Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link. Need an account? Click here to sign up. Download Free PDF. Kevin Symonds. A short summary of this paper. Download Download PDF. Translate PDF. Symonds, M. I hope that you find the talk to be thought-provoking and challenging. Much mystery, suspense, intrigue and sensational speculation have surrounded the third part of the secret for several decades.
Let us begin by pointing out the present status quaestionis of the discussions. In order to demonstrate this reality, let us examine, briefly, the two positions, beginning with the first one mentioned above. In the booklet The Message of Fatima, the Holy See released the text of the third part of the secret. At the time of its publication, certain circles of Catholics were incredulous of the booklet and immediately questioned the Vatican, believing there to be more revelatory text than what was published.
A particular point, as stated earlier, was that the events to which the text refers now seem to pertain to the past, specifically the twentieth century. 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. VIS Full Text of the Third Secret of Fatima not revealed? In a interview for the German magazine Stimme des Glaubens published in October , John Paul II was asked explicitly to speak about the third secret.
He said: " Because of the seriousness of its contents, in order not to encourage the world wide power of Communism to carry out certain coups, my predecessors in the chair of Peter have diplomatically preferred to withhold its publication. On the other hand, it should be sufficient for all Christians to know this much: if there is a message in which it is said that the oceans will flood entire sections of the earth; that, from one moment to the other, millions of people will perish Many want to know merely out of curiosity, or because of their taste for sensationalism, but they forget that 'to know' implies for them a responsibility.
It is dangerous to want to satisfy one's curiosity only, if one is convinced that we can do nothing against a catastrophe that has been predicted. Pray, pray and ask for nothing else. Put everything in the hands of the Mother of God.
Through your prayers and mine, it is possible to alleviate this tribulation, but it is no longer possible to avert it, because it is only in this way that the Church can be effectively renewed. How many times, indeed, has the renewal of the Church been effected in blood?
This time, again, it will not be otherwise. We must be strong, we must prepare ourselves, we must entrust ourselves to Christ and to His holy Mother, and we must be attentive, very attentive, to the prayer of the Rosary. A news article quoted former Philippine ambassador to the Vatican, Howard Dee, as saying that Cardinal Ratzinger had personally confirmed to him that the messages of Akita and Fatima are "essentially the same.
The third message on October 13, , the actual anniversary of the final visions and miracle of Fatima is as follows: "As I told you, if men do not repent and better themselves, the Father will inflict a terrible punishment on all humanity. It will be a punishment greater than the deluge, such as one will never have seen before.
Fire will fall from the sky and will wipe out a great part of humanity, the good as well as the bad, sparing neither priests nor faithful. The survivors will find themselves so desolate that they will envy the dead. The only arms which will remain for you will be the Rosary and the Sign left by my Son. Each day, recite the prayers of the Rosary. With the Rosary, pray for the Pope, the bishops and the priests.
The work of the devil will infiltrate even into the Church in such a way that one will see cardinals opposing cardinals, and bishops against other bishops. The priests who venerate me will be scorned and opposed by their Confreres.
The Church and altars will be vandalized. The Church will be full of those who accept compromises and the demon will press many priests and consecrated souls to leave the service of the Lord. Prophecy of St. Knowing this first: That in the last days there shall come deceitful scoffers, walking after their own lusts, saying: Where is his promise or his coming? For since the time that the fathers slept, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.
For this they are wilfully ignorant of: That the heavens were before, and the earth out of water and through water, consisting by the word of God: Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished. But the heavens and the earth which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of the ungodly men. Decoding the Third Secret of Fatima revealed to the three shepherd children visionaries at Cova da Iria-Fatima, Portugal, on July 13, , and committed to paper by Sr.
The Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to three shepherd children at Fatima, Portugal, 6 times only on the thirteenth day of six consecutive months in , beginning on May Marian Apparitions of the 20th Century a message of urgency. Worldwide, reports of apparitions of Jesus and Mary are surfacing. Discover in this award-winning documentary some of the most fascinating apparitions of the 20th century and the urgency of the message Heaven is giving to the world.
If men only knew what eternity is, they would do everything in their power to change their lives. Is humanity on the verge of self-destruction? Can the world be delivered from the fear engulfing it today? Libor Brom. Text of The Third Secret of Fatima. The Third Secret and Pope - May 13, Catholic Latest News. Statues of Mary. We are reproducing it here for the benefit of our readers. According to Our Lady's instructions, wasn't it supposed to be revealed in ?
And what will happen in the Church? It is dangerous to want to satisfy one's curiosity only, if one is convinced that we can do nothing aganst a catastrophe that has been predicted.
Put everything in the hands of the Mother of God! Through your prayers and mine, it is possible to alleviate this tribulation , but it is no longer possible to avert it, because it is only in this way that the Church can be effectively renewed.
The Blessed Virgin Mary appeared and told her on August 22, ". Russia with her secret armies will battle America: will overrun Europe. The river Rhine will be overflowing with corpses and blood. Italy will also be harassed by a great revolution, and the Pope will suffer terribly. A great revolution is going on in Rome! They are entering the Vatican. The Pope is all alone; he is praying.
They are holding the Pope. They take him by force. The prophetic word is a warning or a consolation, or both together. To interpret the signs of the times in the light of faith means to recognize the presence of Christ in every age. In these reflections we have sought so far to identify the theological status of private revelations.
Before undertaking an interpretation of the message of Fatima, we must still attempt briefly to offer some clarification of their anthropological psychological character. It is clear that in the visions of Lourdes, Fatima and other places it is not a question of normal exterior perception of the senses: the images and forms which are seen are not located spatially, as is the case for example with a tree or a house.
Therefore we are dealing with the middle category, interior perception. For the visionary, this perception certainly has the force of a presence, equivalent for that person to an external manifestation to the senses.
Interior vision does not mean fantasy, which would be no more than an expression of the subjective imagination. It means rather that the soul is touched by something real, even if beyond the senses. This is why there is a need for an interior vigilance of the heart, which is usually precluded by the intense pressure of external reality and of the images and thoughts which fill the soul. The person is led beyond pure exteriority and is touched by deeper dimensions of reality, which become visible to him.
Perhaps this explains why children tend to be the ones to receive these apparitions: their souls are as yet little disturbed, their interior powers of perception are still not impaired. Mt But it also has its limitations.
Even in exterior vision the subjective element is always present. We do not see the pure object, but it comes to us through the filter of our senses, which carry out a work of translation. This is still more evident in the case of interior vision, especially when it involves realities which in themselves transcend our horizon. The subject, the visionary, is still more powerfully involved. He sees insofar as he is able, in the modes of representation and consciousness available to him.
In the case of interior vision, the process of translation is even more extensive than in exterior vision, for the subject shares in an essential way in the formation of the image of what appears. He can arrive at the image only within the bounds of his capacities and possibilities. This can be demonstrated in all the great visions of the saints; and naturally it is also true of the visions of the children at Fatima.
The images described by them are by no means a simple expression of their fantasy, but the result of a real perception of a higher and interior origin. But neither should they be thought of as if for a moment the veil of the other world were drawn back, with heaven appearing in its pure essence, as one day we hope to see it in our definitive union with God.
Rather the images are, in a manner of speaking, a synthesis of the impulse coming from on high and the capacity to receive this impulse in the visionaries, that is, the children. For this reason, the figurative language of the visions is symbolic. This compression of time and place in a single image is typical of such visions, which for the most part can be deciphered only in retrospect.
Not every element of the vision has to have a specific historical sense. It is the vision as a whole that matters, and the details must be understood on the basis of the images taken in their entirety. I would just like to recall briefly the most significant point. For one terrible moment, the children were given a vision of hell. A brief comment may suffice to explain this. It might be objected that we should not place a human being between ourselves and Christ.
In the Apostle they could see concretely what it meant to follow Christ. But from whom might we better learn in every age than from the Mother of the Lord?
As is clear from the documentation presented here, the interpretation offered by Cardinal Sodano in his statement of 13 May was first put personally to Sister Lucia. Sister Lucia responded by pointing out that she had received the vision but not its interpretation.
The interpretation, she said, belonged not to the visionary but to the Church. After reading the text, however, she said that this interpretation corresponded to what she had experienced and that on her part she thought the interpretation correct. In what follows, therefore, we can only attempt to provide a deeper foundation for this interpretation, on the basis of the criteria already considered.
This is the correct response to this moment of history, characterized by the grave perils outlined in the images that follow. Let us now examine more closely the single images. The angel with the flaming sword on the left of the Mother of God recalls similar images in the Book of Revelation. This represents the threat of judgement which looms over the world.
Today the prospect that the world might be reduced to ashes by a sea of fire no longer seems pure fantasy: man himself, with his inventions, has forged the flaming sword. In this way, the importance of human freedom is underlined: the future is not in fact unchangeably set, and the image which the children saw is in no way a film preview of a future in which nothing can be changed. Indeed, the whole point of the vision is to bring freedom onto the scene and to steer freedom in a positive direction.
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. Rather, the vision speaks of dangers and how we might be saved from them. The next phrases of the text show very clearly once again the symbolic character of the vision: God remains immeasurable, and is the light which surpasses every vision of ours.
Human persons appear as in a mirror. We must always keep in mind the limits in the vision itself, which here are indicated visually. The place of the action is described in three symbols: a steep mountain, a great city reduced to ruins and finally a large rough-hewn cross.
The mountain and city symbolize the arena of human history: history as an arduous ascent to the summit, history as the arena of human creativity and social harmony, but at the same time a place of destruction, where man actually destroys the fruits of his own work.
The city can be the place of communion and progress, but also of danger and the most extreme menace. The cross transforms destruction into salvation; it stands as a sign of history's misery but also as a promise for history.
The Pope seems to precede the others, trembling and suffering because of all the horrors around him. Not only do the houses of the city lie half in ruins, but he makes his way among the corpses of the dead.
The Church's path is thus described as a Via Crucis , as a journey through a time of violence, destruction and persecution. The history of an entire century can be seen represented in this image. Just as the places of the earth are synthetically described in the two images of the mountain and the city, and are directed towards the cross, so too time is presented in a compressed way.
In the vision we can recognize the last century as a century of martyrs, a century of suffering and persecution for the Church, a century of World Wars and the many local wars which filled the last fifty years and have inflicted unprecedented forms of cruelty. In the Via Crucis of an entire century, the figure of the Pope has a special role. In his arduous ascent of the mountain we can undoubtedly see a convergence of different Popes.
Beginning from Pius X up to the present Pope, they all shared the sufferings of the century and strove to go forward through all the anguish along the path which leads to the Cross. In the vision, the Pope too is killed along with the martyrs. It is a consoling vision, which seeks to open a history of blood and tears to the healing power of God. Beneath the arms of the cross angels gather up the blood of the martyrs, and with it they give life to the souls making their way to God.
Here, the blood of Christ and the blood of the martyrs are considered as one: the blood of the martyrs runs down from the arms of the cross. The martyrs die in communion with the Passion of Christ, and their death becomes one with his. For the sake of the body of Christ, they complete what is still lacking in his afflictions cf. Col Their life has itself become a Eucharist, part of the mystery of the grain of wheat which in dying yields abundant fruit.
The blood of the martyrs is the seed of Christians, said Tertullian. As from Christ's death, from his wounded side, the Church was born, so the death of the witnesses is fruitful for the future life of the Church. The loving arms of God welcome not only those who suffer like Lazarus, who found great solace there and mysteriously represents Christ, who wished to become for us the poor Lazarus.
There is something more: from the suffering of the witnesses there comes a purifying and renewing power, because their suffering is the actualization of the suffering of Christ himself and a communication in the here and now of its saving effect. What does it say to us? Insofar as individual events are described, they belong to the past. Those who expected exciting apocalyptic revelations about the end of the world or the future course of history are bound to be disappointed.
Fatima does not satisfy our curiosity in this way, just as Christian faith in general cannot be reduced to an object of mere curiosity. What does this mean? The Heart open to God, purified by contemplation of God, is stronger than guns and weapons of every kind. The Evil One has power in this world, as we see and experience continually; he has power because our freedom continually lets itself be led away from God.
But since God himself took a human heart and has thus steered human freedom towards what is good, the freedom to choose evil no longer has the last word. The message of Fatima invites us to trust in this promise.
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