The Three Secrets of Fatima

Lucia dos Santos, the eldest and only long-lived survivor of the three children who reported the 1917 apparitions, wrote down what she said the Virgin had told them in three parts, the first two in a 1941 memoir and the third in a sealed document in 1944. The first secret was a vision of hell. The second predicted that the First World War would end but that a worse one would follow, during the reign of Pius XI, unless people stopped offending God, together with a sign to precede it, an unusual night lit by an unknown light, which believers later matched to a bright aurora borealis seen across much of Europe in January 1938. The same text asked that Russia be consecrated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, warning that without it Russia would spread its errors through the world.

Lucia sealed the third part and gave it to the Bishop of Leiria, who forwarded it, unopened, to the Vatican in 1957. John XXIII read it in 1959 and chose not to publish it; Paul VI and John Paul I likewise left it sealed. John Paul II read it shortly after the 1981 attempt on his life and, in 2000, had the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith release the full text with a theological commentary. It describes a symbolic vision of a bishop dressed in white walking through a ruined city and being killed by soldiers, which the Vatican's published commentary reads as the assassination attempt on John Paul II, which took place on 13 May, the anniversary of the first apparition.

John Paul II attributed his survival to what he called a maternal hand guiding the bullet, and the Vatican's 2000 commentary treats the third secret as substantially fulfilled once read against the assassination attempt. That reading has not closed the question for everyone. Because the text stayed sealed for fifty six years and the Vatican released only a paraphrase of part of it, not the full document, before 2000, a strand of traditionalist Catholic opinion has argued for decades that the released text is incomplete or that a further passage concerning the Church itself was withheld. Cardinal Ratzinger, writing in the Vatican's own 2000 commentary, addressed the claim directly and denied anything had been withheld; those who hold the withholding view have continued to reject that denial rather than treat it as settling the matter.

A second, separate dispute concerns the consecration of Russia the second secret requested. Lucia, still living when John Paul II performed a general consecration of the world in 1984 with the bishops of the world joining him, stated that she considered the request fulfilled, though the public act did not name Russia specifically the way earlier private accounts of her instructions had described. Some Catholics continue to hold that no consecration meeting the precise terms Lucia recorded has been performed, a position the Holy See has neither endorsed nor moved to resolve by repeating the act in the disputed form.