VATICAN CITY — One of Roman Catholicism's most tantalizing secrets came to an anticlimactic end Monday as the Vatican unveiled a 62-line handwritten account by Lucia de Jesus dos Santos of what she saw as a 10-year-old shepherd in a pasture near Fatima, Portugal, on July 13, 1917.
The text describes a radiant Virgin Mary, a flaming sword and a "Bishop dressed in White," presumed to be a pope, who leads a sad procession of priests and nuns up a mountain through a half-ruined city strewn with corpses. One by one, the bishop and his followers are slain by soldiers with bullets and arrows as angels near a cross collect and sprinkle the martyrs' blood on their heaven-bound souls.
Successive popes had kept Lucia's tale locked in a safe, feeding fevered speculation that this "third secret of Fatima" predicted the end of the world. The secret spawned a cult that held the mother of Jesus as both savior and prophet of doom--a view enhanced by the Vatican's surprise announcement last month that Mary's apparition at Fatima had foretold the 1981 wounding of Pope John Paul II by a would-be assassin in St. Peter's Square.
Releasing the full text of Lucia's prophecy at the pope's instruction, the Vatican's top theologian Monday gently debunked the Fatima cult and said Catholics were not required to believe it.
In a 12-page commentary, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger said that Lucia, now a 93-year-old cloistered Carmelite nun, might have conjured her vision from devotional books.
Ratzinger, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, did not endorse a papal spokesman's claim that the felled "Bishop dressed in White" was John Paul or the pope's long-stated belief that Mary had deflected the bullets meant to kill him. The theologian dismissed a claim by Mehmet Ali Agca, the imprisoned Turk who fired the bullets and later embraced the Fatima cult, that he was an instrument of divine will.
Ratzinger called Lucia's text an interpretation of Christian suffering in the 20th century, neither tied to specific events nor foreordained. He said it underlined church teaching that "there is no immutable destiny . . . in the end, prayer is more powerful than bullets, and faith more powerful than armies."
"Those who expected exciting apocalyptic revelations about the end of the world or the future course of history are bound to be disappointed," the German cardinal wrote. "Fatima does not satisfy our curiosity in this way, just as Christian faith cannot be reduced to an object of mere curiosity."
