” – “Well, neither do I condemn you either; go in peace and sin no more.”

“As for injustice, jealousy, ambition and calumny, here are the words of Jesus: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! because you shut the Kingdom of Heaven to men; for you will neither go in yourselves nor allow those who would enter to go in. Woe to you who devour the property of widows on the pretext that you have to make long prayers! On this account, you will be judged the more severely.” (Mt 23.13-14) “Woe to the world on account of scandals! They are inevitable, but woe to the man by whom the scandal arrives! It would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened round his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.” (Mt 18.6-7)

“If we refuse to retrace our steps, how can we expect God and Our Lady to save us?!! I am well aware that God’s mercy is greater than any human misery and malignity; but I also know that He demands our co-operation, our amendment [Sister Lucy underlined this word] and our repentance! He was also distressed and manifestly afflicted when He said: ‘If the salt loses its savour, by what shall it be made salty again?’⁶⁵”

If the hierarchy had heard and listened to the Angel’s call, if they had preached this “amendment” which is so necessary, what graces might they not have obtained for the Church and for the world! For the divine gift of peace is not tied solely to the devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary⁶⁶, but also depends on our conversion.

Blessed Jacinta expressed this in a striking way, on 19 October 1917, in her reply to Canon Formigao’s questions: “Our Lady said that if people amend, the war will end, but if they do not amend, it is the world that will end.⁶⁷” One might think oneself to be listening to Our Lord’s warning: “Unless you do penance, you will all perish.” (Lk 13.3)

In the course of 1955, during his conversations with Sister Lucy, John Haffert observed that she found that “the world was slow to accept Heaven’s message”⁶⁸.

The seer confided her heavy concerns to Father Umberto Pasquale with whom she had been in correspondence since the beginning of the Forties: “At the last meeting we had with her, in the Carmel parlour”, he recounted, “we heard this pained observation from her own lips: ‘What I can tell you is that the world has not yet welcomed the message of Fatima.’⁶⁹”

At the end of 1958 or the beginning of 1959, she was one day unexpectedly questioned about the Third Secret, probably by a personal friend or someone in her family:

“So what will happen in 1960? Around here everyone is gripped with fear.”

And Lucy exclaimed: “Fear? But fear of what?

– I don’t know.

– No one should be afraid without seeing and knowing why.” And she concluded with this maxim: “Behave well towards God and fear not.⁷⁰”

It would be useful to reread Sister Lucy’s conversation with Father Augustin Fuentes on 26 December 1957, published in the preceding volume⁷¹. For now that we know the visions of the Third Secret, we have a better understanding of the confidences made by the seer to this man of God who was preparing to be the postulator of the beatification causes of Jacinta and Francisco Marto.

“Father”, she told him, “the Most Blessed Virgin is very sad, for no one attaches any importance to Her message, neither the good, nor the bad. The good continue on their way, but without paying attention to the message. The bad, failing to see God’s punishment already falling upon them, continue their life of sin without worrying about the message. But believe me, Father, God is going to chastise the world, and it will be in a terrible manner. The punishment from Heaven is imminent.

“How little time there is, Father, before 1960, and what will happen then? It will be very sad for everyone and there will be no rejoicing if the world does not first pray and do penance. I cannot give you further details because it is still a Secret. According to the will of the Most Holy Virgin, only the Holy Father and the Bishop of Leiria are permitted to know it, but they refused to do so lest they be influenced by it. This is the third part of Our Lady’s message which will remain secret until that date of 1960.”

Of what imminent chastisement was Sister Lucy speaking? If it was atomic war, then the World Days of Prayer and Penance of 12 and 13 October 1960, organised by the Bishop of Fatima, avoided it. For the world certainly came within a hair’s breadth of atomic war at the beginning of the Sixties, particularly in October 1962, when the Soviets installed offensive missiles in Cuba, but in the end Khrushchev backed off and lost face. Let us repeat, the Immaculate, touched by the supplications of the pilgrims at Fatima, halted, through the sparkling splendour of the rays emanating from Her right hand, the fire with which the Angel of Extermination was menacing the earth.

Nevertheless, Sister Lucy was probably thinking of another chastisement, more terrible still, occurring at the beginning of the Sixties, as we shall see in a subsequent chapter, as a result of the reform of the Church undertaken by Pope John XXIII, a chastisement prefigured in the visions of the Secret by the “large city half in ruins”.

Let us quote two more extracts from this conversation:

“Father, we should not wait for an appeal to come from Rome, on behalf of the Holy Father, calling on the whole world to do penance; nor should we wait for it to come from our bishops in their dioceses or from the religious congregations. No. Our Lord has already made frequent use of these means and the world took no notice. That is why each of us must now begin his own spiritual reform. Each person must not only save his own soul, but also every soul that God has placed on his path.”

It is extraordinary that a Carmelite nun should have given such a warning even before the death of Pius XII. From 1957, Sister Lucy spoke as if she foresaw the breakdown of every authority, including that of the Holy Father. She knew, it is true, the providential means that Our Heavenly Father had given to the pastors of the flock that they might preach a true reform of the Church, a classical reform, in her head and in her members. This was to be the revelation to the world of the Angel’s threefold call to penance. Yet, in 1957, this Secret had already been ignored as much by Mgr da Silva as by Pius XII, who had both refused to read it.

“There are two means to save the world”, said Sister Lucy to Father Fuentes, “prayer and sacrifice. And then there is the Holy Rosary. Look, Father, the Most Holy Virgin, in these last times in which we live, has given a new efficacy to the recitation of the Holy Rosary. And this in such a manner that there is no problem, no matter how difficult it is, whether temporal or above all spiritual, in the personal life of each one of us or of our families, whether these be families in the world or religious communities, or indeed in the lives of peoples and nations… there is no problem, I say, howsoever difficult, that we cannot solve through the prayer of the Holy Rosary. With the Holy Rosary we will be saved, we will be sanctified, we will console Our Lord and obtain the salvation of many souls. And therefore let us have devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, our Most Holy Mother, by considering Her as the seat of mercy, of goodness and forgiveness, and as the sure door by which we may enter Heaven.⁷²”

Such is the Blessed Trinity’s design of infinite mercy for our times: God wishes to grant us everything through the maternal mediation of the kind Heart of His Most Holy Mother. Now, the publication in 1960 of the Third Secret, showing through its inaugural vision the power of the Immaculate, would have been an opportune reminder to the world of this Divine Will, which is at the origin of all the clauses of the “new covenant” in Mary⁷³, revealed at Fatima on 13 July 1917.

SISTER LUCY, CLOISTERED AT COIMBRA

It was under the pontificate of Pius XII that Sister Lucy’s voice began to be stifled on orders issuing from the Holy See. In 1959, Pope John XXIII renewed and reinforced these measures in order to sequester Our Lady’s messenger in her Carmel.

“In his diary for 19 November 1959”, indicates Mgr Capovilla, “John XXIII, after having received the new Bishop of Leiria-Fatima, noted: ‘Interesting talk with the Cardinal Secretary of State and the young Bishop of Fatima, Joao Pereira Venancio. We spoke at great length about the seer of Fatima, today a good nun in Coimbra: the Holy Office will take care of everything and in the correct manner.’⁷⁴”

The orders given by the Holy Office were such that even her former confessor and director, Father José Aparicio, a true man of God, was unable to obtain permission to talk to her in 1960.

This Jesuit, whom she venerated, had left in 1938 for Brazil where he had been successively rector, novice master and finally superior of the vice-province of North Brazil⁷⁵. In 1960, he had come back to Portugal to take part on August 15^th in the celebration of the centenary of the foundation of the Jesuit noviciate in Soutelo. “The venerable old man”, writes Father Martins, “then suffered the greatest disappointment of his whole life: he was unable to speak to Sister Lucy.⁷⁶”

Certainly, he had learned, as soon as he arrived in Portugal, that in that year 1960 only members of her family could visit her, for “her superiors had forbidden her to receive any other person”. However, he was still hopeful of seeing her. One of his letters, dated 7 August, provides evidence of this:

“Tomorrow or later, I will go to Coimbra. I will not be able to speak to Sister Lucy because she has been cloistered. By order of the Holy Office in Rome, she may not communicate with anyone. The bishop judges that he does not have the authority to let the Sister speak. But I am ready for any eventuality and I will go and spend several days at our apostolic school (Cernache), 7 km from Coimbra. There I will wait until she calls for me.⁷⁷” However, she did not call for him. And on his return to Brazil, Father Aparicio would remark to a correspondent: “I was unable to speak with Sister Lucy because the archbishop could not give permission to meet her. The conditions of isolation she lives under have been imposed by the Holy See. As a consequence, no one can speak with her without a licence from Rome. The archbishop has only a very limited number of these licences.⁷⁸”

Father José Aparicio (1879-1966).

Entering the Society of Jesus when he was sixteen, appointed Superior of the Jesuits in Tuy in 1921, he would become one of the seer of Fatima’s spiritual directors after she entered the Dorothean Sisters. He would leave Tuy on 24 September 1927, but Sister Lucy would always remain very attached to him. Extracts from her correspondence with him, published by Fr Antonio Maria Martins, proves this unquestionably. Let us quote one of her letters: “I am very grateful to you for the salutary counsels you so kindly gave me. They encourage me to continue to lead my life solely and exclusively for the love of Our Good Lord. New advice from your Reverence is always like a new spark that lights up the small fire of my soul sometimes close to going out. It is always a new invitation to more generously embrace the practice of my promises to the unique love of our souls.”

Father Martins, who wrote a biography of Father Aparicio, thought that one day he might be beatified. Furthermore, Father Alonso, who knew through the Fatima documents of his highly personal relations with the seer, stated: “I have a real devotion for Father Aparicio whom I would love to see esteemed and honoured as he deserves.”

In 1962, Marie de Freitas, the International Secretary of the Blue Army, residing at Fatima, wrote an article entitled: “Sister Lucy… the invisible”! “More and more”, she noted, “visits to Sister Lucy remain forbidden.” And she went on: numerous are “the dignitaries of the Church, summoned to Rome for the Vatican II Council, who counted, as they passed through Coimbra, on being able to spend a moment in conversation with the seer of Fatima… Impossible however”⁷⁹.

If the Holy See took such measures, it was clearly to prevent the seer from renewing before anyone the declarations she had made to Father Fuentes, just when the deadline, announced over many a long year, for the Third Secret to be revealed to the world had arrived.

1. Toute la vérité sur Fatima, vol. 3, p. 320 sq.

2. Acta et documenta concilio oecumenico Vaticano II apparando, series I, vol, 2, pars 2, p. 599.

3. Mgr da Silva died on 4 December 1957 and his successor, Mgr Venancio, was officially appointed bishop of Leiria on 13 September 1958.

4. We will not return here to the press release issued by the Portuguese press agency in Rome, Agencia Nacional de Informaçao, on 8 February 1960, a communiqué quoted, analysed and critiqued in Toute la vérité sur Fatima, vol. 3, p. 386 sq.

5. Ibid., p. 402.

6. Particularly since, in publishing the letter to the bishops in the Voz da Fatima, the sanctuary’s monthly journal, of July 1960, he had used these sentences from the Secret as an epigraph: “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, provoking wars and persecutions against the Church.”

7. Toute la vérité sur Fatima, vol. 2, p. 294.

8. L’Homme nouveau, 6 November 1960.

9. L’Homme nouveau, 6 November 1960.

10. La Pravda, 15 January 1960.

11. Missi, n^o 240, May 1960, p. 179.

12. The crisis would become more serious two years later, in October 1962, when Soviet missiles were installed in Cuba. Michel Heller observes that “never had we come so close to world war” (L’utopie au pouvoir, published by Calmann-Lévy, 1982, p. 479).

13. N^o 16, April 1989.

14. Christophe Courau, “En Urss, les 165 morts cachées de Baïkonour”, Historia, May 2000. In quoting this article, we have altered certain dates which appeared to be erroneous.

15. Europrospections n^o 42, February 1985, p. 11. Baudouin Huygens thinks that the explosion of the R-16 missile took place not on 24 October, but on 12 October. And, according to him, it was the news of this disaster that was communicated to Khrushchev at the United Nations session.

16. Toute la vérité sur Fatima, vol. 2, p. 421 sq.

17. CRC n^o 369, August 2000, p. 4-7.

18. CRC n^o 368, June-July 2000, p. 19.

19. Résurrection n^o 12, p. 4.

20. CRC n^o 368, p. 19.

21. CRC n^o 368, p. 19.

22. M. C. de Bragança, Le lendemain de Fatima, Lisboa, 1958, p. 25.

23. This was probably in December 1940, when Hitler informed General Franco of his decision to launch an attack on Gibraltar. The operation was fixed for 10 January 1941, and Hitler had planned to occupy the Lusitanian ports to prevent an English landing. Cf. Toute la vérité sur Fatima, vol. 2, p. 272.

24. “Salazar e Nossa Senhora”, Mensagem de Fatima, n^o 82, July-August 1971, p. 4.

25. Toute la vérité sur Fatima, vol. 3, p. 48.

26. One may reread the demonstration of this, ibid., p. 107-108.

27. Infra, chap. 5.

28. “L'écheance... 1983: plus que deux ans, deux ans encore”, CRC n^o 172, December 1981; CRC n^o 369, August 2000, p. 9-10.

29. CRC n^o 368, p. 20.

30. CRC n^o 370, September 2000, p. 3.

31. Toute la vérité sur Fatima, vol. 1, p. 297.

32. Ibid.

33. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 212 sq.

34. Barthas, Le message de Fatima, Fatima-éditions, Toulouse, 1971, p. 72.

35. Barthas, Ce que la Vierge nous demande, Fatima-éditions, Toulouse, 1966, p. 67.

36. Quoted in “Le Secret de La Salette”, CRC n^o 324, July-August 1996, p. 11.

37. Ibid., p. 8.

38. Documentaçao critica de Fatima, volume 2, Santuario de Fatima, 1999, p. 265.

39. Cf. Toute la vérité de Fatima, volume 2, p. 17 sq.

40. Sister Lucy wrote: “… de pessoas de toda a classe e posiçao.” These are the same words found in the Third Secret: “… cavalheiros e senhoras de varias classes e posiçoes.”

41. A. M. Martins, Cartas da Irma Lucia, Porto, 2^nd edition, 1979, p. 120-122.

42. Fernando Leite, Jacinta de Fatima, Apostolado da oraçao, 1999, p. 202.

43. Father Umberto Pasquale had several conversations with Sister Lucy both before and after she entered the Carmel. In an article published in the Osservatore romano of 12 May 1982, he stated: “I have been the seer of Fatima’s confidant from 1939, when she was still a Dorothean sister at Tuy, until today. I have received 157 letters from her. I have met and visited her several times in my capacity as the confessor of a community of nuns at the College of Sardao, near Porto, and then later, at the Carmel of Coimbra. She was kind enough to look on me as a member of her family for having assisted her mother and for having got her nephew into the Salesians as well as two of her second cousins, nephews of Jacinta and Francisco.”

44. Quoted by Umberto Pasquale, Eu vi nascer Fatima, Salesianas, 1993, p. 30 and 140.

45. Quoted by A. M. Martins, Fatima, caminho da paz, Braga, 1983, p. 79-80.

46. Ibid., p. 89-90.

47. Toute la vérité sur Fatima, vol. 2, p. 271 sq.

48. A. M. Martins, op. cit., p. 80.

49. Mémoires de soeur Lucie, p. 115.

50. Ibid., p. 123.

51. Ibid., p. 116.

52. A. M. Martins, op. cit., p. 77.

53. Umberto Pasquale, op. cit., p. 146-148.

54. Walsh, Notre-Dame de Fatima, Amiot-Dumont, 1953, p. 235.

55. A. M. Martins, Fatima et le Coeur de Marie, Téqui, 1986, p. 77.

56. J. Haffert, Russia will be converted, Washington, 1954.

57. Her letter to the Bishop of Gurza, dated 28 February 1943, may be read in Toute la vérité sur Fatima, vol. 3, p. 19-20.

58. Ibid.

59. Irma Lucia, Apelos da mensagem de Fatima, Secretariado dos pastorinhos, 2000, p. 121.

60. Regarding her Carmelite vocation and her entrance into the Carmel, cf. Toute la vérité sur Fatima, vol. 3, p. 154 sq.

61. Quoted by the journal A voz of 22 June 1959.

62. Quoted in A. M. Martins, Documentos de Fatima, Porto 1976, p. 447.

63. Mgr Palha, “J’ai vu Lucie, la voyante de Fatima”, L’appel du Coeur Douloureux et Immaculé de Marie, n^o 78, April-June 1978, p. 11.

64. Martin F. Armstrong, Fatima pilgrimage to peace, New York, 1954, p. 171-172.

65. Quoted by A. M. Martins, Fatima, caminho da paz, Braga, 1983, p. 88-89.

66. Toute la vérité sur Fatima, vol. 2, p. 178 sq.

67. Documentaçao critica de Fatima, vol. 1, Santuario de Fatima, 1992, p. 142.

68. J. Haffert, Encontro de testemunhas, Lisboa, 1961, p. 99.

69. Pasquale, op. cit., p. 149. This conversation probably took place in the mid Fifties, at any rate before 1967, the year of the first edition of his book Eu vi nascer Fatima.

70. Quoted by Martins dos Reis, O milagre do sol e o Segredo de Fatima, Salesianas, Porto, 1966, p. 135.

71. Toute la vérité sur Fatima, vol. 3, p. 336 sq. This account, “albeit a literary arrangement”, states Father Alonso, “certainly corresponds in its essentials to what Father Fuentes heard from Lucy during his visit on 26 December 1957” (ibid., p. 369).

72. Toute la vérité sur Fatima, vol. 3, p. 336 sq.

73. Supra, p. 13 sq.

74. Mgr Capovilla, Famiglia Cristiana, n^o 48, Nov. 1997.

75. In 1950, passing through Portugal, Father Aparicio visited In the If Sister Lucy in her Carmel at Coimbra. Then again in 1951. He died a holy death in Brazil on 21 May 1966.

76. O padre Aparicio, Braga, 1986, p. 163.

77. Ibid., p. 164.

78. Letter of 24 November 1960, ibid.

79. “Soeur Lucie… l’invisible”, L’appel de Notre-Dame, n^o 29.

* * *

CHAPTER II

1960:
THE CROSSROADS

THE Most Blessed Virgin had fixed the year 1960 as the latest date for the revelation of the Third Secret. Why? Because, as Lucy told Cardinal Ottaviani in 1955, its significance would then be “clearer”¹.

However, the Bishop of Fatima could have revealed it, with Heaven’s authorisation, immediately he came into possession of it, on 17 June 1944². As the events predicted were beginning to come true, the Secret could have been correctly understood and interpreted from that time.

“The flaming sword in the Angel’s left hand” represented, in allegorical form, the diffusion of the “errors of Russia throughout the world”, with their train of “wars and persecutions against the Church”. Had it been published in 1944, the Secret would have put the world on its guard against Russia, by showing it the Angel with the flashing sword, and it would have reminded the hierarchy of Holy Church of the necessity and urgency of satisfying Our Lady’s requests.

Since Russia had not been consecrated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and since the devotion of reparation had neither been approved nor propagated by the Holy Father, God made of Russia, possessed by Communism, the devastating scourge and rod of His anger against all humanity. So it was that Communist expansion, at the end of the Forties, was no longer merely a European problem, it had become a worldwide one: decolonisation would deliver the countries of the Third World over to Bolshevism and famine. The flames from the Angel of Extermination’s sword were now spreading to Asia and Africa.

To understand the magnitude of the danger threatening the world in 1960, one need only open a history synopsis: “The multiplicity of local conflicts, the belligerence of the USSR and the withdrawal of the United States appeared to be transforming the Cold War into a Third World War, envisaged as the possible destruction of the planet by atomic fire. On several points of the globe, the clash between the two power blocs became so acute that a global conflagration was to be feared.³”

In fact Khrushchev’s policies almost precipitated Russia into atomic war when the Cuban crisis reached its boiling point, in October 1962.

In those years, the most perceptive minds were alarmed at the insouciance of Western Catholics at the very time when the Communists were conquering immense territories. In his Letter to my Friends of 1 January 1959, the Abbé de Nantes wrote:

“Our frivolity is terrifying. We doubtless believe in the protection of American rockets just as the people of Jerusalem trusted the chariots and horses of Egypt, that treacherous ally which always let them down in the hour of danger. And we fail to see the cunning, implacable barbarity of Russian Communism coursing towards us like the Assyrian armies! The fall of Budapest unnerved us for a week, the destruction of the Christian Church in Tonkin – the most beautiful of the Asian Churches – scarcely moved us at all. We refuse to listen to the warnings of China’ exiles who can see that we suffer from the same errors and the same compromises that were fatal over there. Africa has been won over by a dizzyingly expanding Islam whilst the Communist party is firmly implanting itself there… and we are quite content that these things should go on in the world because they fit in with ‘our generous ideas’, because they only affect us from a distance, and because, ultimately, if we had taken up the arms of the Crusade, we would first have had to bestir ourselves from our lethargy […].

“The prevailing spirit of these times is clearly that which was denounced by Isaiah: those most attached to their comfort and material security are those who, in both word and desire, are most abetting the rise of the barbarism all around us. One day, as they stand over our ruins, people will say that we were led to the abattoir (or to martyrdom) by men whose pride was only equalled by their egoism and whose love of an easy life and cowardice led them to flatter that enemy of whom the Holy Father reminded us that he is ‘God’s enemy before being ours’, without the least concern for ‘the defence of Christian principles which are the rampart of true justice, now and for all times’. This blindness, compounded of pride and egoism, can only be cleansed by bloodshed.

“That is why there is every reason to fear or to presume that God requires of us rather more than a ballot paper if we are to rediscover the path to greatness. There is also a blood tax! Our soldiers in Algeria are not the stragglers of the colonial wars of yesterday, but the forerunners, alas, of the coming general mêlée of the peoples.⁴”

This was precisely the grave warning that Our Heavenly Mother wanted to give Her children, by 1960 at the latest, through the revelation to the world of the tragic visions of the Secret: the Angel’s call to penance would have awakened the zeal of the men of the Church and of consecrated souls, and would have turned them away from the immense apostasy into which “the errors of Russia” were going to drag them.

CHRISTIAN COMMUNITIES DECIMATED BY PERSECUTION.

Wherever it spread, the Communist leprosy provoked bloody persecutions against the Church, just as the second part of the Secret had prophesied:

“If not, she [Russia] will spread her errors throughout the world, provoking wars and persecutions against the Church. The good will be martyred, the Holy Father will have much to suffer, various nations will be annihilated.”

It is important to recall these prophecies and to see how they were fulfilled, as, according to Sister Lucy, the visions contained in the Third Secret are a symbolic figure of them⁵.

From the time of the annexation of West Ukraine by the Soviets in 1939, and then of the Baltic States in 1940, the Catholic Church was fiercely persecuted in this part of the world⁶. After the Second World War, the Catholic hierarchy was totally eliminated in Rumania, Albania and Bulgaria: hounded from their episcopal sees, the bishops died in prison or in forced labour camps, or else remained incarcerated there.

In the Ukraine, it was Nikita Khrushchev, at that time First Secretary of the Ukraine Communist Party, who unleashed in 1945 the most terrible of persecutions against the Church of the Oriental Rite, united to the See of Peter.

“On 11 April 1945”, recounts Mgr Slipyj, “I was arrested with all the other bishops. Less than a year later, more than eight hundred priests had already followed us into captivity. From 8 to 10 March, the illegal Synod of Lviv was played out. Under atheist pressure, it proclaimed the ‘reunification’ of the Ukrainian Catholic Church with Orthodoxy, itself dominated by the Soviet regime.

“This ‘reunification’, and hence the official liquidation of our Church, was effected by brute force. The bishops were deported to all corners of the Soviet Union. Almost all have since died or been killed in captivity. Each of us had to climb his own Calvary. Now that I am eighty-eight, my memory of Janiseisk, Mordovia, Polaria, Inta and Siberia is fading, but it was a heavy cross at the time. I thank the Almighty for having given me the strength to bear this cross for almost eighteen years and I respectfully pay homage to my ten confreres in the episcopate, to the more than 1,400 priests and 800 nuns, to the tens of thousands of the faithful who, during captivity, sealed through the sacrifice of their lives their fidelity to the Pope, to the Apostolic Roman See and to the Church Universal.

“Our priests had a choice: either to join the Church of the regime and thus deny universal Catholic unity or to undergo, for at least ten years, the painful fate of deportation with all the disciplinary measures which that entails. The immense majority of priests chose the path of the prisons and concentration camps of the Soviet Union.

“From 1945 to 1955, one of our best priests was at the camps of Potma, Sarovo, Javas, Uljanovo and Polivanovo. He wrote to his parishioners: ‘I accept this captivity as a penance and I offer it up as a sacrifice that you may be spared this cross. I bless you and I pray for you. Five times a day I pray for the parishioners. On Sundays I celebrate the sacred liturgy. Every day, I celebrate a moleben (office of prayers)… It has been suggested to me that I should deny my faith, but I refused. The cause of God must triumph. Hold on to the faith of your ancestors!’⁷”

This letter is an excellent illustration of the heroic fidelity of so many Catholics persecuted by the Soviets, Catholics who, in the words of Pius XII, constituted a “Church of silence”⁸, as its “lips were sealed and its hands bound”⁹.

After it had ravaged Eastern Europe, the Communist leprosy spread to Asia where once flourishing Christian communities were decimated and almost eradicated by horrific persecutions. These countless martyrs are the very same whom the children of Fatima saw on 13 July 1917: “… and in the same way¹⁰ there died one after another Bishops, Priests, men and women Religious, and various lay people, men and women of different ranks and positions.”

A rapid reminder of the bloody persecutions in the Communist world during the Fifties will give us a better understanding of how and why the Secret would become “clearer” in 1960.

The case of the Church in China is emblematic:

After the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China, on 1 October 1949, foreign missionaries were systematically arrested, imprisoned, questioned and tortured in a series of often interminable interrogations.

The Chinese Communists expelled them with the design of subjecting the Church to their power. But failing to rally the Chinese bishops to the schismatic principles of the “Movement of the Three Autonomies”, founded in 1950, they attacked Catholics indefectibly attached to the Roman See with such violence that it had all the appearance of a systematic liquidation of the Church.

For example, at Shanghai, on 8 October 1950, the Military Administration Committee decreed the dissolution of the Legion of Mary, accused of being a secret and anti-revolutionary organisation.

“It was not a matter of having a few heads roll”, stresses Jean Lefeuve, “but of crushing all resistance. The whole city was mobilised to put pressure on a few hundred legionaries, harried on all sides by radio, press, posters, advertising banners, shows and meetings.” Learning that one or two priests in charge of the Legion of Mary groups inclined towards capitulation, excused as a lesser evil, several members of the catechism teams wrote them this letter, which they signed in their own blood:

“It is the Blood and death of Jesus that gave birth to the Church our Mother and procured her growth.

“And since then, like an immutable law, keeping beat with the course of her millenary life, it has been the blood and the death of Christians uniting their sacrifice to the sacrifice of Christ that have, in their turn, ensured the Church her vigour and her fecundity. Now it is clear that, for the Mystical Body of Jesus in China, the time has come for her to give birth; for, in the fierce struggle that she sustains today, the Church sees the announcement of new sons to be born. Happy are we to whom it has been given to live at such a time […].

“However, we have recently learned that the government is pressurising our directors to recognise as true the calumnies which the press are spreading about us. There is even a rumour that several were on the point of agreeing. This news made us tremble. Should the day come when there would appear in the newspapers the signatures of priests professing themselves convinced of the crimes laid against them, of all those calumnies which sully the Virgin, Her Legion and the Church, will our Christians, today so firm in the faith, be able to withstand the shock? Or, out of a moment of weakness and distraction, always to be feared at such times, might we not rather stand on the sidelines watching this atrocious spectacle of the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ unpicking itself member by member and dismantling itself altogether?

“Scarcely able to contain our tears at the thought, we have decided today to write this letter which we all sign in our own blood.

“May this still fresh blood transcribe onto this paper the violent desire of our hearts. May these drops of blood, a symbol of the union existing between us, bear practical witness to our fidelity to the redemptive Cross of Christ on which we wish to remain until the sacrifice is consummated.

“We fear that the weight of our sins may prevent our supplication from rising towards the Lord, so we have spent these last few days in fasting and prayer. With all our soul, we unceasingly ask God for the strength to be faithful unto death. We also pray to Him for all our pastors, that He may grant them the grace to protect unflinchingly the purity of the integrity of the faith, to loyally maintain the ‘stance’ of Christ, and to continue to guide us unfailingly along the road ahead, unto victory.¹¹”

One week after the catechists had made this admirable supplication and profession of faith, Father Beda Tsang's martyrdom would procure a flood of graces, reanimating Shanghai’s dangerously threatened Christian community.

To recall the heroic perseverance of the Christian youth of that city, let us quote a letter sent by a young girl to one of her past teachers, an exiled nun who was now in Japan:

“When you receive this letter, I will already be in prison. I must present myself to the police on the 14^th of this month. Do not forget this glorious date. I have disposed of all my personal effects with the exception of these photographs I am sending you: I cannot bear to destroy them. I beg you to keep them for me.

“Today, I went to say goodbye to Mother N. for I fear I will not be able to go to the station on the day she leaves for Japan. As I left her, I felt a frightful sadness. I don’t have the courage to think about anything, only of Heaven.

“I was interrogated on several occasions. The first time, the interrogation lasted nine hours; the next time, three hours, and yesterday they kept me for five hours. They are moments that are hard to get through. My sister made herself sick worrying about me: she is in hospital.

“Pray for me: you cannot imagine how I suffer. Several of my friends betrayed me; pray and do penance that the Good Lord will forgive them. Most of the priests we know have been imprisoned. Don’t forget them in your prayers: that they may have the courage to accept martyrdom. The most painful thing of all is my family. The day my parents saw my name in the paper amid the list of the accused, they fell on their knees imploring me to abandon my faith. O my God! it was then, for the first time, that I fully understood what suffering can be.

“I have nothing further to offer apart from my affection. I offer it to you before my death, to you and to the Mothers who were so good to me. Even if I must lose my life, I prefer this death to the eternal death I would deserve if I denied my faith. Sing the Alleluia with me!¹²”

Devotion to Our Lady of Fatima was widespread in Shanghai’s Christian community, and it was certainly the daily recitation of the Rosary that obtained the grace of final perseverance for so many young martyrs.

The hierarchy of the Church of China, numbering one hundred and nineteen bishops in 1950, counted no more than twenty in 1955, following expulsions and assassinations, and of these ten were in prison.

Unyielding in their plan to subjugate the Catholic communities which had survived despite the bloody persecutions, the Communists forced them to join the small groups of “patriotic” Catholics. In 1957, Mao Tse Tung’s government created “the Patriotic Association of Chinese Catholics” along with its parishes and churches; it was placed under the authority of the Office of Religious Affairs and charged with repressing “the hounds of the reactionary Vatican”.

This “patriotic Church” only took shape with the greatest difficulty. On 29 June 1958, in his encyclical Ad apostolorum principis, Pius XII noted that it was in a state of schism and he forbade Catholics to join it.

Nevertheless, the schism persisted. It should be said that the Chinese Communists used every means possible to rally the recalcitrant. The Benedictine Peter Zhou Bangjiu, a true confessor of the faith, saw himself, with anguish, more and more isolated. “Between the time I entered prison”, he recounts, “and the time I crossed the bamboo curtain [that is to say between 1955 and 1984], I was able to observe that none of the priests or lay faithful imprisoned with me over those long years were able to hold out to the end in their fidelity to the Lord. The pressure used by the Communists was far too strong and too sustained.” If Brother Peter Zhou Bangjiu resisted joyfully and heroically all the tortures inflicted upon him, it was by a grace of special election, something discovered on reading his wonderful autobiographical story¹³.

On the death of Pius XII, the Catholic Church in China, which by now had gone underground, had almost completely disappeared. Here is a brief tally of the ten years of persecution, published in 1959:

“Of the 2,676 Chinese priests, 200 were shot or condemned to forced labour, 500 were exiled, and more than 500 are in prison including 9 Chinese bishops. The 632 Chinese brothers have been disbanded; several have been imprisoned or shot. Of the 5,112 Chinese nuns, 4,000 have been disbanded, and the others have been forced to place themselves in the service of the Communists; a great number of them have been imprisoned.¹⁴”

Pius XII remained very well-informed and justly alarmed at the dramatic situation of the Church in countries where the Communists had seized power.

“The Catholic Church, for dozens of years, for the last ten years above all”, he said in his radio message of 2 September 1956, “has endured one of the gravest and, at any rate, most dangerous persecutions she has ever had to suffer […].

“The Church may well be in anguish about her future in those vast regions where persecution reigns, for, owing to the totalitarian State’s methods of coercion and to the refined techniques used to indoctrinate individuals, particularly the young generation and children, the adversary is deploying methods of pressure unknown to any persecutor of the Church of times past.¹⁵”

At the advent of John XXIII, it was all too clear therefore that, in those countries enslaved to the Communist yoke, the Church was in a frightful situation.

In Lithuania whose population numbered 2,500,000 inhabitants, 85% of them Catholic, massive deportations had been carried out during the Stalin period: 400,000 Lithuanians had been divided up into thirty-nine USSR gulags. All the bishops, with the exception of Mgr Paltarokas, had been assassinated or deported.

Now, the period of calm and beginnings of a renaissance following Stalin’s death were not to last. In 1957, Mgr Sladkevicius, only just consecrated, was seized and placed under house-arrest. In 1961, only one bishop still remained in his diocese: Mgr Mazeles, who was extremely ill. Officially, deportations of the faithful had stopped; in reality, they had restarted; they would now be presented as “voluntary departures” aimed at opening up the virgin lands of Kazakhstan.

In Hungary, in 1960, priests and laypeople who refused to join the Partisans for Peace or other progressive and crypt-communist associations, had to undergo security measures and diabolical harassment. “The situation in Hungary”, indicated Nouvelles de Chrétienté, “has become far worse since the autumn of 1959.¹⁶”

Cardinal Joseph Mindszenty, Archbishop of Esztergom, had been a refugee in the American embassy in Budapest, ever since Hungary had been crushed and occupied by Soviet troops in 1956. He would not even leave the embassy in 1960 for his mother’s funeral. The regime’s police would have arrested him immediately.

The five or six residential bishops, who still remained operational, were closely monitored and even replaced by a political commissioner. “The people call him ‘the bishop with a moustache’. It is he, in fact, who governs the diocese: he opens the correspondence, makes decisions, writes in the diocesan bulletin, chooses candidates for the seminary, supervises them, admits them to priestly ordination or dismisses them.” In short, he can “destroy the Church from within whilst remaining in the shadows”¹⁷.

Let us leave Europe and pass to Africa. Once flourishing Christian communities were now suffering the disastrous consequences of decolonisation: famine, Communist dictatorship, religious, ethnic and tribal wars. Moreover, Islam was becoming increasingly threatening and aggressive, for example in Sudan. The review Missi, December 1960 edition, had this to say: “The population of southern Sudan, a considerable part of whom are Christian (50%), has undergone a formidable push towards Islam at the hands of the governor. Every pupil who enrols at school, even if he is pagan, must choose between Islam and Catholicism. If he chooses Catholicism, he must obtain a permit signed by the village chief, who had been made to understand that he must not grant too great a number. There are countless vexations and restrictions for Catholics, particularly the missionaries. The people dare not express themselves freely for fear of reprisals.” The persecutions instigated by Islam would only be aggravated and extended over the following decades.

The unprecedented gravity and extent of the attacks undergone by the Church in the world when the Third Secret of Fatima was to be revealed, are perfectly summarised in two sentences used to explain a map of “the Church of silence”, presented in 1961 at the Lourdes missionary exhibition: “During the first centuries of our era, 300,000 Christians were martyred. Today, from Berlin to Shanghai, from Siberia to Tonkin, 90,000,000 Catholics are persecuted for our faith!”

No one could deny such a statement. Even the very modernist Cardinal Frings declared: “We must never forget that the last half-century has produced by itself more martyrs than three centuries of Roman persecution.¹⁸”

As for our Father, the Abbé de Nantes, he identified precisely the primary cause of these appalling and terrifying massacres: “The Church, which has suffered persecution since the beginning, has in our times come up against the most formidable demoniacal power she has ever encountered.¹⁹”

It was these persecutions, caused by the errors of Russia, that the three little shepherds of Fatima had seen prophetically, on 13 July 1917, in the scenes of the Third Secret:

“… and in the same way there died one after another Bishops, Priests, men and women Religious, and various lay people, men and women 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.”

Now, this Secret should have enlightened the Church’s supreme hierarchy, in the first place Pope John XXIII, on the tragic situation of Christendom in 1960.

JOHN XXIII BURIES THE THIRD SECRET.

Two years before his elevation to the sovereign pontificate, Cardinal Angelo Roncalli, Patriarch of Venice, had answered an invitation by the Bishop of Fatima: he had come to preside at the Cova da Iria, along with Cardinal Cerejeira, Patriarch of Lisbon, at the ceremonies of 12 and 13 May 1956, for the celebration of the 25^th anniversary of Portugal’s national consecration to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. So he knew of the Fatima pilgrimage and the members of the Portuguese hierarchy who had officially recognised the apparitions of the Immaculate Virgin Mary and the striking miracles that accompanied them, such as the fall of the sun on 13 October 1917.

At Fatima, on 13 May 1956, during the celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Portugal’s consecration to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, Cardinal Cerejeira, Patriarch of Lisbon (on the right, with the microphone), in the presence of Cardinal Roncalli (seated in the centre, near the altar) and Mgr da Silva (seated in a wheelchair, on the left), recalls the circumstances and the fruits of this national consecration.

Performed on 13 May 1931, six months after the canonical recognition of the apparitions, the consecration, pronounced that day by the whole episcopate, earned for Portugal the privilege of being miraculously preserved from war: “Firstly, in 1936, at that infernal hour when blood was soaking the land of Spain. Then came the greatest war of all time: the fire spread to almost every nation… But Portugal, thanks to the protection of the Blessed Virgin, remained at peace!” For the first time, Cardinal Cerejeira publicly revealed the incontrovertible prophecy of Sister Lucy who had announced to her bishop that Portugal would remain outside the conflict. He stated that he had received from Mgr da Silva, in February 1939, a letter from the seer indicating that war was imminent, but that Portugal would be spared on account of her consecration to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

The patriarch would often repeat his testimony, as for example in his preface to Canon Barthas’ book, Fatima and World Destiny, published in 1957: “This unlettered nun had announced, in February 1939, with miraculous precision, something which at that time was unforeseeable and appeared impossible.”

You saw, on the last page, a photograph of Cardinal Roncalli listening to Cardinal Cerejeira explaining, in a speech to six hundred thousand pilgrims, the extraordinary fruits of Portugal’s national consecration to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

“It is time to declare it publicly, it is owing to this consecration – without minimising the efforts of our leaders who were instruments of Providence – that, while the world was in flames, Portugal was able to remain at peace. Six to seven months before the date of 1 September 1939, the first day of the conflagration, the Bishop of Leiria sent me a letter from the seer, Sister Lucy, in which it was stated that the war predicted by Our Lady was on the point of breaking out, that God was going to wash the nations in their own blood, and that the peoples who had most distanced themselves from Christian precepts would endure the most; that Spain had already had its share of the sufferings. But that Portugal would be preserved from this war, through the protection of the Blessed Virgin.²⁰

Thus Cardinal Roncalli heard with his own ears the Patriarch of Lisbon proclaiming that Sister Lucy was a genuine prophetess.

What is more, according to M. C. de Bragança, the Patriarch of Venice was the beneficiary of an exceptional grace at the close of the ceremonies.

“His Eminence, who had celebrated the pontifical Mass, afterwards, through a telegraphic mandate of Pius XII, gave the papal blessing to the pilgrims gathered in the Cova da Iria. And at the blessing of the Blessed Sacrament for the sick, given simultaneously by the two patriarchs, it was granted to him who was to become Pope John XXIII to see one of the disabled people, who received his blessing, miraculously cured before his eyes.²¹”

Nevertheless, on the day after these great ceremonies, Cardinal Roncalli showed no inclination to meet Sister Lucy, and he did not make a pilgrimage to the Carmel of Coimbra before returning to Venice.

After the death of Pius XII, the Patriarch of Venice was elected pope by the conclave, on 28 October 1958, and he chose the name of John XXIII.

He learned the contents of the Third Secret ten months later, in August 1959. We will not go back over all the circumstances of this event, as these can be found in the third volume of The Whole Truth about Fatima. Nevertheless, we can add one detail concerning the Pope’s reaction. In 1997, his former secretary, Mgr Loris Capovilla, revealed for the first time the contents of the note that John XXIII dictated to him after he had read the Secret, a note which was then placed in the envelope along with the precious document.

“John XXIII said to me: ‘Write.’ And I wrote under his dictation: ‘The Holy Father received this document from the hands of Mgr Philippe. He decided to read it on Friday, in the presence of his confessor. Having noted the presence of obscure idioms, he summoned Mgr Tavares, who translated. He had his closest collaborators read it also. Finally, he decided to seal the envelope again, saying: ‘I make no judgement. Silence in the face of what might be a manifestation of the divine or again might not be’.²²”

These last two sentences reveal John XXIII’s hesitation when he discovered the Secret’s contents. He had mixed feelings, doubted the authenticity of these visions, and remained in a state of uncertainty.

When one knows the true personality of this Pontiff, one is less surprised that he displayed such reserve about the Secret, despite the extraordinary graces received three years earlier, in the course of his pilgrimage to Fatima. As a young cleric, he had connections with members of the liberal party who had established themselves in the Church during the pontificate of Leo XIII, in reaction to the doctrinal firmness and anti-revolutionary directives of Pius IX. He was the protégé of a friend of Cardinal Rampolla, Mgr Radini Tadeschi, Bishop of Bergamo, and he was discovered and denounced at Rome as a modernist teacher²³.

Everything seems to prove that the thoughts and feelings of Don Roncalli were not in accord with the spirit and teachings of Saint Pius X²⁴.

Under the pontificate of Pius XII, he revealed his reservations about the development of Marian devotion. He feared that the exaltation of the mission and privileges of the Immaculate would harm the cause of ecumenism. Asked to sign a petition for the institution of a new feast, that of the Queenship of Mary, he replied on 22 April 1954:

“I beg you to forgive my silence so far which is evidence of my uncertainty and the fear that such a feast could prejudice the great action already undertaken towards the refashioning of the unity of the Catholic Church in the world. When Jesus was dying, he said to John, ‘Behold your mother.’ That is enough for faith and the liturgy. All the rest may be – and no doubt is for the most part – edifying and moving for devout and pious souls; but for many, far, far more, however well disposed towards the Catholic Church, it would be merely irritating and – as the modern phrase is – counterproductive.²⁵”

Later on we will quote one of his cautionary warnings against “excesses of devotion”²⁶.

It is very instructive to analyse the talk he gave to the pilgrims at the Cova da Iria on 13 May 1956, even before he knew the Third Secret. Admittedly he spoke of devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, but he did so in neglecting Heaven’s great demands, namely the reparatory devotion of the First Saturdays and the consecration of Russia. What is more, he passed over in silence the prophecies, warnings and threatened chastisements contained in the first two parts of the Secret²⁷. On the other hand, he said he saw in the apparitions of 1916, in the “gentle words” of the Angel of Portugal, a kind of announcement of “something unusual and divine, like the wind that presages a new Pentecost, whose full significance we are now beginning to measure as well as the mysterious riches of its heavenly fragrance”²⁸.

Trusting his own alleged personal illuminations, he saw a “new Pentecost” arriving, whose first fruits would be a Reform of the Church.

His optimistic forecasts were in almost word-for-word opposition to the Third Secret’s prophetic tableau. Before entering the conclave, on 23 October 1958, he wrote to the Bishop of Bergamo:

“My soul finds comfort in the confidence that a new Pentecost can blow through the Church, renewing its head, leading to a new ordering of the ecclesiastical body and bringing fresh vigour in progress towards the victory of truth, goodness and peace.²⁹”

Elected to the throne of Peter, he linked the coming of this “new Pentecost” to his council, Vatican II, whose convention he suddenly announced on 25 January 1959. We will come back to this.

In November 1959, three months after reading the Secret and deciding not to publish it, he wrote in his collection of spiritual notes, which he himself had called Journal of a Soul:

“Above all, I am grateful to the Lord for the temperament he has given me, which has preserved me from anxiety and useless alarms. I feel that I am in a state of obedience in all things and I note that this disposition, ‘in the big things as in the little’, confers on my littleness a strength of daring simplicity which, being wholly evangelical, demands and obtains universal respect; and this is a source of edification for many.³⁰”

The fanciful forecasts of John XXIII, tied to his humanist optimism and his Pentecostal illuminism, in a word, to “his heresies”³¹, which our Father, the Abbé de Nantes, perfectly exposed in a detailed analysis of his Opening Speech to the Council, rendered him indifferent, nay even hostile, to the revelations of Fatima.

According to Father Joaquin Alonso, after he had read the Third Secret, John XXIII said: “This does not concern the years of my pontificate.³²” If that is so, he failed to see the connection between the bloody persecutions, organised in every Communist country and the visions of the Secret. One may also wonder whether the Pope discerned the tragic consequences of these diabolical assaults on Christendom. He would sometimes speak about them with a disconcerting optimism. Take this, for example, at the general audience of 14 November 1962:

“What does the Council set out to do if not to strengthen and spread holiness in the Church […]? Taken together, these generous proposals and noble objectives confirm that our century is not such a disappointment as is too often said, as though every good remained a prerogative of the past. No, today as well, and even with greater enthusiasm, one may say, the heralds of light are fully aware that their lives and deeds must spread the radiance of their Mother the Church. Certainly, persecutions, often grave and cruel, are not lacking, as was also the case in every past age. But, in reality, these refine the noble character of the children of God, and witness to the presence of the Christian people whom it is impossible to suppress.³³”

John XXIII minimised the scale and violence of the attacks suffered by the Catholic Church because he intended, as we shall soon see, to pursue a new policy, one of open relationships with the Soviet leaders.

As for the Third Secret of Fatima, he never spoke about it in public, and he took great affront if anyone mentioned it to him, or if they questioned him on this subject. One day, the future Cardinal Oddi expressed his surprise that it had not been disclosed in 1960. John XXIII replied: “Let’s not talk about that.” The prelate nonetheless insisted: “If you wish, I will say no more on the matter, but I cannot prevent people talking about it. I myself must have given around a hundred sermons announcing the revelation.” The Pope replied: “I told you not to talk to me about that.³⁴”

CARDINAL OTTAVIANI GIVES ECHO TO THE THIRD SECRET.

Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, Secretary of the Holy Office, read the Third Secret, after John XXIII, in the summer or autumn of 1959. Highly disturbed, as Pius XII had been, at the persecutions being suffered by the Church, this prelate understood the topicality of the Secret, which visibly inspired his speech on 7 January 1960³⁵. Cardinal Ottaviani declared himself gripped by fear at the persecutions devastating Christendom, and he denounced the compromises of the Western heads of State towards Nikita Khrushchev. His warning was aimed directly at the President of the Italian Republic, Giovanni Gronchi, who was just about to make an official visit to Moscow. Furthermore, Khrushchev was shortly to be received in France by General de Gaulle. Now Cardinal Ottaviani saw in those Christians who came to terms with their brothers’ assassins, dead members of the Mystical Body. One may therefore hold that he identified them with the “corpses” seen in the Third Secret, “corpses” which strewed “the large city half in ruins”.

Published on 8 January 1960, in Il quotidiano, under the title “Jesus in agony, and terms are made with the executioners”, this speech made something of a splash, at least in the traditionalist press. Let us mention that our Father, at that time parish priest of Villemaur, commented on it to his parishioners and that, later, he would quote a passage from it in a debate with Father Wenger on the subject of General de Gaulle’s trip to Moscow³⁶.

Here are some significant extracts from the speech given by the prelate at a Mass celebrated for the intentions of the Church of silence, in the presence of Hungarian exiles, in the Borghese Chapel of Saint Mary Major:

“No one loves or desires peace more than you, you who still feel the harrowing effects of war, as well as the sorrows of exile to which foreign domination has condemned you.

“As long as Cain is able to massacre Abel without anyone noticing; as long as entire nations can be held in slavery without anyone coming to the assistance of the oppressed; as long as the bloodletting still continues, three years after the Hungarian revolt, with the condemnation to death of students, peasants and workers guilty of having loved a freedom stamped out by foreign tanks, without the world showing any horror at so great a crime… as long as such things persist, then it is impossible to speak of a true peace, but only of an acquiescence and coexistence with the butcher who remains untroubled by anyone.

“It was not enough for Cain to kill his brother Abel. To fratricide, he added indifference and irony: ‘Num custos fratris mei sum? Am I my brother’s keeper?’ (Gn 4.9)

“The quarrel between the two brothers has been perpetuated, as we know, down to our own days. On the one hand, there is the murdered Abel, between his father and mother in tears; on the other, Cain, the murderer, who pours contempt on his victim and finds a thousand pretexts to excuse himself. He has committed murder, but, as compensation, he is building the city.

“And so today we see that decades have passed in which, in the name of so-called humanitarian and social theories, there has been inaugurated in the world a shameless system of government by those who, once having seized power – I dare not say by what means – and grabbed all the levers of control, proceed to deport, imprison, massacre, and, in a word, create a desert.

“The times of Tamerlane have made an historic return. At the height of the twentieth century, we have had to lament over genocides, mass deportations, murders like that of the Katyn graves, and massacres like those in Budapest³⁷.

“But there is more. We no longer find it repugnant to offer the hand to the new antichrists. On the contrary, we fight about who will be the first to shake hands and exchange pleasant smiles with them.

“The frequency and intensity of large-scale crime has, alas, blunted Christian sensibilities even among Christians, not simply as men, but as Christians. They no longer react, they are no longer disturbed. How can they feel themselves to be Christian, if they are insensible to the wounds inflicted on Christianity? A wounded arm which no longer feels pain is a dead arm. In the same way, a Christian who no longer feels the effects of anti-Christianity has ceased to share in the life of the Mystical Body.

“Today, we shudder to think of all those Christians who are imprisoned with their pastors. We are not dealing here with matters that are vague, trivial or unsubstantiated. No! We have a cardinal-primate of Hungary who is imprisoned and continues to share with his people the weight of the Cross borne by a whole country. We have a Cardinal Stepinac, under strictly enforced house-arrest. We have a great archbishop, the Archbishop of Prague, who has neither been judged nor condemned, but who has been made to disappear: for eleven years we have had no information about him, we have not heard his voice and no one has received a letter from him. We have bishops in prison or in anguish, numerous members of the faithful who can no longer celebrate Christmas…, and all this in an immense stretch of the world, with the full knowledge of us all, under the light of the sun³⁸.

“One might think it was a duty to take part in a protest like the roar of the ocean, in an uprising of all humanity, in a clamour of reproof, like the cry of an irrepressible lamentation. No sign of any of this…

“The Mystical Body of Christ makes every Christian a living cell of Christ here below. This Body, which is the Church, has never received such blows, such wounds. Now, if my finger is in pain, my whole body suffers. If the Church suffers in so many of its racked members, is it possible that the other members should not suffer? And if they do not suffer, what does that signify? That they are dead, morally dead.

“One may be the most highly placed person in the social hierarchy and still be dead. Anything is possible apart from living in this state of insensibility. For life is evidenced by feeling and pain, by the sensitivity with which one reacts to injury, by the promptness and power of the reaction. When we rot and decompose, we no longer react.

“Faced with one who murders Christians, faced with one who, not content with denying Him, insults God and cruelly persecutes His servants and His children, can a Christian react with smiles and flattery? Can a Christian opt for alliances with the auxiliaries and allies of those who uphold and prepare the future of such an anti-Christian reign of terror, in countries that are still free? Can we consider ourselves compensated by some kind of détente, when this détente does not first exist in a feeling of humanity – in its most elementary sense of a respect for consciences and for faith, in our case – for the face of Christ, once more covered in spittle, crowned with thorns and beaten. Can we hold out the hand to one who acts in this way? ‘If only I had been there with my Franks!’ said Clovis when he heard the account of Christ’s Passion. But Christ’s Passion continues. Another Frenchman wrote, in an immortal page: ‘Jesus is in agony; and you make terms with His executioners!’

“But at the foot of the Cross, there is a mother, Mary. Through the tears She shed as She shared in the sufferings of Her Son, through the tears with which She begged the conversion and forgiveness of the executioners, and through the bitter anguish which rent Her Heart when She saw Jesus’ first Apostles and disciples pursued, roughly handled and persecuted, may She soon obtain what we all await from Her, that for which we express to Her our hope and desire.

“O Mary! make haste to touch the hearts of the powerful, inspire in those who rule generous resolutions, and let there thus be granted the peoples what they are waiting for in their hunger and thirst for justice, with the aspiration proper to those who feel themselves to be brothers in Christ. Were Thy aid to delay, o Mary, there would no longer be peace for the world, there would be disaster.³⁹”

The vision of the Third Secret probably encouraged Cardinal Ottaviani to publish this poignant warning, which ended on a plea to the Virgin Mary our Mother: Her all-powerful intercession appeared to him to be the sole and final recourse for obtaining peace in the world and the deliverance of the persecuted. However, it is regrettable that he failed to formulate his supplication in accordance with the spirit of the message of Fatima, which teaches us that Our Lord God has entrusted peace to the care of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. The prelate made no allusion to this.

Faithful to the teaching and directives of Pius XII⁴⁰, Cardinal Ottaviani energetically opposed any conciliation with the Communists, but perhaps he did not clearly discern the very principle of the error of progressivist Christians who were betraying their brothers.

It is notable that, at the same moment, the Abbé de Nantes was presenting an equally lucid appraisal of the tragic situation of the Church and Christendom, developing themes present in the visions of the Secret, even though he had no knowledge of them at the time. But, unlike Cardinal Ottaviani, he saw how “the errors of Russia” were seeping into the very heart of the Church, and he went back to the very source of the evil, namely the “mental perversion of progressivism”.

Here are some extracts from his Letter to my Friends of 1 January 1960.

THE OBSERVATIONS OF THE ABBÉ DE NANTES:
THE MENTAL PERVERSION OF PROGRESSIVISM.

“Jealousy and discord have destroyed great cities and brought down powerful nations.⁴¹”

“I wanted to send you my good wishes for the year of grace 1960, year 1 of the expansion of world Communism if we are to believe the declarations of its leader, and also the year of the revelation of the last secret of Fatima.”

A revelation awaited expectantly, with trust and fervour, by our Father, as it was by all Fatima devotees, seeing that the deadline for the disclosure of the Secret had arrived.

“I delayed this letter, so heavy was it with my fears although at the same time charged with a great hope. In announcing that blood would flow this year, the blood of soldiers, the blood of martyrs, I had a sense that these unhappy forecasts would not be long in being tragically confirmed. Where would this blood flow? in what circumstances and why? It was these questions that I wished to answer in order to fortify your souls and to enlighten them in Truth.

“What is the first thing to terrify us? It is obviously persecuting Communism, the red stain of which is spreading over the map of the world and which, strengthened by its success, is now casting its tentacles over a new continent which the West seems to be abandoning to it, Africa... whence it will pounce on Europe and press on towards Mexico where it will already find its emissaries come from the other side of the world. As has been said many times before, such an expansion cannot be explained by its military force alone; it is its truly diabolical power of seduction that enables it to seize, without any opposition, immense regions of the earth. On one hand, the ‘under-developed’ peoples allow themselves to be inebriated by this subversive dialectic which the West itself invented, and on the other, progressivism and its multiple ideological strands even here regard Communism not as an enemy of our civilization and religion, but as a sister movement. I will explain why at some length this winter.

“This complicity is revealed in an event shortly to take place: Khrushchev’s visit to France. This reception, which is absurd and odious, has left the clergy and the elites of the country almost indifferent. Failing some extraordinary mistakes by America, there will not therefore be an all-out war this year, but we will see Communist political and military imperialism feverishly exploiting its ideological conquests: Africa will be devoured. This could happen without any bloodshed or fighting, like a harvest of ripe fruit.

“It is before Communism arrives that blood will flow, and this will be in the very heart of a besieged Christendom, in the outbursts of hatred arising from its divisions. Let me explain.

“Communist imperialism, continuing and extending the doctrines of 1789, uses a highly seductive idea to entice peaceful peoples into its war, the idea of independence. With this it flatters the people in their supreme vice, pride. It gives them an opportunity to pronounce those diabolical words: ‘I will not serve!’ From one region of the earth to the next, these words make their way, arousing hatred and awakening the most savage instincts; each demands his Freedom and the enjoyment of all earthly goods, desiring these at any price and at a single stroke. The old political order is condemned, appetites are unchained, and murder is the clever slogan that must render the movement of the revolution irreversible. The rivers of blood issuing from these ‘wars of national liberation’ are transformed into raging torrents, and there is no wise force left to halt them.

“If all Christians, all civilized people, viewed this evil with the same eyes and a real determination, there is no doubt that this decomposition of the world and of the great Christian empires would be rapidly arrested without great cost. The real drama is that such events are diversely interpreted, even within the Church herself, and that a powerful faction holds that such a development is just and providential. If blood flows in 1960, it will certainly be between Christians, between Frenchmen; even the knife of the Moslem or Communist assassin will be directed by the hands and brains of those of our race and religion. For it is a generally accepted thesis, regurgitated by our ‘fine press’, that this abandonment of our colonial empires is but a normal return to an order that is more humane and more just. It is supposed to be a purely political change, arising from the universal class struggle, which only the ‘nationalism’ or ‘colonialism’ of ‘extremists’, i.e. the selfish interests and proud passion of the French and other colonisers, is preventing from being effected in a peaceful and generous manner. De Gaulle, following Messrs Faure, Mollet and Mendès, seeks to realise this political abandonment by anaesthetizing and paralysing French nationalism; in this he is followed by the blind masses and spurred on by every faction of the revolutionary left...

“Judging by their whole attitude and a thousand all too clear declarations, the missionaries seem to be following an immense section, alas, of the Catholic clergy and simply to be seeking to retire from the game, if one can call it such. They would prefer not to see what is going on, for in Kairouan and Douala it is not so easy as it is in Paris to view this immense revolution and frenzy as nothing but a change of a political order in which terrorism and xenophobic fanaticism are merely insignificant accidents. In this general outlook of the Catholic elite we may note firstly that mental perversion of progressivism which leads them to see in these insurrections, wherein Christians, Moslems, pagans and Communists are all confused together, a new kind of biblical, evangelical march of humanity towards the Promised Land and the City of God, and secondly a certain naivety, bordering on the most craven blindness, in that they imagine they are earning the Church the privilege of complete freedom in these new worlds!

“And that is why, while French Christians are having their throats cut, their brothers – at least the vocal and activist ‘elites’ –, far from helping them, are on one hand supporting the assassins and on the other washing their hands and swearing that the Church has no part in these temporal conflicts. So if God should not see fit to reverse this wind blowing against us, the civil war instituted under this myth of Liberation will precipitate the Christian world into total ruin.

“The missionaries encouraged Cameroonian independence; now they are attacked and killed because pride, which is now calling the shots, cannot attack the terrestrial order without hating the supernatural causes of that order. The departure of the colonists and soldiers signals the inevitable martyrdom of the missionaries, unless they in their turn, returning to a just appreciation of things, take up firearms against their adversaries, the Moslem and Communist Bamilekes, to save their small flock. Yet they are at great risk of being swept away along with the magnificent regions of Christendom which they founded. Sow the strong wind of pride and the storm of hatred is sure to follow.⁴²”

One year later, the Abbé de Nantes could see that his gloomy prognosis had, alas, been realised:

“The year 1960 was, as I warned you last January, disastrous for France, for the West and for the Church. Khrushchev had announced that it would be year 1 of the Communist expansion, and God permitted this general advance of Satan’s armies. The predictions of Fatima have not been revealed; everything indicates that it is still the first of the two branches of the alternative that prevails: the chastisement of mankind and in particular of the Christian peoples for their mental depravation and moral laxity. The prayers of the saints and those of little children have not as yet stayed the avenging arm of Divine Justice and we are being more and more clearly punished, as the hymn says, ‘in manu iniquititatis nostrae, by the very hand of our crimes’.⁴³”

In his Letter to my Friends of 1 January 1962, the Abbé de Nantes returned to the fundamental, ideological cause of the “accelerated expansion of the Communist revolution”:

“More than the planes and tanks, what gave cover to the Viets’ advance on Laos and in the Plain of Jars, what protects the fellaghas in the jebels and in our outer cities, what gives hope to those in our prisons, are the great myths of the modern era which they cite as their inspiration and which we profess to revere. A single word suffices. Colonisation, that human phenomenon par excellence, which may perhaps change its form but will never disappear, is condemned in people’s minds at the very moment when it is enjoying success and commanding recognition, all because the propaganda has added a pejorative ‘ism’ to it… and at a stroke fortune switches sides! But Independence is a goddess to whom everything must be sacrificed!”

When the Abbé de Nantes wrote this Letter, General de Gaulle’s policies had put the departments of Algeria to fire and the sword. In those tragic hours, Catholics animated by true charity, defenders of French Algeria, were pursued, hunted down, imprisoned and murdered by the secret police agents of the Gaullist government.

“Blood flowed, not only that of distant victims, unaware of the drama, but that of noble-minded men who put Country, Church and the true faith before revolutionary ideas. This blood attests and denounces the hypocrisy or the treason. No longer is there any place for quiet compromise, for ethereal arguments in favour of the adversary. We must choose between France and the so-called direction of history, between Church and Revolution. Equivocation results in the blood of witnesses whose throats are cut by the very people entrusted with defending them […].

“Be in no doubt that never, in the whole history of two thousand years of Catholicism, has anyone ever witnessed a suicide of an entire people that is so cruel, so systematic and so implacable.

“O Holy Mother Church, when will you rise and take in hand the defence of your unhappy children? When will you go with them to prison and to death? When will the martyrs find you alongside them, in their midst, proudly sharing their sufferings, instead of continually seeing you in the company of the oppressors?⁴⁴”

Such appeals hardly met with a favourable response from the Church’s senior hierarchy. The Roman prelates were going along with the new orientations that John XXIII was giving his pontificate in denying the prophetic warnings of Our Lady of Fatima, even though they were being fulfilled to the letter. Realistic analyses of the situation of the Church and the world, information passed to him by his staff in the Secretariat of State, proved this indubitably.

JOHN XXIII ENGAGES THE CHURCH IN OSTPOLITIK.

In the first years of John XXIII’s pontificate, Cardinal Domenico Tardini, Secretary of State, a prelate of considerable theological learning and a self-declared opponent of Communism, obstructed the Vatican’s new commitment to a policy of open relations with the East. But after his death on 31 July 1961, John XXIII was able to pursue a global policy in line with his own personal views.

On 10 August 1961, on the first day of the “retreat preparing for his eightieth birthday”, the Pope wrote in his Journal of a Soul:

“When, on 28 October 1958, the Cardinals of the Holy Roman Church chose me to assume the supreme responsibility of ruling the universal flock of Christ Jesus, at the age of seventy-seven, there was a widespread conviction that I would be a transitional Pope. Instead of that, here I am on the eve of my fourth year in the papacy, and with the prospect of a substantial programme to set forth before the whole world which is watching and waiting.⁴⁵”

One month later, on 10 September 1961, in the wake of the Berlin crisis and the construction of the wall, John XXIII issued an appeal for “peace in the world”. The Pope preached disarmament and thus gave support to the declaration of the “non-aligned” countries headed by Tito, Nehru, Nasser and Bourguiba. In Moscow, Khrushchev made several highly favourable references to his appeal which were published in Moscow’s two chief newspapers, Pravda and Izvestia.

On 25 November 1961, John XXIII celebrated his eightieth birthday. At 1:30 pm, his Secretary of State, Cardinal Cicognani, brought him a message from the Soviet ambassador to the Quirinal, transmitted that very day to the nuncio, Mgr Grano: “In line with the instructions I have received from Mr Nikita Khrushchev, I ask you to communicate to His Holiness John XXIII, on the occasion of his eightieth birthday, his congratulations and his sincere good wishes for his good health and for success in his noble aspiration of contributing to the strengthening and consolidation of peace on earth and to the solution of international problems by means of open negotiations.⁴⁶”

John XXIII read the message immediately: “This is good news”, he said to Cardinal Cicognani. “We must reply. We will find the appropriate manner. It’s certainly a good sign, to be interpreted positively: better than a slap in the face.⁴⁷” That evening, the Pope confided to his private secretary, Loris Capovilla: “There is something going on in the world. The Lord is using the humble instrument that I am to give history a shake. Today we have received a sign from Divine Providence.⁴⁸”

On Monday, 27 November, John XXIII sent the Soviet embassy to the Italian government a message for Khrushchev: “His Holiness Pope John XXIII thanks you for your good wishes and, for his part, sends to the whole Russian people cordial wishes for the increase and strengthening of universal peace by means of understanding based on human brotherhood. To this end he prays fervently.”

On 17 December, the good wishes of the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR and the thanks of the Pope were published in l’Osservatore Romano. It is evident that John XXIII was keen for these message to appear to the world as “a sign from Providence”: the indisputable sign of the good dispositions of Khrushchev who, as it was then believed, had taken the initiative in this gesture. The Bolshevik bear was supposedly being tamed, subdued… Subsequently, historians would discover that Pope John XXIII, eager to make contact with the masters of the Kremlin, had himself asked Khrushchev, through the intermediary of Palmiro Togliatti, Secretary of the Italian Communist Party, to send him these good wishes for his eightieth birthday⁴⁹.

John XXIII, blind to Moscow’s machiavellian games, spread within public opinion fanciful hopes of world peace and reconciliation. In his declarations, and particularly in his speech for Christmas 61⁵⁰ and his appeal for negotiations during the Cuban crisis⁵¹, he gave credit to the so-called international policy of “peaceful coexistence” and détente with the Bolsheviks, a policy whose object was to lull to sleep and dupe the West.

The Cuban crisis, in mid-October 1962, came at a time when the Pope could easily have performed, had he wanted to, the collegial consecration of Russia: bishops from the whole world had just arrived in Rome in vast numbers for the first session of Vatican II.

Though well-informed on the conflict and the danger of world war, Pope John XXIII appears to have failed to relate this crisis to the prophecies and visions of the Secret of Fatima. Yet, on 24 October, the day before he made his appeal for negotiations to settle the crisis, he gave a short talk to a Portuguese group on pilgrimage to Rome, in which he recalled his visit to Fatima on 13 May 1956 for the twenty-fifth anniversary of Portugal’s consecration to the Immaculate Heart of Mary⁵². But he made no mention of Our Lady’s requests to which the divine gift of peace was tied. The Pope’s mind was occupied at the time by very different ideas and plans for “converting” Russia and promoting peace.

In December 1962, through the agency of the American progressive journalist, Norman Cousins, Nikita Khruschev sent the Pope this short note: “On the occasion of the holy season of Christmas, I beg you to accept the good wishes and felicitations of one who wishes you good health and strength in your constant efforts in favour of peace, well-being and prosperity for all humanity. Signed, Nikita Khrushchev.”

After reading this message, John XXIII, in conversation with Norman Cousins, declared: “We must talk to the Russians. We must always try to speak to the goodness that is in people. Nothing is lost in the attempt. Everything may be lost if men do not find a way to work together to save peace. I am not afraid to talk to anyone about peace on earth. If Mr Khrushchev were sitting where you are at this moment, I do not believe I would feel uneasy talking to him.⁵³” John XXIII gave a medal to Cousins, asking him to pass it on to Khrushchev with his blessing⁵⁴. If one may believe the historian Paul Dreyfus, he who was both First Secretary of the USSR Communist Party and President of the Council of Ministers would often show this medal to senior members of the party when they visited him in his office in Moscow⁵⁵.

Without delay, John XXIII composed his reply to Khrushchev: “Cordial thanks for the kindly exchange of greetings. We return them from the heart in words that come from on high: ‘Peace on earth to men of good will!’ We bring to your attention two Christmas documents from this year⁵⁶ which call for the consolidation of a just peace between peoples. May the good Lord hear and respond to the ardour and sincerity of our efforts and prayers. Fiat pax in virtute tua, Domine, et abundantia in turribus tuis. All our best wishes for the prosperity of the Russian people and all the peoples of the world.⁵⁷”

The Secretary of State found this message too warm. But John XXIII was inflexible and would not change a line.

Deceived by the Prince of this world, the Pope sought to convince himself that his overtures towards Khrushchev and his contacts with the Soviets were the providential means of obtaining or at least preparing Russia’s conversion. On 26 December 1962, he wrote in his private notes: “My mind remains fascinated by the Lord’s mysterious operations at this time. Perchance this Nikita Khrushchev is about to surprise us. Tonight, after having meditated a great deal and read the introduction to the grammar of the Russian language by Ettore Lo Gatto, which Mgr Capovilla procured for me yesterday, the feast of Christmas, I got up and, kneeling before my crucifix, I consecrated my life to the Lord in the utmost sacrifice of my whole being, with regard to what He wanted of me for His great enterprise of Russia’s conversion to the Catholic Church. I repeated this intention at Holy Mass which was celebrated in the same spirit.⁵⁸”

Alas, John XXIII had not the slightest intention of accomplishing what Our Lord expected of him. He refused to comply with the divine wishes revealed at Fatima. Like Pius XI before him, he preferred to follow his own so-called diplomacy rather than call upon the all-powerful mediation of the Immaculate Heart of Mary through a solemn act of reparation and the consecration of Russia.

Yet, at this time, Nikita Khrushchev was intensifying the atheist propaganda in the Soviet Union and reinforcing the persecutions. The very progressive Peter Hebblethwaite accepts that in “the closing down of churches [thirteen thousand churches!] and contemptuous treatment of Christians, the later Khrushchev years were more authoritarian than the post-war Stalin period”⁵⁹. All of which the Pope was kept informed of by the Secretariat of State’s press review…

JOHN XXIII’S PACIFIST AND INTERNATIONALIST UTOPIA.

On 1 March 1963, the Council of the Balzan Foundation unanimously decided to award John XXIII its “prize for peace”. By their favourable votes, the four USSR representatives, all members of the Council, were expressing, as one of them explained, the approbation of Mr Khrushchev “who was highly appreciative of the Pope’s efforts on behalf of the cause of peace between peoples”⁶⁰. The Pope accepted this Balzan prize, just after he had been informed on 28 February that Alexis Adzhubei wished to meet him during his visit to Rome. Alexis Adzhubei was Khrushchev’s son-in-law and the director of Izvestia, Moscow’s second largest daily newspaper. Everything had been cleverly calculated by the Soviets: the prize was awarded just after the request for an audience was made. So John XXIII responded favourably to Adzhubei, rejecting Cardinal Ottaviani’s objections, and ignoring the analyses and views published in the press review compiled by the Secretariat of State.

On 1 March, the Pope might have read the following in this review: “The policy of the Soviets towards the Vatican probably aims at the neutralisation of the Catholic Church. Who could forget the grave persecutions to which the Church has been exposed ever since the Bolshevik revolution? Who could define as a misunderstanding, conditioned by historical circumstances, that which is an openly declared objective: to eradicate Christianity, and even all religion? The Ukrainian metropolitan⁶¹ who has arrived in Rome is but the survivor of an innumerable army which has been killed. The methods have changed: mass executions, noisy trials and disappearances at night or in the fog are no longer the order of the day. However, the ideological goal remains unchanged, as does the monopoly of atheist propaganda.⁶²”

The following day, the press review prepared by the Secretary of State indicated that if Khrushchev no longer wished to be considered the sworn enemy of the Holy See, he did so “for reasons of economics, politics and propaganda”: “grappling with numerous difficulties, it was in his interests to obtain a momentary truce with a spiritual power of such scope”⁶³.

On 7 March, Alexis Adzhubei, who the day before, at a Roman dinner, had declared himself “an absolute atheist”⁶⁴, was at the Vatican with the journalists who were listening to John XXIII discoursing on the active neutrality of the Church, “the perfect supranational neutrality of the Church and of her visible head”⁶⁵. At the close of this meeting, in the presence of an interpreter, Fr Koulic, the Pope received Alexis Adzhubei and his wife in his private library. After this interview, John XXIII confided to his secretary: “It is possible that it is an illusion, but it is also possible that it is a mysterious thread offered me by Providence. In that case, I do not have the right to snap it.⁶⁶”

Moscow had thus won a striking victory. “The Western Communist press, especially in Italy”, Mourin points out, “exploited to the full, for their own private ends, the audience granted to Adzhubei as well as the Pope’s speech on the Church’s neutrality, interpreting the latter as giving Catholics a free political choice, contrary to the instructions of the episcopate. On the other side, the right wing press denounced the Soviet manoeuvre as a calculated attempt to achieve a ‘psychological disarmament’ of the West, whilst the peoples subject to Communist regimes would continue to live in the same state of tension.⁶⁷”

One month later, when he published his encyclical Pacem in Terris, John XXIII sent Khrushchev a copy translated into Russian⁶⁸. In Moscow, on 21 April, in a conversation with the correspondent of the Milanese daily Il Giorno, the Soviet president manifested his pleasure:

“We applaud the position Pope John XXIII has taken on the side of peace… I am no theologian, but insofar as I can remember, according to the Gospel, Jesus Christ preached peace and not war. Everyone who considers himself a believer should therefore be aware of the fact that they should not be building atomic bombs, missiles, guns and other weapons…⁶⁹” Izvestia announced that by “intervening in the political sphere, the Pope gave proof of a certain tolerance towards atheistic Communists”⁷⁰. And as for the Milanese newspaper, Corriere d’informazione, might it not have been right to give Pacem in Terris this significant title: Falcem in Terris (the sickle on earth)⁷¹? So what was the novel element in John XXIII’s teaching?

The Abbé de Nantes expounded and publicly criticised the novelty in his Letter to my Friends of 28 April 1963. There he contrasted two documents: the Pope’s encyclical and Colonel Bastien-Thiry’s declaration before his judges.

In Pacem in Terris, the Pope gave no consideration to Christendom, he failed to examine the dangers which threatened it, he was not in the least concerned about saving its historic communities, but he did give official recognition to the United Nations’ “charter of human rights”, and he advocated a world community which was free, equal and fraternal; this ideal, future society was to be built on the good will of all men.

“We do not consent”, wrote the Abbé de Nantes, “to exchanging these vital goods, these moral virtues, this honourable legacy of our fathers, in a word this Country from which we draw our very life, for a new World, the dream of which we are expected to share with good Communists and men of all religions, races and nations, suddenly reconciled and united in the search for the same universal common good. Let them go on hoping, fine! Let them go on working towards this end, very well, provided they do not give up what they have for a will-o’-the-wisp, in other words, provided that they do not betray the country, the civilisation and the religion that we already possess in an attempt to build with our enemies of yesteryear a better world, of which as yet we know neither its viability nor whether it be the most deadly illusion with which the Adversary has dazzled our eyes for our destruction.

“It seems to me that, after the Tonkin experiment and the Algerian experiment, after the deadly illusions of the Cuban clergy and the desperate pleas from Goa or Katanga, it would be truly stupid and indeed criminal for us to relax our love for our Country and Church, to hastily forget the Decalogue and our age-old morals to fall for the utopia of a fraternal world which has, for the last twenty years, been behind a terrifying expansion of the Communist empire, the most inhumane in history. No one will convince us or legitimately command us to substitute, in our hearts, an optimistic faith in this new world for the love of our country; no one will persuade us to disarm or to trust a Khrushchev-Kennedy world government, and even less to collaborate with the Communists or Islam. One should know, in both Rome and Paris, that there are acts of denial and treason that are simply impossible to a French Catholic. The blood of our martyrs bears witness to this.⁷²”

Now, John XXIII affirmed that “it is a matter of justice at all times to distinguish between error and those who commit it”. And it came to the point where he practically lifted the ban against collaborating with Communists⁷³.

In Italy, the consequences of this encyclical were immediate: the Communists won an unmistakable success at the elections of 28 April. In comparison to previous polls, they won a million votes off Christian Democracy. But Pope John XXIII was not in the least troubled by this. Intoxicated by the unusual congratulations he was receiving, especially those from Khrushchev, he seemed to have convinced himself that the Church no longer had any enemies and that the hour of reconciliation had sounded. Had he not told the students at the Russicum that the peoples of Russia “at the present time needed to be understood and attracted by proofs of fraternity, gentleness and peace”⁷⁴?

In this way John XXIII adopted towards Russia, possessed as it was by Bolshevism, an attitude that was absolutely contrary to the wishes of the Virgin of Fatima. Instead of carrying out a solemn and public act of reparation for the impiety and crimes committed in that country, he looked benignly on the Communist leaders and allowed himself to be seduced and cajoled by them.

Convinced that mankind had arrived at “the turning point of a new era”⁷⁵, he extolled the subversive utopia of peaceful coexistence, thus disarming the Church and the West in the face of the world revolution which itself refused to disarm. To place one’s trust in man, to hope in his goodness, to believe in the advent of a new, fraternal world where all men of all races and nations would finally be reconciled, such was his utopia which led him to expect the institution of world peace by a “supranational or world power”⁷⁶ and to court the friendship of Russia’s Communist leaders.

“Historians”, notes the Abbé de Nantes, “will characterise the years 1958-1963 as those of incredible utopias and of the auto-destruction of Christendom abandoning itself to barbarians. The reign of John XXIII, the return of Charles de Gaulle, the passing of Kennedy… these years will be seen as a time of peaceful coexistence with world Communism at the price of the abandonment of Asia and Africa, and within the Catholic world as the time of an opening to the world concluded at the price of the blood and tears of persecuted Christians.⁷⁷”

By the end of John XXIII’s reign, no one continued to theorize about the probable content of the Third Secret of Fatima. It was totally ignored. The Portuguese experts scarcely mentioned it.

Nevertheless, the Abbé de Nantes was convinced that the orientations given by John XXIII to his pontificate were not in accord with Our Lady’s ultimate Secret. His correspondence with Pierre Lemaire, concerning the encyclical Pacem in Terris, testifies to this. Here is one of his letters addressed to the traditionalist editor, a letter written in haste at a single sitting, in the month of April 1963:

“From Rome they write to tell me that a captatio benevolentiae is being attempted on Christ’s enemies. That is all very well. It is an act of diplomacy. But one does not create a doctrine with an act of diplomacy. To confuse these two things does not produce the intended result, but simply division and the ruin of one’s own world, and this plays into the hands of the enemy.”

One can but remark the perfect concordance with the vision of the Third Secret: “… a large city half in ruins…”

“Your explanations are ingenious”, he continued, “but the remedial measures you advocate, albeit moderate and wise, will be like the honourable rallying cry of an Albert de Mun: they will not prevent the throng of the ambitious and deceitful spirits from going further and dragging everyone else into the farthest extremes.

“I have confidence in the Pope, in the Council⁷⁸, but allow me, dear sir, to consider this encyclical as something terrible whose effects will continue to make themselves felt.

“I would love to see the Holy Father settle the debate by publishing the Secret of Fatima. Follow this idea up in your excellent review. It would be a real test.⁷⁹”

It is now apparent that the visions of the Third Secret, describing the bloody persecutions organised by the enemies of Christ and of His Church, belied the personal politics and doctrinal novelties of John XXIII.

By suppressing the Third Secret, by forging relationships with the Kremlin’s Communist rulers, by preaching a new morality for the coming of a free, equal and fraternal world community, founded on the good will of all men, and by claiming that Vatican II would give rise to a new “Spring” in the Church, Pope John XXIII seems to have been struck with that “miserable mental blindness” which Saint Pius X regarded as “the great and fitting punishment of God’s vengeance” which falls on those “who separate themselves from Him”⁸⁰.

This chastisement appears to mark the fulfilment of the truly telling prophecy at Rianjo. In 1931, after Pope Pius XI’s first refusal to carry out the consecration of Russia, Our Lord said to Lucy, by means of an interior locution: “They refused to heed My request! Like the king of France, they will repent […]. They will follow him into misfortune.⁸¹”

Assuredly, the prophecy was fulfilled. The misfortune announced was the spiritual blindness of so many pastors who remained insensible to Our Lady’s maternal voice.

And yet this revelation at Rianjo does not lead us to despair, as it ends on this comforting promise: “It will never be too late to have recourse to Jesus and Mary.⁸²” Words full of mercy and wonderful forbearance, which strengthen the hope in our hearts in the final triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, announced on 13 July 1917, in the conclusion of the Secret.

1. Toute la vérité sur Fatima, vol. 3, p. 316.

2. Ibid., p. 310-319.

3. Précis d’histoire, vol. 5, p. 75, Fideliter, 1990.

4. Lettre à mes amis n^o 48, 1 January 1959.

5. Supra, p. 24.

6. Toute la vérité sur Fatima, vol. 3, p. 88-89; 133-137.

7. “Église des martyrs” in L’aide à l’Église en détresse, March 1981, p. 5-6.

8. An unfortunate term, for “there can never be a Church of silence”, remarks Didier Rance. “The persecuted Christians proclaimed their faith and paid the price for doing so; the most one can say is that here at home the Church was somewhat deaf and the blind and wanted neither to see or hear.” (Un siècle de témoins, Le Sarment, p. 49)

9. Radio message for Christmas 1951.

10. This scene of the death “of bishops, priests, men and women religious, and various lay people” can give rise to several explanations. Brother Bruno of Jesus, in his first commentary on this vision, wrote: “ ‘And in the same way” means that they died like the Holy Father, killed by bullets and arrows.” (CRC n^o 368, July 2000, p. 26) On this interpretation, they would be martyrs. We will see later on that Brother Bruno also interpreted this scene as the prophetic announcement of the consumption of the Church. Cf. infra, chap. 13.

11. Jean Lefeuvre, Les enfants dans la ville, Témoignage chrétien, Paris, 1956, p. 99-103.

12. Quoted by Louis Dransard, Vu en Chine, Téqui, 1952, p. 72.

13. “Une aube de resurrection se lève à l’Ést”, Résurrection, n^o 7, July 2001, p. 21-30.

14. André Jany, Les torturés de la Chine, Librairie Mignard, Paris, 1959, p. 21.

15. D. C., 1956, col. 1244.

16. Nouvelles de Chrétienté, n^o 282, 24 November 1960.

17. Nouvelles de Chrétienté, n^o 350, 17 May 1962.

18. Conference of 20 November 1961, D. C., 1962, col, 268.

19. Lettre à mes amis n^o 100, 1 January 1962, p. 1.

20. M. C. de Bragança, Le lendemain de Fatima, Lisboa, 1958, p. 23-24.

21. Ibid., p. 4.

22. Quoted in CRC n^o 341, December 1997, p. 7.

23. Paul Dreyfus, Jean XXIII, Fayard, 1979, p. 53.

24. Don Roncalli’s impressions and reactions during the pontifical audience of 18 November 1908 are highly revealing of his state of mind regarding Saint Pius X. Cf. Résurrection, n^o 7, July 2001, p. 16.

25. Quoted by Hebblethwaite, John XXIII, Pope of the Council, Geoffrey Chapman, London, 1985. p. 249.

26. Infra, p. 123.

27. He made no allusion to the vision of hell. Note moreover that, according to Giancarlo Zizola, John XXIII, throughout his pontificate, never “once used the world hell” (quoted by D. Chivot, La Croix, 15 March 1997).

28. Osservatore Romano, Italian edition, 16 September 1959.

29. Hebblethwaite, op. cit., p. 278.

30. Jean XXIII, Journal de l’âme, Éditions du Cerf, 1964, p. 460.

31. “Les huit heresies de Jean XXIII, prophète de bonheur”, Résurrection, n^o 7, July 2001, p. 13-20.

32. Toute la vérité sur Fatima, vol. 3, p. 372.

33. D. C., 1962, col. 1572.

34. Quoted by Stefano Paci, “Fatima et ses secrets”, in the review Trente jours, April 1991, p. 25.

35. It is worth remarking that subsequently, in his conference of 11 February 1967 where he dealt with the Third Secret, Cardinal Ottaviani revealed, without openly saying so, one of its themes: “Much has been spoken about the links between the Secret of Fatima and the fearful and anguishing situation of the Church in numerous parts of the world where hell has unleashed its anger against everything that is holy and divine, and where the persecutor, even though he adopts the gloves of diplomacy and uses the honeyed language of peace, seeks to extend over the whole world the domination he already exercises over immense territories, sown with crosses, scaffolds and prisons sanctified by countless martyrs.” D. C., 1967, col. 545. Cf. Toute la vérité sur Fatima, vol. 3, p. 490.

36. Lettre à mes amis n^o 233, September 1966.

37. After the invasion of Western Poland by the Soviets, Stalin, in April 1940, gave orders for fifteen thousand imprisoned Polish officers to be “liquidated”. When the Germans discovered their corpses, in February 1943, in the Katyn Forest, Stalin accused them of having committed the massacre, a massacre for which he was in fact the only one responsible (cf. Toute la vérité sur Fatima, vol. 2, p. 486, vol. 3, p. 89 and 111). In Budapest, in November 1956, Soviet tanks bloodily crushed the insurgents who wanted to free themselves from Stalin’s Communism: twenty-five thousand Hungarians were killed in this tragedy.

38. In a footnote, Cardinal Ottaviani gave a precise tally of the bishops imprisoned, deported or detained. He counted one hundred and fifty-one in total.

39. D. C., 1960, col. 149-154.

40. Up until the end of his papacy, Pius XII remained deaf to all the fallacious advances and solicitations of the master of the Kremlin. Cf. Toute la vérité sur Fatima, vol. 3, p. 291 sq.

41. These words of Saint Clement, used by our Father as an epigraph, are taken from the Letter to the Corinthians, dated 96 AD.

42. Lettre à mes amis n^o 63, 1 January 1960.

43. Lettre à mes amis n^o 81, January 1961.

44. Lettre à mes amis n^o 100, 1 January 1962.

45. Journal de l’âme, p. 465-466.

46. L’Osservatore Romano published this message three weeks later, on 17 December 1961. In France, it was quoted by D. C., 1962, col. 28. Italy’s left wing press gave it page one coverage; cf. Mourin, Le Vatican et l’Urss, Payot, 1965, p. 247.

47. Giancarlo Zizola, L’utopie du pape Jean XXIII, du Seuil, 1978, p. 136.

48. Ibid.

49. P. Hebblethwaite, op. cit., p. 393.

50. D. C., 1962, col. 2-8.

51. Ibid., col. 1443-1444.

52. D. C., 1962, col. 1445.

53. Zizola, op. cit., p. 161.

54. Ibid., p. 28; cf. Paul Dreyfus, Jean XXIII, Fayard, 1979, p. 364 and 382. According to Peter Hebblethwaite, p. 483, John XXIII gave Adzhubei medals to give to Khrushchev on 7 March 1962.

55. Dreyfus, op. cit., p. 382.

56. The reference is to his radio talk for Christmas, given on 22 December, and his speech to the diplomatic corps. Extracts from his Christmas radio message were quoted shortly afterwards by Pravda. There the Pope repeated his “appeal for peace and the harmony of all peoples… We beg all governments”, he said, “not to remain deaf to this cry of humanity. May they do everything in their power to save peace.” (D. C., 1963, col. 3)

57. Zizola, op. cit., p. 162-163.

58. Quoted by Antoine Wenger, Les trois Rome, Desclée de Brouwer, 1991, p. 120.

59. Hebblethwaite, op. cit., p. 515, draws this conclusion from Medvedev’s book, Khrushchev, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1983.

60. Quoted by Mourin, op. cit., p. 257.

61. Mgr Josef Slipyj.

62. Quoted by Giancarlo Zizola, op. cit., p. 177.

63. Ibid., p. 178.

64. Ibid., p. 183.

65. D. C., 1963, col. 419.

66. Mourin, op. cit., p. 267.

67. Ibid., p. 259.

68. Zizola, op. cit., p. 208.

69. D. C. 1963, col. 662.

70. Dreyfus, op. cit., p. 384.

71. Ibid., p. 383.

72. Lettre à mes amis n^o 139, 28 April 1963. Cf. Pour L’Église, volume 1, p. 344-348.

73. A decree of the Holy Office, promulgated on 1 July 1949, forbade all collaboration with Communism (Toute la vérité sur Fatima, vol. 3, p. 179-180). In April 1959, in an official note, the Holy Office recalled and clarified this decree (cf. Dreyfus, p. 292).

Now, in Pacem in Terris, John XXIII claimed that “it is a matter of justice always to distinguish between error and those who commit it, even if it be a question of men whose false ideas and inadequate notions concern religion or morals. A man who has fallen into error does not cease to be a man; he retains his personal dignity, something that must always be taken into account.” Then John XXIII went on to apply this principle to Communism and he concluded that it was essential to avoid confusing in an indiscriminate condemnation the atheism of Marx and the party of Mr Khrushchev, as well as the Italian or French Communist parties, which are “changing realities, in the process of evolving in the right direction” (cf. Pacem in Terris, n^os 156-158, D. C., 1963, col. 541-542). According to the Italian journalist Zizola, this passage was written, unlike the rest of the encyclical, not by Mgr Pavan, but by John XXIII himself (Zizola, op. cit., p. 35).

74. John XXIII, 30 April 1960. Quoted by Antoine Wenger, Vatican II, première session, Le Centurion, March 1963, p. 21.

75. Bull of convocation of the Council, Humanae salutis, 25 December 1961, D. C., 1962, col. 98.

76. Pacem in Terris, D. C., 1963, col. 537.

77. Lettre à mes amis n^o 161, 1 January 1964.

78. Even after the victories of the progressives at the first session of Vatican II, our Father did not question the benefit of calling the Council, provided however that this assembly of the episcopal Body, meeting under the authority of the Pope, should exercise its power to teach in a solemn and extraordinary form, as was always the case in councils of times past.

79. Private archives of the Little Brothers of the Sacred Heart of Villemaur, Georges de Nantes collection.

80. Allocution to the French bishops, 29 February 1906.

81. Toute la vérité sur Fatima, vol. 2, p. 344-345. Our Lord added: “They will do it, but it will be late.” (ibid.)

82. Ibid.

* * *

CHAPTER III

VATICAN COUNCIL II
AND THE REVELATIONS OF FATIMA

VATICAN Council II could have been a providential occasion to carry out the collegial consecration of Russia. “With the meeting of the Council”, Father Antonio Maria Martins rightly remarks, “Divine Providence offered the Pope an excellent opportunity to carry out the requested consecration along with all the bishops assembled in Rome.¹”

THE PETITIONS OF THE COUNCIL FATHERS
FOR A CONSECRATION TO THE IMMACULATE HEART OF MARY.

During the Council, recounts John Haffert, “I was in constant communication with Mgr Venancio. Poor Mgr Venancio! How he suffered! He was confined to bed during almost the whole time of the Council… Some of us circulated petitions in favour of the collegial consecration among the bishops.²”

The secretary of the Belgian section of the Blue Army, Miss Emma Folon, sent each of the 2,500 Council Fathers through the Vatican post the text of a message to the Holy Father asking him to carry out the collegial consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary³.

On 3 February 1964, two months after the close of the Council’s second session, Dom Geraldo de Proença Sigaud SVD, Archbishop of Diamantina in Brazil, personally handed Pope Paul VI a petition signed by five hundred and ten bishops living in seventy-eight nations. Let us quote a few lines from it:

“Responding to the desires of the Most Blessed Virgin who, in Her apparitions at Fatima, requested that the Sovereign Pontiff, in union with all the Catholic bishops, make the consecration of the world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary with a special mention of Russia⁴; uniting my voice to the desire of a great number of prelates animated by the firm hope of obtaining peace for our troubled times, of removing the profound causes of apostasy, of obtaining the conversion of those who have gone over to Communism, of obtaining the intercession of Her who, on Her own, has destroyed all heresies throughout the entire world, of restoring the liberty of the Church in nations where she is persecuted, of promoting the abundant fruits of a renewal of Christian life among the faithful; I humbly beg Your Holiness to consecrate the entire world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary and, in a special and explicit manner, Russia and other nations which are dominated by sectarian Communism; and also to order that on the same day and at the same time as the Sovereign Pontiff, all the Catholic bishops of the world should make the same consecration of the world and of these nations.⁵”

During the Council’s third session, in the autumn of the year 1964, Mgr de Proença Sigaud collected 250 new episcopal signatures for this petition⁶.

In the Council chamber, during the discussion on the chapter dealing with the Virgin Mary, on 16 September 1964, Cardinal Wyszinski presented the memorandum that he had addressed to Paul VI in the name of seventy Polish bishops, asking that the Holy Father and all the Catholic bishops carry out a consecration of the Church and of the world to the Blessed Virgin Mary, and that the consecration of the human race to the Immaculate Heart of Mary performed by Pius XII on 31 October 1942 be renewed in the conciliar assembly, in a collegial and universal manner, that is with all the bishops of the entire world⁷.

Shortly afterwards, Mgr Mingo, Bishop of Monreale in Sicily, ended his intervention by asking for “the renewal, at the close of Vatican II, of the consecration of the Church, the world and particularly Russia to the Immaculate Heart of the Blessed Virgin Mary. All of Christ’s faithful are waiting for us to perform this act and certainly it would be agreeable to the Virgin Mother of God, Mediatrix of all graces.⁸”

The progressivist press⁹ expressed surprise that Mgr Mingo should have explicitly mentioned Russia, almost as if he had infringed an embargo!

The next day, 17 September, Mgr Rendeiro, Bishop of Faro, a small coastal city in Portugal, associated himself with Cardinal Wyszinski’s second request, in the name of the whole Portuguese episcopate:

“May I be permitted”, he said, “to express the wish of the bishops of my country, Portugal, which, like a number of other countries, glories in the title of Holy Mary. It was a great joy to all of us this consecration of the world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, accomplished in 1942 by His Holiness Pius XII and recalled yesterday by His Eminence Cardinal Wyszinski. With all our heart we desire to see this consecration renewed by Our Holy Father the Pope, all of us accompanying him. Aware that this wish had already been presented to the Holy Father by numerous bishops from Brazil and elsewhere, we were overjoyed yesterday to hear it formulated in these precincts by His Eminence Cardinal Wyszinski; that is why we express it again with great confidence.¹⁰”

Some devotees of Fatima, such as the Abbé Richard, have claimed that the Pope answered these requests through his act of 21 November 1964.

Paul VI was anxious at that time to put the brakes on the partisans of the Church’s aggiornamento who were racing ahead. He wanted to reassure the Fathers who were disturbed to see the progressive minority propagating and imposing on the Council the wildest doctrines. In this context, on 21 November 1964, in the course of his closing speech for the session, Paul VI proclaimed Mary “Mother of the Church”, and then recalled the act by which Pius XII had consecrated the world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary on 31 October 1942. Commenting on this speech, the Abbé René Laurentin emphasised its very limited scope. Pope Paul VI was extremely reticent in comparison to Pius XII. “Paul VI does not formally renew, but simply recalls the consecration made by his predecessor: he uses the verb commemorate (commemorari). Paul VI entrusts the human race to the protection of the Virgin: he uses the word entrust (committimus), but he does not repeat the word consecrate (consagramos) used by Pius XII.¹¹” We will soon discover, as we study the debates of the Council’s third session, why the Abbé Laurentin analysed this speech with such perspicacity¹².

Father Alonso remarked that, on 21 November 1964, “he had omitted something essential” for the execution of the collegial consecration of Russia: to be precise “the consecration of Russia”¹³!

During the Vatican II Council, neither John XXIII nor Paul VI sought to respond to Our Lady’s requests because the objectives they had set it were not in harmony with the message of Fatima

FROM 11 OCTOBER 1962, TWO CONTRADICTORY SPIRITS.

To show that the spirit of the conciliar aggiornamento and that of the revelations of Fatima were two contradictory spirits, we must begin by recalling the orientations that Pope John XXIII gave his Council.

We deliberately say his Council because John XXIII never revealed which prelates had suggested to him the idea of calling an Ecumenical Council. He even dared to write, in his Journal of a Soul, that no one had ever made this request of him¹⁴. He wanted his decision to call such an assembly to look like a personal idea, a heavenly inspiration, an illumination of the Holy Spirit.

However, he put out so many different and indeed contradictory versions of this “inspiration” that Peter Hebblethwaite, his biographer, and indeed hagiographer! was led to explain: “One can only conclude that [Pope] John’s memory faltered and that his unconscious editing of his reminiscences is designed to emphasise, yet again, that the idea of the Council was an ‘inspiration’ in the sense defined above¹⁵”…

So what did happen then? This:

During the conclave, on the night of 27 October 1958, Cardinals Ottaviani and Ruffini, both very conscious of the threats weighing on the Church and the faith, visited Cardinal Roncalli in his cell, whose election to the throne of Peter now seemed almost certain. They suggested to him that he incorporate in the programme of his pontificate the calling of an Ecumenical Council¹⁶. Six days later, on 2 November, Cardinal Ruffini spoke again on this matter to John XXIII: “By November 2”, Hebblethwaite indicates, “we have the first documented mention of the idea [of a Council]: in a memo after an audience with Cardinal Ruffini, [Pope] John noted that they had discussed the possibility of calling a Council.¹⁷”

So the calling of a Council was requested of him by traditionalist cardinals as a remedy to the invading apostasy.

But the “illuminism” of which John XXIII made such great show allowed him to regard their suggestions as his own, and then to distance himself from their reactionary preoccupations and to fix for the ecumenical assembly strange and novel aims, namely to carry out an aggiornamento of the Church in order to adapt it to the modern world.

In his analysis of the Opening Speech to Vatican II¹⁸, given on 11 October 1962, the Abbé de Nantes discerned and denounced “eight heresies”¹⁹. We will mention only the third, that is “the authoritarian condemnation of the prophets of gloom”.

In condemning them categorically, the Pope indirectly discredited the prophecies of the Virgin of Fatima and took a position wholly antithetical to the visions of the Third Secret:

“In order that the holy joy which fills Our hearts at this solemn hour may be more complete, may We be permitted to say before this great assembly that this Ecumenical Council is opening in particularly favourable circumstances.

“It often happens that, in the daily exercise of Our apostolic ministry, Our ears are offended by what is said by certain people who, although burning with religious zeal [an obligatory concession], lack sound judgement, discretion and balance in their way of seeing things. In the situation of society today, they see nothing but ruin and calamity [a probable reminiscence of the Third Secret: ‘Before reaching there, the Holy Father crossed a large city half in ruins’]; they are in the habit of saying that our era is far worse than past centuries; they behave as though history, which is the teacher of life, had nothing to teach them and as though at the time of former Councils everything was perfect in regard to Christian doctrine, morals and the proper liberty of the Church.”

The Abbé de Nantes comments: “This is calumny pure and simple. The prophets of gloom draw all their experience and wisdom from the lessons of the past, whereas the prophets of happiness build their utopias, the like of which had never been invented in the past, in a future adapted to the pleasure of their insane folly. Today, the prophets of happiness of the Sixties – and their number was legion at the time – have fallen into oblivion. Forty years later, we have war, famine, the ‘plague’ of AIDS and the persecutions against the Church announced by the prophets of gloom.”

“We feel we must state Our complete disagreement”, continued John XXIII, “with these prophets of gloom, who are always forecasting disaster, as though the end of the world were at hand.”

“A multitude of canonised saints and miracle workers”, remarks the Abbé de Nantes, “have acted exactly in this manner, imitating Saint Paul, and inspiring by such announcements immense movements of conversion for the salvation of souls. What is more, they had as their patron in this office Our Lord Jesus Christ who Himself stood in the line of John the Baptist, His Precursor, a prophet of gloom… of disasters which took place at their allotted time, whilst others still await their hour. Which means that the odds are always stacked in favour of the prophets of gloom… right to the end. Among the maledictions pronounced by Jesus, a single judgment is sufficient to exclude John XXIII from the cohort of the blessed: ‘Alas for you when the world speaks well of you! This was the way their fathers treated the false prophets.’ (Lk 6.26)

“From Jeremiah to Our Lady of Fatima, the only valid prophecies of happiness are those which announce a reward after sacred trials (Jr 30.31), liberation after a harsh exile (Is 40-55), and a deluge of graces obtained through the Immaculate Heart of Mary on behalf of a people docile to Her demands.²⁰”

Further on in his speech, John XXIII alluded to the persecutions suffered by “a large number of bishops”. More than eighty bishops were in fact known to be in prison in the countries of the Warsaw Pact, North Vietnam, China and North Korea. But the Pope gave no indication as to the origin of these persecutions. He said not a word about Communism nor about the danger it constituted for the Church and Christendom. John XXIII was already bound by the secret undertakings he had given to the Moscow Patriarchate.

VATICAN II’S SILENCE ON COMMUNISM.
JOHN XXIII’S SECRET UNDERTAKINGS.

Pope John XXIII’s efforts to have Russian Orthodox observers take part in the Council had initially run up against the open hostility of the official Russian Orthodox Church, enslaved as it was to the KGB, which had issued a Non possumus as a response to the advances made by Cardinal Bea, President of the Secretariat for Unity. This was in fact the title of an article published in May 1961, in the journal of the Moscow Patriarchate. One of its sentences summarises the whole argument: “In the current proposals of Catholic officials on the subject of Christian unity, it is advisable to see nothing but an attempt to extend Rome’s power over the Orthodox Church.²¹” In this the Russian Orthodox displayed the same inflexibility as they had at the time of Vatican Council I: in 1869, they had rejected the request of Pope Pius IX, who had not only invited the Catholic bishops to the Council but also “all the bishops of the Oriental Rite who were not in communion with the Apostolic See”.

However, the Russians soon learned that John XXIII was disposed to make some astonishing concessions to ensure the presence of their Church’s representatives in the conciliar aula.

Following the death of Cardinal Tardini and the Pope’s eightieth birthday, in December 1961, the Moscow Patriarchate publicly stated on what conditions Russian observers would attend the Council:

“Provided that the Vatican programme contains no doctrinal points on which the Orthodox Church are unable to agree, for example, the dogma of papal primacy, and provided moreover that there are no hostile declarations against the country that we love, I believe that, for our part, there will no difficulty in principle in sending observers to Rome.²²”

Mgr Georges Roche, who enjoyed the confidence of Cardinal Tisserant, certifies that “the decision to invite the Russian Orthodox observers to the Second Vatican Council had been taken personally by His Holiness Pope John XXIII with the evident encouragement of Cardinal Montini, who had been the Patriarch of Venice’s adviser when he himself was the Archbishop of Milan. Cardinal Tisserant had received firm, irrevocable instructions from the Pope himself, and the Cardinal had always been a man of trust. He believed in authority, he obeyed authority, even when he was convinced that there had been a diplomatic or political error.²³”

Historians generally pass over in silence or deny the existence of the agreement between Rome and Moscow, which was negotiated over the summer of 1962. For example, Sergio Trasatti writes: “There was a rumour that some kind of pact had been concluded between John XXIII and the Soviets: send your representatives, and the Council will abstain from condemning Communism. Nothing could be more fanciful.²⁴”

A brief presentation of the history of the secret negotiations which resulted in this agreement is therefore indispensable. The envoy of the Moscow Patriarchate, Mgr Nikodim, met Mgr Willebrands in Paris and then Cardinal Tisserant in Metz on 18 August 1962. According to Mgr J.-P. Schmitt, the Bishop of Metz, “after this conversation, Mgr Nikodim accepted that someone should take an invitation to Moscow, on condition that guarantees be given regarding the Council’s non-political attitude”²⁵. Such were the demands of the Moscow Patriarchate, totally devoted to the Kremlin. If Vatican Council II “refrained” from discussing Communism and Russia, then the Russian Orthodox would come and follow its work as observers. And Pope John XXIII secretly subscribed to such an undertaking.

“The commitment had been given”, writes our Father, “and, it must be said, through an uncompensated act of surrender: the Church, surrendering on a point of capital importance her chief function, her doctrinal magisterium, her rights and duties, would not condemn Communism. In exchange for which silence she would allow herself to be infiltrated by the agents of the most fearful persecutor and despot in history.²⁶”

There exist indisputable proofs of this verbal agreement hatched between the Vatican and the Kremlin in August 1962. The Communist press alluded to it almost immediately. In January 1963, in France nouvelle, the weekly French Communist Party paper, Jean-Claude Poulain wrote: “The Church can no longer be happy with a crude anti-Communism. She has even given an undertaking, on the occasion of her dialogue with the Russian Orthodox Church, that there will be no direct attack in the Council against the Communist regime.²⁷”

This horrible bargain concluded between Rome and Moscow explains the manoeuvres, the fraudulent schemes, the backstabbing perpetrated by the highest authorities of the Church to prevent the Council from condemning Communism.

“The greatest Council of all time (supposedly)”, writes the Abbé de Nantes, “would therefore remain deaf and blind to the greatest phenomenon of inhumanity of all time: the worldwide expansion of Bolshevism. In this manner it secretly lent it its decisive aid.²⁸”

THE VAIN PETITIONS OF THE COUNCIL FATHERS.

To respond to the vota of the more than three hundred bishops who had explicitly requested it, Vatican II’s preparatory commissions had provided that Communism would be censured and condemned in two of the Council’s constitutions. But neither of these schemas was included in the agenda of Vatican II’s first session.

Shortly after this session had opened, on 20 October 1962, during the discussion on the “Message to the World”, the third speaker, Cardinal Ferretto, who was warmly applauded, and then three other prelates, expressed their surprise that this first declaration of the Council should totally ignore those who were being persecuted on the other side of the iron curtain. All at once, Cardinal Liénart, who was presiding, interrupted the session to give this warning: “May I ask speakers not to repeat what has already been said.²⁹” He wanted to put a stop to these demands lest they gravely offend the two Russian observers.

A Ukrainian bishop had the courage to defy the Cardinal’s veto and asked, yet again, that there be added “a clear, unequivocal statement in support of the Church of silence”. He proposed an amendment formula: “At this solemn hour of the Council, we unite ourselves heart and soul with the whole Church of silence, where bishops and priests offer Christ Our Saviour their daily sacrifice on behalf of the Church and the salvation of the world. We beseech Christ Our Lord that He shorten the time of their tribulation.³⁰”

Cardinal Liénart refused to insert this amendment.

By way of protest, the fifteen Ukrainian bishops present at the Council – bishops who were either in exile or came from dioceses established in Europe or America for Ukrainian exiles – noticeably remained seated when the Fathers stood up to signify their acceptance of the “Message to the World”.

One month later, in mid-November 1962, these Ukrainian bishops prepared a declaration to protest against the presence at the Council of the two delegates from the Moscow Patriarchate, a presence which, they said, “had aroused among the clergy and the faithful entrusted to their care a sense of unease, unhappiness and discouragement. For some sections of public opinion, it is apparent that the coming to Rome of the Orthodox observers was greeted with a great commotion, while Metropolitan Slipyj’s absence and his detention were passed over in silence. Mgr Slipyj is the sole survivor of the eleven members of the Ukrainian episcopate who were imprisoned by the Communists and deported to Siberia.

“The Moscow Patriarchate has assumed ecclesiastical jurisdiction over 4,500,000 Ukrainian Catholics against all justice, divine, ecclesiastical or human, and in open collaboration with the atheist civil power, because that was the only way of suppressing and eliminating the Ukrainian Catholic Church.³¹”

Even before they had officially published their protest, the Ukrainian bishops found themselves publicly repudiated by Mgr Willebrands, Secretary of the Secretariat for Christian Unity. “This act by Mgr Willebrands”, remarks Sergio Trasatti, “was greatly appreciated by the Russian Patriarchate, for, as was noted in Moscow, it demonstrated the loyalty (sic) of the Holy See.³²”

However, many Council Fathers could not resign themselves to the Council’s silence on Russia’s errors and Communist persecutions. On 3 December 1963, the day before the second session ended, Mgr de Proença Sigaud was able to hand the Cardinal Secretary of State petitions addressed to the Sovereign Pontiff and signed by more than two hundred Council Fathers from forty-six countries. These called for a special schema to be prepared in which “the Catholic social doctrine would be set forth with great clarity, and the errors of Marxism, Socialism and Communism refuted on philosophical, sociological and economic grounds”³³. A request formulated in vain: Communism was not even mentioned in the draft constitution on “The Church in the Modern World” which was submitted to the Fathers during the third session, in the autumn of 64. As a result, when its paragraphs on atheism came up for discussion, Mgr Yu Pin, Rector of the Catholic University of Formosa, speaking in the name of seventy bishops, asked that a new chapter or at least a solemn declaration be added on Communism. The Chinese bishop advanced some compelling reasons including the following:

“Communism is a militant atheism and a crude materialism. In a word, it is the compilation of all heresies, and it must be treated as such, if the truth is to be defended.” The Council “must dispel the confusion created by the doctrine of peaceful co-existence, by the policy of the outstretched hand, and by Catholic Communism, as it is called, all of which are stratagems calculated to aid Communism and to create obscurity, doubt, or at least hesitation, in the minds of Christians. In this matter the utmost clarity is now required.³⁴”

But the Council’s pastoral “purpose” was quite different. Two weeks later, on 5 November 1964, did not Cardinal Alfrink declare in the chamber: “Our pastoral solicitude looks for the good seed even in the Communist world.³⁵”

The revised draft constitution on “The Church in the Modern World”, presented at the start of the fourth session, nowhere contained the least mention of Communism. So, on 9 October 1965, Mgr de Proença Sigaud and Mgr Marcel Lefebvre presented to the General Secretariat of the Council a petition from 334 Fathers³⁶ asking that Communism be condemned. The text of the petition explained:

“In every age, Councils must unmask and banish the stealthy spread of errors, such as they exist in reality and not in abstracto. Now, today, the most dangerous and the most virulent form in which atheism is embodied and operates is that of Communism. That is why the Second Vatican Council must speak of Communism and explicitly refer to it by name, as did Pius XI in the encyclical Divini Redemptoris.

“If the Council were not to talk of Communism, its silence would be interpreted by the faithful, unjustly but inevitably, as a tacit abrogation of everything that recent popes have said or written against Communism, including the reiterated condemnations of the Holy Office. The psychological harm and discredit to the Church’s magisterium that would result from this would be immensely grave. Furthermore, people might easily accuse the Church of opportunism, of false witness, and of being more concerned about Jews than about Christians suffering persecution.

“Communism ardently desires and hopes for this silence from the Council, a fact which is highly significant. There can be no doubt that Communist propaganda will use every opportunity to interpret this silence of the Council in its favour. From this will result a great confusion of ideas among the faithful.³⁷”

This petition was not passed on to the members of the joint commission responsible for drawing up the official report on the schema under discussion. It was set to one side by Mgr Glorieux³⁸ who could not have committed such a felony, such an abuse of power, unless covered by the highest authorities of the Church³⁹. “Everyone knew of the existence of this petition”, Father Rouquette relates. “The members of the commission for Schema XIII were astonished that it had not been passed to them and surmised that it had been blocked at the highest level… I have good reason to believe that Paul VI, questioned by one of the members responsible for Schema XIII, advised against a new condemnation of Communism along the lines demanded by the petition.⁴⁰”

In the words of Mgr Haubtmann, Mgr Garrone “was granted special powers to ensure that this schema to which Paul VI attached such great importance for the aggiornamento of the Church was finalised on time, despite the difficult circumstances”. In the Council chamber, on 15 November 1965, this French prelate declared that “this manner of proceeding [i.e. the decision to reject the request for an express and formal condemnation of Communism] appeared to the Commission to be in perfect conformity, firstly with the pastoral “purpose” of the Council, and secondly with the express wishes of Popes John XXIII and Paul VI”⁴¹.

So Vatican II neither condemned nor even named atheistic Communism. Analytical tables of its Acts contain none of the following words: Communism, Marxism, Socialism. Commenting on the paragraphs in Gaudium et Spes which deal with atheism (n^os 19-21), the Abbé de Nantes remarks that “Vatican II directs all its energy into trying to excuse, understand, esteem, respect and love atheists, and, when necessary, to hold Christians responsible for the atheism of others”⁴².

The Council neglected the martyrs, their heroic witness as well as the fruits of their sacrifice, that is to say the graces they win for “souls who are making their way to God”, as seen in the vision of the Third Secret. However, several bishops whose flock had suffered and continued to suffer diabolical persecutions under the Communist yoke, gave voice to some passionate appeals in the Council chamber. Listen for instance to the intervention of Mgr Andrea Sapelak, a Ukrainian bishop, at the general congregation of 31 October 1963:

“In the text of the schema on the Church, not a single word is said of the extraordinary but constant vocation in Christ’s Church to that heroic sanctity which produced countless martyrs and confessors of the faith in the Church, as evidenced in the ‘Martyrology’.

“Nothing in the schema makes reference to this supreme act of love for God and neighbour, comparable to Christ’s confession before men and to the sacrifice of His life. Now, in our times, countless numbers of Christ’s faithful have been called to this sublime vocation, and still are continually […]. Persecutions constitute an exceptional but permanent aspect of the Church’s life, a little like the stigmata of Christ in His Mystical Body. Our Lord warned us of this: ‘If they persecuted Me, they will persecute you too.’ (Jn 15.20)

“What a comfort it would be for all those who suffer in the name of Christ and the Church, in the various nations, if the sacrosanct Vatican II Council were expressly to declare that, by virtue of the anxieties, harassment, torments, oppressions and imprisonments they have suffered, they are going before all others on the path of holiness, because they are following most closely Our Divine Saviour and Master.

“On several occasions already, and with good reason, it has been said in this assembly that the poor have a special place in Christ’s Church. But our brothers, who renew Christ’s passion in their flesh and aid the whole Mystical Body by their sufferings, deserve a very particular place in the Church. What is more, their very life is a source of great apostolate for all the faithful, for they give everyone an eminent example by extolling the practice of loving God to the highest degree.

“It has also been said, and on several occasions, that the Council intended to open a dialogue with the world of today. But we must be careful not to forget the immense multitude of our brothers who suffer in the name of Christ and the Church.

“In conclusion, I make so bold as to propose that, in Chapter IV on the vocation to holiness in the Church, mention is also made, alongside the multiform but ordinary practices of holiness, of this extraordinary vocation to holiness, namely the confession of faith and martyrdom, under a special heading which would celebrate its sublime character as a very particular and mysterious gift made by God to each person and to every community of the faithful. I have spoken.⁴³”

Mgr Sapelak’s proposal was not accepted. The constitution Lumen Gentium did not discuss martyrdom under a special heading, nor did it extol the sacrifice of these blessed as the greatest witness to the faith that a Christian can offer his Father in Heaven.

The constitution Gaudium et Spes, on the Church in the Modern World, spoke of persecutions with surprising levity and optimism. “The Church recognises that she has drawn great benefits and continues to do so from the very opposition of her enemies and persecutors,.” (n^o 44) What are these benefits? No one will ever know by reading this constitution tainted with naturalism.

If the Council neglected and ignored the harsh trials of the persecuted, it was in order to leave the way open to the policy inaugurated by John XXIII, one of rapprochement and cooperation with the Communist States. The Council recommended dialogue with “those who oppose the Church and persecute her in different ways”. This in order to “cooperate, without violence or hidden agenda, in building up the world in a spirit of genuine peace”⁴⁴.

THE NOVELTIES OF VATICAN II
CONTRADICTED BY THE MESSAGE OF FATIMA.

All the grand orientations of Vatican II were in contradiction with the message of Our Lady of Fatima. Each element of the Virgin’s request regarding the act of reparation and Russia’s consecration is radically opposed by one or other of the doctrinal novelties of Vatican II.

The Council was simply unable to extol “the spiritual values present in every religion and even in atheism” and at the same time stage a solemn and public act of reparation for the acts of impiety committed in Russia by the Bolsheviks.

Our Lady had asked the Pope to use his sovereign authority to get the bishops to perform this act themselves: “Let the Holy Father deign to make and order all the Catholic bishops likewise to make…” Now, at the Council, the progressivist Fathers violently contested papal authority. The struggled victoriously to impose “collegiality”: against the absolute and personal authority of the Pope, the supreme and immediate head of all bishops, they exalted the power of the episcopal college, “which possessed supreme and full authority over the universal Church”⁴⁵.

Furthermore, Congarian ecumenism, imposed on Vatican II by the progressivist minority, led the Council to ridicule the prerogatives of the Immaculate Mediatrix. Certainly, the dogma of Mary Mediatrix of all graces is not explicitly formulated in the revelations of Fatima, the term “mediation” not being found there. However, the message of Fatima necessarily implies this. Does it not teach us that God wishes to establish in the world devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary? And the divine plan is to achieve this by making known to the whole world the universal mediation of grace and mercy of His Most Holy Mother through the miracle of Russia’s conversion which will only be obtained from Divine Omnipotence when that nation has been consecrated to Her Immaculate Heart.

THE OUTRAGES AGAINST THE IMMACULATE MEDIATRIX.

The teaching of Vatican II on the Virgin Mary is a great step backwards from that of all the modern popes, from Pius IX to Pius XII. We say to Pius XII and not to John XXIII, for the latter was very anxious “to re-centre and purify traditional Italian piety”⁴⁶. This Pope, explains Laurentin, “was keen to promote an interior form of renewal, and seemed to fear that the exterior lustre and formalism of certain ceremonies of consecration would make people forget rather than support this renewal”⁴⁷.

On 24 October 1960, John XXIII put the clergy of Rome on guard against “an eagerness to cultivate certain practices or particular devotions which are perhaps excessive in their cult of the Madonna – the dear Mother of Jesus and our Mother, who will not take offence at our words – or of certain men and women saints, devotions which, on occasion, give a poor idea of the piety of our good people. Know how to understand Us. It is the duty of the priest to be on guard and also to put the people on guard. Certain pious practices merely satisfy the feelings, but are not enough to fulfil religious obligations, and even less do they fully correspond to the first three commandments of the Decalogue, grave and imperious.⁴⁸”

The Abbé Laurentin remarks that “John XXIII several times used the title ‘Mother of the Church’, following in this Leo XIII, but never used those of Coredemptrix and Mediatrix”⁴⁹.

During the Council’s preparation period, the universal Mediation of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary, the dogmatic definition of which had been expressly desired by three hundred bishops⁵⁰, had had a fierce adversary in Cardinal Montini. On 20 June 1962, when the draft schema on the Virgin Mary, elaborated by the theological commission, was discussed by the central commission, this prelate actually made the following declaration: “The proposal for a new title, especially that of Mediatrix, to be given to Mary Most Holy, would appear inopportune and even damnable (damnosa).” And he went on to make his own the old Protestant refrain a hundred times refuted: “The term Mediator must be attributed uniquely and exclusively to none but Christ alone, as the Apostle says: Unus est Mediator.⁵¹” The future Pope Paul VI continued with this patent falsehood: “The extension of this title does not appear to favour true piety […]. It is much better to speak of the universal spiritual motherhood of Mary Most Holy, of her queenship and of her marvellous and truly benign intercession, but not of her mediation (non vero de mediatione).⁵²”

Well might Laurentin point out, in 1966, that one found in Paul VI’s teaching “the same abstention [as in John XXIII’s teaching] with regard to the same titles [i.e. the titles of Coredemptrix and Mediatrix]”⁵³.

Before the Council’s second session opened, Cardinal Koenig’s theologian, Father Karl Rahner, studied and denigrated the schema on the Virgin Mary elaborated by the theological preparatory commission. Wiltgen presents his corrosive criticism:

“Were the text to be accepted as it stood, Father Rahner contended, ‘unimaginable harm would result from an ecumenical point of view’ It could not be too strongly stressed, he said, ‘that all the success achieved in the field of ecumenism through the Council and in connection with the Council will be rendered worthless by the retention of the schema as it stands’. It should therefore be urged ‘with all possible insistence’ that this schema be made either a chapter or an epilogue of the schema on the Church. ‘This would be the easiest way to delete from the schema statements which, theologically, are not sufficiently developed and which could only do incalculable harm from an ecumenical point of view. It would also prevent bitter discussion.’

“What he attacked especially was the schema’s teaching on the mediation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and the title ‘Mediatrix of all graces’, which it attributed to the Blessed Virgin… If the word ‘mediation’ were to be used at all, it must be most clearly defined.”

Father Karl Rahner presented his comments at the Fulda Conference, which adopted them and submitted them to the General Secretariat of the Council: “By far the greater part of the Council Fathers of Austria, Germany, Switzerland and Scandinavia are not absolutely opposed to retaining the words ‘Mediatrix’ and ‘mediation’ in the schema. However, it seems desirable that the expression ‘Mediatrix of all graces’ should not be used.”

“The proposal officially submitted by the Fulda Conference to the General Secretariat of the Council also quoted from Protestant writings. ‘Bishop’ Dibelius, of the German Evangelical Church, was quoted as saying, in 1962, that the Catholic Church’s teaching on Mary was one of the major impediments to union. Other German Protestant authorities, such as Hampe and Künneth, were quoted as saying that the Council Fathers in Rome should remember that they would be erecting a new wall of division by approving a schema on Mary. Therefore, these writers had concluded, the Council should either keep silence on the subject, or reprehend those guilty of excesses. More moderate Protestant writers, such as Professor Meinhold, were quoted as expressing the hope that, if the Council treated of the Blessed Virgin Mary at all, it would do so in the schema on the Church, since then ‘a new approach could be made to the doctrine on the Blessed Virgin’.⁵⁴”

But now the defenders of the Virgin rose up. The theories of the partisans of the Marian aggiornamento were subjected to some learned and severe criticism in the course of the Council’s second session.

Mgr Grotti, a Servite monk and prelate from Acre e Purús in Brazil, wrote to the Fathers: “Does ecumenism consist in confessing or hiding the truth? Ought the Council to explain Catholic doctrine, or the doctrine of our separated brethren? Hiding the truth hurts both us and those separated from us. It hurts us, because we appear as hypocrites. It hurts those who are separated from us because it makes them appear weak and capable of being offended by the truth.⁵⁵”

Let us also note that five Eastern-rite bishops (two bishops from Malabar in India, and three Ukrainian bishops) asked the Council to vote against the amalgamation of the two separate schemas, and this in order to facilitate ecumenism with the schismatics of the East. They recalled, in a letter which they distributed to the Fathers at the entrance of Saint Peter’s Basilica, that “among the Orientals united to the Apostolic See, as well as among those separated from it, the Blessed Virgin Mary is very greatly honoured”⁵⁶.

Father Antoine Wenger, an Assumptionist, regretted that the Council, in its debates on the Virgin Mary, neglected Oriental theology and tradition, an oversight hardly calculated to favour ecumenism with the Christians of the East:

“The Marian debate in the Council and the conversations it gave rise to oblige me to repeat an observation I have made before. It concerns the ignorance of both Protestants and Catholics about the Marian theology of the East. Before such ignorance, it often happens that the Orientals themselves, unsure of their tradition from a scientific aspect, keep quiet, as though they had nothing to say. I keenly regret, for example, that during the Marian debate no voice from the East was heard, even though their bishops were favourably regarded and were more likely to be listened to inasmuch as they appeared to rise above the general mêlée. Perhaps they thought that this quarrel was exclusively between the Latins and the Protestants. But was that not a further reason to speak out and make themselves heard by each of the two sides, and to show that the diverse points of Marian dogma are the heritage of the undivided Church?

“Only one Ukrainian bishop, the Apostolic Visitor for Latin America, Mgr Sapelak, invoked the tradition of the East in favour of the Mediation. Yet he did so from a particularly Slav perspective, recalling the feast of the Pokrov, based on Saint Andrew-the-Fool’s vision of the Virgin taking the world under the protection of Her mantle.

“Faced with this situation, we have often regretted not having been able to continue our research into Marian theology and not having published the numerous unpublished Marian homilies of Byzantine orators which we have recovered from Athos, as well as from Rome, Athens and Moscow, or else discovered, in large numbers, at Paris. Although belonging to tradition inherited from apocryphal writers, these orators wove a Marian theology that teaches the perfect exemption from sin of Mary, the Mother of God, Her integral virginity, Her assumption in body and soul after death, and Her perfect intercession before Her Son, owing to the maternal confidence She has in His presence.

“We are not sure to what extent the Byzantines called Mary the Mother of the Church. It is clear, however, that certain authors or certain writings derived a particular satisfaction from calling Mary the Mother of the faithful and the Mother of pastors. Regarding the Mediation, at any rate, they are unanimous and constant in their affirmation.⁵⁷”

Father Wenger returned to this theme when commenting on one of the interventions of Cardinal Ruffini, the Archbishop of Palermo, who so often distinguished himself by his learning and the steadfastness of his faith.

“Opening the debate once more, Cardinal Ruffini spoke with a youthful ardour despite his age – he is seventy-six – and appeared visibly happy to sing the glories of Mary: ‘This title of Mediatrix’, he said, ‘is eminently acceptable, acceptissimus. To preserve the title of One Mediator which belongs to Christ, we could call Mary Mediatrix ad Mediatorem, the Mediatrix to the Mediator.’

“He may not have known it, but Cardinal Ruffini was echoing a Byzantine orator, John the Geometer, who, more than any other, penetrated the mystery of Mary, a mystery which the Church of the East prefers to contemplate in silence rather than to express in words. For it is so great that it surpasses understanding. Mary, to use John the Geometer’s beautiful expression, is She whom words cannot utter, whom time cannot express, whom thought can never exhaust. Now, John the Geometer, when considering Mary’s role in the historic redemption and Her permanent intercession after Her assumption into Heaven, has no hesitation in calling Her Mediatrix, the second Mediatrix to the first Mediator.⁵⁸”

Thus, neither true devotion nor scholarship were on the side of the upholders of the Marian aggiornamento. This did not prevent them from winning a determinant victory at the Council’s second session: on 29 October 1963, the Fathers voted to combine the schema on the Church with that on the Virgin Mary.

The “minimalists” then waged a stubborn battle to prevent the dogma of Mary Mediatrix from being defined at any cost. One has only to read the accounts of the debates in the Council chamber, published by the Documentation catholique, or in Henri Fesquet’s Journal du Concile, or again in the Abbé Georges de Nantes’ Lettres à mes amis, to discover by what blasphemous declarations they dared to oppose this definition. Here is a passage from the chronicles of the Council, written by the Abbé de Nantes on 1 October 1964:

“16-17 September. ‘The Virgin Mary’. The proposed chapter is the reduction to the minimum of a first draft. Ample satisfaction has been given to the Left who are only too happy to love the Virgin provided that one speak of Her as little as possible and in the driest terms. Mary is not declared ‘Mother of the Church’ as many were expecting; one finds the briefest mention of Her ancient title of Mediatrix; Her Coredemption is subtly skirted around. Yesterday, Chapter VII called for the correction of abuses in devotion to the saints. Today, Chapter VIII recommends preachers not to make Mary equal to Jesus and to be wary of idolatry in this domain! This delirious self-criticism will at least have the effect of tickling the ears of the most backward Protestants…

“Thereupon, Cardinals Bea, Léger and Doepfner repeated and developed all the specious or plainly erroneous arguments of the so-called reformers of the sixteenth century against Marian theology and devotion. What a dismal chorus! It is, it seems, urgent to repress a devotion that does not lead to Christ; we must stick to the certain and ancient data of Scripture and Tradition, and in this field, but contrary to the Council’s general pretensions, we must put the brakes on theological development and go backwards, we must distrust popular sentiment and deny spontaneous devotion. Ecumenism demands it!

“Thanks be to God! a number of Fathers manifested their indignation. Firstly, one had tricked them by reducing and amputating this schema on the pretext of inserting it into the treatise on the Church; and then, everything that had been said against Mary and against Her cult was offensive to Catholic ears, unjust to the Church, and grossly contrary to the truth. Cardinal Ruffini pointed out everything about this text that was odiously restrictive.

“Cardinal Wyszinski and other Fathers in the name of hundreds of bishops asked for a solemn consecration of the Church to Mary and even, in response to the expectation of Our Lady of Fatima, for the consecration of the world, including Russia, to Her Immaculate Heart. To entrust oneself to Her ‘would be an act of faith and devotion to obtain the freedom of the Church’.

“They defended every one of Mary’s contested titles: ‘It would be a scandal in the eyes of believers to rob Mary of Her title of Mediatrix’, said Mgr Rendeiro, particularly, Mgr van Lierde added, as this title is ‘much better understood than is often said’. Several of them proved that, far from being an obstacle to ecumenism, the splendours of Mary and of Her cult would aid it powerfully. Cardinal Suenens, breaking with the solidarity of the reformists to their great indignation, thought the schema had been scaled down too far and protested that ‘Christocentrism’ should not become ‘anti-Marian’. Finally, avenging the outraged Church, the Rev. Fr Fernandez, Master General of the Dominicans, gave a fitting reply to the odious recommendation not to exalt the Virgin to a position of equality with Her Son: ‘Has ever there existed a true theologian, a true preacher who taught such a thing? To pass this recommendation would make people believe that this deviation has actually existed in the Catholic Church and would justify Protestantism.’ Indeed! The chapter was about to be shelved, the clandestine activity of the reformists checkmated.

“A clever ruse would save all. French-speaking bishops, Mgr Le Couëdic and Mgr Ancel, the latter from Mexico, pretended to view this text as a judicious compromise, capable therefore of securing unanimity. To get the point over, His Excellency Ancel saw fit to declare that, now that he had studied the question more deeply, he no longer believed in Mary Mediatrix. Some believe in it, others not, so let us vote for a text that takes a middle position.

“As if by chance, the question was concluded the following day by Cardinals Frings and Alfrink who invited everyone to sacrifice his private opinions in the interests of the necessary… unanimity! In reality, this was an appeal to the believers to join the non-believers in their negations and to sacrifice the Virgin Mary to this tyrannical minority. As Mgr Carli would point out, oh ever so politely! these concessions, these doubts, this respect for others are wholly one-sided. When it comes to exalting, not the Queen of Heaven but the episcopate, then neither the fear of novel words, nor the silence of Scripture and Tradition, nor the opposition of a part of the assembly can be allowed to obstruct the proclamation and imposition on the Church of the ideas of one party!

“If anything is to block the path of subversion at the Council, it can only be the rejection, by an overwhelming majority, of this offensive chapter. Freed from all constraint, the Fathers would certainly reject it. But the system is too powerful and carries them before it irresistibly. Let us hope for a miracle! It is evident that there is an incompatibility between the reformist party and the Virgin Mary, Our Lady of Lourdes and Fatima!⁵⁹”

When one realizes just how much odious contempt was heaped on the Most Blessed Virgin Mary at Vatican II, one understands why, during Her apparitions at Pontevedra, Our Lord had asked so insistently for the practice of reparatory devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary; one is no longer is surprised at the vigour of His complaints and of His desire to see fervent souls consoling the Immaculate Heart of the most tender of mothers, so horribly outraged. Certainly, in Russia, Bolshevism sought every means to destroy the traditional veneration of the Russian people towards the Mother of God. Sacred icons were destroyed or hidden. But there is something far graver than these crimes committed by apostates and infidels. It is the blasphemies of rebellious sons, yes, the blasphemies of the Catholic Church’s own children towards the Immaculate Heart of Mary, such as they rang out in the Basilica of Saint Peter’s during the Vatican II Council. With the passing of time, the message of Pontevedra appears astonishingly prophetic.

During this autumn of 64, the Abbé Laurentin exercised an influence over the Council’s debates that should not be forgotten. The book that he had just published, La question mariale, was a minimalist plea of consummate ingenuity and hypocrisy. He insinuated that the definition of the universal mediation of the Virgin Mary was inopportune, whilst claiming to follow ‘a middle path’ which avoided slipping into “a Christianity of the Virgin which Saint Paul would find alien” on one side and into “a Christianity without the Virgin which would no longer be Catholic” on the other⁶⁰. Furthermore, he earnestly encouraged the “hierarchy” to “discreetly moderate the excesses” of those whose “religion has practically been reduced to recent apparitions, Fatima in particular”. Woe to those Catholics who “practically tend to behave as if the Virgin, or even the message of some apparition, were considered ‘the means of salvation’”! “The hierarchy” must “reintegrate this feverish piety into a Catholic framework”. Laurentin attacked the message of Fatima with arguments drawn from the murky waters of Protestant theology. He had the temerity to toss out for public consumption cheap objections against the consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, presenting them as highly serious⁶¹. Reading these pages, one understands why our expert then went on to analyse Paul VI’s speech of 21 November 1964, taking evident pleasure in pointing out that the Pope had not consecrated the world to Mary, but that he had simply entrusted or recommended it to Mary. One also understands why the French bishops were so opposed to a consecration of Russia, or of the world, to the Immaculate Heart of Mary⁶². John Haffert describes the altercation between Mgr Venancio and one of them, a few days before 21 November 1964: “You will get something”, the French prelate told him, “but it will not be the collegial consecration!” This bishop waved his finger as though angry⁶³.

Chapter VIII of Lumen Gentium, on the Virgin Mary, finally passed by the Fathers on 18 November 1964, did contain the word “Mediatrix”, but the dogma of Mary Mediatrix of all graces was not however defined. Let us quote its article 62: “The Church invokes the Blessed Virgin under the titles of Advocate, Auxiliatrix, Adjutrix and Mediatrix. This, however, is so to be understood that it neither takes away anything from, nor adds anything to, the dignity and efficacy of Christ the one Mediator. For no creature can ever be put on the same level with the Incarnate Word and Redeemer… The Church does not hesitate to profess this subordinate role of Mary…”

Laurentin, the wretched man! had himself recommended this solution. In a study entitled “Must Vatican II’s Marian chapter speak of mediation?” and published by the Dutch service Documentatie Centrum Concilie, he made the following suggestion:

After having explained how “the Virgin Mary shares in the whole mystery of salvation through her active and profound involvement in every intention and action of Christ, an explicit reference might be made to the word mediatrix to indicate the legitimacy of this badly defined word, in such terms as these: ‘Because of this intention and this living relationship, Christian piety has given Mary the titles of advocate, mediatrix, queen of Christians, etc.’

“Or again more profoundly: ‘For centuries, Christian piety has striven to express through countless formulas, titles and figures this singular and ineffable excellence of Mary over the other saints. The Council, far from condemning these pious expressions, approves and praises them, on condition firstly that they are well understood, that is to say in the subordination of Mary to Christ, the one Redeemer and universal Mediator; and then that these pious formulas are never considered dogmas of faith, particularly as Catholic theologians have often, and with good reason, been in some disagreement over their precise meaning.’⁶⁴”

The first of these two suggestions was taken forward by the Secretary of the Theological Commission, but not the second which would have encountered strong opposition among the Fathers as it too plainly presented the universal Mediation of the Virgin Mary as a highly debatable theological opinion.

The experts who drew up the schemas revealed their intrigues, triumphs and secret intentions in the commentaries on the Acts of Vatican II published in the Unam Sanctam collection. The article by Father Barauna OFM, “The Most Blessed Virgin in the service of the economy of salvation”, is highly instructive. Let us pick out some of its admissions:

“So those who would seek to find in the Constitution a quantitative development in Marian theology, in the sense, for example, of a new dogma – as many Fathers were hoping with regard to certain doctrines, like the spiritual maternity or the mediation – would inevitably be disappointed. The pastoral character of the Council exerted a decisive influence in this domain… Concretely speaking, it was important before all else not to define a new dogma, either because the doctrines in question had not yet acquired the internal maturation required, or by reason of the inconvenience that a definition of this kind would entail for ecumenical dialogue… One notices above all a great effort to reduce, to include, to integrate, to ‘re-centre’.”

The Council Fathers had resigned themselves “to a sort of compromise, consisting in placing the term ‘Mediatrix’ in such a context that the uniqueness and transcendence of Christ’s mediation would be fully safeguarded. In this context, the concept of Marian ‘mediation’ is mentioned but once and even that incidentally, whereas the spiritual maternity is presented three times… The Council prefers to go back to the biblical language in which Mary is essentially Mother… It does not speak about the ‘Mediatrix of all graces’, nor is it said that Mary ‘distributes’ graces, etc.

“Shortly before the Council’s second session, we asked a Protestant observer what he thought of the schema De Beata Maria Virgine Matre Ecclesiae. His response was categorical: ‘For ecumenical dialogue, the approval of this schema would be a disaster. How can a Council make pronouncements about Mary without first dealing with far more central subjects, such as the Most Holy Trinity and Jesus Christ?’ During the third session, I had the opportunity to ask the same observer what he thought of the new Marian chapter about to be promulgated: ‘Now that is something quite different!’ he replied.⁶⁵”

It certainly was “something quite different” for, as the Abbé de Nantes stresses, “the thesis of the minimalists had triumphed: the Virgin Mary was considered from the perspective of our salvation, not for the sake of God nor for Herself, but for us, ‘with regard to our own salvation in the Church’”. Our Father observed that “they no longer want to proclaim Her beauty, Her glory, Her grace, but only Her service! And this in the declared intention of reintegrating Mary into humanity, alongside sinners, whereas the Tradition and devotion of centuries has placed Her alongside Christ Our Saviour, as Coredemptrix, and alongside God, as Mediatrix… Significant too is another deliberate deviation, one which is highly relevant today: the Council passes very quickly over Mary’s presence at the foot of the Cross and Her active participation in our redemption through Her wonderful compassion, on the pretext of concentrating our attention on Her role as ‘Mother of Jesus’.⁶⁶”

Our Lord’s ecumenical views and designs, clearly revealed at Fatima, are diametrically opposed to the ecumenism of Vatican II. The message of Fatima teaches us that God’s first wishes to save and convert Orthodox Russia through the double mediation of His Most Holy Mother and of the hierarchy of His one true Church. When the Pope and the bishops accomplish the consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, the Church will manifest Her communion in the faith with Orthodoxy, since in the East the dogma of the Mediation of the Queen of Heaven is deeply rooted in tradition.

Now, according to Heaven’s promises, it is through this act of faith in Mary Mediatrix, it is through this appeal of the Catholic hierarchy to the all-powerful Mediation of the Immaculate Virgin that the Russian Orthodox will obtain the grace of their conversion, that is to say their return en masse to the one fold of Christ, an event truly unheard of, an incomparable miracle which will excite the wonder of all schismatics and heretics throughout the world and, shortly afterwards, their conversion.

At the Council, the Church, in advocating Congarian ecumenism, proceeded down an entirely different path. Vatican II neither hoped for nor even envisaged the return of the lost sheep to the fold of the One Church of Christ; instead it recommended a search for Christian unity in an egalitarian reconciliation with schismatic and heretical sects. Making peace with the adversary, maintaining a respectful dialogue with the leaders of heretical and Protestant communities, and renouncing anything that could create obstacles to mutual understanding, these are the things that were to lead the Council Fathers so blithely to sacrifice the Catholic faith. Did not Pope Paul VI himself say: “We do not wish to turn our faith into an occasion of polemics with our separated brethren”⁶⁷? The Council’s abandonment of dogma and its outrages against the Immaculate Mediatrix were the fruits of this disastrous ecumenism. It is not surprising, therefore, that the only bishop, to our knowledge, to have asked in the Council chamber for the consecration of Russia, Mgr Mingo, Bishop of Monreale in Sicily, had also fought for the definition of Mary Mediatrix⁶⁸ and against Congarian ecumenism⁶⁹.

THE CULT OF THE VIRGIN ABANDONED AND DEVALUED.

Over the course of Vatican II’s four sessions, not one bishop, not even a Portuguese prelate⁷⁰, ever stood up in the chamber and entreated the Fathers to embrace and recommend the devotion of reparation to the Immaculate Heart, in accordance with Heaven’s wishes.

However, several bishops were alarmed to see the Council totally neglecting the cult of the Virgin Mary. “We know from an authorised source”, writes Fr Luis Cerdeira OP that, when number 67 of Lumen Gentium was being written, experts and Council Fathers insisted that any ex professo reference to devotion to the Rosary must use one of these expressions or their equivalents: Utpote Rosarium, like the Rosary; verbi gratia Rosarium, for example the Rosary.⁷¹” During the second session, Mgr Rendeiro expressed “the desire that the Sacred Council should see fit to enlighten the intelligence of the Church by exalting and recommending to both priests and faithful this form of devotion expressed by the Marian Rosary”. Yes, this seemed indispensable to him as there could be heard “in the choir of theologians and liturgists some discordant voices. Certain of these, falling into the excess of a sort of ‘hyper-liturgism’, declare that the recitation of the Rosary of the Blessed Virgin Mary should be discarded, particularly in public prayers, and that a truly liturgical cult is sufficient.⁷²” At the third session, Cardinal Cerejeira, in the name of thirteen bishops, made a written request for the following amendment: “To the words ‘the practices and exercises of piety’ (in n^o 67 of Lumen Gentium), let there be added: ‘among which the Rosary holds a place of distinction’, so that it reads: ‘the practices and exercises of piety, among which the Rosary holds a place of distinction’.⁷³” In support of his request, Cardinal Cerejeira advanced five reasons of both a theological and pastoral nature. It is notable however – and how regrettable! – that neither Mgr Rendeiro, the Portuguese Bishop of Faro, nor the Patriarch of Lisbon made any reference to the revelations of Fatima to justify their request. Finally, the commission drawing up the chapter on the Virgin Mary ruled that “the Council ought not to designate any devotion in particular”⁷⁴. As a result, the Rosary is not mentioned in the Acts of Vatican II.

One is no longer surprised, therefore, at the catastrophic decline of this devotion after the Council. Let us quote a single statistic. The newspaper La Croix, for 11 July 1974, recorded a decline in the Rosary production industry at Ambert: one year’s output was now equivalent to what had been manufactured and sold in just one month during the Fifties!

All the Fathers of Vatican II officially supported its minimalist teaching on the Most Blessed Virgin. When the definitive text concerning the Virgin Mary, supposedly revised in light of the juxta modum votes, was submitted to a vote on 18 November 1964, only twenty-three Fathers voted against it. And not one of these opponents created a rumpus. And yet, according to the message of Fatima, there is no crime more unforgivable in Our Lord’s eyes than that of despising His Holy Mother and outraging Her Immaculate Heart which is the sanctuary of the Holy Spirit. In her conversation with Fr Fuentes, Sister Lucy herself presented this sin as “the blasphemy against the Spirit which will not be forgiven, neither in this world nor in the next” (Mt 12.31-32).

The liturgical reform which followed the Council diminished the cult of the Virgin Mary. The motu proprio of 19 February 1969 suppressed from the Roman Missal numerous feasts including those of the Holy Name of Mary, Our Lady of Mercy, and the Seven Sorrows of the Blessed Virgin Mary⁷⁵. The Visitation was moved to 31 May, in place of Mary Queen, while the feast of “Mary Mediatrix of all graces”, formerly celebrated on that same day, disappeared altogether from the Roman Missal.

The feast of Our Lady of the Most Holy Rosary of Fatima, fixed for 13 May and granted to the diocese of Leiria by the Brief Miris Modis, of 13 December 1962, was not listed in the Roman Calendar of the universal Church⁷⁶.

Pius XII had extended the feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary to the whole world as a rite of the second class. He had responded imperfectly to the request of Sister Lucy, who had asked that it become “one of the principal feasts of Holy Church: a feast of the first class”. And the seer specified: “This desire is not solely mine. Someone placed it within me. It comes from the Most Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary.⁷⁷”

Now, the new Ordo neglected this feast: it reduced it to a simple optional memoria on the Saturday following the Second Sunday after Pentecost. This feast, lacking its own Office and Mass, was therefore relegated to a position after the feria, after the ordinary feasts of the Saints and the obligatory memorias. This optional memoria was omitted as soon as there was a conflict with another memoria.

So scandalous was this that petitions were addressed to the Vatican asking that the Immaculate Heart of Mary be again liturgically honoured and celebrated. The Roman Congregation for Divine Worship only responded, alas, in a very partial manner: by a decree dated 1 January 1996, it inscribed the commemoration of the Immaculate Heart of Mary as obligatory in the universal Roman Calendar.

“The liturgical reform”, writes Father Alonso, “undoubtedly caused Sister Lucy great personal suffering. It had failed to respect a venerable tradition that had gradually formed over the centuries around the specific liturgical signification of the feast of the Heart of Mary. Nor had it shown any respect or deference to a revelation from Heaven, one possessed of all the guarantees of the Church, indicating that devotion to this Immaculate Heart is a necessity for the Church of our time. This Heart is presented in all the richness of its eschatological hope and yet, at least in the new reform of the liturgy, this hope has been obscured.⁷⁸”

To our knowledge, Sister Lucy has never spoken enthusiastically, nor even favourably, of the Reform of the Church decreed at Vatican Council II. In her already published writings, one rarely finds any mention of Vatican II. Sister Lucy spoke of it in a letter of 16 September 1970, addressed to Mother Maria José Martins. Having explained that the prayer of the Rosary is necessary to preserve the faith, she stated:

“This is why the devil is waging war against it! And the worst of it is that he has succeeded in leading into error and deceiving souls who bear a heavy responsibility because of the position they occupy!... It is a case of the blind leading the blind... And they claim to base themselves on the Council! And they fail to see that the Sacred Council ordered the preservation of all the devotions which, over the years, have been practised in honour of the Immaculate Virgin, the Mother of God, and that the prayer of the Rosary or the chaplet is one of the principal devotions we are bound to uphold since this is what the Sacred Council and the Supreme Pontiff prescribed, namely that we preserve it.⁷⁹”

Sister Lucy referred to the Council using a term that was certainly traditional: the Sacred Council (Sag. Concilio). But this solemn formula cannot stop us noticing the limited character of this reference to Vatican II which, as we have seen, contains not a single explicit mention of the Rosary. So we are not dealing with a eulogy of the conciliar Reform. Sister Lucy was simply expressing her indignation that the progressivists were invoking directives by the Pope and the Council in order to discredit the practise of the Holy Rosary, as though it had been condemned and forbidden⁸⁰.

THE “LARGE CITY HALF IN RUINS”, STREWN WITH “CORPSES”.

The Reform of the Church undertaken by John XXIII at the opening of the Council to bring it into “symbiosis” with the modern world, a reform subsequently taken up, decelerated, directed and managed by the expert hand of Paul VI, failed to produce the fruits anticipated and announced by these two Popes. The Abbé de Nantes has often reminded his readers of this. In January 1969, he wrote:

“At the end of this third postconciliar year, we must first remark on the total, all-encompassing error of the prophets of happiness. They promised us universal peace; it was, they said, achievable and imminent. We have seen the opposite, the continuance of local wars, the exacerbation of other quarrels, and large armies taking up attack positions for a Third World War. They also told us that the peoples, once they had wider access to culture and material goods, would lose their revolutionary zest; the world was about to enter a golden age of tranquillity. Once again events have given the lie to all this; we have seen the anarchical agitations of May 68 and the protests against the ‘consumer society’, that is to say a calling into question of the Masdu humanism and progress which they all dreamed would give rise to a universal reconciliation.

“These prophets were similarly mistaken in their announcement of a springtime of the Church, an extraordinary renewal, following its return to the Gospel and its opening up to the world. It is the opposite that has proved true, from malaise to crisis and from crisis to the ‘decomposition of Catholicism’, to the ‘auto-demolition of the Church’. And, prodigious blindness, they see in this fatal malady – and as a reason for self-congratulation – the labour-pains of an imminent and miraculous childbirth.

“The immense thirst for licence and mental disorder that characterises the human animal when it is over-nourished and over-satiated has now taken possession of Churchmen. We find an admission of this in these new catechisms which have been published this year in several countries, and those countries which as yet do not have their own are working at them feverishly. These catechisms are clearly in flagrant contradiction with the Catholic catechism for which they are regarded as an urgent replacement. No matter in what ineptitudes, errors and heresies they abound, no one is willing to ban them. Rome may point out their essential shortcomings, but she dare not proscribe their use! It is ‘irreversible’. In line with Vatican II, in accordance with the synarchical pact which binds Paul VI and the episcopates of the majority, the world must be gratified and given a new religion, one that is agreeable and flattering. We are going to need a new Elijah and his zeal for God’s House.

“‘If the salt loses its savour’… We have reached this point now. 1968 presents all the symptoms of cadaveric decomposition […]. ‘Jam foetet’⁸¹, just like Lazarus after three days. After three years of reform, the Church of Vatican II already smells. It is the smell of decomposition, of the auto-demolition of religion wrought by its own ministers. The odour of putrefaction leads straight back to Rome.⁸²”

Had not Pope Paul VI himself admitted his disappointment, on 7 December 1969: “The Church is in a disturbed period of self-criticism, one might even say of self-demolition. It is an acute and complex upheaval which nobody could have foreseen after the Council. We had in mind a flowering, a healthy expansion of the conceptions ripened in the great sessions of the Council. This aspect also exists. But... we have come to notice above all its sorrowful aspect. It is as almost as if the Church were attacking herself.”

The Abbé de Nantes immediately responded to this: “Yes! it was foreseeable, it was even inevitable.⁸³” He at any rate had foreseen it… Let us listen to the public testimony of a diocesan priest at the meeting organised by the League of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, at Paris, in the great hall of the Mutualité, on 14 October 1971:

“As soon as the Council closed, one immediately noticed, in the parishes, ‘on the ground’, a startling contrast between the high-sounding optimism of the Reform’s theoreticians and the coldening of hearts, the falling-off of religious practice and general indifference. At the time I was at Les Lilas, in a good place to judge! It was the Council’s opponent who had seen things correctly. Through systematic pessimism? No, that would be a rash conclusion. He had announced as inescapable the very crisis which had come about and in the form I was observing. And he had shown in advance that it would be a direct result of the Council: logically, this Reform of the Church would be her ruin, and her ruin would bring disaster to the world. Every day, on a hundred occasions of my ministry, I was forced to accept the truth of his demonstrations: everything tended to confusion, scepticism, disorder… Six years have now passed. Today, no one disputes that there is a crisis in the Church. Everything proves that this ruin dates from the Council, especially and most cruelly the statistics. So is it still possible to deny that the Council was its direct, determinant and enduring cause?

“The Abbé de Nantes established this a priori, that is to say before events furnished the proof, simply by a detailed study of the conciliar documents. He was able see the effects in the causes themselves, just as Bainville, with incredible precision, was able to read between the lines of the Treaty of Versailles and see the series of events that, twenty years later, would give rise to the Second World War. At this level, the forecast seems almost prophetic. These specialist works honour the genius of their authors although they have little influence on the masses.

“But after the events, a posteriori, their demonstrations become blindingly obvious because they are corroborated by the facts. And it would be criminal to continue to dispute them. Does not the Gospel tell us: ‘You shall know them by their fruits…’?

“When a priest has seen for himself, on a daily basis, these fruits of the conciliar Reform – which represent a frightful decomposition of Catholicism within just five years – how could he hesitate for a second to identify this Council as the origin of all our woes?⁸⁴”

We now understand, following the revelation to the world of the Third Secret of Fatima, that the disaster occasioned by the conciliar Reform – the Holy City devastated by the Revolution of Vatican II – was shown by Our Lady to the three little shepherds, on 13 July 1917, under a symbolic figure:

“The Holy Father passed through a large city half in ruins […], he prayed for the souls of the corpses he met on his way.”

Let us follow our Brother Bruno of Jesus in his exegetical commentary on the vision:

“As revealed in the Book of the Apocalypse, ‘a large city’ in ruins and filled with corpses recalls the Rome of Nero, punished for its double crime of idolatry (Ap 17.4) and murder (Ap 17.6).

“The association of the ‘steep mountain’ and the ‘large city’ in the vision of the Secret recalls Armageddon, ‘the mountain of Megiddo’ (Ap 16.16), on which the demons assemble the kings of the earth for the final combat. This eschatological gathering had been prophesied in Ezekiel 38-39, which announces the assault in the mountains of Israel (Ez 38.8; 39.2,4,17). It is in Megiddo that the holy King Josiah, conquered and killed by Pharaoh, was long mourned by his inconsolable people (2 K 23.29-30).

“In the vision of Fatima, the ‘large city’ traversed by the Pope is Christian Rome, a figure of the Church ruined by the conciliar reform. It is the Holy City, the Catholic, Apostolic and Roman Church, in a state of auto-demolition, exposed to the smoke of Satan, on Paul VI’s very own admission, ever since that Pope himself shook its foundations, levelled its ramparts, and profaned and devastated the Sanctuary.⁸⁵”

Sister Lucy was probably alluding to this terrible disaster, the very worst possible, on 26 December 1957 when she said to Father Fuentes: “The punishment from Heaven is imminent. It will be very sad for everyone and there will be no rejoicing if the world does not first pray and do penance.⁸⁶” The messenger of Heaven spoke as a prophetess, having contemplated with fear, on 13 July 1917, the large city half in ruins, strewn with corpses.

But let us return to the exegetical commentary on the vision.

The presence of “corpses” lying on the “way” is a sign of the divine chastisement: “Therefore Yahweh’s anger burns against His people: He has stretched out His hand to strike them; the mountains tremble, and their corpses are as refuse in the midst of the streets. But His anger is not calmed, His hand is still stretched out.” (Is 5.25)

In the Old Testament, not to have a burial was the most terrible of punishments: “At that time, says Yahweh, they shall bring out from their graves the bones of the kings of Judah, the bones of princes, the bones of priests, the bones of prophets and the bones of the inhabitants of Jerusalem. And they shall spread them out before the sun, before the moon, and before the whole host of heaven, which they have served and after which they have walked, and which they have worshipped. They shall not be gathered, nor shall they be buried; they shall be as dung on the surface of the earth.” (Jr 8.1-2; cf. 9.21; 16.4; 25.33)

Does that mean that the “corpses” encountered by the Holy Father “on his way” were guilty of the same idolatry as the inhabitants of Jerusalem in the time of Jeremiah? Most definitely! Already in 1964, well before the inter-religious meetings organised by John Paul II, Rome had become the theatre of an idolatrous cult similar to that which was rampant in Jerusalem on the eve of its destruction by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BC.

“The Pope brought back from Bombay a statue of the god Krishna, the eighth incarnation of Vishnu, and this is certainly the first time that an idol has ever entered the City of God ex officio”, indignantly exclaimed the Abbé de Nantes, and he was in fact the only one, just like Jeremiah in the time of Zedekiah! “We are well on the way to integrating the Church with the United Nations”, he noted, “and to coming to a general understanding with Buddhism in Asia, Islam in Africa and Communism in Europe.⁸⁷”

“The corpses”, remarks Brother Bruno of Jesus, “are those which Saint John refers to in his letter to the Church of Sardis: ‘I know all about you: how you are reputed to be alive and yet are dead.’ (Ap 3.1)⁸⁸”

This message of Saint John’s is directly applicable to the conciliar Church, ravaged by the modernist and progressivist cancer. The works of death of this disastrous conciliar reform may be listed. Less than two years after the close of Vatican II, the Abbé de Nantes had already summarised the tragic state of affairs:

“Satan has free roam in the Church. He debauches monks and nuns, as he did in Luther’s day. Many receive Holy Communion – standing, of course! – but scarcely anyone goes to Confession. Preaching is everywhere heretical, worldly and socialist. Worship is profaned. Thus, whether they be victims or accomplices of this ‘new way of feeling, desiring and behaving’ (Paul VI, 6 January 1964), all Catholics, even the best of them, are becoming habituated to a religion which is no longer that of Jesus Christ or the saints. Should they be reminded of this religion, they will suddenly realise that they have lost it and will no longer want it. So it is that everyone marches under the banner of the Pope and the Council towards the great Apostasy.⁸⁹”

It is notable that towards the end of the Sixties, Sister Lucy was alarmed by the campaigns being waged by the progressivists, even in Portugal, against the devotion of the Holy Rosary. At that time she wrote to Father Umberto Pasquale: “We see, alas, the lamentable ruins that the demon has created.⁹⁰”

The Church was falling into ruin but only by half, because there still existed Catholics whose innocent souls had not let themselves be perverted by heresy.

“There are all those”, noted the Abbé de Nantes, “bishops, priests and faithful, who follow the movement out of obedience, of whom nothing is asked and whose understanding extends no further. ‘Blessed are the simple in spirit.’⁹¹

“In this apostasy of both the head and the members, it is miraculous to see so many good priests and faithful Catholics, the former consuming themselves in their bleak ministry, the latter practising their damaged religion. They retain faith in Christ, devotion to His Holy Mother, and belief in the Real Presence and the Holy Sacrifice. They obey their bishops blindly through fear of losing their souls. And they hate us for our terrible criticisms of the Pope, of the Pope above all, and of the bishops and of everything else! But more importantly, they condemn schism.

“God knows, however, how much we admire these priests, these members of the faithful, for they are the holiness of the Church, they are her charity.⁹²”

1. A. M. Martins, Fatima e o Coraçao de Maria, Loyola, 1984, p. 93.

2. J. Haffert, Fatima, apostolat mondial, Téqui, 1984, p. 109-110.

3. This appeal is mentioned by the Abbé Caillon in his lectures on Fatima.

4. Unfortunately, this was not the exact request of Our Lady of Fatima who had asked for the consecration of Russia, and of Russia alone!

5. Quoted by the Voz da Fatima, n^o 496, January 1964.

6. Cf. Netter, Fatima Chronik, Grafica de Leiria, 1970, p. 57.

7. The conciliar debates were published in full by the Vatican. This declaration by Cardinal Wyszinski is quoted in the Acta Synodalia sacrosancti Concilii oecumenici Vaticani II [ASCO VII], vol. III, pars I, Rome, Vatican Polyglot, 1973, p. 441-444.

8. ASCO VII, vol. III, pars I, p. 465.

9. Informations catholiques internationales, n^o 225, 1 October 1964, p. 10.

10. ACSO VII, vol. III, par I, p. 507.

11. Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques, 1966, p. 499, extracts.

12. Nevertheless, in his commentary on this speech, Laurentin had committed a major gaffe which undermined his scholarly analysis. Our expert wrote: “Paul VI no longer speaks of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, but of the Heavenly Mother, without further precision.” But Pope Paul VI had twice mentioned the Immaculate Heart of Mary in this speech.

13. Alonso, Fatima ante la Esfinge, Sol de Fatima, 1979, p. 115.

14. John XXIII, Journal de l’âme, Cerf, 1964, p. 503-504.

15. Hebblethwaite, John XXIII, Geoffrey Chapman, London, 1985, p. 318.

16. Ibid., p. 283.

17. Ibid., p. 307.

18. This speech was written by Cardinal Montini (cf. CRC n^o 97, October 1975, p. 13), but its themes matched the thinking of John XXIII who had no love for “the prophets of gloom”.

19. Résurrection, n^o 7, July 2001, p. 13 sq.

20. Résurrection, n^o 7, July 2001, p. 15.

21. Quoted by Antoine Wenger, Vatican II, chronique de la première session, Centurion, 1963, p. 207.

22. Quoted in the article “De Benoît XV à Jean XXIII. Les relations entre le Vatican et le Kremlin”, published in the Informations catholiques internationales, 1 January 1963.

23. Letter of Mgr Georges Roche to Jean Madiran, dated 14 May 1984, published in the journal Itinéraires, n^o 285, July-August 1984.

24. Sergio Trasatti, Vatican-Kremlin. Les secrets d’un face à face, Payot, 1995, p. 198.

25. Quoted by the journal Le Lorrain, 9 February 1963.

26. Georges de Nantes, “L’Église à l’heure soviétique”, CRC n^o 142, June 1979, p. 2.

27. “De Vatican I à Vatican II”, France nouvelle, n^o 900, 16 January 1963. The Saint Benedict Fraternity for a Christian Europe published on 11 April 1988 a very complete dossier on the secret agreements of 1962. This dossier proves the existence of these agreements, drawing on seven sources and fourteen different texts.

28. CRC n^o 142, p. 2.

29. ASCO VII, vol. I, pars I, p. 239.

30. Ibid., p. 241.

31. Quoted by Wenger, op. cit., p. 235; Trasatti, op. cit., p. 208.

32. Trasatti, op. cit., p. 209.

33. Cf. Wiltgen, The Rhine flows into the Tiber, Augustine Publishing Company, 1978, p. 272-3.

34. ASCO VII, vol. III, pars V, p. 378-379.

35. D. C., 1965, col. 410.

36. In his book Perche il Concilio no ha condannato il Communismo, Giovanni Scantamburlo states that 334 Fathers had supported this petition on 9 October 1965, each of them having signed a separate slip. Ten days later, 71 new petitions were presented to the General Secretariat of the Council. And subsequently, 30 more Fathers signed this petition. Wiltgen speaks throughout his account of the petition of “450 Council Fathers” (cf. Wiltgen, op. cit., p. 272-278).

37. The text of this petition was published in full in the D. C., 1966, col. 361-362.

38. The journalist Ralph Wiltgen, in Rome at the time, revealed on 23 November 1965 that this petition had been put to one side by Mgr Glorieux “who held nearly half a dozen Vatican positions” (The Rhine flows into the Tiber, p. 276). In 1985, the Abbé Pierre Caillon was able to question Mgr Glorieux. In a letter dated 17 August 1985, he explained: “Mgr Glorieux is still alive. He is now retired in Rome in a house for the clergy. I saw him in his office in Rome on Thursday, 28 March last. He admitted to me quite openly that it was he who had effected the disappearance of the petition of the bishops who were asking for Communism to be condemned. This good Mgr Glorieux told me very nicely that several attempts had been made previously to obtain the condemnation of Communism and that they had all been set aside, as they did not conform to the spirit of the Council.” (Private archives of the Little Brothers of the Sacred Heart, Fatima collection)

39. The Abbé de Nantes publicly formulated this accusation against Paul VI and Mgr Glorieux, to which no one replied. Cf. Liber accusationis in Paulum Sextum, CRC, 1973, p. 83.

40. Quoted in D. C., 1966, col. 363.

41. Ibid., col. 365.

42. “L’humanisme chrétien et Gaudium et spes”, CRC n^o 60, September 1972, p. 7.

43. ASCO VII, vol. II, pars IV, p. 51-52.

44. Constitution Gaudium et Spes, n^o 92.

45. Constitution Lumen Gentium, n^o 22.

46. Laurentin, Revue des Sciences philosophiques et théologiques [RSPT], 1966, p. 498.

47. Laurentin, La Vierge au Concile, Lethielleux, 1965, p. 175.

48. D. C., 1960, col. 1542.

49. Laurentin, RSPT, 1966, p. 498.

50. Cf. Laurentin, La Vierge au Concile, p. 9.

51. For example, by Pope Saint Pius X, in his encyclical Ad diem illum. Here is his reply to the objection of the unus Mediator of Saint Paul: Although the dispensation of graces is a right proper and peculiar to Christ, it was however given to the Virgin to share in it, being as She is “the most powerful Mediatrix and Advocate of the whole world before Her only Son”. But whereas Jesus dispenses graces as their source, as the head of the Mystical Body, Mary is as their aqueduct and channel. “It can be seen, therefore, that we are far from attributing to the Mother of God a virtue productive of grace, a virtue which belong to God alone. Nevertheless, because Mary surpasses all in holiness and in Her union with Jesus Christ, and because Jesus Christ made Her an associate in the work of redemption, She merits for us de congruo, as theologians say, what Jesus Christ merited for us de condigno, and She is the supreme minister of the dispensation of graces.”

52. Acta et documenta Concilio oecumenico Vaticano II apparando, Series II, Praeparatoria, vol. II, pars IV, Rome, Vatican Polyglot, 1968, p. 777-778.

53. Laurentin, RSPT, 1966, p. 498.

54. Extracts from Wiltgen, op. cit., p. 90-92.

55. Text distributed on 27 October 1963. Wiltgen, op. cit., p. 95.

56. Wiltgen, op. cit., p. 95.

57. Wenger, Vatican II. Chronique de la troisième session, Centurion, 1965, p. 122.

58. Ibid., p. 97-98.

59. Abbé G. de Nantes, Lettre à mes amis n^o 185, 1 October 1964. A full account of these debates on the Virgin Mary on 16 and 17 September 1964, during the 81^st and 82^nd general congregations of the Council, was published in 1973 in ASCO VII, vol. III, pars I.

60. Laurentin, La question mariale, Seuil, 1963, p. 81.

61. Ibid., p. 35-37, 81-82.

62. Cf. Wiltgen, op. cit., p. 241.

63. J. Haffert, op. cit., p. 111.

64. Laurentin, “Le chapitre marial doit-il parler de mediation?” D. C., 1964, col. 1256-1257.

65. “La très Sainte Vierge au service de l’économie du salut”, Commentary on Lumen Gentium, Unam Sanctam collection, 51C, Cerf, 1966, p. 1222-1239.

66. Abbé de Nantes, “La perfection de l’amour”, CRC n^o 61, October 1972, p. 6-7.

67. Speech of 29 September 1963.

68. Cf. ASCO VII, vol. III, pars I, p. 463-466.

69. Cf. ASCO VII, vol. II, pars VI, p. 158-160.

70. Cardinal Cerejeira simply signed a note inviting the bishops to take part in the celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of the Fatima apparitions, which was read by Cardinal Felici at the Council’s final congregation, on 6 December 1965 (cf. ASCO VII, vol. IV, pars VII, p. 642).

71. Acta congressus Mariologici mariani in Lusitania anno 1967 celebrati, vol. VI, p. 331, Romae, A. M. I., 1970.

72. ASCO VII, vol. II, pars III, p. 777-778.

73. ASCO VII, vol. III, pars II, p. 99-100.

74. J. Haffert, Marie sous le symbole du Coeur, p. 151; Fatima, apostolat mondial, p. 82 and 90.

75. Cf. Instructions officielles sur les nouveaux rites de la Messe. Le calendrier. Les traductions liturgiques. Presented by the C.N.P.L., Centurion, September 1969.

76. The feast was finally inscribed in the liturgical calendar of the universal Church, in March 2002.

77. Toute la vérité sur Fatima, vol. 3, p. 61.

78. Alonso, Fatima, Espana, Rusia, Centro Mariano, 1976, p. 43.

79. Quoted by Martins dos Reis, Uma vida ao serviço de Fatima, Porto, 1973, p. 379.

80. The seer was probably aware of a document which at the time carried great weight in Portugal: the Portuguese Bishops’ pastoral letter for the jubilee of the Fatima apparitions. She was visibly inspired by the following passages in this text: “The Council, in chapter VIII of the Constitution Lumen Gentium, exhorts the sons of the Church to ‘hold in great esteem the practices and exercises of devotion which the Magisterium of the Church has recommended over the centuries in honour of the Most Blessed Virgin’.” Quoted in the journal Fatima 50, n^o 1, 13 May 1967, p. 11, col. 1.

81. “He already smells.” (Jn 11.39)

82. CRC n^o 16, January 1969.

83. Ibid.

84. CRC n^o 50, November 1971, p. 5.

85. CRC n^o 368, June-July 2000, p. 23; CRC n^o 369, August 2000, p. 12.

86. Toute la vérité sur Fatima, vol. 3, p. 366 sq.

87. Lettre à mes amis n^o 195, 25 January 1965.

88. CRC n^o 368, p. 23.

89. Lettre à mes amis n^o 250, 25 August 1967.

90. Letter of 26 November 1970. Infra, Chapter 4, Appendix 2.

91. CRC n^o 247, October 1988, p. 11.

92. CRC n^o 245, July-August 1988, p. 22.

* * * * *

CHAPTER IV

IN PORTUGAL
THE DOGMA OF THE FAITH IS PRESERVED

ON 13 July 1917, the vision of the Third Secret showed the blessed little shepherds several “bishops, priests, men and women religious”, who were “climbing a steep mountain, at the top of which there was a large Cross of rough-hewn trunks as of a cork-tree with its bark”. This tableau can be seen as connected to Our Lady’s promise, reported by Sister Lucy in her Fourth Memoir: “In Portugal the dogma of the faith will always be preserved, etc.¹”

THE “STEEP MOUNTAIN”

Brother Bruno writes: “Portugal, and Spanish Galicia where Our Lady came to ask at Pontevedra for the Communion of Reparation of the first Saturdays of the month, and at Tuy for the consecration of Russia, are fittingly presented as ‘a steep mountain’ whose altitude decreases between the Spanish border and the Ocean, and from North to South, right down to the Serra de Aire where Fatima is situated. On this mountain, the Holy Dove was seen and heard in Her apparitions of 1917: ‘My dove, hiding in the clefts of the rocks, in the high recesses of the cliff.’ (Sg 2.14) But the ‘large Cross’ erected on the summit is even more reminiscent of Mount Calvary.

“It is here that the vision showed the children, in advance, ‘several other bishops, priests, men and women religious’ ascending in pilgrimage.²”

When he canonically recognised the apparitions of Fatima, on 13 October 1930, Mgr da Silva observed: “How prodigious is the power of the Most Holy Virgin who brings multitudes to a bare mountain (escalvada) and who, in just a few years, has transformed a place without life into a great centre of devotion, through the most astonishing miracle in the religious life of our times!³”

The apostolic nuncio of Lisbon, Mgr Beda Cardinale, who came to the Cova da Iria to preside over the pilgrimage of 13 May 1932, was amazed at the spectacle of “the immense crowd which acclaimed the Virgin Mary in a frenzy of faith and love. From a human point of view, there is nothing in Fatima to attract people. The pilgrimages are a real sacrifice; and yet, notwithstanding, the number of pilgrims is palpably growing […]. Fatima is a real blessing for Portugal. I am convinced that Mary will always protect this nation which, over the course of its millenary history, has won so many truly Christian glories. I am convinced that She will save it from the dangers which, at this grave hour, menace the whole of society.⁴”

The vision of the Third Secret presents these pilgrims in a hierarchical order, and this fits in with the chronology of the events which, following the spontaneous expansion of the pilgrimage, gradually brought bishops, priests, men and women religious to the mountain.

It would be otiose to publish the long list of prelates who made a pilgrimage to the Cova da Iria. It would however demonstrate the national and subsequently worldwide renown of Fatima, so aptly stated by Mgr Venancio in his pastoral letter of 14 April 1968: “Through the merciful choice of the Virgin Mary, our little diocese and, with it, Portugal has become a sign lifted up among the nations of the Earth (Is 5.26); and, in the Church of God, it is like an illustrious city set on a hill-top (Mt 5.14).”

But let us continue our reading of Brother Bruno of Jesus’ commentary on the Secret:

“The ‘cork-tree’ is the symbol of Portugal, just as the maple is that of Canada and the cedar that of Lebanon. The ‘rough-hewn trunks’, with their thick casing of cork, assembled to form ‘a large Cross’, represent the ‘dogma of the faith’ which will always be preserved in Portugal, under the rough bark we know it possesses, for want of liturgical dress! But ‘the bark’ protects a trunk that is perfectly smooth. When stripped away, one will discover saints: Blesseds Francisco and Jacinta, and one day Sister Lucy. They are sheltered from the world, under the bark of their apparent rusticity, while ‘several bishops, priests, men and women religious’ come to Fatima in large pilgrim crowds.⁵”

The preservation of the dogma of the faith is the first of Portugal’s privileges, whence flow others of a temporal nature: the stability and peace it enjoyed in the twentieth century, after having renewed, thanks to the apparitions of Fatima, its great tradition of public and official devotion towards the Immaculate, its Patroness, Protectress and Queen⁶.

The Abbé de Nantes writes: “Here is some surprising news: ‘In Portugal the dogma of the faith will always be preserved.’ So will it be lost elsewhere? Why will it be kept in Portugal? Because this land was consecrated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary by its bishops, its civil authorities and its unanimous people. Thus this Land of Mary, this pious People have become for the world the witnesses of Catholic fidelity and, in exchange, they remain the showcase of the graces and blessings which the Immaculate Mother of God is eager to shower on those – whether families, nations or Church – who declare themselves devoted to Her Heart.⁷”

In a conversation with Sister Lucy, probably in July 1946, Father Luis Gonzaga da Fonseca put the following question to her: “Our Lady guaranteed that the dogma of the faith would always be preserved in Portugal. What does the ‘Dogma of the faith’ mean?” Lucy replied: “True faith!”⁸

THE CATECHISM OF FATIMA

The Portuguese preserve the dogma of the faith in the exact measure that they hold fast with filial docility to the revelations of Our Lady of Fatima, “the best of catechists”⁹, as Mgr Venancio said. During his episcopate, he often recalled that “the message of Fatima encompasses a doctrinal content so vast that none of the fundamental themes of the Christian faith are missing”¹⁰. In his pastoral letter for the fiftieth anniversary of the apparitions, he declared: “Today people are searching, and with good reason, for new pastoral methods that are living and effective. But, allow me to say this, nothing is more effective than to show how Catholic dogma lies at the bottom of the Message confided to us at Fatima. Destined, by its content, for the whole world, it translates dogma and sets it before our eyes in a manner that is at once concrete and arresting.¹¹”

Observing the progress of apostasy within the Church, his successor, Mgr do Amaral, said, in 1975, in a strikingly pithy turn of phrase: “Fatima is a proclamation of faith for the Christian of our times. If there is no article in the Credo that is not questioned today, neither is there any truth of faith that is not affirmed by Fatima.¹²”

Brother Michael of the Holy Trinity published a demonstration of this in his first two volumes of The Whole Truth about Fatima. In commenting on the Angel’s words and the acts he taught the three little shepherds in 1916, and then in presenting Our Lady’s revelations at the Cova da Iria and Pontevedra, as well as the theophany of Tuy, our Brother shows, at every stage of his account, that the message of Fatima, by its theological content, is in opposition to the heresies which have invaded the Church since Vatican II: it can and it must p