What are the three parts of the secret of Fatima, and what do they mean? Read this excerpt to discover what these messages mean for the Church.
Remember the secret of Fatima had three parts, so it was revealed to the children like a triptych piece of art (a piece of art depicted on three panels). This occurred during the July 13, 1917 apparition. The first part was a dramatic vision of hell; the second part involved devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary in the context of an announcement of another war, famine, and persecution of the Church and the spread of communism; finally, the third part concerned the Church’s pilgrimage towards Christ and the persecution she would face, as well as the suffering of the pope and that of the martyrs. Here is how Lucia described each part.
Part 1: Vision of Hell
As Our Lady spoke these last words, she opened her hands once more, as she had done during the two previous months. The rays of light seemed to penetrate the earth, and we saw as it were a sea of fire. Plunged in this fire were demons and souls in human form, like transparent burning embers, all blackened or burnished bronze, floating about in the conflagration, now raised into the air by the flames that issued from within themselves together with great clouds of smoke now falling back on every side like sparks in huge fires, without weight or equilibrium, amid shrieks and groans of pain and despair, which horrified us and made us tremble with fear. (It must have been this sight which caused me to cry out, as people say they heard me). The demons could be distinguished by their terrifying and repellent likeness to frightful and unknown animals, black and transparent like burning coals.
Part 2: The Immaculate Heart
Terrified and as if to plead for succor, we looked up at Our Lady, who said to us, so kindly and so sadly:
“You have seen hell where the souls of poor sinners go. To save them, God wishes to establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart. If what I say to you is done, many souls will be saved and there will be peace. The war is going to end; but if people do not cease offending God, a worse one will break out during the pontificate of Pius Xl. When you see a night illumined by an unknown light, know that this is the great sign given you by God that he is about to punish the world for its crimes, by means of war, famine, and persecutions of the Church and of the Holy Father. To prevent this, I shall come to ask for the consecration of Russia to my Immaculate Heart, and the Communion of Reparation on the First Saturdays. If my requests are heeded, Russia will be converted, and there will be peace; if not, she will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church. The good will be martyred, the Holy Father will have much to suffer, various nations will be annihilated. In the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph. The Holy Father will consecrate Russia to me, and she will be converted, and a period of peace will be granted to the world. In Portugal, the dogma of the Faith will always be preserved.”
Part 3: Persecution of the Church
After the two parts which I have already explained, 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 splendor 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 were 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 a 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.
The Secret Explained
Now that we know the contents of the secret, it is important to discuss its theological implications. These visions were so sensational that they can be misconstrued if we are not careful.
Part 1
Let us begin first with the vision of hell, which was revealed through an intense experience of God. It is not easy to understand hell because it is a reality which is not within a temporal dimension but in a transcendental and eternal dimension. This forces us to rely on symbolic language, just as Jesus did when he wanted to explain the loss of or the moving away from God. He used words and human expressions like “fiery furnace,” “eternal fire,” “darkness,” and “wailing and grinding of teeth” (Mt 13:42; 10:28).
The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that “the chief punishment of hell is eternal separation from God” and that the teaching about hell is “a call to the responsibility incumbent upon man to make use of his freedom in view of his eternal destiny” (CCC 1035–36).
Theology, though, cannot comment on the number of condemned souls, the type of punishment they receive, or the “geography” of hell, because the Gospels do not answer these questions. Revelation does not stipulate this, and neither does Our Lady of Fatima.
With that horrifying vision, Our Lady did not try to provide new information about hell, as if it were a color film about the world beyond, and even less did she want to frighten the children. What was shown was meant to provoke their consciences, calling them to a message of salvation. “You have seen hell where the souls of poor sinners go. To save them, God wishes to establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart. If what I say to you is done, many souls will be saved and there will be peace.”
Part 2
The second part of the secret leaves the eternal realm behind to dive into a more historical and political appeal. It refers to wars and famine, and to persecution of the Church and the pope. Our Lady attributes a harmful effect of Russia that will spread its errors throughout the world and destroy several nations. On the one hand, Russia is a people, a historical power unknown to the children. But on the other hand, it symbolically represents the explicit refusal of God on a political and social level. These two aspects cannot be confused or thought of as the same. In a prudent and balanced way, we can interpret the second part of the secret with this distinction in mind. In Russia, Communism resulted in the death of millions, many of which were Catholic, and destroyed the independence of many nations. As John Paul II said, we can verify in this dynamic “the willingness and the systematic program of the destruction of all that entails religion!”
This cannot, however, be used to demonize a whole country and its people. There are authors, like Stefano De Fiores, who defend Russia as a more historical reference with its role in worldwide geopolitics. For J. M. Alonso, Russia did not have a geographical connotation but rather a moral and religious one, being merely a symbolic name for the evil opposition to God and the Church. We must find a balance when trying to understand these two dimensions, historical and symbolic, without absolutizing either one.
Part 3
And now we move to the theological significance of the third part of the secret. Here, we have to recall that, like the other two parts, the language Our Lady uses is symbolic and prophetic. Let’s review what the children saw. First, in the beginning, they saw an angel with a flaming sword trying to touch the Earth. But the angel could do no harm to the world because the Blessed Mother was there. With her right hand, she was preventing the flames from touching the Earth.
In the theological commentary of the third part of the secret, Cardinal Ratzinger presented the Church’s interpretation of this. (Lucia did not presume to give her own interpretation, feeling as though she was merely the one given the vision but it was up to the Church to interpret it.) Cardinal Ratzinger explains, “This represents the threat of judgement which looms over the world. Today the prospect that the world might be reduced to ashes by a sea of fire no longer seems pure fantasy: man himself, with his inventions, has forged the flaming sword. The vision then shows the power which stands opposed to the force of destruction—the splendor of the Mother of God and, stemming from this in a certain way, the summons to penance.”
After the angel, the children saw many other things: a cross on top of a mountain, a city half in ruins, a pilgrimage of people, the pope, the martyrs, angels collecting the blood of the martyr, and the presence of the woman more shining than the sun.
Let us consider each of these aspects individually.
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This article is taken from a chapter in Inside the Light: Understanding the Message of Fatima by Sr. Angela de Fatima Coelho which is available from TAN Books.
