As has already been noted, the Pope, Cardinal Ratzinger and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith accord a particular and exalted status to the Virgin Mary. In the effort to establish the Church in regions beyond the developed West, apparitions, manifestations or miraculous appearances of the Madonna have played a significant role. When the Assumption of Mary was officially promulgated as dogma in 1950, C. G. Jung observed that she had been ‘elevated to the status of a goddess’.3 It is in this august capacity that she has allegedly been seen with increasing frequency in Egypt, in other parts of Africa, in Vietnam, in the Philippines, in Mexico, in the fragments of what used to be Yugoslavia, even in the Russian Federation, where Rome has sought for centuries to establish supremacy over the Orthodox Church, and where, in the general disarray following the demise of the Soviet Union, a profound spiritual longing has created a happy hunting ground for proselytisers of every persuasion. In ever swelling numbers, believers today are making pilgrimages to Marian shrines often to new ones, as well as to the ancient sites.
But if Mary is associated with the conversion and consolidation of a new body of the faithful, she would also seem – for Ratzinger and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, as well as for Pope John Paul II himself – to be a harbinger of rather more disconcerting developments. According to some accounts, manifestations of the Virgin are supposed to portend the impending end of the world. According to other sources, such manifestations are alleged to presage the end of the Roman Catholic Church, or, at very least, of the Papacy. These rumours derive in large part from the mystery associated with the portentous ‘Third Prophecy of Fátima’.
The Secrets of Fátima
In May of 1916, Western civilisation seemed engaged in a process of tearing itself apart. Since February, German and French armies were grinding each other to pieces at Verdun in a battle which would end up costing more than a million lives. On the Somme, the British army was mobilising for a bloodbath of even more staggering proportions. Portugal, however, was a backwater untouched by such traumatic events. At the village of Fátima, a young shepherdess, Lúcia dos Santos, was cavorting with some friends on a remote hill when, as she subsequently testified, a copse of trees shuddered in the wind and revealed a pure white light in the depths of the foliage. The light, she said, coalesced into the form of a transparent young man who then approached the children, identified himself as the ‘Angel of Peace’ and exhorted them to prayer.
During the summer, Lúcia, accompanied this time by two younger cousins, claimed to have seen the vision again. In the autumn, the apparition came once more, holding up a chalice into which a host dripped blood from above. The apparition placed the bleeding host on Lúcia's tongue and then, after a prayer, disappeared.4
At the same spot a year later, on 13 May 1917, another vision appeared to Lúcia, then aged ten, and her two cousins, aged nine and seven respectively. This time it assumed the form, in Lúcia's words, of ‘a lady dressed all in white’, who seemed ‘more brilliant than the sun, shedding rays of light’. She was young, perhaps sixteen years of age, and held a rosary of white beads. ‘I am from Heaven,’ she reportedly said to the children.5 When Lúcia asked what she wanted, she replied with the request that the children come to the same hilltop on the thirteenth day of each of the months that followed. At the end of this time, she promised, she would identify herself.
Lúcia and her cousins complied with the instructions they had received, returning to the hilltop on the thirteenth day of the next six months. The vision appeared on schedule, accompanied by three flashes of light and once by a ‘luminous globe’, then disappeared amid claps of thunder. Not surprisingly, recent commentators have been quick to stress parallels between the children's experience and the testimony of witnesses to phenomena associated with so-called UFOs. At the time many people were sceptical of the children's accounts, and the local bishop refused to take them seriously. Local people, on the other hand, were convinced; and by the scheduled date of the last vision, 13 October 1917, a crowd of some 70,000 pilgrims had gathered from all over Portugal.
On the night of the 12th, a prodigious storm occurred. At the appointed time on the afternoon of the 13th, Lúcia and her cousins climbed their accustomed hilltop. According to Lúcia's account, the clouds parted and the woman of her previous visions reappeared. Immediately thereafter, according to an independent account:
The rain stopped suddenly, and through a rift, or hole, in the clouds the sun was seen like a silvery disc. It then seemed to rotate, paused, and rotated a second and third time, emitting rays of various colours. Then it seemed to approach the earth, radiating a red light and an intense heat. The crowd fell into a panic, thinking the world was ending, and then into tumultuous devotion.6
As the sun regained its wonted position, the terror of the pilgrims subsided. Whatever occurred had been witnessed by some 70,000 people, and there were reports of extraordinary solar phenomena from as far as forty kilometres away. Apart from the three children, however, no one seems to have seen anything unusual on the hilltop.
The children's accounts of their vision varied significantly. Lúcia later claimed to have seen the woman of her previous experiences appear first as ‘Our Lady of Sorrows’, then mutate into ‘Our Lady of Carmel’. She also claimed to have seen Saint Joseph with the infant Jesus in his arms and, presumably at some point after this, ‘Our Lord’ blessing the assembled multitude. The older of her two cousins claimed to have seen Jesus as a child standing beside St Joseph. The youngest of the three children, a little boy, said nothing at the time. A few days later, he denied having seen the ‘two Madonnas’ and ‘Our Lord’ conferring a blessing. He had witnessed, he said, only St Joseph and the child Jesus.
The younger of Lúcia's cousins died in 1919, the elder in 1920. Lúcia herself, illiterate at the time of her visions, entered a boarding school in 1921 and acquired the elements of learning. She subsequently became a Carmelite nun. Between 1936 and 1937, she attempted to describe her experience in prose. The woman, she said, was composed ‘altogether of light’, waves of ‘undulating’ light tumbling over one another. She described the woman's veil and gown as waves of running light, the woman's face as of light rather than flesh – ‘carnea luz’, or ‘flesh light’.7 The woman had identified herself as ‘Our Lady of the Rosary’ – clearly, for Roman Catholic believers, the Virgin Mary. Rather prematurely, she declared the war to have ended. In fact, on the Western Front, the bloody British offensive at Ypres had only just begun, and the major German attack of 1918 was still to come. Within a week of Lúcia's vision, Austro-German forces on the Italian Front were to launch their massive assault at Caporetto, and revolution was erupting in Russia, to be followed by four years of catastrophic civil war.
Between 1941 and 1942, with the world again in conflict, Lúcia penned a second account of her vision in 1917. She stated for the first time that the apparition at Fátima had revealed three secret messages to her – or, to be more accurate, one secret message in three parts. She would disclose the first two parts of the message, she declared, but not the third.
The first part, apparently, consisted of a vision of hell – appropriate enough for the situation in October 1917, as well as for that of the winter of 1941–2. According to the second part, world peace would ensue if a special Communion were offered at the beginning of each month and if Russia were to be consecrated to the Immaculate Heart by the Pope and all Catholic bishops – a consecration which would bring about the conversion of the country. Since the message supposedly dated from the autumn of 1917, it is not clear what Russia was to be converted from – the Orthodox Church or atheistic Bolshevism. The third part of the message Lúcia declared too terrible to be revealed.
The Bishop of Leiria feared that Lúcia might die before she could reveal the whole of the message entrusted to her. At his instigation, a local cleric persuaded her to record the dreaded third part. On 2 January 1944, she began to write it down and took an entire week to do so.8 She th
en slipped it into an envelope and sealed it with wax. In due course it was sent to the Bishop of Leiria, who received it on 17 June. Not daring to read it himself, he offered it to the Holy Office. The Holy Office inexplicably refused to accept it. The bishop placed Lúcia's envelope inside another and instructed that after his death it should be delivered to the Cardinal of Lisbon. At Lúcia's insistence, he promised the message would be divulged to the world in 1960, or on her death if it came before then.
In 1957, with Lúcia still alive, the Holy Office abruptly changed its mind and summarily requested the envelope containing her text. No indication was vouchsafed of who made this decision or why. In March, the envelope was delivered to the Papal Nuncio in Lisbon, who dispatched it to Rome. Holding the envelope up to the light, the bishop entrusted with carrying it could see a small sheet of paper. Whatever the portentous secret was, and despite the week Lucia had needed to transcribe it, it consisted of no more than some twenty-five lines of handwriting.
On 16 April 1957, the envelope was received by the Vatican, where Pope Pius XII placed it in his personal private archive, apparently without reading it. According to Cardinal Ottaviani, Prefect of the Holy Office under Pope John XXIII, the envelope was still sealed when John opened it in 1959, the year following his election as pontiff. Cardinal Ottaviani subsequently read the text himself. On 8 February 1960, it was announced that public disclosure of the ‘Third Secret of Fátima’ would be delayed indefinitely.
Until he died in 1963, John XXIII kept Lúcia's text in a drawer of his desk. Immediately following his election, Pope Paul VI demanded to see it. He read it but refused to speak about it. On 11 February 1967, Cardinal Ottaviani reiterated the Vatican's earlier decision. There would be no disclosure of Lúcia's text. The secret was to remain secret. On 13 October of that year – the fiftieth anniversary of Lúcia's vision – Pope Paul VI visited Fátima, where a shrine and a basilica had been erected during the intervening half century. In front of an audience of a million pilgrims, the Pope conducted a public Mass and offered prayers for world peace.
On 13 May 1981, the sixty-fifth anniversary of Lúcia's first vision, Pope John Paul II, on a visit to Portugal, was wounded by the bullet of a would-be assassin. In the aftermath of this trauma, he, too, read Lúcia's text, apparently requiring the aid of a Portuguese translator for some of the nuances. Cardinal Ratzinger read it as well. A year later, on 13 May 1982, the Pope visited Fátima, to thank the Virgin ‘whose hand had miraculously guided the bullet’.9
In 1984, an Italian journalist, Vittorio Messori, was granted a lengthy interview with Ratzinger and probed the cardinal insistently on the ‘Third Secret of Fátima’. When asked whether he had read Lúcia's text, Ratzinger replied curtly and without elaboration that he had. Why would it not be made public? Did it reveal something terrible? Ratzinger replied evasively:
If that were so… that after all would only confirm the part of the message of Fátima already known. A stern warning has been launched from that place that is directed against the prevailing frivolity, a summons to the seriousness of life, of history, to the perils that threaten humanity.10
There was, then, Signor Messori pursued, to be no publication? Ratzinger this time answered somewhat more explicitly:
The Holy Father deems that it would add nothing to what a Christian must know from revelation and also from the Marian apparitions approved by the Church in their known contents, which only reconfirmed the urgency of penance, conversion, forgiveness, fasting. To publish the ‘third secret’ would mean exposing the Church to the danger of sensationalism, exploitation of the contents.11
When pressed on a possible political dimension to the ‘secret’ – one that might, for example, pertain to what was then the Soviet Union – Ratzinger replied he was not in a position to elaborate any further and firmly refused to discuss other particulars. Elsewhere, however, he stated that
one of the signs of our times is that the announcements of ‘Marian apparitions’ are multiplying all over the world. For example, reports are arriving from Africa and from other continents at the section of the Congregation that is competent to deal with such reports.12
And he vouchsafed something purporting to be an interpretation:
The correct evaluation of messages such as those of Fátima can represent one form of our answer: the Church hearkening to the message of Christ, delivered through Mary to our time, feels the threat to all and to each individual and responds with a decisive conversion and penance.13
In a number of his own statements, Pope John Paul II echoes the foreboding that suffuses Ratzinger's words. On his visit to the site of Lúcia's vision in 1982, he declared that ‘Mary's message of Fátima is still more relevant than it was sixty-five years ago. It is still more urgent.’14 A year and a half later, in December 1983, the Pope said: ‘Precisely at the end of the second millennium there accumulate on the horizon of all mankind enormously threatening clouds, and darkness falls upon human souls.’15 In his book, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, John Paul wrote that ‘Mary appeared to the three children of Fátima in Portugal and spoke to them words that now, at the end of this century, seem close to their fulfilment’.16 In a Catholic magazine he was quoted as warning that apparitions of Mary around the world are: ‘A sign of the times… of terrible times.’17 As for the concealed part of Lúcia's message, the Pope is said to worry about it ‘daily’.
There has been no shortage of speculation about the ‘Third Secret of Fátima’. In certain more extreme quarters, it has been whispered to forecast that the devil, or perhaps the Antichrist, will usurp control of the Papacy. Other commentators have suggested somewhat less apocalyptic interpretations – a general loss of faith, or a loss of faith specifically among the Catholic clergy, or a dismantling of the Papacy, or simply internal conflict within the Church. Shortly before his death in 1981 Father Joaquim Alonso, an acknowledged expert on Fátima who frequently met and spoke with Lúcia, wrote:
It is thus entirely probable that the text of the Third Secret makes concrete allusion to the crisis of Faith within the Church and to the negligence of the Pastors themselves… internal conflicts in the bosom of the Church herself and of grave pastoral negligence on the part of the upper hierarchy… deficiencies of the upper hierarchy of the Church.18
Because of their importance to Cardinal Ratzinger and to recent Popes, and because of the mystery (and often spurious mystification) associated with them, the visions of Fátima enjoy a special, even sacrosanct, place in certain enclaves of the Church today. But the Church still endeavours to purvey a façade of stability, still endeavours to live up to the image of an ark breasting the sea of time; and this tends to obscure the fact that Catholicism is subject to its own forms of apocalyptic fundamentalism, which are often as extreme as those to be found in many independent fundamentalist sects. Like such sects, factions within the Church are prey to apocalyptic fears and the conviction of living through the ‘Last Times’, or the ‘Final Days’. This sense of impending doom runs through much fringe devotional Catholic literature – and so, too, do apparitions of the Virgin acting as harbinger. Indeed, such literature often teeters on the brink of heresy, on the creation of a new goddess cult. The line dividing the Queen of Heaven from the full-fledged Mother Goddesses of antiquity can often become blurred.
It is in this context that the apparitions of the Virgin at Fátima must be placed. The visions at Fátima were not unique, not isolated phenomena. On the contrary, they conform recognisably to a pattern of Marian apparitions extending back at least to the nineteenth century. Since 1830, nearly ninety years before Lúcia's experience at Fátima, the Virgin had been uttering political pronouncements fraught with dire apocalyptic admonitions.
In Paris, in the Rue du Bac, on the evening of 18 July 1830, a nun named Catherine Labouré was awakened by the vision of a child, perhaps five years old, dressed in white. The child, she reported, led her to the convent's chapel, where, she was told, ‘the Blessed Virgin is waiting for you’.
On this first appearance, the Madonna's advice was wholly personal, intended merely to aid Catherine in her novitiate. Some months later, however, the Virgin appeared again, this time with streams of light issuing from her hands. She confronted the nun with a vision of two hearts – the heart of Jesus wrapped with thorns and her own, pierced by a sword to represent her suffering – and exhorted Catherine to have a medal struck which enshrined the occasion. The medal has subsequently become known as ‘the medal of the Immaculate Conception’.19 And on this appearance, the Virgin also vouchsafed a commentary on the struggle between righteousness and wickedness then occurring in the world at large. The times, she declared, were evil. Misfortunes would fall upon France. The throne would be overturned. The entire world would be overcome by evils of all kinds.
Modern Catholic apocalyptic commentators invoke the apparition of the Rue du Bac as a defining moment. The Virgin, they believe, came to warn the world that from this point on, ‘evil’ would present itself to humanity as ‘goodness’ and subvert the divine order by deception. According to one writer,
evil would be extolled as a modern ‘good’ – in the form of many liberalisms – and God would be subjugated. Little seeds of the occult, spores from certain secret societies like the Masons, would eventually germinate into a large forest, altering the landscape of politics and human thought.20
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