Pope punctures more-fanciful Fatima predictions http://www.cnn.com/2000/WORLD/europe/05/13/pope.fatima.02/index.html

On Saturday, Pope John Paul II celebrates Mass at the Fatima sanctuary in central Portugal

May 13, 2000 Web posted at: 1:59 p.m. EDT (1759 GMT)

LISBON, Portugal (Reuters) -- For decades, the content of the so-called "Third Secret of Fatima," supposedly transmitted to three shepherd children by the Virgin Mary in 1917, has spawned fears and fancies.

From the date of Doomsday to sex scandals so scurrilous they would sink the Roman Catholic church, speculation has been rife about a prophecy that the Vatican apparently felt was too delicate to divulge.

But on Saturday, before hundreds of thousands of faithful gathered to witness the beatification of two of the three child visionaries, the Vatican drew back the veil -- at least partially.

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ALSO Vatican ends mystery of the third prophecy of Fatima

On the instructions of the 79-year-old Pope, who was in Fatima to officiate at the beatification, the number two in the Vatican hierarchy, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, announced that the prophecy had foreseen the 1981 assassination attempt on the Pope and the persecution of the church by communist regimes.

He said other details would be released in the future.

"The vision of Fatima concerns above all the war waged by atheist systems against the church and Christians," Sodano said in an address at the end of the beatification ceremony.

The protection afforded to the Pontiff by the Virgin Mary, who Pope John Paul fervently believes saved him from an assassin's bullet 19 years ago in Rome, "seems also to be linked to the so-called third part of the secret of Fatima," he added.

According to Sister Lucia , a 93-year-old nun who is the last survivor of the three shepherds, the children saw a vision in which a "bishop clothed in white...falls to the ground, apparently dead under a burst of gunfire," the Cardinal said.

The Pope narrowly survived the attack by Turkish gunman Mehmet Ali Agca and later donated the bullet dug from his body to the sanctuary at Fatima where it was placed in the gold crown of the Madonna.

An image of the Virgin of Fatima is paraded through the crowd at the Basilica of Fatima, in Portugal

First messages made known in the 1940s The first part of the Madonna's message was a vision of hell shown to the children.

In the second part, Mary predicted the outbreak of World War Two some 22 years before it started, asked for devotion to her Immaculate Heart and asked that Russia, which was about to undergo the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, be consecrated to her.

But it was not until 1943 that Sister Lucia, whose two young cousins died of pneumonia shortly after the visions, told her superiors about the Madonna's messages. However, she only revealed the first two.

She wrote down the third in a sealed envelope and gave it to her local bishop. It was sent to the Vatican in the late 1950s.

When Pope John XXIII read the secret, he was reportedly shocked and told aides he did not want to hear about it again. His successor, Pope Paul VI, who reigned from 1963 to 1978, and the current Pontiff both decided against publishing it.

Secret spawned millions of words The secret of Fatima has been the subject of hundreds of books, fills thousands of web sites and even inspired a 1981 hijacking by a man who wanted the Vatican to reveal it.

Australian Laurence James Downy hijacked an Aer Lingus flight between Dublin and London holding test tubes he claimed were filled with explosives.

In 1998, Nicholas Gruner, a Catholic priest, warned that the secret predicted the Church would be rocked by sex scandals, while others have seen it linked to Armageddon or the collapse of Portugal's African empire, which it lost in the 1970s.

Sodano did not close the door completely to speculation when he said that the secret contained a "prophetic vision" similar to those found in the Bible.

The full version will be issued after "an appropriate" commentary has been prepared by the Vatican's Doctrine of the Faith to make it intelligible to believers.

But Sodano limited the room for the doomsday theorists when he added that "the events to which the third part of the Secret of Fatima refers now seem part of the past."

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