Volume 47, Number 13 · August 10, 2000
Fatima: 'The Third Secret'
By Garry Wills
The cult of Our Lady of Fatima is based on appearances of the Virgin Mary, in 1917, to three illiterate children praying in a field near the Portuguese village of Fatima. There would seem little reason to write about the cult if the current Pope did not take the visions very seriously indeed. He believes that Our Lady of Fatima saved his life by deflecting the bullet aimed at him in 1981 by his would-be assassin, Mahmet Ali Agca. The bullet that entered his body was given to the shrine at Fatima, where it is now part of the crown on the Virgin's statue. This May, during his third pilgrimage to Fatima, the Pope beatified two of the three children who saw Mary, and released a previously suppressed account of a vision that had been granted them. On June 26, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, published the Vatican's official interpretation of the newly released account, called 'Theological Commentary.'[1]
Feature, 1706 words
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