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The Secrets of Fatima

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The Secrets of Fatima

From the House Of David Teaching Center - Library File

A paper on the Third Secret of Fatima apparitions written by the principal seeress Lucia dos Santos who is still living today in Fatima as a Carmelite nun known as Sister Lucy. She is the last survivor of the three young shepherds who encountered the Virgin in her family's pasture in 1917. Lucia would keep the secret until 1941, when she received an inner "locution" Virgin giving her leave to publish all but the last of its three parts. The Vatican refused to disclose the Third Secret in 1960 and continues to suppress it to this day. The author uses a thorough analysis of the first two parts of the Secret to construct the essential aspects of the undisclosed third part as well. He concludes that the real thrust of the Third Secret does "not" concern itself with natural or man-made cataclysms, but rather with the "spiritual" catastrophe which is looming on humanity's horizon.

Source: 'APOKALYPSO' --Summer/fall 1995--As posted on the Internet at the following URL: http://www.planet.net/ptgermine/fatima.htm

THE SECRETS OF FATIMA

"When the Church and the World are One, these days will be close at hand. For our divine Master has built a wall between His things and the things of the World." -- St. Anthony of the Desert (4th Century)

"I give you the end of a golden string, Only wind it into a ball: It will lead you in at Heaven's gate Built in Jerusalem's wall." -- William Blake

On the afternoon of Wednesday, May 13, 1981, the "Popemobile", not yet fitted with the now-familiar plexiglass shield, slowly traversed St. Peter's Square in observance of the weekly General Audience. In it stood John Paul II, dispensing his blessings to the crowd of 20,000 which was parting like a sea of humanity at his feet. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a young woman wearing a white blouse which seemed to radiate sunlight from out of the deepening shadows of the waning day. In that light, the Pontiff thought he glimpsed an image of the Blessed Virgin -- could it be a picture which the girl was wearing? As he turned and bent over to get a better look, two 9mm bullets screamed past his ear: then a third slug ripped into his abdomen, coming within a hair's breadth of severing his aorta.

As the Holy Father lost consciousness, he was heard to whisper in Polish, "Mary, my Mother ...". It was 5:17 p.m., the exact time at which Karol Wojtyla had been elected to the papal throne on October 16, 1978. Inexplicably, his ambulance was directed to the more distant of the two local hospitals, causing him to lose three-quarters of the blood in his body -- fully six pints -- by the time he arrived at Polyclinico Gemelli, where he was administered last rites before surgery. In the massive transfusions which followed, the Pontiff would be infected with hepatitis from a tainted supply of blood mistakenly used by the doctors.

Meanwhile, back in St. Peter's Square, the would-be assassin was grabbed by a Franciscan nun and wrestled to the ground by the crowd. He turned out to be a 23-year-old Turkish national named Mehmet Ali Agca, a member of the so-called "Turkish Mafia", which controlled drugs and arms smuggling in neighbouring Bulgaria. Agca was also associated with a group of right-wing terrorists in his homeland known as the "Gray Wolves", at whose behest he participated in the assassination of a liberal newspaper editor in Istanbul in 1979. Arrested for that crime and sent to a top-security military prison, Agca "escaped" (or, more likely, was allowed to escape) three days before John Paul II was to arrive in Turkey for a papal visit. In a letter to the newspaper the day after his jail-break, Agca announced his intention to shoot the Pope and stated, "this is the sole motive for my escape from prison".(1)

In view of the young Turk's known contacts with the Bulgarian secret service and John Paul's support for the emerging anticommunist Solidarity movement in Poland, the Bulgarians and their Soviet masters became the focus of the conspiracy investigations which followed the shooting. Yet the CIA's monitoring of encrypted cables between Moscow and the KGB's Rome station indicated that the news of the attempt of the Pope's life was unanticipated by the Soviets, and a report issued by the CIA's Papal Task Force in 1985 concluded that by May 1981 Moscow had already worked out a "modus vivendi" with the Polish Pontiff and had little to gain from his death.(2)

As for Agca himself, while he is subject to bizarre delusions (e.g. claiming at times to be Jesus Christ), it is intriguing to note that, when the Pope visited him in his jail cell in 1983, the prisoner implored his victim to reveal the "mystery of Fatima". And during his trial for attempted murder and conspiracy in 1985, Agca testified that his fusillade against the Pope was "linked to the Third Secret of the Madonna of Fatima".(3)

By what stretch of the imagination could Fatima -- a series of six apparitions of the Virgin Mary witnessed by three Portuguese children in 1917 -- be linked to a papal assassination plot in 1981? During his long convalescence in the hospital, Papa Wojtyla would ponder a number of connections between the two events, beginning with the correspondence of the date of the shooting in St. Peter's Square with the liturgical Feast of Our Lady of Fatima: May 13th, the date on which the vision of the Virgin had first appeared to the three young shepherds at the Cova da Iria near the village of Fatima 64 years earlier. The children were instructed by the Virgin to return to the same spot on the 13th of each month for the next five months, culminating in the "Miracle of the Sun" on October 13, 1917, when some 70,000 onlookers beheld a series of wondrous solar transformations which many described as a "dance". John Paul also mulled over the last thing he remembered seeing before feeling the searing pain of his wound -- the luminous image of the Blessed Mother which caused him to turn his head just in time to evade the first two bullets ... bullets which would have surely shattered his skull.

Anyone who is familiar with the writings of Karol Wojtyla knows the man to possess a
razor-sharp analytical mind, not at all given to flights of supernatural fancy. Yet as he hovered between life and death after the shooting in St. Peter's Square, he experienced a "prodigy" -- a vivid visual reenactment of Fatima's "Miracle of the Sun" -- in the midst of which he had a vision of the terrible agony which would grip the Church in the wake of his assassination. A courageous man who had faced down ruthless tyrants in his native land, John Paul did not fear death, especially if his blood might in some way inspire the spiritual renewal which he knew Catholicism so desperately needed. But here he was confronting the most bitter of ends -- with the foreknowledge that his death now would precipitate the calamitous wreckage of the See of St. Peter. As he felt his life slipping away, in his prayers he begged to be reprieved, to be given the chance to banish the dread shadows of things to come which had been cast upon his dying eyes.

When he awoke some days later and found himself miraculously recovering, the Pontiff's first action was to direct the Vatican's Holy Office to copy and send to his hospital room all of the accounts of the Fatima apparitions written by the principal seeress Lucia dos Santos. Included in the documents which arrived a few days later was a single sheet of paper, consisting of some 20 handwritten lines. It was the fabled Third Secret of Fatima.

Lucia dos Santos -- her name means the "light of the saints" -- is still living today in Fatima as a Carmelite nun known as Sister Lucy. She is the last survivor of the three young shepherds who encountered the Virgin in her family's pasture in 1917: her younger cousins, Jacinta and Francisco Marto, both died within three years after the apparitions, just as had been foretold to them by the spectral Lady. It was during the third of the six apparitions, on July 13th, that the Lady directed the light emanating from her hands downward, seemingly into the Earth's interior, revealing an infernal domain peopled by demons and damned souls caught in a vortex of flaming fury. This horrifying vision lasted but an instant, after which the Virgin spoke to the two girls of future events, instructing them to tell no one except Francisco (who could see the Lady but could not hear her words).

Lucia would keep the secret until 1941, when she received an inner "locution" from the Virgin giving her leave to publish all but the last of its three parts. As for the final part, which has come to be known as the "Third Secret", Sister Lucy's nearly fatal bout of pleurisy in 1943 moved the Bishop of Fatima to ask her to write it down and seal it up in an envelope, so that it might be read if she died. After much agonizing and another visitation by the Lady, she complied with the Bishop's request in January 1944, and forwarded the envelope to him with the instructions that it was to be opened by the Pope and read to the world in 1960, "because the Virgin wishes it so".

But, for reasons which will become clearer as we proceed in this inquiry, the Vatican refused to disclose the Third Secret in 1960 and continues to suppress it to this day. All the popes since John XXIII, as well as a few Curial cardinals, have read the contents of Lucy's envelope, as John Paul II is reported to have done shortly after his inauguration in October 1978. Indeed, several months before the shooting in St. Peter's Square, the Pope had spoken quite candidly to a group of Catholics concerning the Third Secret. What he said at that time sheds considerable light on how the assassination attempt of May 13, 1981, would later fit into his interpretation of the Fatima message.

RENEWAL IN BLOOD

While conversing with a small group of pilgrims in the cathedral square of Fulda, West
Germany, in November 1980, the Holy Father was asked to explain why the Third Secret had not been published in 1960, as the Lady of Fatima had directed. John Paul responded that "the gravity of its contents" was such as to possibly provoke a hostile response to its release on the part of the "world power of Communism", i.e. the Soviet Union, and hence the Vatican had seen fit to defer its publication "out of diplomacy". He alluded to a portion of the message "where it is said that the oceans will entirely flood certain parts of the earth, and that from moment to moment millions of men will perish". A question was then posed concerning the fate of the Church in Fatima's apocalyptic scenario --

John Paul: "We have to be prepared to suffer, before long, great trials which will require of us the disposition to sacrifice even our life ... for Christ. Through your prayers and mine, it is still possible to diminish this trial, but it is no longer possible to avert it, because only in this manner can the Church be effectively renewed. How many times has the renewal of the Church been brought about in blood! It will not be different this time." (4)

In passing, we must regard the Pontiff's references to the anticipated Soviet response and diplomatic concerns pertaining to publication of the Third Secret as striking confirmation of the thesis developed in the first installment of this series of 'Apokalypso' monographs (5) -- i.e. the shameful degree to which the temporal role of the "sovereign" Papacy has come to overshadow and absolutely subvert the spiritual mission of the Church. Incredibly, the Vatican pronounces the Fatima message to be the authentic Word of Christ, spoken through his Blessed Mother, while in the very next breath they declare that their obedience to the plain directives of that
message must be indefinitely postponed for reasons of international diplomacy!

For the moment, however, let us suspend further consideration of the themes of Communism and catastrophes in the first part of the Pope's 1980 comments in order to focus on the "great trials" and the "renewal of the Church" of which he spoke so dramatically at the time. What are we to make the extreme urgency of the Pontiff's words with regard to this "renewal" -- a "renewal" which he anticipates paying for with his own blood? On the superficial level, the Church of Rome in the latter years of the 20th Century seems to be riding the crest of a wave of prosperity and popularity which it has never before known in its 2000-year history. An appearance by the Pope anywhere in the world -- not just the Christian world -- can fill a stadium more quickly than a World Cup match or a rock concert. The Holy Father has become an icon of popular culture, his writings even dominating the best-seller lists of secular literature. Nations and governments which short decades ago afflicted the Church and treated its vicar with mistrust now universally accept and recognize the sovereign See and admit its representatives as full participants in the their highest diplomatic conclaves.

So, we may well ask, what then can be so terribly wrong with the Church that the Pope sees such an absolute need to fix it, even at the price of his own life? If the truth be told, all of what we have just recounted as to the unprecedented acceptance of the Church by the World and its institutions are the surest signs of the spiritual crisis which it faces. By way of explanation of this point, we may recount an anecdote involving Pius X (1903-1914), the only pontiff of this century to be canonized. "What are the distinguishing characteristics of the Church?", he once asked a group of young novices. After they had dutifully exhausted the gamut of standard answers -- it is apostolic, universal, etc. -- Pius informed them that they had omitted the most essential trait: "It is "persecuted"." The true message of Christ can never be received by the World with anything but the most violent antagonism, because it teaches the utter vanity of worldly pursuits and prophesies the ultimate downfall of the proud and powerful. Hence, the Church which is no longer oppressed by the world is a ship which has lost its spiritual compass.

The vitiation of the Faith which has spread through the Church like a cancer over the last four decades is, however, recognized by the Vatican hierarchy only by its outward symptoms: the precipitous decline in priestly vocations, Mass attendance, and virtually every other index of the strength of the creed. Perhaps the most devastating aspect of this trend is buried in the statistics -- the appalling deterioration in the moral quality of many men of the cloth. Would the priesthood of barely a generation ago have winked at the presence of known pederasts in its midst? In the words of Pope Paul VI in 1977, the "smoke of Satan" has filled the Church and ascended "even to its summit".

Apostasy -- loss of faith -- is most pernicious when it strikes at the shepherds of the flock. Just as it is no "coincidence" that Mehmet Ali Agca fired his bullets on the anniversary of the first Fatima apparition, so we must consider the significance of the date on which the Lady of Fatima chose to confide Her great Secret to the young shepherdesses at the Cova da Iria. July 13th is the liturgical feast of St. Anacletus, the third Pontiff of Rome, who selected as his papal name the Greek word "amencletus" -- meaning "beyond reproach" --used by St. Paul in his Epistle to Titus:

"For a bishop must be blameless ('amencletus')... not given to filthy lucre; ...Unto the pure, all things are pure: but unto them that are defiled and unbelieving is nothing pure; ...They profess that they know God; but in their works they deny him, being abominable..." (6)

And indeed, the corruption of those who, like the Pharisees of old, hold themselves out as spiritual leaders, effectively blocks the path to salvation for all of the people of God:

"You shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for you neither go in yourselves nor suffer ye them that are entering to go in." (7)

Evidently, from John Paul's remarks at Fulda quoted above, the Third Secret of Fatima addresses this unprecedented crisis of faith and in fact predicts its onset in the latter decades of this century. This would explain the Lady's desire to have the message revealed in 1960, when a veritable epidemic of universal apostasy began to sweep across the globe. Another strong inference here is that the Church "renewal" which will resolve this great crisis may involve the martyrdom of one or more popes. It also seems clear that, even before the attempt on his life in St. Peter's Square, Karol Wojtyla believed "himself" to be destined for such martyrdom.

Why? Part of the lore surrounding his papacy is the tale of his pilgrimage in 1947 to the monastery of Padre Pio, the famous Capuchin stigmatic.(8) Padre Pio was said to have the faculty of "reading consciences", such that when he heard confessions, penitents would not need to verbally recount their sins. He was also known to possess the gift of prophecy. When he heard the confession of then-Cardinal Wojtyla -- so the story goes -- Padre Pio told him that he would become Pope ... and that he would one day be assassinated.

Thus when John Paul II first read Sister Lucy's handwritten note sometime late in 1978, he would not have been able to toss it aside with the dismissive remark, "this does not pertain to the years of my papacy", as John XXIII reportedly did in 1959. He may even have been aware that the revelation of the Secret of Fatima was accompanied by an eclipse-like dimming of the Sun's light, to the extent that witnesses reported seeing a starry sky. As discussed in the previous monograph of this series, Karol Wojtyla was born during a solar eclipse, and the Latin phrase applied to him by St. Malachy's prophecy means "the Eclipse of the Sun". Interestingly, the astronomical records of the time disclose that the Virgin's appearance on July 13, 1917, was actually bracketed by "two" solar eclipses within a month of each other, on June 19th and July 19th (9), a rare occurrence -- successive solar eclipses usually occur about six months apart -- marking the end of one 1000+year series of eclipses and the beginning of a new cycle.

It is likely, however, that the new Pontiff's initial interpretation of the Third Secret was heavily prejudiced by the reactionary exegetes who have virtually monopolized the field of Fatima "expertise". This school of thought casts the Blessed Virgin as a Cold Warrior of sorts, warning the world that in the ideologies of socialism, Bolshevism, Communism -- the list is often extended to include liberalism, modernism, freemasonry, and even "Judeo-masonry" -- lie the road to hell and damnation.

From their vantage point, the Third Secret (regardless of what it actually says) necessarily reads like a script for World War III, with an armor-clad, Amazonian Mary drawing up the battle lines of Armageddon, pitting the forces of the Light on one side against the execrable legions of Red atheism on the other. Understandably, Karol Wojtyla, who had experienced Stalinism at its ugliest, would have found the scenario of an apocalyptic showdown between the Church and world Communism plausible -- along with the fatalistic notion that the vicar of Christ might be called upon to lay down his life to secure the final victory.

If so, then the Pope's seemingly disjointed remarks concerning the Fatima Secret in Germany six months before his near-assassination begin to make some sense. Yes, he realized, the Third Secret calls for a revolutionary spiritual renewal of a Church whose corrupt hierarchy has forfeited its legitimacy. But, "No," he averred: "the Church cannot be reformed at the present moment" (10), because he believed that, in the ensuing leadership vacuum, the Red adversary would seize the advantage. Convinced that the principal enemies of the Faith were external to the Church -- with those subverting it from within being merely their henchmen or dupes -- John Paul would have logically concluded that the demise of Marxist atheism would inexorably usher in a Christian renaissance. And perhaps he even anticipated that the martyrdom presaged for him by Padre Pio would be the last act of infamy which would topple the monstrous megalith of godless Communism. Whatever the Holy Father may have seen when he glimpsed into the abyss from his hospital bed in 1981, it definitely disabused him of the notion of a Soviet Antichrist.

Assuming that the dying Pope had, during his "prodigy", peered behind the curtain which conceals events to come, what would he have likely seen? In retrospect, the answer seems fairly obvious: The Pope's assassination at that time, with the blame --regardless of the ultimate proofs -- inevitably falling on the Russians, would have driven the U.S.S.R. into a posture of such extreme international isolation that the "glasnost" opening of a few years later would have been unthinkable. The death of John Paul II would not have hastened the collapse of Soviet Communism, it would have prolonged its death agony, perhaps to the point of a world-wide conflagration. Viewed in this light, the Blessed Virgin's intervention to save the life of the Pontiff possibly saved the whole planet as well.

When Papa Wojtyla visited Fatima on the first anniversary of the shooting in St. Peter's
Square, therefore, it was not only to thank the Virgin for his own life, but to thank Her on behalf of the entire human race for having "averted our disaster...".(11) Had not the Lady of Peace broken through the wall of silence imposed by the Vatican hierarchy and begun to unfold her great Secret -- Her own design for spiritual renewal "without" bloodshed -- on the stage of human history?

Incredibly, within a space of seven years, the bogeyman of Red Russia would recede with virtually no carnage, the Berlin wall would topple without the firing of a shot, Masses commemorating the anniversary of Fatima would be celebrated within the Kremlin itself, and John Paul II, the implacable antagonist of Communism, would become the first Roman Pontiff to receive the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the U.S.S.R. in the Vatican.

Withholding the Secret, against the Lady's wishes, is what the Pharisees of Rome must do to perpetuate their ill-gotten power and wealth. To justify their defiance of God's will, they invoke the instinctual fear of the future which runs deep in the dark recesses of the human mind. Patronizingly, they assure the flock that the knowledge is not good for us, it involves fearful "chastisements" and nightmarish cataclysms, which are the price to be paid for the world's sinfulness. The fervent desire of the people of God to hear the Virgin's message is -- so they tell us -- simply a lust for sensationalism, sinful in itself. Surely, the time of purgation and purification of which the prophets have long written is close upon us now. Man's crimes against his brothers, against the earth and her creatures, and most of all against himself, in the negation and denial of his own divine Spirit -- the one crime which Christ teaches to be unpardonable -- all of this must soon be reconciled as the accounts of the passing Age are settled and those of a new Aeon are opened. We may chose to refer to these accounts as "sin" or "karma", but the reality is that they constitute an energy imbalance, a metaphysical disequilibrium which must be righted, centered before the God-Man can return and begin His thousand-year reign of peace.

The celestial Virgin comes to us at this juncture, "in the fullness of time" as the Scriptures express it, to offer us her alternative to the karma of blood and retribution -- her option of Grace. As the descendants of Adam, we all share in the consequences of humanity's Fall from Grace, the Fall which Christians believe preordained the sacrifice of the Son of Man on the Cross of Golgotha -- so that the consciousness which had lapsed into the dream of Time might again be lifted up "as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness"(12). To bring the Son of Man into the World, however, God needed to open a "space" in Time for the Eternal, a "place" in the finite for the Infinite. This "place" is what the Catholics describe as the Immaculate Heart -- a vessel preserved for Grace in the World of sin. Regardless of doctrinal niceties as to how this belief relates to the historical Mary or the circumstances of her physical conception, it is solidly grounded in the bedrock of spiritual Truth common to all God's children.

As we shall see, the message of Fatima is universal, albeit couched in the language of Roman Catholic theology as befits the cultural setting of the revelation. Like the Christian Trinity, the Secret is One which reveals itself as Three. Each "part" of the Secret is dependent upon the others for its meaning, and hence we cannot expect to understand the so-called Third Secret in isolation from the other two parts.

Moreover, a thorough analysis of the first two parts of the Secret will enable us to construct the essential aspects of the undisclosed third part as well. Let us begin, therefore, with the first formula in the Lady's tripartite optio n of Grace -- the devotion to Her Immaculate Heart.

THE IMMACULATE HEART

The iconography of the Immaculate Heart of the Virgin is an image steeped in the most ancient traditions of the human Spirit -- or the Holy Spirit, as rendered in the Christian lexicon. When "the Spirit is upon him", so to speak, Man has always seen himself as part of a collective Being: the God-Man. The Egyptians associated this God-Man with the Sun, and called him by the name Ra -- the One, He who Is. But Ra is not knowable as the One, because the One encompassing All cannot contemplate Itself. To know Itself, the One must engender Two and thereby become, with the Two, a Triad or Trinity. Now, when we say that the One "engenders"

Two, we employ that particular verb very advisedly, because contained within it is the word "gender" -- precisely the quality which is inherent in duality. When the Jews came out bondage in Egypt, they became the keepers of this inspired wisdom, and hence they were the Nation which received the new infusions of the Spirit for a time thereafter. In the books of Moses, we read of the creation of Adam, who is "male and female"(13), initially embracing within himself Eve. Later, the Hebrew prophets would teach of a Son of Man, one of the lineage of Adam, whose coming would complete the ternary cycle of creation. In the interval between the scission of the One into Two and the advent of this Redeemer to consummate the Trinity, however, the principle of division appears -- a principle embodied in the Snake of the Garden.

In Genesis this Snake is described as the "most subtle of animals". It is worthwhile to give some thought to the chosen adjective "subtle". Our modern usage associates the meanings "crafty" and "deceptive" when this term is applied to a sentient being, and so the Snake is a deceiver, because duality is illusory -- i.e., although it "exists" in Time, and for a time, it does not partake of the Eternal, the That which Is. But even more to the point is the Latin etymology of the word "subtle": "sub", or beneath, and "tela", which is the "web" formed by the "crossing" on a loom of the woof across the fixed threads of the warp. Only by the reunion of the divided threads of being do they again become Real, that is to say, do they again partake of the Eternal. "Beneath" the crossing -- the "tela" -- wrought by consciousness, is the primordial chaos of matter which antedates Creation and is always immanent in it. This is the Snake, the Adversary of the redemptive crossing, the divider, the limiter, the "self" in each of us which separates us from God and frustrates our return to Him. (14)

The Egyptians related all of their sacred knowledge to the concept of "crossing", which was symbolically expressed in crossed arms of their mummies -- a gesture which we have inherited and unwittingly continue to mimic in the preparation of our own dead for their journey back to the Eternal, or "Net"-er world. To the principle, or Neter, which opposes the crossing, the Egyptians gave the name Set, from which the Semites derived their Shaat and the Christians their Satan. In the pagan pantheon, the same qualities were embodied in the Roman god Saturn and his Greek counterpart Chronos. The name Chronos directly invokes the concept of Time, and indeed, Saturn is still depicted as the Scythe-wielding Father Time.

The Fall brought about by the Serpent, then, is a fall out of Eternity into Time, and hence when we talk about redemption, we necessarily speak in eschatological terms, i.e. of the "last times" or the "end of Time" -- because Time is only that interval between the scission of the One and the consummate revelation of the Trinity. In that interval exists, as we have discussed,
Set/Satan/Saturn, whose principle -- the principle of Time -- is karma, or "sin" in Christian terminology. It is the principle of the vegetative/animal world, the relentless alternating cycles of birth and death, which in ancient Egypt was represented by the dismembering of Osiris by his rival Set and the scattering of his body parts into the Ocean of primordial chaos. Symbolically, therefore, the light of the Spirit is disseminated in the formless void of matter, where it awaits the incarnation of the Word, the Christ, who will release it from this prison.

This incarnation of the Word thus represents the freeing of the soul from its bondage to the law of karma. Just as the soul's servitude to the principle of Time -- corresponding to the oppression of the Jews in Egypt -- is reflected in a false "temporal" consciousness, so the promise of the soul's liberation reflects itself in a distinctly "spatial" consciousness, an intelligence which the Pharaonic sages associated with the "heart". For an individual, of course, the physical heart is the nourisher of the carnal body, and in the same way the metaphysical Heart of redemptive Space is the nourisher of the divine Body of the God-Man. If we contemplate the Christian icon of the God-Man affixed to the Cross, we find the Heart at the "center" of the mystical
crossing.

With the influx of the Holy Spirit, the Mind awakens from the dream of Time and is lifted aloft to the pinnacle of Grace, the mountaintop from which it may see in all directions at once. Freed from the illusion of sequential past, present and future, consciousness ascends on the wings of Horus, the Hawk of the Nile, and surveys from above -- at one and the same moment -- the entire landscape which is visible only in sequential installments to the traveller on the road below. It is thus that Grace confers the gift of prophecy, which is the "living" knowledge, the living water which the mystical Heart receives from above and transubstantiates as the consecrated wine, the blood of the Lamb, which flows from the Heart to feed the divine Body.

"They will never hunger or thirst again;.. because the Lamb who is at the 'heart' of the throne will be their shepherd and will guide them to the springs of living water; ... " Revelation 7:16-17 (15)

In the Holy Land, Mount Carmel is literally 'Karim-El', the "Vineyard of God", the birthplace of the Virgin, who the angel Gabriel addresses by the name 'Kecharitom,ne', meaning "Full of Grace". Gabriel announces to the woman who is "Full of Grace" that the Spirit of the Most High will come upon Her as a "cloud" -- the same pillar of cloud which had gone before Israel as they came out of Egypt, and which had shrouded the top of Mt. Sinai when Moses received the tablets of the Covenant. As this cloud covered Mary, so it had covered the Ark of the Covenant, and so it would be witnessed , some 3400 years later, to cover the three young shepherds of Fatima each time they encountered the apparition who ultimately revealed Herself as the "Lady of Mt. Carmel". From the very beginning of the Virgin's divine mission, then, she is associated with a sacred landscape, a network of consecrated sites which are to mark the way through the spiritual desert of this World to the gate of the New Jerusalem.

We do well to recall, however, that the people of Israel did not pass directly from the land of their bondage to the promised land. Rather, during the absence of their prophet Moses, they fashioned for themselves a golden calf and were abandoned by the guiding pillar of cloud to wander aimlessly in the desert for forty years. Accordingly, Man's fallen condition is one of idolatry, because he perceives Creation to be "external" to himself, rather than positioning his consciousness at the center, in the Heart, where it may receive the "in-spiration" of the breath of God. This false consciousness of an external objective universe induces humanity, thoroughly deluded by egocentric pride, to spurn the guidance of Grace and fall into abject obeisance to "empirical" science -- i.e., knowledge based not on inspiration but observation. Modern man does not "breath in" his experiences, does not take them into his lungs and let them infuse their energy into the contents of his heart. Instead, he approaches cold, dead matter as an "observer" and seeks to put his hands on it, to possess it, to make it obey his will and divulge its secret laws to him.

As a result, mankind now finds itself wandering in the desert for a term much longer than the forty years of the Israelites. Like Achilles chasing the Tortoise, our vaunted science seems always to be within a step of the Grand Formula which will explain everything. After making astounding strides early in this race, however, empirical science in our century finds its quarry increasingly elusive, its objective universe evaporating into the statistical haze of quantum theory. Advanced thinkers in the sciences are even beginning to concede that they have erred in attempting to separate the conscious observor from the "objective phenomenon", since the underlying truth is that Mind and Matter become Real only to the extent they "cross" one another -- each reciprocally occupying for the other the interstitial void at the center, the place of the Heart. Moreover, a thorough analysis of the first two parts of the Secret will enable us to construct the essential aspects of the undisclosed third part as well. Once our soul reposes in the chamber of that Heart which did not partake in the Fall from Grace, that is, in the unblemished, or Immaculate Heart of our collective female Body of Light, we are no longer caught up in the whirlwind at the circumference of the sphere of incarnation -- the infernal vortex the vision of which so terrified the Fatima seers -- but instead enjoy the Lady's blessed peace in the eye of the storm.

Here we find the turning point, the metaphysical axis of the temporal World, and here the principle of harmonic resonance applies, whereby an infinitesimal force applied at the center can modulate huge dynamics at the periphery. It is this principle, by the way, and not massive manual labor, which explains the monumental architecture of the Nile Valley, and it is this principle which the Virgin of Fatima taught in the first part of her great Secret.

By devotion to the contemplation of the Immaculate Heart, we may begin to access the power of the stillness, of the "null point", to direct the energies swirling around it. The most notable contemporary example of the exercise of this power was the inexplicable survival of eight Jesuits whose home was a mere eight blocks from "ground zero" of the Hiroshima bombing in 1945.
When interviewed on American television and asked to account for this apparent miracle, one of the survivors responded: "In that house, we were living the message of Fatima." (16)

Now it becomes clear why the Lady of Mt. Carmel prefaced her revelation of the great Secret at Cova da Iria with a vision which the young shepherds described as "hell". Recall that she directed the supernal light which emanated from her palms downward toward the "center" of the Earth. Because of our fallen condition, we perceive ourselves as existing on the circumference of a spinning globe of dead matter whose axis lies within a fathomless Abyss. But the truth is that this Abyss lies at the "periphery" of a spiritual universe whose real axis is in the Heart of our
divine Body. Even a comparative handful of souls consecrated to the Immaculate Heart can, through their spiritual exercises of devotion, restrain the fury of the vast centrifugal forces whirling at the periphery. Herein we find the profound meaning of the Catholic dogma of the Communion of Saints --i.e., that the penance and reparations of the few can effect the salvation of the many -- and herein we once again we encounter the central theme of Man's "collective" spiritual nature: our separateness is the illusion of the temporal World, the World of duality, and hence the World in which Set/Satan rules.

Throughout human history, the wisdom of the Heart has remained the province of a tiny, persecuted elect, but beginning in the mid-19th Century, the World -- apprehending that its time was short -- launched a furious war to extirpate this wisdom. Many visionaries, including Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903), have told us that the God-Man will not intervene to end this persecution until He Himself returns again in glory at the end of Time. For the people of God, these times are like the fourth watch of the night for the Apostles on the Sea of Galilee, when they were menaced by a tempest while their Master remained behind in the hills praying after the martyrdom of John the Baptist.(17) Previously in the Gospel, the Apostles had been similarly beset by raging winds and waters after Christ had fallen asleep in the boat(18), and we should infer that this scenario is repeated for emphasis. Symbolically, these stories foreshadow the "fourth watch" of the long night between the Passion of Christ and His triumphant return, or Parousia -- the "latter times" in which the God-Man tests the faith of His disciples.

Since we know that God does not engage in idle diversions, we must inquire as to the purpose of this "test of faith". It has been said that Christ seeks to associate Man to His great redemptive Work, and that it is only through such collaboration that Man can actualize his divine potential. True faith cannot be passive: this is the teaching of the Gospel stories concerning the stilling of the tempests. True faith must be active, both externally and, more importantly, internally. On the Sea of Galilee, the Apostles acted, in the external sense, by calling upon Christ -- and that is indeed "all" that is required of Man in the way of outwardly-manifested action. Where the Apostles failed, however, was in their "fear", and it was for this fear that their Master chided them, "Where is your faith?". The violent chaos of the elements -- of the World without the divine presence -- had invaded their souls and recreated its tempest within their own hearts.

The ultimate eschatalogical question, then, and the only one that really matters, is simply this: "When the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on the earth?"(19). For the past 150 years, a vortex has been forming, growing exponentially in its destructive fury, spreading its spiralling tentacles like a black hole, and drawing into itself ever greater multitudes of humanity:

"Turning and turning in the widening gyre , The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold..." (20)

As fewer and fewer souls find their way to the stillness of the Heart, its power to restrain and control the swirling maelstrom of the World is weakened, causing the gyres of the vortex to expand and accelerate. On the mundane level, we all observe this in our daily lives: time seems to pass more and more rapidly -- so rapidly in fact that we humans of the late 20th Century have completely lost control of our lives. We no longer live in Time, we are possessed by it, picked up and carried along helplessly in its raging wind. As this tornado increases in velocity and its pull becomes more and more irresistible, the number of those who remain faithful to the Heart diminishes still further, and along with it the restraining force at the center. Our science calls such a process, in which disorder feeds back upon itself in an escalating spiral, "chaos".

Like the runaway calliope in the finale of Alfred Hitchcock's "Strangers on a Train", the brakes will soon enough be applied to the whirligig of Time. Just how destructive and cataclysmic that climax turns out to be obviously depends on how far out of control the calliope manages to get. This explains why the Fatima prophecies of future human sufferings are all "contingent" upon mankind's continued rejection of the option of Grace, its contumacious refusal of the sanctuary of the Immaculate Heart.

Since the "reality" of the dualistic World is in fact illusory, the most fundamental law of the World is what modern physics calls "symmetry". The principle of symmetry dictates that every phenomenon which appears in the physical universe must be accompanied by another phenomenon which exactly negates it. When matter comes into existence, therefore, it must be accompanied by an anti-matter counterpart, so that the sum of the two always equates to zero.

When we apply this principle to the exponential acceleration of Time which is occurring at the cusp of the Ages, we find that the increase in the velocity of Time is accompanied by an offsetting "attenuation" of the "scale" of Time -- which is to say, in effect, that our errant culture feverishly subdivides Time into ever more rarefied and vacuous moments. In its limitless lust for dominion, the World now seeks, as it were, to wring out of the fabric of Time the blessed intervals of Eternity which occur between the ticks of the clock.

Unless and until it descends into total chaos, however, the World remains tied to the cycles of the higher planes of existence. Hence a "day" is actually the interval between the Sun's successive culminations -- i.e., its noontime crossing of the meridian above a particular point on the Earth -- while a "year" is really the interval between the Sun's successive northward crossings of the Earth's equator at the vernal equinox. Again we see in this the process of "crossing" as the means by which the cycles of our temporal sphere are attuned to the harmonics --literally the music -- of the progressively more sublime spheres above us. In its movements throughout each year and through the precessional Age of about 2000 years, the Sun weaves across the surface of our globe a "net"-work of crossings, which comprise the nodal points of celestial influx. In the surviving spherical megaliths of the antediluvian world, of which Stonehenge (_cerca_ 2300 B.C.) is a notable example, we find evidence of a dawning consciousness of these nodal points as gateways of the Spirit. Apparently, however, this consciousness did not emerge soon enough to avert the Deluge which largely swept away the traces of mankind's "prehistoric" civilization. Obviously, then, the question presents itself to us: Is the same fate in store for our own civilization?

Each of us on a daily basis engages in one or more desultory conversations in which we commiserate with our fellows over the unbearable intensification of the "pace" of our existence. We have come to resign ourselves to this ever- accelerating and increasingly inhuman and maddening tempo as if it were an inherent fact of life. Our so-called leaders tell us that these wretched conditions represents "progress", that we are becoming more competitive, "lean and mean", etc., and we are exhorted to instill this same frenzied ethic in our children lest they turn out "losers". The World pursues this interminable speed-up by "dividing" Time ever more minutely. The "sound bites" of human experience become more and more ephemeral. We become the deformed creatures of a cyberworld, living our lives in increments of nanoseconds.

But, unlike days and years, nanoseconds have no nexus to the higher planes of consciousness which proceed toward the Spirit. "The Time," as Hamlet observed, "is out of joint." It has ripped loose of its moorings in the cycles of the Heavens and has proceeded without bearings upon the Ocean of primordial chaos, the "_sub-tela_" realm beneath the web of solar crossings, the domain of the "subtle" Serpent of Genesis.

In Genesis Yahweh speaks of the "enmity" between this Serpent and the archetypal Woman -- who is Eve in the Fall and Mary in the Redemption -- and He prophesies an eschatological battle between the Serpent and the Woman, in which She and Her progeny will ultimately prevail.(21) This, then, is the spiritual context of the series of public apparitions of the Virgin which began in LaSalette, France, in 1846, continued in Lourdes a decade later, and in the wake of Fatima have recurred in Garabandal, Spain, in 1961, and Medjugorje, Yugoslavia, beginning in 1981. In each case, there is a basic message which She repeats: She is restraining the hand of Her Son from scotching the Snake, because, as things now stand, the Serpent would drag a large portion of mankind down with it. Of as much significance as the message itself is how it is delivered and to whom. Invariably the seers are children or adolescents living in a "backwater" culture insulated in some measure from the international juggernaut of "progress" and its attendant temporal acceleration.

At Fatima, each of the six appearances of Mary commenced exactly at solar noon -- the moment when a particular spot on our spinning globe is passing through the plane defined by the center of the Sun and the axis of the Earth. Unlike the homogenized "standard time" which has been imposed on humanity in this century, solar noon represents a uniquely "local" time, occurring at one and only one precise longitudinal meridian at a any given instant. In rural Portugal of 1917, everyone except government officials still reckoned time by the position of the Sun in the sky, and consequently the three young shepherds reported that they heard the midday 'Angelus' prayer bells of the local church just as they would first catch sight of the Lady's approach. Shortly before the last apparition -- the October "Miracle of the Sun", which Lucy announced would occur, as had the others, at "noon" -- a priest from Lisbon produced a watch showing the "official" time to be already past 1 p.m.. In what would prove to establish a pattern of ecclesiastical disbelief and obstruction, the priest declared the whole affair to be an "illusion", and tried to drive the three children away from the site just moments before the Virgin actually appeared there.(22)

What is the significance of the repeated appearances precisely at solar noon? Local or solar noon is the one moment of the day at which the temporal point of reference is "lifted up", so to speak, from the axis of the turning Earth to the center of the Sun -- the cosmic archetype of Christ. Again what is revealed to us in this symbolic rendering is the option of Grace: Time itself may be redeemed, and the Serpent of the Fall may be raised upon the Cross to become the caduceus of Christic mercy and healing. Karmic retribution, i.e., the annihilation of the Serpent, is "not" the only alternative -- unless we chose it to be so because we wilfully reject the Heart of Grace which our heavenly Mother offers us. Tragically, however, the true message of the Immaculate Heart is being systematically perverted by most of those within the Catholic Chruch who claim to be its advocates, insofar as they speak of "chastisements" which it is "too late" to avert. They speak this way out of "fear" -- the internalization of the tempest of temporal chaos. When Christ "awakens", as he did on Lake Tiberias, will he not ask of them also, "Where is your faith?".

Christ's pardoning of the thief crucified at His right side teaches us that the moment of Grace, the symbolic solar noon, can never be "too late", because it occurs outside of Time, without reference to the infernal axis churning in the dark Abyss of Matter. Indeed, Scripture specifies that, on the spiritual plane, one thousand of our years is "as one day", and "as a watch in the night".(23) The latter simile is clearly linked to the Gospel tale of Jesus walking across the raging waters during the fourth watch of the night on the Sea of Galilee, when He speaks the words: "Be not afraid". "Be not afraid" is also the very first phrase which the Virgin spoke at Fatima, as well as at LaSalette in 1846, and it resonates with the same injunction spoken to Mary herself by the angel Gabriel during the Annunciation -- a dialogue which Catholic ritual recalls each day in the 'Angelus' prayer at solar noon. Suspension of fear is the necessary prerequisite to "hearing" the message, since fear binds the soul to the tempestuous cadence of the fallen World. It is significant that, after the first apparition, various observers accompanied the three children to Cova da Iria, but all that they could "hear" when Mary spoke was "a buzzing sound" -- the same sound produced by greatly accelerating the speed of an audio recording. Similarly, the witnesses reported hearing a thunderous "boom" when the apparition approached -- a phenomenon familiar to us in the era of jet aviation as the "sonic boom" associated with rapid acceleration.

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