One of the most well-known tidbits of Catholic history is the “Third Secret of Fatima”. Fátima is a village in the Oeste e Vale do Tejo region of Portugal, where the Virgin Mary appeared to three shepherd children in 1917: Francisco de Jesus Marto, Jacinta de Jesus Marto and Lúcia de Jesus Rosa dos Santos. The former two have been beatified by John Paul II in 2000 (and invalidly “canonized” by Antipope Bergoglio in 2017).
The children received a three-part secret (also known as three secrets) from Mary. The first secret was a vision of Hell. The second one was the devotion to Mary’s Immaculate Heart and a prophecy about World War II. The third secret was not revealed at first. It was to be released in 1960 or at the death of Lúcia, whichever occurred first, but that didn’t happen. On June 26, 2000, the Vatican released an alleged third secret. That secret was a vision, where a “bishop dressed in white” walked through a half-destroyed city. He went up a steep mountain, knelt down in front of a large wooden cross, and was shot by soldiers.
Ever since the “third secret” was allegedly released, there has been much debate about its authenticity. In this article, I give some quotes from people who have read the third secret in advance. What they said is at odds with the release of 2000.
This article is based on “The devil’s final battle: how rejection of the Fatima prophecies imminently threatens the church and the world, and, what you can do about it to protect yourself and your family” (Internet Archive, book to borrow) by Father Paul Kramer. Kramer is an Irish priest, who assisted Father Nicholas Gruner, a Canadian priest, at the Fatima Center, which was an organization dedicated to spreading the message of Fatima.
The Third Secret was about some sort of apostasy in the Church
There are multiple witnesses that the topic of the Third Secret is some sort of apostasy in the Church.
“Its content concerns only our faith. To identify the [Third] Secret with catastrophic announcements or with a nuclear holocaust is to deform the meaning of the message. The loss of faith of a continent is worse than the annihilation of a nation; and it is true that faith is continually diminishing in Europe.”
Alberto Cosme do Amaral, bishop of Leiria between 1972 and 1993, died 2005, in a speech given in Vienna on September 10, 1984 (p. 35)
(The Diocese of Leiria was renamed the Diocese of Leiria–Fátima in 1984.)
“It [the Third Secret] has nothing to do with Gorbachev. The Blessed Virgin was alerting us against apostasy in the Church.”
Cardinal Silvio Oddi (d. 2001) to the journal Il Sabato of March 17, 1990 (p. 35)
“In the Third Secret it is foretold, among other things, that the great apostasy in the Church will begin at the top.”
Cardinal Mario Luigi Ciappi OP (d. 1996), personal theologian of Pius XII and the next four popes in a private letter to Professor Baumgartner (p. 36)
“[A]ccording to the judgment of the Popes, it [the Third Secret] adds nothing different to what a Christian must know concerning what derives from Revelation: i.e., a radical call for conversion; the absolute importance of history; the dangers threatening the faith and the life of the Christian, and therefore of the world. And then the importance of the ‘novissimi’ [the last events at the end of time]. If it is not made public – at least for the time being – it is in order to prevent religious prophecy from being mistaken for a quest for the sensational [literally: ‘for sensationalism’]. But the things contained in this ‘Third Secret’ correspond to what has been announced in Scripture and has been said again and again in many other Marian apparitions, first of all that of Fatima in what is already known of what its message contains. Conversion and penitence are the essential condition for ‘salvation’.” Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) in Jesus magazine of November 11, 1984 (p. 197)
The Third Secret was written on a single sheet of paper
There are multiple witnesses that the topic of the Third Secret was written on a single sheet of paper and not four pages on one folio, like the one released in 2000.
“And then, what did she [Lucy] do to obey the Most Holy Virgin? She wrote on a sheet of paper, in Portuguese, what the Holy Virgin had asked her to tell…”
Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani (d. 1979) at a press conference on February 11, 1967 (p. 28)
Bishop João Pereira Venâncio (Bishop of Leiria 1958-1972) did not read the Third Secret, but:
“Bishop Venancio related that once he was by himself, he took the great envelope of the Secret and tried to look through it and see the contents. In the bishop’s large envelope he discerned a smaller envelope, that of Lucy, and inside this envelope an ordinary sheet of paper with margins on each side of three quarters of a centimeter. He took the trouble to note the size of everything. Thus the final Secret of Fatima was written on a small sheet of paper.” (p. 29)
The pilgrimage church in Fátima, Portugal. Image taken by Konrad Marciniak in 2006, on Flickr here, under the CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0 license.