What is the Third Secret of Fátima?

What the third secret says

The Third Secret of Fátima is a short written account of a vision that three shepherd children in Portugal said the Virgin Mary showed them in 1917. Sister Lúcia wrote it down in 1944, at the order of her bishop. The Vatican kept the sealed text unread for decades and published it in full on June 26, 2000, together with a theological commentary. It describes a "Bishop dressed in White" climbing a hill past ruined buildings and dead bodies before being shot by soldiers, an image the Vatican reads as a foretelling of the 1981 attempt on Pope John Paul II's life.

Where to read the Third Secret

The full text is public. The Vatican published the third part of the secret, in Sister Lúcia's own words, on June 26, 2000, in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith's document The Message of Fatima, which is free to read on the Vatican's website (linked in the sources below).

The apparitions at Fátima

Over several months in 1917, three shepherd children — Lúcia, Francisco and Jacinta — reported seeing a woman they called Our Lady at Cova da Iria, a field near the town of Fátima, Portugal. During the apparition of July 13, 1917, the vision is said to have shown the children three things in succession, later known as the first, second and third parts of "the secret." Francisco and Jacinta were beatified by Pope John Paul II on May 13, 2000; Lúcia later became a Carmelite nun at the Carmel of Saint Teresa in Coimbra.

Three parts of one secret

The first part, in Sister Lúcia's own written account, was a vision of hell: "a great sea of fire which seemed to be under the earth," filled with suffering souls, followed by a request that devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary be established to save them. The second part concerned Russia: "If my requests are heeded, Russia will be converted; if not, she will spread her errors," bringing wars and the persecution of the Church, in the text the Vatican later published.

Both of the first two parts became known well before the third. Lúcia set the vision of hell down in writing in 1941, and the Russia prediction circulated for decades afterward. The third part was treated differently from the start: written separately, sealed inside an envelope, and kept from public view for almost sixty years.

How the text was sealed

Sister Lúcia wrote the third part of the secret on January 3, 1944, noting on it that she did so "by order of His Excellency the Bishop of Leiria and the Most Holy Mother," according to the Vatican's own account. The sealed envelope was transferred into the Vatican's Secret Archives on April 4, 1957.

Kept unopened for decades

Pope John XXIII received the envelope and read it on August 17, 1959, but chose not to make it public. Pope Paul VI read it on March 27, 1965, and also chose not to release it, according to the timeline the Vatican later published.

That changed after May 13, 1981, when Pope John Paul II was shot and wounded. He later asked for the envelope and read the text himself. Nineteen years after that, on June 26, 2000, the Vatican published the full text for the first time, together with a commentary by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

What the Vatican released in 2000

The published text — the Vatican's English translation of Lúcia's handwritten Portuguese original — describes "a Bishop dressed in White" who gave the children, in Lúcia's words, "the impression that it was the Holy Father," passing through "a big city half in ruins" and praying for the dead he met on the way, before reaching the foot of a large cross on a mountaintop, where he was "killed by a group of soldiers who fired bullets and arrows at him." Other bishops, priests, and men and women in religious life climb the same slope and are killed with him in the vision.

Cardinal Ratzinger's commentary read the vision as symbolic rather than a literal newsreel, an image of the twentieth century's persecution of the Church rather than a single dated event. The Vatican tied it most directly to 1981: John Paul II himself concluded, in words the commentary quotes, that "it was a mother's hand that guided the bullet's path," turning the shooting aside from a fatal course.

Claims that part was withheld

Not everyone accepts that the 2000 text is the whole of what Lúcia wrote. The Italian journalist Antonio Socci argued in a 2006 book, "The Fourth Secret of Fatima," that a further page existed, containing explanatory words from Our Lady that were never released. Father Nicholas Gruner and his Fatima Center made a similar claim, as did Christopher Ferrara, who pointed to an envelope he said had been kept by Monsignor Loris Capovilla, secretary to Pope John XXIII, and never produced.

The Vatican's position has been that the published text is complete. Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican's Secretary of State, wrote a book rebutting Socci's claims; the Vatican's own website presented it in February 2007, framing the disclosure as necessary "to dispel the air of mystery which shrouded the last part of the secret" so that "the truth could be revealed amid the confused apocalyptic interpretations and speculation."

The writer Kevin Symonds has separately argued that Lúcia's own 1944 note explains the gap: she was told to write "what they command you, but not that which is given to you to understand of its meaning." On that reading, no second page is missing; Lúcia was simply never ordered to write one.

Questions people ask

Verdict

Real or Legend files the Third Secret of Fátima as disputed, with a distinction worth holding onto. The text itself, its 1944 date, its passage through the Vatican archives, and its 2000 publication are documented, recorded in the Vatican's own materials, and not seriously contested.

What remains disputed are two separate questions. Whether the vision foretold the 1981 attempt on John Paul II's life is a matter of religious interpretation that no historical record can settle, and this record does not attempt to settle it. Whether the Vatican released the complete text Lúcia wrote is a separate, factual dispute: named critics say no, the Vatican says yes, and no independent examination of the original has been published.