Last Secret of Fatima Foretold Attack on Pope, Vatican Says

FATIMA, Portugal —  Since 1917, Roman Catholics have been so fascinated by the tale of three Portuguese shepherd children that they have flocked here by the millions each year to the spot where the Virgin Mary reportedly appeared “dressed as the sun” and startled the youngsters with three prophecies.

And since 1941, when the lone surviving shepherd revealed two of those predictions in her memoirs, the “third secret of Fatima” has become one of the most intriguing mysteries of modern times. It has inspired hundreds of speculative books and Web sites and even a skyjacking, in 1981, by a man who demanded that the Vatican reveal all.

On Saturday, as Pope John Paul II visited the Fatima shrine, the Vatican announced that the remaining secret was a “prophetic vision” of Christian suffering and martyrdom that foresaw, among other events, the 1981 assassination attempt that left John Paul wounded by gunfire in St. Peter’s Square.

The full secret--written down by the surviving shepherd, sealed in a letter to the Vatican in 1957 and kept under lock by five successive popes--will soon be published on John Paul’s orders, Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Angelo Sodano told 600,000 worshipers after a papal Mass here.

Many in the huge crowd voiced relief that the surprise announcement appeared to rule out an imminent end of the world, but others challenged the “prediction” because it was revealed only after the event happened.

Saturday’s Mass was held to beatify the two other shepherds, who died of influenza in 1919 and 1920. Thousands of children dressed as shepherds were scattered through the ecstatic crowd, which packed Fatima’s spacious square on a hot, bright day to welcome the pope on his third visit to Fatima’s Chapel of Apparitions.

The beatified siblings, Francisco and Jacinta Marto, became the first pre-adolescent candidates for Catholic sainthood who did not die as martyrs.

The ceremony was a coincidence of two anniversaries--the one of Mary’s first reported sighting here and the other of the shooting of the pope exactly 64 years later. John Paul has said that the mother of Jesus, acting as Our Lady of Fatima, “deflected the bullets” that hit him from point-blank range.

He also has thanked her for aiding in the collapse of Soviet communism--a result, he said, of her reported 1917 prophecy to the shepherds that Russia would be “reconverted” after spreading “errors” in the world.

The other reported prophecy made that year and revealed in 1941 was that World War I would end, only to be followed by a new, more terrible conflict if humankind did not stop offending God.

Vatican officials did not explain why John Paul decided to reveal the third prophecy now. But the revelation seems to fit his vision for Holy Year 2000 as a time for clarifying the church’s past and purifying its mission.

Unveiling the secret enables John Paul, who will turn 80 on Thursday, to enhance his mystique among Catholics as an ailing pastor who has endured with divine protection to lead an often persecuted flock into Christendom’s third millennium.

The Vatican’s revelation also is certain to revive conspiracy theories that Soviet and Bulgarian security services backed the 1981 assassination attempt by Turkish gunman Mehmet Ali Agca, who confessed to the crime and is serving a life sentence but insists that he did not act alone. For proponents of such theories, so far unproved, Fatima offers a neat link between the church’s struggle against atheism and a Soviet plot to strike back at its Polish-born leader.

Sodano said the young shepherds were told in 1917 of a “bishop clothed in white” who “makes his way with great effort toward the Cross amid the corpses of those who were martyred.” The account continues: “He too falls to the ground, apparently dead, under a burst of gunfire.”

Papal spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls later told reporters that the bishop in white was “a clear reference” to John Paul.

Vatican officials said they had cleared their announcement with Lucia de Jesus dos Santos, who reported the Fatima prophecies and is now a 93-year-old cloistered Carmelite nun. On Saturday she came to the chapel, where she greeted John Paul and called it a “day of glory for God and Our Lady.”

Lucia was 10 years old when she and her cousins, Francisco, 8, and Jacinta, 7, said Jesus’ mother made the first of six monthly apparitions near a grotto here, causing the sun to dance in the sky.

Crowds reportedly witnessed the last apparition, in October 1917, and returned to make Fatima one of Catholicism’s most revered shrines. The Vatican declared in 1930 that the visions were worthy of belief and later embraced the first two prophecies.

Many Catholics had believed that the third prophecy was kept secret for so long because it was deemed too frightening. Three popes have read it since 1960, the year that Lucia said the prophecy could be revealed. John Paul read it within days of becoming pope, Navarro said.

The Vatican’s long silence became unbearable for many, inspiring doomsday scenarios. In 1981, a former Catholic monk, Laurence J. Downey, hijacked an airliner during a Dublin-to-London flight and threatened to blow it up unless the secret was told. What he claimed were explosives turned out to be harmless, and he was captured.

Lucia Dias, a 31-year-old Portuguese lawyer, said she had long assumed that the secret presaged a third world war. After hearing Saturday’s announcement, she said she was relieved and happy for the pope.

“It’s wonderful,” she said. “He knew the prophecy, and he survived it.”

More skeptical pilgrims noted that the 1917 prophecies about Russia’s “errors” and a new war had been revealed only after Russia fell under Soviet rule and World War II was underway. Sodano’s announcement disappointed them.

“What he said happened in the past,” said Julio Estela, 33, a Portuguese car salesman. “This isn’t a prediction. There must be more.”

Sodano said the Vatican will issue Sister Lucia’s written account of the third secret along with “an appropriate commentary.” He said a Vatican interpretation was needed because her text does not clearly predict future events but rather describes “events spread out over time in a succession and a duration that are not specified.”

Her account, he went on, “describes the immense suffering endured by the witnesses to the faith in the last century.”

John Paul did not mention the secret during his 23-hour visit to Portugal but thanked Mary again for saving him. He donated to the Fatima chapel one of his most precious possessions--the gold ring given to him by his mentor, Polish Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski, after his election as pope in 1978.

The pope devoted Saturday’s homily to “the little shepherds” of Fatima, calling them examples of how children often see truths their elders don’t. Francisco and Jacinta, he said, were “two little candles that God had lighted to illuminate humanity during dark and restless hours.”

Their cause was delayed for decades by doubts within the church about whether they were mature enough to show the “heroic virtues” required for sainthood. Finally, John Paul ruled in their favor. And in June, the Vatican certified that a Portuguese woman had been miraculously cured of paralysis in 1989 after praying to them for 22 years. Sister Lucia was not eligible for beatification, which is bestowed only on the dead.