Fatima "prophecy"
Lúcia
de Jesus dos Santos (1907-2005) grew up to become a Catholic nun known
as Sister Lúcia of Fátima. As a child of nine or ten she claimed the
Virgin Mary appeared to her and two cousins at Fatima, Portugal. Perhaps
they had a collective hallucination.
Perhaps the ghost of a person who has been dead for 2,000 years and who
is thought by Catholics to be the human mother of a godman really did
choose three Portuguese children to tell them what their parents,
relatives, priests, and nuns had been telling them all their lives: Sin and you'll go to hell.
Lúcia also claimed that Mary told the children three secrets.
In 1941she "revealed" two of the secrets after her cousins had died
of the flu. She kept the third secret a secret, however.
The first two secrets involved a vision of hell and a
prophecy that WWI would end--good call in 1941--and that if people
didn't shape up there would be another war soon. Perfect record, so far.
In 1944, Lúcia wrote down the third secret when ordered to do so by Dom Jose Alves Correia da Silva, the bishop of the diocese of Leiria-Fatima. The third secret was sealed in an envelope that was opened in 2000.
A large cult following grew out of these religious fantasies and pilgrims from all over the world still beat a path to Fatima
to pray, do penance, leave money, and hope for a miracle. Many devout
followers were sure that Mary had told the children when the world was
going to end. They were gravely disappointed when it was revealed that
the expected doomsday "prophecy," though apocalyptic after a fashion,
didn't say much more than repent or you'll be sorry! Below is an English translation of the Fatima "prophecy":
....at the left of Our Lady and a little above, we
saw an Angel with a flaming sword in his left hand; flashing, it gave
out flames that looked as though they would set the world on fire; but
they died out in contact with the splendour that Our Lady radiated
towards him from her right hand: pointing to the earth with his right
hand, the Angel cried out in a loud voice: 'Penance, Penance, Penance!'.
And we saw in an immense light that is God: 'something similar to how
people appear in a mirror when they pass in front of it' a Bishop
dressed in White 'we had the impression that it was the Holy Father'.
Other Bishops, Priests, men and women Religious going up a steep
mountain, at the top of which there was a big Cross of rough-hewn trunks
as of a cork-tree with the bark; before reaching there the Holy Father
passed through a big city half in ruins and half trembling with halting
step, afflicted with pain and sorrow, he prayed for the souls of the
corpses he met on his way; having reached the top of the mountain, on
his knees at the foot of the big Cross he was killed by a group of
soldiers who fired bullets and arrows at him, and in the same way there
died one after another the other Bishops, Priests, men and women
Religious, and various lay people of different ranks and positions.
Beneath the two arms of the Cross there were two Angels each with a
crystal aspersorium in his hand, in which they gathered up the blood of
the Martyrs and with it sprinkled the souls that were making their way
to God.
Lúcia was a person who lived in a "delirious world of
infantile fantasies" and suffered "religious hallucinations." That is
how friar Mario de Oliveira described her (Sunday-Times, UK,
June 29, 2000). Lúcia was a 93-year-old cloistered Carmelite nun when
the third secret was revealed to the world. At the time, Cardinal Joseph
Ratzinger (later to become Pope Benedict XVI), said that she might have conjured her vision from devotional books. Skeptics are not so charitable and see her as another pious fraud. According to the Sunday-Times (UK,
June 29, 2000), many people in Portugal and beyond were angry because
the secret was not a doomsday prophecy, thus making their recent
penitence and contributions unnecessary. Some conspiracy mongers think
the 3rd prophecy is a forgery, but the vision is so generic and pointless as to make that notion seem absurd even if true.