A Controversial Letter of Sister Lúcia

Introduction: The Interpretation of Sister Lúcia’s Letter

In the controversy regarding the Third Secret of Fatima one of the most important documents is the letter that Sister Lúcia wrote to Pope John Paul II on May 12, 1982, in anticipation of her meeting with him the following day during his visit to Fatima. The authenticity of the letter as published by the Vatican and by the Carmelites of Coimbra, however, has been called into question because Sister Lúcia mentions to the Pope that he was “anxious to know” the Third Secret, whereas in fact Pope John Paul II had previously read the Third Secret on two different occasions. The argument is made that Sister Lúcia could not have made such a mistake, and therefore the letter was either forged, or was not addressed to John Paul II on that particular occasion.

The primary problem with this argument is the English translation of Sister Lúcia’s Portuguese. Sister Lúcia used the word “conhecer,” which is more specific than the English word “to know.” It comes from the Latin word “cognoscere,” which gives rise to various words in English, such as “cognition,” “cognizance,” etc. Cassell’s Latin-English dictionary in defining cognoscere cites a passage from Cicero where a clear distinction is made between a mere knowledge of the existence or content of something, on one hand, and a deeper understanding of its meaning, on the other hand. In this particular case Sister Lúcia was referring not simply to John Paul II’s awareness of the contents of the Secret, but even more so to his understanding of what the Secret signified.

Once one focuses on this aspect of Sister Lúcia’s letter, everything that follows in the letter becomes clear. Sister Lúcia begins by referring to the Secret as a “symbolic vision.” Proponents of a “fourth secret” have argued that the Third Secret vision is only a part of the Secret, and that there is another text containing the “words of Our Lady” which the Vatican has refused to publish. However, Sister Lúcia in this letter is indicating that the vision itself is the Secret, the Secret in its entirety, but which requires an explanation, and which she then proceeds to provide to the Pope.

The Secret as Distinct from Its Explanation

In the previous article we discussed the words of Our Lady to Sister Lúcia in January 1944, when Our Lady instructed Sister Lúcia to write down what she saw, but not what was given to her “to understand of its meaning.” The proponents of a missing document find in this information from the Carmelites of Coimbra, in their biography of Sister Lúcia, a proof that there is more to the Secret than the vision, insofar as Our Lady Herself had made this distinction between the vision and its interpretation. However, Our Lady instructed Sister Lúcia not to write down the interpretation at that time, in January of 1944, when she was to write the Third Secret itself – which was the vision, not a separate document explaining it.

The advocates of a missing document argue that this command to Sister Lúcia applied only to January of 1944, but certainly not to later years, because eventually Sister Lúcia had to have written the explanation, for otherwise the Secret would have remained forever unintelligible. In analyzing this hypothesis, we cited in the previous article Father Alonso, and the Carmelite prioress whom he himself quoted, both of them stating that it was the mission of Sister Lúcia to present to the world the message of Fatima, but not to be its interpreter, and that this latter responsibility belonged to the theologians, to the apostles of Fatima, and ultimately to the magisterium of the Church.

When, however, we read Sister Lúcia’s letter to Pope John Paul II of May 1982, we find what is in fact an explanation of the meaning of the Secret. On this point we give credit to the proponents of a missing document for arguing, after the publication of the Carmelite biography, that at a later date Sister Lúcia must have written down an explanation. But their problem in the application of this principle is that the explanation given by Sister Lúcia in her letter is not what they previously expected the Third Secret to be.

For example, Christopher Ferrara criticized the Brazilian Fatima scholar Antonio Borelli for giving an interpretation of the Secret which, according to Mr. Ferrara, reduces the Third Secret to nothing more than what was already revealed in the Second Secret – the chastisement of the world and the triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Sister Lúcia’s letter, however, contains an indirect response to this very objection. She explained very clearly to John Paul II that the Third Secret “refers” to a part of the Second Secret. Our Lady in the Second Secret had said that if we did not heed Her requests, Russia would spread its errors. And this, Sister Lúcia stated, is what has happened: We have not heeded Our Lady’s requests, and as a result Russia has spread its errors throughout the world. For this reason Antonio Borelli’s explanation of the Third Secret is perfectly justified. For after the Secret was published in June 2000, he could show how this fulfillment of Our Lady’s prophecy in the Second Secret was represented in the symbolism of the Third Secret – which is what Sister Lúcia appropriately told John Paul II when stating that the Secret was a “symbolic vision.” Sister Lúcia’s letter to the Pope was written precisely to explain the meaning of this symbolism.

Sister Lúcia, however, does not enter into a detailed explanation to the Pope. She is content to give a general reference to the “errors of Russia” but without giving a complete analysis of all the ways in which these errors affected the Church and temporal society, or in precisely what manner they have spread to other countries throughout the world. To understand more precisely Sister Lúcia’s role in providing an explanation of the Secret, we must turn to the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas on the nature of supernatural revelations.

St. Thomas Aquinas and Prophetic Revelation

If we study the teaching of St. Thomas about the nature of prophetic knowledge (the Latin cognitio, or cognition, from cognoscere, in the sense explained above in reference to Sister Lúcia’s Portuguese word conhecer), we find in it all the distinctions necessary for understanding the perspective of Sister Lúcia and her mission. In the Third Secret Sister Lúcia writes, “we saw in an immense light that is God....” Sister Lúcia describes the revelation that she, Francisco and Jacinta received as a “light” that comes from God. St. Thomas uses the same word in Latin, or lumen, to describe such divine communications. He distinguishes this “light” from the “species,” knowledge from the senses, imagination and intellect, but different from the light regarding its ultimate meaning (Summa Theologica, II-II, q. 173, a. 2).

In the case of Sister Lúcia and the other seers, the species was knowledge of the Third Secret vision itself, and the light was the understanding of its meaning. But to communicate the meaning of a prophetic revelation, God also uses secondary causes or instruments, which in this case was Our Lady Herself speaking to the seers. The words of Our Lady at Fatima that served this purpose were those of the second part of the Secret of Fatima, popularly known as the Second Secret. The first part, or First Secret, was the vision of hell, and the second part begins with Our Lady referring to hell as the place where poor sinners go. In this Second Secret Our Lady also prophesied the coming of the Second World War, and the spreading of the errors of Russia if mankind did not heed Her warnings. But Our Lady did not leave the seers without reasons for hope, for She ended with the words that have become the center of the debate about the Third Secret: “In Portugal the dogma of the Faith will always be preserved.

Proponents of a missing document argue that these final words are the beginning of the Third Secret. If this were the case, however, Sister Lúcia would have been revealing part of the Third Secret before she was authorized to do so. For she wrote these words in her Fourth Memoir in 1941, whereas she wrote the Third Secret in January of 1944, only after she had been told to do so by the bishop of Leiria-Fatima and afterwards by Our Lady. Another argument they use to identify these words with the Third Secret is that they appear to contain a message different from that of the Second Secret, a prophecy relating to a crisis in the Church or a crisis of faith, rather than what are perceived to be events concerning primarily temporal society, such as the Second World War.

The “Errors of Russia” versus “the Dogma of the Faith”

The problem with this argument is that it is lacking a proper understanding of the relationship between the Church and temporal society in the light of modern papal teaching. Preserving Christian Publications recently published Pope Leo XIII and the Prayer to St. Michael by Kevin J. Symonds, a book that shows the relationship between the vision of Pope Leo in the late nineteenth century and the events prophesied by Our Lady in Fatima in 1917. The prayers that the Pope ordered to be recited after low Masses were a development of earlier prayers introduced by his predecessor, Blessed Pius IX, because of the growing assaults against the Church. Related to these facts is another book that we published, Juan Donoso Cortés’s Catholicism, Liberalism and Socialism, in which this English translation of 1862 contains a handwritten blessing from Pius IX to the translator. This Pope identified himself in some way with the prophetic insights of its author, who, as a renowned Spanish statesman and European diplomat, saw the direction in which modern society was going and what this meant for the Church.

In 1849, two years before the publication of his book in 1851, Juan Donoso Cortés gave an address to the Spanish Parliament in which he analyzed the crisis in the following manner. When religion prospers, he explained, the power of the State diminishes, because the Church attends to man’s needs so profoundly that the role of government is reduced to a minimum. However, when the influence of religion declines, the power of the State increases. And, he warned his listeners, the world of his time – contrary to what many of them assumed – rather than making great social progress, was heading in the direction of the greatest tyranny the world has ever seen. Not only did Donoso Cortés foresee what was coming, but he also foretold the rise of Russia.

What Donoso Cortés foresaw in the nineteenth century became the reality of the twentieth century, and now into the twenty-first century. Our Lady appeared in Fatima just as the Communist revolution was taking place in Russia. In the context of the Secret of Fatima, the meaning of Our Lady’s twofold prophecy becomes clear. The “errors of Russia” have spread precisely to the degree in which the “dogma of the Faith” is no longer acknowledged within society. These two aspects of Our Lady’s prophecy in the Second Secret are inseparably related, and together they point to the Third Secret.

Conclusion: Sister Lúcia’s May 1982 Letter Is Her Explanation of the Third Secret

We have attempted in this brief article to summarize the state of the question regarding the controversy surrounding the Third Secret, as it has developed since the publication of the Carmelite biography of Sister Lúcia in 2013, and in the English translation in 2015. Advocates of a missing part of the Third Secret are now faced with the evidence that Our Lady told Sister Lúcia in January of 1944 to write down the Third Secret itself, the vision, and not its explanation. In this way the two would not be confused. But by May 12, 1982, Sister Lúcia could freely write to Pope John Paul II and explain to him that the Third Secret was this “symbolic vision,” and the explanation of its meaning was that the errors of Russia foretold by Our Lady had indeed spread throughout the world, bringing wars and persecution of the Church. The present day loss of faith has resulted from an internal crisis within the Church. This in turn has amplified the crisis in temporal society. All of this is represented in the vision of the Third Secret, as explained in the first of this series of articles, through the interpretations of Pope Benedict XVI, Bishop Bernard Fellay, and Father Nicholas Gruner, whose explanations are fully understood only by referring to Sister Lúcia’s 1982 letter to Pope John Paul II.