The Pope created a sensation on his visit to Fatima when he authorised the ?third secret? to be revealed. The Reader in Church History at the University of Cambridge looks at what the message of the Fatima visionaries implies ? and what it does not. ON 13 May Pope John Paul beatified two Portuguese children, Francisco Marto and his sister Jacinta. These illiterate little shepherds, in company with their cousin Lucia dos Santos, experienced between 13 May and 13 October 1917 a series of visions of a lady who revealed herself at last as Our Lady of the Rosary. Lucia was 10 years old, Francisco nine, Jacinta only seven. Within three years, Francisco and Jacinta were dead, victims of lung disease. Lucia became a nun, and lives still in a Spanish convent.

Encounters between peasants and the Mother of God were not rare in nineteenth-century Europe. The visions of Bernadette Soubirous at Lourdes created the greatest shrine in Christian history, but Bernadette was at one level merely the best-known example of a tradition of Pyrenean peasant seers stretching back for centuries.

The message of the Lady of Fatima was both generalised and conventional: the world was steeped in sin, God was grieved, people must repent, say the rosary, wear the Carmelite brown scapular. As was usual in such apparitions, a chapel was to be built on the spot. Iberian piety in 1917 was lachrymose and penitential, and the Church at odds with a bitterly anticlerical government. Accordingly, the children taught a message of reparation and sacrifice, expressed, as the Pope declared in his beatification homily, in renunciation of pleasures . . . even of innocent childhood games. Francisco was found weeping for the sins of the world, and shortly before her death the nine-year-old Jacinta bewailed the prevalence of the sins of the flesh, and the introduction of certain fashions which offend Our Lord very much.

Their message was laced with menace. On 13 July 1917 the children were petrified by a vision of hell: millions of souls, they prophesied, would die in new and crueller wars, God?s scourge for sin, and almost all would go to hell. Only Mary could help: urgent prayer and the dedication of Russia and the world to her Immaculate Heart might avert the outpouring of horror, the spread of atheism, the destruction of nations.

These prophecies, collected in a careful diocesan investigation in the 1920s, and elaborated in successive memoirs by Lucia, had, or acquired in transmission, a marked apocalyptic character. Famously, at her last appearance on 13 October 1917, the Virgin caused the sun to dance in the sky: the Pope at the beatification explicitly identified the Virgin of Fatima with the woman clothed with the sun of Revelation 12.

The Fatima prophecies, with their furniture of persecution, martyrdom, wars and the rumours of war, caught the beleaguered mood of early-twentieth-century Catholicism. The conversion of Orthodox Russia had long been a papal preoccupation, but the Bolshevik Revolution came hard on the heels of the visions, and the spread of Russian error took on an entirely new dimension. Fatima came to be seen as a direct forewarning of the conflict with Communism. Unlike twentieth-century Lourdes, it became the focus of the fierce anxieties and atavisms of the religious and political Right. During the Cold War period, many feared that the mysterious third secret, written down by Lucia in 1944 and kept undisclosed in the Vatican since 1957, predicted nuclear war. The Virgin of Fatima predicted Russian atheism: about its Nazi equivalent she was bafflingly silent.

The ecclesiology of Fatima was ultramontane: the Church stood against the world, and at the heart of the Church stood the Pope, a lonely leader interceding and suffering for the people. At the beatification Mass, Cardinal Angelo Sardano announced that the third secret was at last to be published, with an explanatory commentary by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. This third part of the secret of Fatima, he declared, contains a prophetic vision similar to those found in sacred Scripture, portraying in symbolic form the war waged by atheist systems against the Church and Christians, and describing the immense suffering endured by the witnesses to the faith in the last century of the second millennium . . . an interminable Way of the Cross led by the popes of the twentieth century. Chief among these was the bishop clothed in white, who intercedes for the people and makes his way with great effort towards the Cross over the corpses of other martyrs. In the prophecy, he too falls to the ground, apparently dead, under a burst of gunfire.

Persecuted and beleaguered popes were part of the imaginative landscape of early-twentieth-century ultramontane Catholicism, and popes warmed to the message of Fatima. Under its influence, Pius XII consecrated the world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary in 1942 and 1952. For Pope John Paul, however, the bishop in white is no generalised symbol, but a direct reference to himself. He was shot by a Turkish terrorist on 13 May 1981, the sixty-fourth anniversary of the children?s first vision, and he is convinced that the date is charged with meaning. It was a motherly hand which guided the bullet millimetres away from vital blood vessels, and so halted him at the threshold of death. One of the assassin?s bullets now adorns the crown of the Virgin of Fatima. Just what was beatified along with the little shepherd seers on 13 May? Not, for certain, a new source of revelation. Successive popes from Pius XI onwards have recognised the authenticity of the shrine of Fatima but, as Karl Rahner made clear 40 years ago, the actual content of the children?s prophecies, like every other private revelation, remains a matter of pious opinion, to be judged by the standard of the faith delivered once for all to the apostles. Catholics are free to take it or leave it. It has always been acknowledged that some of the prophecies were simply wrong: in October 1917, for example, the children predicted the immediate end of the First World War.

The Pope believes. At the beatification Mass he thanked Our Lady of Fatima for his delivery on 13 May 1981, and then went on to thank Blessed Jacinta for the sacrifices and prayers offered during her life for the Holy Father, whom she saw suffering greatly. Yet the language of his homily treads a tightrope between apocalyptic particularity and generalised spiritual exhortation. It is charged with imagery derived from the Book of Revelation. He recites the calamities which befell humanity in the century just elapsed because of its rejection of God: the horrors of the First and Second World Wars and other wars, the concentration and extermination camps, the gulags, ethnic cleansings and persecutions, terrorism, kidnappings, drugs, the attacks on unborn life and the family. The message of Fatima is, he declared, a message of mercy and a call to conversion, alerting humanity to have nothing to do with the dragon . . . whose tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven. In practice, what this means is essentially a heightened fidelity to the Gospel. Fatima calls us to sacrifice, reparation, penitence, and to attend to the testimony of the twentieth-century martyrs who have borne witness with their blood.

BEATIFICATIONS are first and foremost an act of discernment of spirits, the recognition of the finger of God in a human life, and as such they are always a source of joy to the Church. They are always and unavoidably, nevertheless, also political gestures. The beatification of these two child seers is at one level a Christian version of the romantic movement?s idealisation of childhood, a recognition of the intrinsic worth of innocence and unspoiled vision. But the modern papacy needs Fatima. This particular beatification is also a complex negotiation between structure and charism, partly a recognition and partly an annexation by the Church?s hierarchy of the value and legitimacy of non-hierarchical gifts, the role and authority of the prophet as distinct from the priest. Like Jacinta and Francisco, Moses was a shepherd.

Yet to raise the little shepherds to the altars is inevitably to bestow legitimacy on a good deal more than the dignity of childhood or purity of heart. The Fatima website I visited recently declared belief in Fatima?s message to be synonymous with an orthodox adherence to the doctrines, rites and traditional practices and teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. Heaven had intervened there not only to save the world, but to preserve the Church from the apostasy and chaos which now beset it. The website portrays both the Church and the world as places convulsed by a series of deepening crises . . . beyond the capacity of human beings to alleviate or solve.

The world, to be sure, is a scene of sorrows. Switch the news on any night and you will find the prophet?s scroll, full of mourning and lamentation and woe. But there is a disturbing mismatch between the Fatima website?s almost Manichaean horror at the state of Church and world, and the very different and far more positive language in which the Second Vatican Council called for the discernment of the signs of the times. Our world leaves little room for optimism: but Christian faith calls us to exercise the virtue of hope. It would be a tragedy if the recognition of the holiness of two Portuguese children opened the doors of the Church a little wider to forces of suspicion and fear.

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