The Vatican yesterday published the text of the "third secret of Fatima", an apocalyptic vision of suffering and death which Pope John Paul has interpreted as predicting the attempt on his own life in 1981.
The three-page handwritten document, written in Portuguese, is the account of a revelation allegedly made by the Virgin Mary to three shepherd children in 1917 and was put down on paper in 1944 by Sister Lucia Dos Santos. Sister Lucia, now 93, lives in a convent in Portugal, while her two companions, Giacinta and Francisco Marto, both died in childhood.
Two previous parts of the revelation - which include a vision of hell, the prediction of the end of the first World War and the beginning of the second, and an appeal for the consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary - were published in 1937.
The document describes the vision of a bishop dressed in white, which the shepherd children assume to be the Pope, who is seen climbing 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," the document says. "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 the other bishops, priests, men and women religious, and various lay people of different ranks and positions."
The essence of the message was revealed by Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the Vatican Secretary of State, in the course of a visit to Fatima with the Pope on May 13th, the 19th anniversary of Turkish terrorist Mehmet Ali Agca's pistol attack on the Pontiff in St Peter's Square.
Pope John Paul has attributed his survival to the intervention of the Virgin - "one hand fired and another guided the trajectory of the bullet" - and he called for a copy of the prophecy to read in his hospital bed after the attack, Mgr Tarcisio Bertone, secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, revealed yesterday. The long-preserved secret had inspired much speculation about the possible terrifying content of the document, with theories ranging from a prediction of nuclear holocaust to the collapse of Christianity. To avoid suggestions that part of the document had been suppressed, the Vatican yesterday published a photocopy of the original text in Portuguese, accompanied by 40 pages of explanation and interpretation.
"The church does not want to impose an interpretation, but it seems that the Pope sees his own sufferings in it and I identify myself with this interpretation," Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the Vatican's guardian of doctrinal orthodoxy, told a press conference.
"Whoever carefully reads the text of the so-called third secret of Fatima will probably be disappointed or amazed after all the speculation there has been," Cardinal Ratzinger said.
"We see represented here in a snapshot and with a symbolic language that is difficult to decipher, the church of the martyrs of the past century. No great mystery is revealed; the veil of the future is not torn apart."
Cardinal Ratzinger emphasised that the message was a call to repentance and that the image of "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", represented the threat of judgment that looms over the world.
"Today the prospect that the world might be reduced to ashes by a sea of fire no longer seems pure fantasy: man himself, with his inventions, has forged the flaming sword," he wrote in his accompanying explanation.
The sufferings seen in the vision represented the persecution of the church by atheist communism during the last century, he wrote, while the call to penitence underlined the power of prayer and repentance to change the history of the world.
"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," Sister Lucia's text concludes.
In an article published by the Milan daily Corriere della Sera on Sunday, papal biographer and Vaticanologist Vittorio Messori said the Pope's personal commitment to Mary had led him to change the "theological statute" of a popular Marian devotion, recommended by the church but which individuals are free to accept or refuse as they choose. "It is prophecy, this great element forgotten by the ecclesiastical intelligentsia of recent centuries, that finds its place again within theology," he wrote.