The Three Secrets of Fátima consist of a series of visions and prophecies given by an apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary to three young Portuguese shepherds, Lúcia Santos and her cousins Jacinta and Fransisco Marto, starting on May 13,1917. The three children claimed to have been visited by a Marian apparition six times between May and October 1917. The apparition is now popularly known as Our Lady of Fátima.
According to the official interpretation, the three secrets involve; Hell, World War I and World War II, and the shooting of Pope John Paul II.
On July 13, 1917, around noon, the lady is said to have entrusted the
children with three secrets. Two of the secrets were revealed in 1941 in
a document written by Lúcia, at the request of José da Silva, Bishop of Leiria, to assist with the publication of a new edition of a book on Jacinta.
When asked by the Bishop of Leiria in 1943 to reveal the third secret,
Lúcia struggled for a short period, being "not yet convinced that God
had clearly authorized her to act." However, in October 1943 the Bishop of Leiria ordered her to put it in writing. Lucia then wrote the secret down and sealed it in an envelope not to be opened until 1960, when "it will appear clearer." The text of the third secret was officially released by Pope John Paul II in 2000, although some claim that it was not the entire secret revealed by Lucia, despite repeated assertions from the Vatican to the contrary.
Here is the COMPLETE
TRANSLATION OF ORIGINAL TEXT of the Third Secret of Fatima.
VATICAN
CITY, JUNE 26, 2000 (VIS) - Given below is the complete translation of the
original Portuguese text of the third part of the secret of Fatima, revealed
to the three shepherd children at Cova da Iria-Fatima on July 13, 1917, and
committed to paper by Sr. Lucia on January 3, 1944:
"I
write in obedience to you, my God, who command me to do so through his Excellency
the Bishop of Leiria and through your Most Holy Mother and mine.
"After
the two parts which I have already explained, at the left of Our Lady and
a little above, we saw an Angel with a flaming sword in his left hand; flashing,
it gave out flames that looked as though they would set the world on fire;
but they died out in contact with the splendor that Our Lady radiated towards
him from her right hand: pointing to the earth with his right hand, the Angel
cried out in a loud voice: 'Penance, Penance, Penance!'. And we saw in an
immense light that is God: 'something similar to how people appear in a mirror
when they pass in front of it' a Bishop dressed in White 'we had the impression
that it was the Holy Father'. Other Bishops, Priests, men and women Religious
going up a steep mountain, at the top of which there was a big Cross of rough-hewn
trunks as of a cork-tree with the bark; before reaching there the Holy Father
passed through a big city half in ruins and half trembling with halting step,
afflicted with pain and sorrow, he prayed for the souls of the corpses he
met on his way; having reached the top of the mountain, on his knees at the
foot of the big Cross he was killed by a group of soldiers who fired bullets
and arrows at him, and in the same way there died one after another the other
Bishops, Priests, men and women Religious, and various lay people of different
ranks and positions. Beneath the two arms of the Cross there were two Angels
each with a crystal aspersorium in his hand, in which they gathered up the
blood of the Martyrs and with it sprinkled the souls that were making their
way to God."
A careful reading of the text of the so-called third 'secret' of
Fatima ... will probably prove disappointing or surprising after all the
speculation it has stirred. No great mystery is revealed; nor is the
future unveiled.
After explaining the differences between public and private
revelations, he cautions people not to see in the message a determined
future event:
The purpose of the vision is not to show a film of an irrevocably
fixed future. Its meaning is exactly the opposite: it is meant to
mobilize the forces of change in the right direction. Therefore we must
totally discount fatalistic explanations of the "secret", such as, for
example, the claim that the would-be assassin of May13,1981 was merely
an instrument of the divine plan guided by Providence
and could not therefore have acted freely, or other similar ideas in
circulation. Rather, the vision speaks of dangers and how we might be
saved from them.
The concluding part of the 'secret' uses images which Lucia may have
seen in devotional books and which draw their inspiration from
long-standing intuitions of faith.
As for the meaning of the message:
What remains was already evident when we began our reflections on the
text of the 'secret': the exhortation to prayer as the path of
'salvation for souls' and, likewise, the summons to penance and
conversion.
Third Secret controversy
The Holy See withheld the Third Secret until June 26, 2000, despite
Lúcia's declaration that it should be released to the public after 1960.
Some sources, including Canon Barthas and Cardinal Ottaviani,
said that Lúcia insisted to them it must be released by 1960, saying
that, "by that time, it will be more clearly understood", and, "because
the Blessed Virgin wishes it so."
When 1960 arrived, rather than releasing the Third Secret, the Vatican
published an official press release stating that it was "most probable
the Secret would remain, forever, under absolute seal." After this announcement, immense speculation over the content of the secret materialized. According to the New York Times,
speculation over the content of the secret ranged from "worldwide
nuclear annihilation to deep rifts in the Roman Catholic Church that
lead to rival papacies."
The release of the text sparked immediate criticism, even outrage,
from the Catholic Church in Portugal. Clergy as well as laypeople had
been outraged that the text had been read in Rome and not at the Fatima
shrine in Portugal where the reported events took place. Portuguese
Catholics responded to the release of the text with disbelief, saying
that if the words did not concern some kind of terrible catastrophe such
as war, holocaust or apocalypse, there had been no reason for the
Vatican to keep them secret. The New York Times for June 29, 2000,
reported that "The revelation on Monday that there were no doomsday
predictions has provoked angry reactions from the Portuguese church over
the decision to keep the prophecy secret for half a century."
Portuguese newspapers reported that many people felt "dismayed, cheated,
and betrayed" by the news.
Some sources claim that the four-page, handwritten text of the Third Secret released by the Vatican in the year 2000 is not the real secret, or at least not the full secret.
These sources contend that the Third Secret is actually composed of two
texts, where one of these texts is the published four-page vision, and
the other is a single-page letter containing the words of the Virgin
Mary that has been concealed.
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