Last Letter of Fatima

I would be remis if I did not post what I have read about the last letter of Fatima, which was told to SR Lucy, the last of the children of Fatima. She was pressed into revealing to the Bishop of Portugal that she needed direction from our Lady, before she committed the information to writing. Upon receiving this direction from Our Blessed Mother Mary, she informed the Arch-Bishop that the letter should not be revealed until 1960, or her death. The letter had been then sent to the Pope, and kept by the Pope in a wooden box marked "Secrect Paper of the Pope". Here is a small portion of the history of that letter, and what is known. Sr Lucy died, and 1960 has passed without the general information being revealed:

Cardinal Ratzinger

On November 11, 1984, Cardinal Ratzinger, head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, gave an interview in Jesus magazine, a publication of the Pauline Sisters. The interview is entitled “Here is Why the Faith is in Crisis,” and was published with the Cardinal's explicit permission. In this interview Cardinal Ratzinger admits that a crisis of faith is affecting the Church around the world. In this context, he reveals that he has read the Third Secret and that the Secret refers to “dangers threatening the faith and the life of the Christian and therefore (the life) of the world.”

The Cardinal thus confirms Father Alonso's thesis that the Secret pertains to widespread apostasy in the Church. Cardinal Ratzinger says in the same interview that the Secret also refers to “the importance of the Novissimi [the Last Times/the Last Things]” and that “If it is not published, at least for now, it is to avoid confusing religious prophecy with sensationalism ...” The Cardinal further reveals that “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 ...”25

Bishop Amaral

In complete accord with Cardinal Ratzinger is Bishop Amaral—the third Bishop of Fatima. In a speech in Vienna, Austria on September 10, 1984, he said the following:

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.26 [Emphasis added]

Cardinal Oddi

On March 17, 1990 Cardinal Oddi gave the following testimony to Italian journalist Lucio Brunelli in the journal Il Sabato:

It [the Third Secret] has nothing to do with Gorbachev. The Blessed Virgin was alerting us against apostasy in the Church.

Cardinal Ciappi

To these witnesses we must add the testimony of Cardinal Mario Luigi Ciappi, who was nothing less than Pope John Paul II's own personal papal theologian. In a personal communication to a Professor Baumgartner in Salzburg, Cardinal Ciappi revealed that:

In the Third Secret it is foretold, among other things, that the great apostasy in the Church will begin at the top.27

All of these testimonies are consistent with the repeated remarks of Sister Lucy herself—not only to Fr. Fuentes, as quoted above, but to many other reliable witnesses. Although bound to secrecy concerning the precise contents of the Third Secret, her remarks to reliable witnesses are full of references to churchmen “being fooled by false doctrine”; to a “diabolical disorientation” afflicting “so many persons who occupy places of responsibility” in the Church; to “priests and consecrated souls” who “are so deceived and misled” because “the devil has succeeded in infiltrating evil under cover of good … leading into error and deceiving souls having a heavy responsibility through the place which they occupy … They are blind men guiding other blind men,” and so on.28

Pius XII Confirms
the Secret's Prediction of Apostasy

But perhaps the most remarkable testimony of all on this score, although it is of indirect relevance, is that of Msgr. Eugenio Pacelli, before he became Pope Pius XII and while he was still serving as Vatican Secretary of State during the reign of Pope Pius XI. Speaking even before Sister Lucy had committed the Third Secret to paper, the future Pius XII made an astonishing prophecy about a coming upheaval in the Church:

I am worried by the Blessed Virgin's messages to Lucy of Fatima. This persistence of Mary about the dangers which menace the Church is a divine warning against the suicide of altering the Faith, in Her liturgy, Her theology and Her soul. … I hear all around me innovators who wish to dismantle the Sacred Chapel, destroy the universal flame of the Church, reject Her ornaments and make Her feel remorse for Her historical past.

Pope Pius XII's biographer, Msgr. Roche, noted that at this moment in the conversation, according to a Count Galeazzi, “the gaze of the Pope, seen through the lenses of his glasses, became supernatural, and there emanated from his tall and slender body an irresistible mystical force.” Pius XII then said (in answer to an objection from a curial Cardinal):

A day will come when the civilized world will deny its God, when the Church will doubt as Peter doubted. She will be tempted to believe that man has become God. In our churches, Christians will search in vain for the red lamp where God awaits them. Like Mary Magdalene, weeping before the empty tomb, they will ask, “Where have they taken Him?”29

It is quite remarkable that the future Pope would relate this apparently supernatural intuition of coming devastation in the Church specifically to “the Blessed Virgin's messages to Lucy of Fatima” and “this persistence of Mary about the dangers which menace the Church.” The prediction would be utterly senseless if it had been based on the first two parts of the Great Secret, which make no mention of such things as “the suicide of altering the Faith, in Her liturgy, Her theology and Her soul” or “innovators who wish to dismantle the Sacred Chapel, destroy the universal flame of the Church, reject Her ornaments and make Her feel remorse for Her historical past.” Nor is there any indication whatsoever in the first two parts that “In our churches, Christians will search in vain for the red lamp where God awaits them.”

How did the future Pope Pius XII know these things? If not by supernatural intuition, then by direct knowledge that some hitherto undisclosed portion of “the Blessed Virgin's messages to Sister Lucy of Fatima” revealed these future events in the Church.

In short, every single testimony pertaining to the contents of the Third Secret, from 1944 until at least 1984 (the date of the Ratzinger interview) confirms that it points to a catastrophic loss of faith and discipline in the Church, representing a breakthrough for the forces arrayed against Her for so long—the “innovators” that the future Pope Pius XII heard “all around me,” clamoring for the dismantling of the Sacred Chapel and changes in the liturgy and Catholic theology.