Praised be Jesus Christ and blessed be the Virgin Mary, Our Mother. Amen.
The first two parts of the secret are written by Lucía in the third memory of August 31st, 1941,
destined for the bishop of Leiría-Fátima.
Lucia says: “The first part, referring to the secret, was the sight of hell.
Our Lady told us with goodness and sadness:
You saw hell where the souls of poor sinners go.
To save them, God wants to establish in the world the devotion to my Immaculate Heart.
If they do what I tell you, many souls will be saved and there will be peace.
The war is going to end.
But, if they do not stop offending God, another worse one will begin in the reign of Pius XI.
Our mother the Virgin Mary was referring to the Second World War
when she said "another worse one will begin".
To prevent this,
I will come to ask for the consecration of Russia to my Immaculate Heart
and the reparative communion of the first Saturdays.
If they heed my requests,
Russia will be converted and there will be peace;
if not, Russia will spread her errors throughout the world,
promoting wars and persecutions against the Church.
The good will be martyred, the Holy Father will have much to suffer,
various nations will be annihilated.
At last, my Immaculate Heart will triumph,
the Holy Father will consecrate Russia to me,
it will be converted, and a time of peace will be granted to the world.
The second part refers to the devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
The third part of the secret was written by Lucia on January 3rd, 1944
by order of the bishop of Leiría and the Virgin Mary.
The sealed envelope was first kept by the Bishop of Leiría.
On April 4th, 1957, to better protect the secret and without having read it,
the bishop handed it over to the secret archive of the Holy Office,
and Sister Lucia was informed about this.
Pope Saint John XXIII read it on August 17th, 1959.
Pope Saint Paul VI read it on March 27th, 1965.
Pope Saint John Paul II read it, within days of starting his pontificate.
Pope Saint John Paul II asked to read it after the attack when an attempt was made on his life on May 13th, 1981
and immediately thought about the consecration of the world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
The third part of the secret, like the other two, was revealed on July 13th, 1917.
Lucia, in the envelope, placed a phrase, indicating that it should be opened after 1960.
In her letter, Lucia says: “We have seen on the left side of Our Lady, a little higher,
an angel with a sword of fire in his left hand.
Twinkling, it emitted flames that seemed to set the world on fire,
but were extinguished upon contact with the splendor that Our Lady radiated with her right hand,
directed towards him.
The angel, pointing to the earth with his right hand,
said in a loud voice: Penance, Penance, Penance!
And we saw in an immense light, which is God,
how people look when they pass in front of a mirror,
a bishop dressed in white, we had the presentiment that he was the Holy Father, the Pope.
We also saw other bishops, priests, men and religious women climbing a steep mountain,
at the top of which was a large cross
made of rough timbers as if they were cork oak with its bark.
The Holy Father, before reaching it, crossed a great city,
half in ruins,
half trembling and with a hesitant step,
with pain and grief, praying for the souls of the corpses that he encountered along the way.
He reached the top of the mountain, and prostrate on his knees at the foot of the great cross,
he was killed by a group of soldiers who shot him with several shots from guns and arrows.
In the same way, all the bishops, priests, men and religious women
and various lay people,
men and women of various classes and positions, died, one after another.
Under the arms of the cross there were two angels,
each one with a glass jug in his hand,
in which they collected the blood of the martyrs
and watered with it the souls that were approaching God ”.
Let us see what Lucia says about this
in a letter addressed to the Holy Father on May 12th, 1982:
“The third part of the secret refers to the words of Our Lady:
If they do not, listen to my requests,
Russia will spread its errors to the world,
promoting wars and persecutions against the Church.
The good will be martyred, the Holy Father will have much to suffer,
various nations will be annihilated”.
This letter refers to the Virgin Mary's apparition on July 13th, 1917.
The third part of the secret of Fatima is a symbolic revelation
that refers to this part of the message,
conditioned on the fact of our accepting or not what the message itself asks:
"If they heed my requests,
Russia will be converted and there will be peace;
if not, she will spread her mistakes throughout the world".
From the moment that we have not taken into account this call of the message,
we verify that it has been fulfilled,
Russia has invaded the world with her mistakes.
And, although we have not yet verified the complete consummation
of the end of this prophecy,
we see that we are slowly moving towards it with great strides,
if we do not renounce the path of sin, hatred, revenge, injustice, immorality and violence.
And let's not say that in this way it is God who punishes us;
on the contrary, it is the men who, by themselves, prepare the punishment.
God warns us with haste and calls us to the right path,
respecting the freedom,
referring to our free will, that he has given us. For that, men are responsible.
In the conversation that Lucia had with Bishop Tarsicio Bertone,
secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, on April 27th, 2000
at Carmel in Coimbra, where she lives,
she expressed the conviction that the vision of Fatima refers, above all,
to the struggle of atheist communism against the Church and Christians,
describing the immense suffering of the victims of the faith in the 20th century.
When asked who the bishop dressed in white was,
she replied that the three little shepherds believed that he was the Pope.
“We did not know the name of the Pope,
the Lady did not tell us the name of the Pope;
we didn't know if he was Benedict XV or Pius XII or Paul VI or John Paul II,
but he was the Pope who suffered and made us suffer too”.
When asked why she put in the envelope that it should be read after 1960,
she replied that “I have put the date, not the Lady, because according to my intuition,
before 1960 it would not have been understood.
Now it can be understood better.
I have written what I have seen, the interpretation does not correspond to me, but to the Pope”.
In the theological commentary of Cardinal Ratzinger's, referring to Pope Benedict XVI,
regarding the secret he says: “No great mystery is revealed here,
the veil of the future has not been drawn.
We see the Church of the Martyrs, from the century just passed,
represented by a scene described in symbolic language.
The message of Fatima is a private revelation.
Its function is not to "complete" the definitive Revelation of Christ,
but to help to live it more fully at a certain time in history.
Private revelation is an aid to faith.
It can be a valid aid to better understand and live the Gospel in the present moment.
Therefore, it should not be ruled out.
It is a help that is offered, but it is not mandatory to use it."
The three shepherd children of Fatima experienced for an instant the terrible vision of hell.
They saw the fall of the souls of poor sinners.
And they are told why they went through that moment:
to save them, to show a way of salvation.
Thus comes to mind the phrase from the first letter of Saint Peter:
"and you are sure of the goal of your faith, that is, the salvation of your souls." - 1 Peter 1:9
For this purpose, devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary is indicated as a path.
The Immaculate Heart is, according to Matthew 5:8,
a Heart that, starting from God, has reached a perfect unity
and therefore "sees God."
Devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary is thus an approach to this attitude of the heart,
in which the fiat, your will be done, becomes the animated center of all existence.
If anyone opposed this,
saying that we should not interpose a human being between us and Christ,
they should be reminded that Saint Paul has no qualms about saying to his communities:
imitate me (1 Corinthians 4:16; Philippians 3:17; 1 Thessalonians 1:6 ; 2 Thessalonians 3:7-9).
From whom can we learn better at any time, if not from the Mother of the Lord?