Happy Feast Day! Our Lady of Fatima (May 13)

Our Lady of Fatima (May 13)

The general Message of Fatima is not complicated. Its requests are for prayer, reparation, repentance, and sacrifice, and the abandonment of sin. Before Our Lady appeared to the three shepherd children, Lucy, Francisco and Jacinta, the Angel of Peace visited them. The Angel prepared the children to receive the Blessed Virgin Mary, and his instructions are an important aspect of the Message that is often overlooked.

       The Angel demonstrated to the children the fervent, attentive, and composed manner in which we should all pray, and the reverence we should show toward God in prayer. He also explained to them the great importance of praying and making sacrifices in reparation for the offenses committed against God. He told them: "Make of everything you can a sacrifice and offer it to God as an act of reparation for the sins by which He is offended, and in supplication, for the conversion of sinners." In his third and final apparition to the children, the Angel gave them Holy Communion, and demonstrated the proper way to receive Our Lord in the Eucharist: all three children knelt to receive Communion; and Lucy was given the Sacred Host on the tongue and the Angel shared the Blood of the Chalice between Francisco and Jacinta.
       Our Lady stressed the importance of praying the Rosary in each of Her apparitions, asking the children to pray the Rosary every day for peace. Another principal part of the Message of Fatima is devotion to Our Lady’s Immaculate Heart, which is terribly outraged and offended by the sins of humanity, and we are lovingly urged to console Her by making reparation. She showed Her Heart, surrounded by piercing thorns (which represented the sins against Her Immaculate Heart), to the children, who understood that their sacrifices could help to console Her.

        The children also saw that God is terribly offended by the sins of humanity, and that He desires each of us and all mankind to abandon sin and make reparation for their crimes through prayer and sacrifice. Our Lady sadly pleaded: "Do not offend the Lord our God any more, for He is already too much offended!"
        The children were also told to pray and sacrifice themselves for sinners, in order to save them from hell. The children were briefly shown a vision of hell, after which Our Lady told them: "You have seen hell where the souls of poor sinners go. To save them, God wishes to establish in the world devotion to My Immaculate Heart. If what I say to you is done, many souls will be saved and there will be peace."
       She said that if people did not stop offending God, He would punish the world severely by means of war, famine, persecution of the Church, and persecution of the Holy Father. To prevent these chastisements, Our Lady offered a remedy: She would return to ask for the Consecration of Russia to Her Immaculate Heart and the Communion of Reparation on the Five First Saturdays. If Her requests were heeded, there would be peace. If not, Russia’s errors would spread throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions against the Church, the Holy Father to suffer much, martyrdom of the good and the annihilation of various nations.

        Our Lady indicated to us the specific root of all the troubles in the world, the one that causes world wars and such terrible suffering: sin. She then gave a solution, first to individual people, then to the Church’s leaders. God asks each one of us to stop offending Him. We must pray, especially the Rosary. By this frequent prayer of the Rosary, we will get the graces we need to overcome sin. God wants us to have devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary and to work to spread this devotion throughout the world. Our Lady said, "My Immaculate Heart will be your refuge and the way that will lead you to God." If we wish to go to God, we have a sure way to Him through true devotion to the Immaculate Heart of His Mother.
       When Sister Lucy questioned Our Lord as to why He would not convert Russia without the solemn public consecration of that nation specifically, Jesus answered:

       Because I want My whole Church to acknowledge that consecration as a triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, so that it may extend its homage later on, and put the devotion to This Immaculate Heart beside the devotion to My Sacred Heart.

        Thus, we see that the conversion of Russia cannot take place unless and until the Pope and bishops consecrate specifically Russia, because God has reserved this grace – this special grace – to this special act of honor and reparation to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Jesus does this because He wants to establish throughout the world, in the hearts and minds of the faithful, the importance of devotion to His Mother’s Immaculate Heart.
       Devotion to the Immaculate Heart is central to the Fatima Message. God determined that the Consecration of Russia and the Communion of Reparation on the First Saturdays be the means of implementing this devotion throughout the world, and gave this task to His Pope and bishops and to individual souls to practice and promote this devotion.

       In order to move ever closer to Her, and therefore to Her Son, Our Lady stressed the importance of praying at least five decades of the Rosary daily. She asked us to wear the Brown Scapular. And we must make sacrifices, especially the sacrifice of doing our daily duty, in reparation for the sins committed against Our Lord and Our Lady. She also stressed the necessity of prayers and sacrifices to save poor sinners from hell. The Message of Fatima, to individual souls, is summarized in these things.
        Besides these general points, given in the Fatima Message over 6 months, Our Lady confided a Secret to the three shepherd children on July 13, 1917. This Secret was meant for all Catholics, but was to be given to them later (at the latest, in 1960) since no one was prepared to understand it all in 1917.
       In her Third and Fourth Memoirs, which were both written in 1941, Sister Lucy revealed to a wider audience the first two parts of the Secret. The third part of the Secret – or, as it is called, the Third Secret – was written down for the first time between January 2 and January 9, 1944.
 

3rd Secret of Fatima

The Secret in Three Parts:

The Third Part

Context
        In her Fourth Memoir (dated December 8, 1941), Sister Lucy copied the first two parts of the Fatima Secret word-for-word – including what appears to be the conclusion to the whole Secret:

        In the end, My Immaculate Heart will triumph. The Holy Father will consecrate Russia to Me, and she will be converted, and a period of peace will be granted to the world.

Partial Text of the Third Secret

        Sister Lucy then immediately added the following text to her Fourth Memoir:

        In Portugal the dogma of the Faith will always be preserved etc.

Commentary
        Fatima scholars have been unanimous in their belief that this phrase begins the third part of the Secret and the word "etc." that Sister Lucy wrote indicates the rest of the words Our Lady spoke in the text of the Third Secret.
        Here it must be noted that immediately following the words "In Portugal the dogma of the Faith will always be preserved etc.", Our Lady said to Sister Lucy: "Tell this to no one. Yes you may tell it to Francisco." The "this" that can be told to Francisco refers to the last thing said during the vision. If it was only a vision, without an explanation, then Francisco didn't need to be told anything, because he had just seen it himself already. But if "this" refers to additional words of the Virgin by way of explanation of the vision, then Francisco would have to be told because, as we know, he could not hear Our Lady during the Fatima apparitions. Francisco saw but did not hear, and would thus have needed to be informed about what Our Lady had said about the vision.
        Nor can one argue plausibly that "you may tell it to Francisco" refers merely to the words Our Lady spoke during the second part of the Secret. The phrase "Tell this to no one. Yes, you may tell it to Francisco" follows immediately after "In Portugal the dogma of the Faith will always be preserved etc."¹ Clearly, then, the "etc." indicates the words, not yet written down, that Sister Lucy could tell Francisco orally. Those words clearly belong to the Third Secret, which was finally written down in 1944 under orders from the Bishop of Fatima.

Vatican’s Version of the Third Secret, Released on June 26, 2000
        On June 26, 2000, the Vatican released what they claim to be the "third part" of the Secret of Fatima, given by Our Lady to the three shepherd children on July 13, 1917, but this text contains no actual words of Our Lady indicated by the "etc.". The text that the Vatican released is as follows:

        After the two parts which I have already explained, at the left of Our Lady and a little above, we saw an Angel with a flaming sword in his left hand; flashing, it gave out flames that looked as though they would set the world on fire; but they died out in contact with the splendour that Our Lady radiated towards him from her right hand: pointing to the earth with his right hand, the Angel cried out in a loud voice: ‘Penance, Penance, Penance!’. And we saw in an immense light that is God: ‘something similar to how people appear in a mirror when they pass in front of it’ a Bishop dressed in White ‘we had the impression that it was the Holy Father’. Other Bishops, Priests, men and women Religious going up a steep mountain, at the top of which there was a big Cross of rough-hewn trunks as of a cork-tree with the bark; before reaching there the Holy Father passed through a big city half in ruins and half trembling with halting step, afflicted with pain and sorrow, he prayed for the souls of the corpses he met on his way; having reached the top of the mountain, on his knees at the foot of the big Cross he was killed by a group of soldiers who fired bullets and arrows at him, and in the same way there died one after another the other Bishops, Priests, men and women Religious, and various lay people of different ranks and positions. Beneath the two arms of the Cross there were two Angels, each with a crystal aspersorium in his hand, in which they gathered up the blood of the Martyrs and with it sprinkled the souls that were making their way to God.²

         Commentary
        There are many reasons for stating that the above text cannot be the whole Third Secret. First, there is solid evidence that the text above is, at best, part of the notebooks of Sister Lucy – not the actual 25-line letter in which Sister Lucy gives the actual words of Our Lady. For a comparison between the alleged Third Secret released on June 26, 2000 and the Third Secret text that has been alluded to by various witnesses, see Chapter 12 of The Devil’s Final Battle. There is also the testimony of what the text actually contains from people who have read it or studied it thoroughly (see Chapter 13 of The Devil’s Final Battle).
        A year and a half after the release of the alleged Third Secret, Msgr. (now Cardinal) Tarcisio Bertone, Secretary for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and co-author of the Commentary on the vision that was released on June 26, 2000, held an interview with Sister Lucy. The November 17, 2001 "interview" consisted of nothing more than Bertone’s Italian language report of what Sister Lucy is supposed to have said in Portuguese. According to Bertone, Sister Lucy said that the consecration of the world in 1984 has been "accepted by heaven" (for what purpose she did not say), and that "everything has been published."
        The "interview", which Bertone claims went on for two hours, contains only 44 words alleged to be from the mouth of Sister Lucy concerning the matters in controversy (the consecration of Russia and the Third Secret). No transcript or other independent record of the "interview" has ever been provided, making it impossible to determine what exactly Sister Lucy was asked during the closeted two hour interrogation, or the context of the 44 words she is alleged to have uttered during those unrecorded two hours. [The numerous suspicious circumstances of this secret "interview" are analyzed in Chapter 14 of The Devil’s Final Battle, entitled "Let Us Hear the Witness, for Heaven’s Sake"].

Source: Fatima.org

Father Martin on Third Secret of Fatima