“The opaque sphere moved outward slightly, either spinning, or moving from left to right and vice versa. But within the sphere, you could see marked movements with total clarity and without interruption.”—Pope Pius XII, after the sighting on October 30–31, 1950[i]
The Miracle of the Sun was an Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAP) witnessed on October 13, 1917, by up to one hundred thousand people gathered near Fátima, Portugal. Several newspaper reporters in attendance recorded testimony from people who claimed to have witnessed an extraordinary aerial phenomenon in which a silvery disc flew about the sky. Of course, this was long before the term “flying saucer” was coined, and many thought the disc was the sun. Also, because it had been raining and the clouds broke just as the phenomenon occurred, many believed it was a solar miracle. However, if the sun had actually moved in the described manner, the gravitational effects would have devastated the Earth. Even so, the sighting was officially declared a miracle by the Roman Catholic Church in 1930. During a commemorative celebration on October 13, 1951, the papal legate, Cardinal Tedeschini, told the million people gathered at Fátima that Pope Pius XII had witnessed the same miracle of the sun from the Vatican gardens thirty-three years later, in 1950.[ii]
Mass UFO sighting, Fátima, Portugal, October 13, 1917
While the bulk of this entry will discuss the Fátima sighting in 1917, a lesser-known fact is that thirty-three years later, the pope claimed to have seen the same thing above the Vatican gardens in Rome. A note signed by Pope Pius XII states that on October 31, 1950, “The sun, which was still quite high, looked like a pale, opaque sphere, entirely surrounded by a luminous circle.”[iii] The disc-shaped object “moved outward slightly, either spinning, or moving from left to right and vice versa. But within the sphere, you could see marked movements with total clarity and without interruption.”[iv] That this sort of Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon (UAP) is associated with Mary is astonishing; however, what makes this especially interesting is that this pope approved the Fátima apparitions in 1940 and then consecrated the entire world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary two years later. More provocative is that he saw the spinning spherical anomaly on the day he defined the dogma of the Assumption of Mary—the Catholic belief that Mary ascended bodily into heaven—which he, himself, made official dogma shortly thereafter. In other words, this UFO sighting inspired the pope to promulgate the dogma of the Assumption! Considering Constantine’s fourth-century sighting got it started, the event in Fátima, and all the sightings over the Vatican, Roman Catholicism arguably qualifies as a UFO religion.
What this suggests is that the entities behind the aerial phenomenon are influencing Catholic dogmas. Other officially recognized apparitions are similarly suspicious. Every year, nearly 6 million pilgrims visit Lourdes, France, because Mary was said to appear there. People report being healed from diseases and seeing apparitions of her. However, few Catholics are aware of the origin of “Our Lady of Lourdes.” The apparition first appeared to an impressionable teenager, Bernadette Soubirous, under very questionable circumstances. But what is astounding is that Bernadette originally never believed it to be Mary—that is, until she was pressured by a local priest. According to Lynn Picknett’s excellent book on the paranormal, Flights of Fancy:
In February 1858, fourteen-year-old Bernadette Soubirous had discovered a strange creature, apparently suspended between the branches of a tree. It glowed, smiled and beckoned. The future Catholic Saint did not, as in the Hollywood version, fall enraptured to her knees, but ran home to grab a bottle of holy water to throw at ‘that thing’, as she called the vision. She believed it to be a demon, sent by the devil to lure her to doom, and perhaps she was right.…
She took her extraordinary secret to the parish priest, the only man of letters she knew. History might have taken a different turn, had he not been a fierce defender of Mariolatry at a time when the status of the Virgin was being challenged within the Catholic Church.[v]
The priest spun this phantasm into evidence for Marian dogma, and the rest is history. Astonishingly, Bernadette was heralded as a mystic, canonized as a saint in 1933, and even given her own feast day on the sixteenth of April. See a pattern emerging? Like at Fátima, it always speaks through naïve children (see Marzulli’s material in the following pages). While a few credulous Portuguese children could be easily deceived by a supernatural entity, the events at Fátima had nothing to do with the biblical Mary.
Many scholars are now categorizing Fátima as a mass UFO sighting. A Portuguese scholar, Joaquim Fernandes, professor of history at the Universidade Fernando Pessoa, assembled an international panel to subject the Fátima apparitions to the scrutiny of modern scientific analysis. In Fátima Revisited (2008), Jacques Vallée and Eric Davis discuss the psycho-spiritual nature of the UFO phenomenon and assert Fátima as a representative case:
As one example among many, it will be recalled that the events at Fátima involved luminous phenomena, atmospheric and thermal effects, and descriptions of an apparently metallic disk in the sky, while many of the 70,000 witnesses also experienced spiritual and psychological effects. The main percipients reported psychic states conducive to a form of extrasensory communication with a non-human Being assumed to be the Virgin Mary.[vi]
Remember in 1917 the word “UFO” or “flying saucer” was not in the lexicon of the local inhabitants. Those terms would come later in the twentieth century. The people who saw the “Miracle of the Sun” had no reference point, nothing in their realm of experience to compare with what they were looking at. I realize that the Catholic Church has embraced the apparitions, and the previous Pope, Pope John Paul II, credited the failure of his assassination attempt to “Our Lady of Fátima.” He also entrusted the third millennium to the apparition as well as entrusted the world to the “Lady of Fátima.”
However, one must remember that the Pope is a man and that the priests, bishops, and clergy who witnessed the event were also men and that all of us are, in fact, not infallible. In their two coauthored books Heavenly Lights: The Apparitions and the UFO Phenomenon and Celestial Secrets: The Hidden History of the Fátima Cover-Up, Portuguese historians Dr. Joaquim Fernandes and Fina d’Armada cite eyewitness accounts of the Fátima event. I have included these eyewitness accounts from Heavenly Lights because they add an important perspective that was not addressed in my previously provided thumbnail sketch and fictional accounts of the event.
Eyewitness Testimonies of the Event as Taken from Heavenly Lights
JOSE’ PROENCE DE ALMEIDA GARRET, A LAWYER:
Moments before, the sun had broken overhead through a dense layer of clouds that would have otherwise hidden it, allowing it to shine clearly and intensely. I turned toward that magnet that attracted every gaze, and I could see that it was similar to a disk with a distinct and lively border, luminous and lucent, but harmless.
NEWSPAPER, BEIRA BAIZA:
The sun uncovered itself, and had a diverse gradation, appearing sometimes like a solar globe…enclosed by an aureole of flames, other times a metallic disk as if of silver.
MARIO GOHINO, AN ENGINEER:
In a radiant sky, the Sun could be looked at straight-on and with eyes wide open, without blinking, as if we were looking at a disk of polished glass illuminated from behind, with a rainbow of iridescence on its periphery, seeming to have a rotating movement.… And the Sun did not have the brilliance that hurt our eyes on normal days, as it was a majestic disk, magnetic, which attracted us and sort of revolved in the immense sky.…
RAIO DE LUZ, A RELIGIOUS PERIODICAL OF THE TIME:
Suddenly a luminous disk, the size of a great host, but one which could be gazed upon as one gazes at the moon, appeared, as if it stood out from the Sun, descending visibly…
GILBERTO DOS SANTOS:
I saw the Sun, seeming a dull, silver disk, but more luminous than the moon.
MARIA ROMANA:
The Sun gave the appearance of a globe of dull silver fire, surrounded by a very dark purplish disk.
ANA MARIA CAMARA:
I saw a very clear, silvery blue disk, without rays…
More eyewitness accounts could be cited, but I think the point has been made. The official version of the story was packaged in the religious terminology, specifically Catholic dogma, of the day. What I mean by Catholic dogma is that the apparition was declared to be Mary, the mother of Jesus. Authors Fernandes and d’Armada have researched this aspect and, according to them, they believe that there was a rush to judgment in this regard. They have interviewed a fourth witness to the events that until recently had been overlooked. However, based on the multiple descriptions of a “silver disk” and a “sun” that did not have the blinding qualities of the sun, it appears from the eyewitness accounts above that what people were looking at was a craft of some sort. I believe that if you or I could somehow transport ourselves back to 1917 in Fátima, Portugal, we would point overhead and say, “I can’t believe it, a flying saucer!” Or maybe, “Look at that, a UFO.…”
One extremely interesting aspect of the Fátima apparitions was the secrets that were told to the seers. There were three secrets in total, and the first two were revealed to the public. One of which was a vision of hell and the other a request to “consecrate” Russia, or there would be turmoil in the world, and Russia would spread her errors (Communism?) throughout the world.
The third and final secret was recorded in a letter and was supposed to be revealed publicly after 1960. It was not and caused speculation both inside and outside of the Catholic church as to the letter’s contents. Pope John Paul II finally revealed it on June 6, 2000, and, in doing so, created controversy regarding the authenticity of the secret. The Pope declared that the secret had to do with an assassination attempt on his life and the persecution of the Catholic Church. There are those within the church that believed that what the Pope read was not the third secret, hence the controversy.
The lone surviving visionary, Lucia, had been in a Carmelite convent for most of her life, which prevented her from talking to anyone because of her vows. She remained silent until her death.
So why am I bringing all of this to your attention? In my opinion the “secrets” of Fátima drew people away from biblical truth. They usurped the authority of scripture with extrabiblical revelations. Why else would Pope John Paul II dedicate the world to “Our Lady of Fátima”? This one supernatural event, that of the Fátima apparition, which is controversial at best, shifted millions of peoples’ belief from the solidity of biblical scripture to the “visions” of the three seers who may have been part of a great deception.
Here are some interesting questions that I raise regarding the event.
- Since there are photographs of the various details of the event, just not the object that appeared, we know that there were photographers at Cova da Iria on October 13, 1917. So where are the photographs of the “miracle of the sun”?
- Why was the surviving seer, Lucia, whisked off to a convent and essentially silenced?
- Why have the revelations or “secrets” of Fátima seemed to have overshadowed the relevancy of biblical scripture?
- Why has the testimony of many eyewitnesses who claimed to have seen a disk been ignored?
Since 1917 the events that transpired at Fátima changed the worldview of millions of people. The “Miracle of the Sun” lasted less than half an hour; yet, the event continues to affect millions of people around the world.
What I take umbrage with is that the revelations of Fátima—the secrets that I mentioned earlier, especially the third secret—have usurped the Bible as the source for truth, and in its place provided “secrets” that play upon the superstitions and gullibility of the masses. What is interesting is that some of the clergy of the Catholic Church state that the third secret has never been revealed. Although the Pope John Paul II claimed to have read the third secret in 2001, there are those within the church that believe it was not the secret written down by the seer, Lucia. What is more, if this secret is so important to the church, then why was not it read when it was supposed to be in 1960?[vii]
In our book Petrus Romanus (FREE IN COLLECTION HERE), we, too, investigated the secrets of Fátima and found an intriguing connection between the Vatileaks scandal of 2011–2012 and a possible Vatican cover-up of the complete vision of Fátima (and related prophecies). Our discovery began with a work by famous Italian media personality, journalist, and author, Antonio Socci, whose manuscript The Fourth Secret of Fátima claims the Holy See has repressed information concerning the true secrets delivered in Marian apparitions to three shepherd children in the rural Portuguese village of Fátima in 1917. At the center of his investigation, Socci focuses on a powerful papal contender for the role of Petrus Romanus or “Peter the Roman” (the Final Pope)—Cardinal Tarcisio Pietro (Peter) Bertone, who was born in Romano Canavese (the Roman). As the Secretary of State and the pope’s Camerlengo (Italian for “Chamberlain”), he is responsible during a papal vacancy to serve as acting Head of State of the Vatican City until “the time of agreement” and the election of a new pope. Within uncharacteristically explosive accusations against Cardinal Bertone published online (“Dear Cardinal Bertone: Who—Between You and Me—Is Deliberately Lying?”[viii]) we first discover how, after significant time and investigation, Mr. Socci concluded the Vatican had withheld an important part of the Fátima revelation during its celebrated press conference and release of “The Message of Fátima,” June 26, 2000. On pages 456–465 of Petrus Romanus, we wrote:
Socci describes in the introduction to his book how at first he truly believed the Vatican’s official version of the Fátima message, prepared at that time by Cardinal Ratzinger (current Pope Benedict XVI) and Monsignor Tarcisio Bertone (possible next and final pope), which with its release to the public claimed to be the final secret. Then Socci came across an article by Italian journalist Vittorio Messori, entitled “The Fátima Secret, the Cell of Sister Lucy Has Been Sealed,” and a series of questions for which Socci had no answers cast suspicions on the Vatican’s authorized publication. Why would Messori, whom Socci describes as “a great journalist, extremely precise…the most translated Catholic columnist in the world,”[ix] want to challenge the Church’s official version of the third secret without good cause, he reasoned. Not long after, Socci came across a second similar thesis published in Italy by a young and careful writer named Solideo Paolini. The thesis convinced Socci to begin a probe of his own focusing on the biggest question of them all: Was a portion of Lucy’s handwritten document, which contained the principal words “of the Blessed Virgin Mother” concerning end-times conditions at Rome, being withheld from public view by the Vatican due to its potentially explosive content?
Socci’s suspicions only deepened after he requested an interview (well ahead of his work, The Fourth Secret of Fátima, which later cast doubts on Rome’s official story) with Cardinal Bertone, who, together with Joseph Ratzinger, had coauthored the June 26, 2000, Vatican document that purportedly released the final segment of the “The Message of Fátima.”[x]
“I’ve searched many influential authorities inside the Curia, like Cardinal Bertone, today Secretary of State in the Vatican, who was central to the publication of the Secret in 2000,” Socci says. “The Cardinal, who actually favored me with his personal consideration, having asked me to conduct conferences in his former diocese of Genoa, [now] didn’t deem it necessary to [even] answer my request for an interview. He was within his rights to make this choice, of course, but this only increased the fear of the existence of embarrassing questions, and most of all, that there is something (extremely important) which needs to be kept hidden.”[xi]
Though not expecting to uncover such a colossal enigma, in the end Socci was left convinced that two sets of the Fátima secret actually exist: one that the public has seen, and another, which for reasons yet unknown, the Vatican is keeping buried.
At the beginning of this possible plot was a description of the third secret given by Cardinal Angelo Sodano a full five weeks before the June 26, 2000, “Message of Fátima” was delivered by Rome. Sodano’s comments came during Pope John Paul II’s beautification of Jacinta and Francisco at Fátima, when he surprised many in a speech, saying the vision of a “bishop clothed in white” who makes his way with great effort past the corpses of bishops, priests, and many laypersons, is only “apparently dead” when he falls to the ground under a burst of gunfire.[xii]
Using the added language “apparently dead,” Cardinal Sodano went on to suggest the Fátima vision had been fulfilled in the 1981 assassination attempt against John Paul II. “It appeared evident to His Holiness that it was ‘a motherly hand which guided the bullet’s path,’ enabling the ‘dying Pope’ to halt ‘at the threshold of death.’”[xiii]
Though some applauded Sodano’s presentation that day, others saw in it, and him, a concerted cover-up, as the Fátima prophecy and the alleged fulfillment in 1981 bore significant differences. The Washington Post was happy to point out these glaring contradictions on July 1, 2000, when under the stinging headline, “Third Secret Spurs More Questions: Fátima Interpretation Departs from Vision,” the newspaper opined:
On May 13, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, a top Vatican official, announced the imminent release of the carefully guarded text. He said the Third Secret of Fátima foretold not the end of the world, as some had speculated, but the May 13, 1981, shooting of Pope John Paul II in St. Peter’s Square.
Sodano said the manuscript…tells of a “bishop clothed in white” who, while making his way amid corpses of martyrs, “falls to the ground, apparently dead, under a burst of gunfire.”
But the text released Monday (June 26) leaves no doubt about the bishop’s fate, saying that he “was killed by a group of soldiers who fired bullets and arrows at him.” Everyone with the pontiff also dies: bishops, priests, monks, nuns and lay people. John Paul survived his shooting at the hands of a single gunman, Mehmet Ali Agca, and no one in the crowd was harmed in the attack.[xiv]
Other facts the Washington Post did not point out is how, according to the prophecy, the pope is killed in “a big city half in ruins” while walking to the top of a mountain and kneeling at the foot of a cross. John Paul was riding in the pope’s car through St. Peter’s Square, not walking; there was no big mountain or kneeling at a cross; and the city was not half destroyed. And then there is the contradictory testimony by Cardinal Ratzinger (current Pope Benedict XVI) himself from 1984, which he gave in an interview with the Pauline Sisters’ newsletter (Jesus Magazine) and which was republished a year later in The Ratzinger Report, in an article titled “Here Is Why the Faith Is in Crisis.” In this discussion, Ratzinger, who had read the actual Fátima secret, said the vision involved “dangers threatening the faith and the life of the Christian and therefore [the life] of the world” as well as marking the beginning of the end times.[xv] Additionally, he said, “the things contained in [the] third secret correspond to what has been announced in Scripture and has been said again and again in many other Marian apparitions” and that, “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.”[xvi]
Concerned Catholics have since contrasted this 1984 testimony with the more recent report by Ratzinger, and have wondered when, where, and under what circumstance his account changed. The 1981 assassination attempt against John Paul II certainly did not fulfill the published parts of the Fátima vision or correspond to the “last times” as depicted in the Bible. And then there is the affirmation by the Vatican’s most respected scholars who had deduced from years of studying the Fátima prophecy that it concerned an end-time global crisis of faith emanating from the highest echelons at Rome. Celebrated Cardinal Mario Luigi Ciappi (1909–1996) served as the personal theologian to five popes including John Paul II and unreservedly held that in “the third secret it is foretold, among other things, that the great apostasy in the Church begins at the top” (emphasis added).[xvii] Cardinal Silvio Oddi added in a March 1990 interview with Il Sabato magazine in Rome, Italy: “The Third Secret alluded to dark times for the Church: grave confusions and troubling apostasies within Catholicism itself.… If we consider the grave crisis we have lived through since the [Vatican II] Council, the signs that this prophecy has been fulfilled do not seem to be lacking.”[xviii] Even more impressive in his testimony was the late Father Joaquin Alonso, who knew Sister Lucy personally, had conversations with her, was for sixteen years the archivist at Fátima, and,before his death in 1981, stated the following concerning the third secret:
The text makes concrete references to the crisis of faith within the Church and to the negligence of the pastors themselves [and the] internal struggles in the very bosom of the Church and of grave pastoral negligence by the upper hierarchy… terrible things are to happen. These form the content of the third part of the Secret… [and] like the secret of La Salette, for example, there are more concrete references to the internal struggles of Catholics or to the fall of priests and religious. Perhaps it even refers to the failures of the upper hierarchy of the Church. For that matter, none of this is foreign to other communications Sister Lucy has had on this subject.[xix]
Perhaps most unvarying among those who actually had access to and read the Fátima message was Jesuit Malachi Martin, a close personal friend of Pope Paul VI who worked within the Holy See doing research on the Dead Sea Scrolls, publishing articles in journals on Semitic paleography, and teaching Aramaic, Hebrew, and sacred Scripture. As a member of the Vatican Advisory Council and personal secretary to renowned Jesuit Cardinal Augustin Bea, Martin had privileged information pertaining to secretive church and world issues, including the third secret of Fátima, which Martin hinted spelled out parts of the plan to formerly install the dreaded False Prophet (Petrus Romanus?) during a “Final Conclave.” Comparing the conflicting statements between Cardinal Ratzinger and Malachi Martin, Father Charles Fiore, a good friend of the murdered priest Alfred J. Kunz (discussed elsewhere in this series) and the late eminent theologian Fr. John Hardon, said in a taped interview: “We have two different Cardinal Ratzingers; we have two different messages. But Malachi Martin was consistent all the way through.”[xx]
Wikipedia’s entry on the “Three Secrets of Fátima” adds:
On a syndicated radio broadcast, Father Malachi Martin was asked the following question by a caller: “I had a Jesuit priest tell me more of the Third Secret of Fátima years ago, in Perth. He said, among other things, the last pope would be under control of Satan.… Any comment on that?” Fr. Martin responded, “Yes, it sounds as if they were reading, or being told, the text of the Third Secret.” In a taped interview with Bernard Janzen, Fr. Martin was asked the following question: “Who are the people who are working so hard to suppress Fátima?” Fr. Martin responded, “A bunch, a whole bunch, of Catholic prelates in Rome, who belong to Satan. They’re servants of Satan. And the servants of Satan outside the Church, in various organizations; they want to destroy the Catholicism of the Church, and keep it as a stabilizing factor in human affairs. It’s an alliance. A dirty alliance, a filthy alliance.…” In the same interview, Fr. Martin also said with respect to Lucia [Lucy of Fátima] that, “They’ve (The Vatican) published forged letters in her name; they’ve made her say things she didn’t want to say. They put statements on her lips she never made.”[xxi]
One thing is certain: Something unnerving did seem to be happening around and with Sister Lucy in the lead-up to the release of the so-called final secret. After all, the first two parts of the message of Fátima had been publicly issued by her bishop in 1941, and the third secret had been sent to the Holy See with instructions that it be made public in 1960. That year was chosen, according to Lucy, because the “Holy Mother” had revealed to her that it would then be when “the Message will appear more clear.” And, lo and behold, it was immediately following 1960 that Vatican II set in motion what many conservative Catholics today believe is a crisis of faith in the form of Roman heresies. And though there could have been much more to the revelation than just a Vatican II warning, and the secret was not released in 1960 as it was supposed to be anyway (so we may never know), when Pope John XXIII read the contents of the secret, he refused to publish it, and it remained under lock and key until it was supposedly disclosed in the year 2000. If the first two secrets were any indication of the scope and accuracy of the third one, they had been amazingly insightful, including the “miracle of the sun” that was witnessed “by over 70,000 persons (including nonbelievers hoping to dispel the apparitions), whereby the sun itself [seemed to be] dislodged from its setting and performed miraculous maneuvers while emitting astonishing light displays; the end of World War I; the name of the pope who would be reigning at the beginning of World War II; the extraordinary heavenly phenomenon that would be witnessed worldwide foretelling of the beginning of World War II; the ascendance of Russia (a weak and insignificant nation in 1917) to an evil monolithic power that would afflict the world with suffering and death.”[xxii]
But something about the third and final secret was different, a phenomenon evidently to be avoided and obfuscated at all costs by the hierarchy of Rome. At a minimum, it spoke of the apostatizing of the clergy and dogma that followed Vatican II. And yet perhaps these were simply devices to lead to something more sinister, elements so dark that it was keeping Lucy awake at night. When she finally had written down the secret in 1944 under obedience to Rome, she had a hard time doing so because of its terrifying contents. It had taken a fresh visit from the “Holy Mother” herself to convince Lucy it was okay. Then in the years following, she had been ordered by the Vatican to remain silent concerning its disclosure. Under orders from the pope, visits to her for hours at a time were made by Cardinal Bertone. During the visits, the two of them would go over the diminutive aspects of the vision in private. This happened in 2000, again in 2001, and again in 2003. When, at age ninety-seven, the Carmelite nun finally passed away (2005), taking whatever secrets remained with her to the grave, her behavior at the last seemed odd to Catholics who understood Roman doctrinal “salvation” implications. Antonio Socci comments on this, pointing out that the long visits with the aged seer were not videotaped or recorded for posterity because viewers would have seen for themselves the psychological pressure that was being exerted on the cloistered sister. “These thoughts came back to my mind while I was reading a passage of Bertone’s book, in which the Cardinal remembers that at one point the seer was ‘irritated’, and she told him ‘I’m not going to confession!’” About this, Socci wonders, “What kind of question could Sister Lucy answer to so strongly? Maybe someone was reminding the old Sister of the ecclesiastical power, and hinting that she would ‘not get absolution’? We don’t know, because the prelate [Bertone]—who knows and remembers the Sister’s (quite tough) answer very well—says he literally ‘forgot’ what his question was.”[xxiii]
It appears in truth that poor Lucy was trapped inside a sinister ring of Romanita Omertà Siciliani or “Mafia Code of Silence” imposed by Rome. Yet Socci believes the full truth of Fátima may have gotten out anyway, and based on his investigation, he offers a brave theory in his book The Fourth Secret of Fátima about what actually transpired in 2000 behind the Vatican’s walls. John Vennari summarizes Socci’s shocking hypothesis this way:
Socci believes that when John Paul II decided to release the Secret, a power-struggle of sorts erupted in the Vatican. He postulates that John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger wanted to release the Secret in its entirety, but Cardinal Sodano, then Vatican Secretary of State, opposed the idea. And opposition from a Vatican Secretary of State is formidable.
A compromise was reached that sadly reveals heroic virtue from none of the main players.
The “Bishop dressed in white” vision, which is the four pages written by Sister Lucy would be initially revealed by Cardinal Sodano, along with his ludicrous interpretation that the Secret is nothing more than the predicted 1981 assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II.
At the same time, at the May 13 2000 beatification ceremony of Jacinta and Francisco, Pope John Paul II would “reveal” the other part—the most “terrifying part”—of the Secret obliquely in his sermon. It was here that John Paul II spoke on the Apocaplyse: “Another portent appeared in Heaven; behold, a great red dragon” (Apoc. 12:3). These words from the first reading of the Mass make us think of the great struggle between good and evil, showing how, when man puts God aside, he cannot achieve happiness, but ends up destroying himself… The Message of Fátima is a call to conversion, alerting humanity to have nothing to do with the “dragon” whose “tail swept down a third of the stars of Heaven, and dragged them to the earth” (Apoc. 12:4).
The Fathers of the Church have always interpreted the stars as the clergy, and the stars swept up in the dragon’s tail indicates a great number of churchmen who would be under the influence of the devil. This was Pope John Paul II’s way of explaining that the Third Secret also predicts a great apostasy. [xxiv] (brackets and emphasis in original)
If Socci is correct in this analysis, Bishop Richard Nelson Williamson, an English traditionalist Catholic and member of the Society of Saint Pius X who opposes changes in the Catholic Church brought on by Vatican II, may have verified his hypothesis in 2005 when he related how a priest acquaintance of his from Austria shared privately that Cardinal Ratzinger had confessed: “I have two problems on my conscience: Archbishop Lefebvre and Fátima. As to the latter, my hand was forced.” Who could have “forced” Ratzinger’s hand to go along with a false or partial statement on the final Fátima secret? Was it pressure from the papal office, or, as Williamson questions, “Some hidden power behind both Pope and Cardinal?”[xxv] If Pope John Paul II’s sermon at Fátima did in fact speak to the “terrifying part” of the final secret—as in the dragon’s tail sweeping down a third of the clergy to do his bidding—we are left with the unsettling impression that at least 33 percent (Masonic marker) of the Vatican’s hierarchy are committed to a satanic plan. Will this involve a return of that “disc” that first appeared in Fátima as a harbinger of deception?
UP NEXT: When Chariots of the Fallen Star Gods Appear
[i] Antonio Gaspari, “Pope Pius XII Saw the ‘Miracle of the Sun,’” as quoted in: Catholic.org, November 5, 2008, http://www.catholic.org/international/international_story.php?id=30396.
[ii]Antonio Gaspari, “Pius XII Saw ‘Miracle of the Sun,’” Zenit, November, 04, 2008, last accessed February 2, 2013, http://www.zenit.org/article-24149?l=english.
[iii] Ibid.
[iv] Ibid.
[v] Lynn Picknett, Flights of Fancy (London: Ward Lock, 1987), 82–83.
[vi] Jacques F. Vallée and Eric W. Davis, “Incommensurability, Orthodoxy, and the Physics of High Strangeness — A 6-Layer Model For Anomalous Phenomena” in Fátima Revisited: The Apparition Phenomenon in Ufology, Psychology, and Science Kindle Edition ed. Fernando Fernandes (Anomalist Books 2010), Kindle locations 5568-5571.
[vii] L. A. Marzulli, Politics, Prophecy & the Supernatural (Crane, MO: Anomalos Publishing, 2007), 110–120.
[viii] Antonio Socci, “Dear Cardinal Bertone: Who—Between You and Me—Is Deliberately Lying?” The Fátima Network: Our Lady of Fátima Online, May 12, 2007, last accessed February 6, 2013, http://www.fatima.org/news/newsviews/052907socci.asp.
[ix] John Vennari, “The Fourth Secret of Fátima,” Catholic Family News, last accessed February 13, 2012, http://www.cfnews.org/Socci-FourthSecret.htm.
[x] See: http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20000626_message-fatima_en.html.
[xi] John Vennari, “The Fourth Secret of Fátima,” Fátima.org, last accessed February 13, 2012, http://www.fatima.org/news/newsviews/010207fourthsecret.asp.
[xii] “Cardinal Sodano Reads a Text on the ‘Third Secret,’” The Fátima Network: Our Lady of Fátima Online , May 13, 2000, http://www.fatima.org/news/newsviews/thirdsecret01.asp?printer.
[xiii] Ibid.
[xiv] John Vennari, “The Fourth Secret of Fátima,” Catholic Family News.
[xv] “Joseph Ratzinger as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,” Wikipedia, last modified November 14, 2011, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Ratzinger_as_Prefect_of_the_Congregation_for_the_Doctrine_of_the_Faith.
[xvi] “Published Testimony: Cardinal Ratzinger (November 1984),” The Fátima Network: Our Lady of Fátima Online , last accessed February 13, 2012, http://www.fatima.org/thirdsecret/ratzinger.asp?printer.
[xvii] John Vennari, “The Fourth Secret of Fátima,” Catholic Family News.
[xviii] “Cardinal Oddi on the REAL Third Secret of Fátima: ‘The Blessed Virgin was Alerting Us Against the Apostacy in the Church,” last accessed February 13, 2012, http://www.tldm.org/news7/thirdsecretcardinaloddi.htm.
[xix] Published Testimony: Cardinal Alonso (1975–1981),” The Fátima Network: Our Lady of Fátima Online , last accessed February 13, 2012, http://www.fatima.org/thirdsecret/fralonso.asp.
[xx] “Three Secrets of Fátima,”Wikipedia, last modified February 6, 2012, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Secrets_of_F%C3%A1tima.
[xxi] Ibid.
[xxii] Erven Park, “‘Diabolic Disorientation’ in the Church,” New Oxford Review, October 2006, http://www.newoxfordreview.org/article.jsp?did=1006-park.
[xxiii] Antonio Socci, “Dear Cardinal Bertone: Who—Between You and Me—Is Deliberately Lying? And Please Don’t Mention Freemasonry,” last accessed February 13, 2012, http://www.fatimacrusader.com/cr86/cr86pg35.asp.
[xxiv] Thomas R. Horn and Cris Putnam, Petrus Romanus: The Final Pope Is Here (Crane, MO: Defender Publishing, 2012), 456–465.
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