- Vatican wants to end conspiracy theory
- Apocalypse vision `revealed` 90 years ago
- Third secret `not` collapse of church
THE Vatican tried yesterday to draw a line under a conspiracy theory that has dogged the Catholic Church for decades - that it has been harbouring details of the predicted apocalypse.
The Pope`s second-in-command, Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, denied that the church was suppressing a vision of the end of the world said to have been revealed by the Virgin Mary to three shepherd children on a hillside at Fatima in Portugal exactly 90 years ago.
The three Secrets of Fatima were written down by one of the children, Lucia Dos Santos - who became a Carmelite nun - and sent to the Vatican in a sealed envelope. Two of the secrets were made public, apparently predicting 20th-century world war, totalitarianism and the eventual reconversion of communist Russia to Christianity.
Pope John Paul II suggested that the third secret predicted the 1981 attempt on his life. But he failed to satisfy conspiracy theorists, with many accusing the Vatican of disclosing only part of the last Fatima secret.
Antonio Socci, a Catholic journalist and author of The Fourth Secret of Fatima, said he had at first accepted John Paul`s explanation. But his researches led him to believe that the late pontiff`s revelation had been "partial".
He said the undisclosed portion of the secret predicted a crisis of faith in the West and the collapse of the church hierarchy in the face of a tidal wave of "apostasy and heresy".
Marco Tosatti, a Vatican watcher and author of The Prophecies of Fatima, also said the Vatican was believed to be "hiding something" so as "not to alarm millions of the faithful".
But yesterday, as tens of thousands gathered at Fatima, 130km north of Lisbon, to mark the 90th anniversary of the "visions", Cardinal Bertone insisted the idea that the secret predicted "catastrophic world events" or the collapse of the Christian church was "pure fantasy".
The cardinal has been fighting conspiracy theories involving the church, such as The Da Vinci Code, which he dismissed as a "pack of lies".
In his book The Last Fatima Visionary: My Meetings with Sister Lucia, Cardinal Bertone says that before her death in 2005, at the age of 97, the nun confirmed John Paul`s account of the "third secret".
"There is no fourth secret," he declared yesterday. "Everything has been published and correctly interpreted." He hinted that "anti-Christians" were behind the conspiracy theories.
In a preface to Cardinal Bertone`s book, Pope Benedict XVI writes that publication of the "third secret" by his predecessor "unveiled the truth amid the confused framework of apocalyptic interpretations and speculation in the church".
The Times, London, in The Australian
