As for the third prophecy, Lucia wrote it down and sealed it in an envelope. She gave it to a Portuguese bishop with instructions that it wasn’t to be opened and read until after 1960. That bishop in turn presented it to the Vatican.
When 1960 came, Pope John XXIII reportedly unsealed the envelope but refused to reveal its contents, with the cryptic explanation that “this prophecy does not relate to my time.” His successor, Pope John Paul II, is said to have read the prophecy as well. Rumor had it that it referred to a “bishop clothed in white,” i.e., the Pope, who, as he makes his way through throngs of the faithful, falls to the ground, seemingly dead from a burst of gunfire.
On May 13, 1981, sixty-four years to the day after Our Lady of Fatima’s first appearance to the three children in the Cova da Iria, a Turkish gunman in St. Peter’s Square attempted to assassinate Pope John Paul II. The Pope thanked the Mother Herself for saving his life by “guiding the bullet’s path,” and the potentially fatal bullet was given by the Pope to the bishop of Leiria-Fatima, who had it set in the crown on the statue of Our Lady of Fatima at her shrine.
On May 13, 2000, Pope John Paul II visited Sister Lucia dos Santos, who by then was ninety-three years old and a Carmelite nun. He also beatified her cousins, Francisco and Jacinta, who are buried near the Virgin’s shrine. Never before or since has the Roman Catholic Church beatified children who weren’t martyrs.
And finally, on June 26, 2000, the Vatican released the complete forty-page text of the third Fatima prophecy, which had been committed to paper in Portuguese by Sister Lucia on January 3, 1944, and eventually translated into English, French, Italian, Spanish, German, and Polish.
The third prophecy from the Blessed Virgin of Fatima, reads, in part:
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 splendor 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 [basin meant to hold holy water] 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.
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the Roman Catholic Church’s prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, interpreted the third prophecy of Our Lady of Fatima as being perfectly summed up by the “triple cry, ‘Penance, Penance, Penance!’ ” In its entirety, he says, he believes it to be
a consoling vision, which seeks to open a history of blood and tears to the healing power of God. Beneath the arms of the cross angels gather up the blood of the martyrs, and with it they give life to the souls making their way to God. Here, the blood of Christ and the blood of the martyrs are considered as one: the blood of the martyrs runs down from the arms of the cross. The martyrs die in communion with the Passion of Christ, and their death becomes one with his … Since God
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