John Paul?s Fatima secret

The Pope?s belief that he was saved from an assassin?s bullet to fulfil his destiny has enormous implications for the Church, says the author of a new biography

FOR most Catholics, the notorious Third Secret of Fatima, which once terrified the faithful (it was thought to contain the date of the third world war), is now of restricted interest. For many it is perhaps an embarrassment. And yet, it is of considerable significance for a biographer of John Paul II, since, by the Pope?s admission, it is crucial to his pontificate: the strange affair of the assassination attempt on his life in 1981, and the certitude of his papal style and determination not to resign.

In the early autumn of 1980 a Turkish hitman, mentally disturbed but nonetheless effective (he had murdered a Jewish news-paper editor), arrived in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia, having escaped prison in Istanbul. His name was Mehmet Ali Agca. He took up residence at the expensive Vitosha hotel, where he stayed for almost two months, and acquired a Bulgarian passport bearing his photograph issued in the name of Frank Ozgun. He travelled around Europe for several weeks, eventually arriving in Rome in December 1980.

On the afternoon of 13 May, 1981, Agca positioned himself close to one of the fountains in St Peter?s Square where John Paul was about to lead a service. At 5.19 p.m., as John Paul was being driven through the crowds of pilgrims in his Pope-mobile, Agca fired two shots from a semi-automatic pistol at a range of nine feet. One bullet tore through John Paul?s abdomen. As he fell back into the arms of his secretary Stanislaw Dziwisz a second bullet grazed his elbow and hit two American pilgrims.

Not the least of the mysteries is how Agca failed to kill John Paul. One explanation has it that a nun saw Agca raising the pistol and pulled his jacket, disturbing his aim. Another has it that at the moment of the first shot John Paul leaned down to hug a girl who was wearing a badge of Our Lady of Fatima.

Was Agca acting alone, or was he a tool of the Soviets via the Bulgarian secret service? To this day the conspiracy theories proliferate, including a notion that this was an early project of al-Qaida. Ali Agca said in 2,000 that he would reveal all when the Turkish authorities released him from his current open-ended jail term in Istanbul.

An ambulance got the Pope to the Poli-clinico Gemelli, four miles away, within eight minutes. By the time John Paul arrived he had lost consciousness and six pints of blood. The bullet had missed vital organs and arteries by millimetres. For four days and nights the Pope lay in intensive care.

John Paul was to spend about four months in and out of hospital. There were sudden mystery infections, advances and retreats in his convalescence, suspicions that the bullets ? there being that Bulgarian connection ? might have been poisoned (the Bulgarians had infamously murdered a native dissident of their country in London by prodding him with a poison-tipped umbrella); the injured pilgrims also suffered mystery infections.

Lying in hospital John Paul had pondered the coincidence that the attempt had occurred on the Feast of Our Lady of Fatima, 13 May, the exact anniversary of the day ? indeed, according to John Paul, the ?very hour? ? that Mary appeared to the three peasant children of Fatima. On returning to the Vatican he requested that the materials relating to the Fatima story be brought to him, including the text of the Third Secret, which had remained undivulged. Sr Lucia dos Santos, the eldest of the visionaries, had sent it to her local bishop in 1944. What John Paul read, in the light of the attempt on his life, shocked him to the core. It was about a bishop in white, whom the seers took to be a pope. As he read the Third Secret, he realised that the pope referred to was none other than himself, Karol Wojtyla. John Paul was convinced that the Virgin Mary had prophesied in 1917 that he, Karol Wojtyla, would be the victim of an assassination attempt.

On 13 May of the following year, 1982, John Paul travelled to Fatima to place the bullet that had nearly killed him in the crown of the Virgin. He told the faithful that one hand guided the gun, but it was another, ?a motherly hand, which guided the bullet millimetres away from vital blood vessels, and halted him at the threshold of death?.

John Paul?s long-held conviction about the interventionist role of the Virgin Mary in the history of the world had thus been revealed to him in a personal, revelatory way. She had saved his life. He gave the impression that he was inclined to believe that he was saved for a divine purpose. He came to realise, moreover, that great events of history of the late Eighties were linked to all the other messages the Virgin had imparted to the three Portuguese peasant children. Following the assassination attempt and his deeply felt convictions about the role of the Fatima Virgin, John Paul took steps in 1984 to fulfil one of the Virgin?s requests: that the Pope should dedicate Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

The most powerful expression of his mystical understanding of history, the fall of Communism, and the Virgin of Fatima, was expressed in his autobiographical work Crossing the Threshold of Hope, published in 1994. He wrote: ?And thus we come to May 13, 1981, when I was wounded by gunshots fired in St Peter?s Square. At first, I did not pay attention to the fact that the assassination attempt had occurred on the exact anniversary of the day Mary appeared to the three children at Fatima in Portugal and spoke to them the words that now, at the end of this century, seem to be close to their fulfilment.? The words to which he referred related to the Virgin?s prophecy that Russia would cease to spread its errors and become converted to Christianity. By the year 1994, Soviet Communism had fallen, but by 2000 the devout hope of Russia?s conversion appeared as far from realisation as it ever had been. John Paul, however, did not repine. There was other business to attend to, which was the significance of the Third Secret of Fatima as it applied to him.

The day before the Feast of Our Lady of Fatima, 2000, the great Jubilee Year, John Paul arrived with Cardinal Angelo Sodano at the shrine in Portugal. That evening he prayed in the Chapel of the Apparitions and left a small red box at the foot of the statue of Our Lady of Fatima. The box contained a ring given to him by Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski, former primate of all Poland when John Paul was elected Pope.

The next day, before a crowd of a million faithful, John Paul presided at the beatification Mass of the two seers of Fatima, Francisco and Jacinta Marto. The two had died at the age of 11 and 10 respectively, not long after the last apparitions in 13 October, 1917. Sr Lucia dos Santos, the surviving seer, by then 93 years old, joined the Pope and various cardinals and archbishops for the beatification ceremony.

The vast congregation that usually collects on the Fatima Feast was stunned when Cardinal Sodano announced that he had been given permission by the Pope to divulge the secret 56 years after its delivery. It is to be remembered that the seer had told the reigning pope, Pius XII, a devotee of the cult, that it should not be opened until 1960. Both the intervening popes (not counting John Paul I, who was pope for only 33 days) had declined to announce the secret. The decision of John Paul II to divulge it at last in the millennium year would tell us much about his state of mind.

The cardinal told the assembled crowds that the secret contained a ?prophetic vision? similar to prophecies found in scripture. He went on to explain that the elements of the secret were not to be interpreted with ?photographic clarity?, anticipating any objections that the vision was not an accurate description of what the cardinal (or more accurately John Paul) thought it described. Sodano went on to say that the vision ?synthesised and condensed against a unified background events spread out over time in an unspecified succession and duration?.

He averred that the content of the vision should be interpreted in a symbolic way, but its primary message was about ?the war waged by atheist systems against the Church and Christians?. It was also about the ?immense suffering endured by witnesses to faith in the last century of the second millennium?. Then he came to the actual message. The vision, he declared, said that ?a bishop, clothed in white, makes his way with great effort towards the Cross amid the corpses of martyred bishops, priests, men and women Religious and many lay people. He too falls to the ground, apparently dead, under a burst of gunfire.? This rendering of the Third Secret was highly edited, for the original, as it turned out, spoke of the bishop in white being ?killed by a group of soldiers who fired bullets and arrows at him?. Sr Lucia, said the cardinal, and the other seers, had understood the figure in white to be a pope.

Here is the Third Secret in full, retaining her odd punctuation in which quotation marks substitute parentheses:

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.

A month after this revelation, which was greeted enthusiastically by devotees of the cult, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the senior figure of doctrinal orthodoxy at the Vatican, published a commentary, confirming that the prophecy was indeed about John Paul II himself. He wrote: ?When, after the attempted assassination on 13 May, 1981, the Holy Father had the text of the third part of the secret brought to him, was it not inevitable that he should see in it his own fate??

What does the Third Secret tell us about John Paul?s pontificate in its late stages? Secrets remain secret, even after their contents have been divulged to the widest number of people: secrets invariably contain metaphors requiring further interpretation. What is the inner secret of the Third Secret, and who has the authority to crack the code?

John Paul believes that the Third Secret is about him. The vision tells of the murderous attack, lending him the status of honorary martyr. At the brink of death, however, he was saved by divine intervention. Surely, then, this indicates that he had been saved for a purpose: the fulfilment of the full agenda of his papacy. Divulging the secret now, at the beginning of the new millennium of Christianity, guaranteed the maximum impact of the secret prophecy which has come to pass.

Religious secrets are about religious power. And by the mere fact of rescuing the Third Secret from oblivion (most of us, after all, had more or less forgotten about it), John Paul had encouraged an enthusiasm for the paranormal in Catholic popular piety and blurred the margins between private (or secret) and public revelation. There can be no new public revelation (which ends with the death of the last apostle). Private revelations confirm the content of public revelation, and are for the edification of the individual seer or seers involved. Hence he who holds the power to make public revelation out of secrets received in private visions exerts a vastly unequal power relationship over the rest of the Catholic community.

At the time of the divulging of the Third Secret there had been much internet activity suggesting that the true import of the message had confirmed the claims of traditionalist Catholics over the liberals or progressives. To allay any such interpretation Joaqu?n Navarro-Valls, the Vatican press spokesman, announced that the Third Secret implied ?no papal support for traditionalists opposed to ecumenism?. Some traditionalist groups, he said, had ?wrongly appropriated some aspects of the Fatima message, speculating in a millenarian fashion about the assumed, but false, contents of the message?. He went on to say: ?The decision to publish the secret obeys the conviction that Fatima cannot be kidnapped by any particular party position.?

A palpable point was being made here. The beatification of the young seers of Fatima on 13 May had bestowed a decisive legitimacy on the message of the visions, despite any disclaimers from the Vatican. There were websites on Fatima already urging the belief that the message was ?synonymous with an orthodox adherence to the doctrines, rites and traditional practices and teaching of the Roman Catholic Church?. The propagandists claimed that the world was ?convulsed by a series of deepening crises ? beyond the capacity of human beings to alleviate or solve?. This indeed was the interpretation of the message that John Paul had urged all along.

A week after the Feast of Our Lady of Fatima, John Paul celebrated his eightieth birthday on 18 May. He concelebrated Mass in St Peter?s Square with 78 cardinals from six continents; in his homily he mentioned those ?who are sick, alone or in difficulty?.

That day Cardinal Ratzinger gave an interview to La Repubblica emphatically denying that the Pope would ever resign. ?In the most absolute way I do not believe in such an eventuality?, he said. He could not see how the Pope could imagine retiring, even in the distant future, he went on. The Pope was carrying out his pastoral mission, and ?his presence is vital to the Church today?. The comment seemed designed to put to rest for good those mounting anxieties about the Pope?s ability to serve the Church as age and illness undermined his ability to function. Underpinning this ?absolute? certitude, moreover, was the Third Secret of Fatima, reverberating across the previous century, indicating that John Paul had been singled out by providence to remain in the chair of St Peter until he had completed the divine mission assigned to him.

This is an edited extract from The Pope in Winter, by John Cornwell, published this week by Viking, ?20. Tablet bookshop, ?18. Telephone 01420 592974.