The "Third Secret of Fatima" may be the focus of much attention today when Pope John Paul II travels to Fatima in Portugal to beatify Jacinta and Francisco Marto, the two shepherd children, who, along with their cousin Lucia dos Santos, are said to have had visions of the Virgin Mary on a hillside near the town in 1917.
More than one million pilgrims are expected at the Fatima shrine for a ceremony that clearly has a particular significance for the ailing 79-year-old Pope, who arrived in Portugal last night. Today's date, May 13th, has a double purport: it is the anniversary of the first apparition of the Virgin to Jacinta, Francisco and Lucia, and the 19th anniversary of the attempt by a Turkish gunman, Mehmet Ali Agca, to assassinate Pope John Paul in Saint Peter's Square, Rome.
The Pope has never made any secret of his belief that the Virgin saved his life back in 1981, a point he underlined by making a special pilgrimage to Fatima in May 1982, while in 1984 he presented the shrine with the bullet fired by Ali Agca that nearly killed him. In that context, Vatican commentators have been asking if the Pope may choose today's beatification ceremony to reveal the "third secret".
In the last of her apparitions to the three shepherd children, the Virgin is said to have entrusted them with three secrets. The first was that the two younger children, Jacinta and Francisco, would shortly die, leaving Lucia to spread the "Fatima Message". Jacinta and Francisco did die soon afterwards from complications following influenza at the ages of 10 and 11. The third child, Lucia dos Santos, went on to take vows as a Carmelite nun in the early 1930s. She is still alive and is expected to meet with the Pope today.
The "second secret" was a prediction that Russia would one day return to Christianity, while the "third secret" has never been revealed. Written down by Sister Lucia in 1944 - at a time when she thought she was dying - and entrusted to the Vatican, this "third secret" has been the object of much speculation over the years, with many believing it to reveal a terrifying vision of the end of the world.
Speculation about the apocalyptic nature of the "third secret" goes back to 1959 when Pope John XXIII, in accordance with Sister Lucia's wishes, read her letter containing the secret. One witness, writer Jacques Lallee, claimed that after reading the letter, Pope John had "an expression of terror on his face".
Today the secret is believed to be known only to four people - Sister Lucia, Pope John Paul, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, and Monsignor Loris Capovilla, private secretary to Pope John XXIII. Twice in the past, in 1993 and 1996, Cardinal Ratzinger has, however, denied the "third secret" contains an end-of-the-world message.
Four years ago, the cardinal explained: "The Virgin did not appear to children, to little simple souls, for reasons of sensationalism, but rather to remind people of the essentials of the faith, of conversion and of prayer."