Berry, Steve - the Third Secret

“Father Michener.”

He turned.

One of the nuns who’d prepared his dinner was hustling toward him. “Forgive me, but the Holy Father would like to see you.”

Usually Michener dined with Clement, but tonight the pope had eaten with a group of visiting Mexican bishops at the North American College. He glanced at his watch. Clement was back early. “Thank you, Sister. I’ll head to the apartment.”

“The pope is not there.”

That was strange.

“He’s in the L’ Archivio Segreto Vaticano. The Riserva. He asked that you join him there.”

He concealed his surprise as he said, “All right. I’ll head there now.”

He walked the empty corridors toward the archives. Clement’s presence again in the Riserva was a problem. He knew exactly what the pope was doing. What he couldn’t figure out was why. So he allowed his mind to wander, reviewing once more the phenomenon of Fatima.

In 1917 the Virgin Mary revealed herself to three peasant children in a great hollow basin known as Cova da Iria, near the Portuguese village of Fatima. Jacinta and Francisco Marto were brother and sister. She was seven and he was nine. Lucia dos Santos, their first cousin, was ten. The mother of God appeared six times from May to October, always on the thirteenth of the month, at the same place, at the same time. By the final apparition, thousands were present to witness the sun dancing across the sky, a sign from heaven that the visions were real.

It was more than a decade later that the Church sanctioned the apparitions as worthy of assent. But two of the young seers never lived to see that recognition. Jacinta and Francisco both died of influenza within thirty months of the Virgin’s final appearance. Lucia, though, lived to be an old woman, having died only recently, after devoting her life to God as a cloistered nun. The Virgin even foretold those occurrences when She said, I will take Jacinta and Francisco soon, but you, Lucia, shall remain here for a certain time. Jesus wishes to use you to make Me known and loved.

It was during Her July visit that the Virgin told three secrets to the young seers. Lucia herself revealed the first two secrets in the years after the apparitions, even including them in her memoirs, published in the early 1940s. Only Jacinta and Lucia actually heard the Virgin convey the third secret. For some reason Francisco was excluded from a direct rendition, but Lucia was given permission to tell him. Though pressed hard by the local bishop to reveal the third secret, all of the children refused. Jacinta and Francisco took the information with them to their graves, though Francisco told an interviewer in October 1917 that the third secret “was for the good of souls and that many would be sad if they knew.”

It remained for Lucia to be the keeper of the final message.

Though she was blessed with good health, in 1943 a recurring pleurisy seemed to spell the end. Her local bishop, a man named da Silva, asked her to write the third secret down and seal it in an envelope. She initially resisted, but in January 1944 the Virgin appeared to her at the convent in Tuy and told her that it was God’s will that she now memorialize the final message.

Lucia wrote the secret and sealed it in an envelope. On being asked when the communication should be publicly divulged, she would only say, in 1960. The envelope was delivered to Bishop da Silva and placed inside a larger envelope, sealed with wax, and deposited in the diocese safe, where it remained for thirteen years.

In 1957 the Vatican requested all of Sister Lucia’s writings be sent to Rome, including the third secret. On its arrival, Pope Pius XII placed the envelope containing the third secret inside a wooden box bearing the inscription SECRETUM SANCTI OFFICIO, Secret of the Holy Office. The box stayed on the pope’s desk for two years and Pius XII never read its contents.

In August 1959 the box was finally opened and the double envelope, still sealed with wax, was delivered to Pope John XXIII. In February 1960 the Vatican issued a curt statement pronouncing that the third secret of Fatima would remain under seal. No other explanation was offered. By papal order, Sister Lucia’s handwritten text was replaced in the wooden box and deposited in the Riserva. Each pope since John XXIII had ventured into the archives and opened the box, yet no pontiff ever publicly divulged the information.

Until John Paul II.

When an assassin’s bullet nearly killed him in 1981, he concluded that a motherly hand had guided the bullet’s path. Nineteen years later, in gratitude to the Virgin, he ordered the third secret revealed. To quell any debate, a forty-page dissertation accompanying the release interpreted the Virgin’s complex metaphors. Also, photographs of Sister Lucia’s actual writing were published. The press was fascinated for a while, then the matter faded.

Speculation ended.

Few even mentioned the subject any longer.

Only Clement XV remained obsessed.

Michener entered the archives and passed the night prefect, who gave him only a cursory nod. The cavernous reading room beyond was cast in shadows. A yellowish glow shone from the far side, where the Riserva’s iron grille was swung open.

Maurice Cardinal Ngovi stood outside, his arms crossed beneath a scarlet cassock. He was a slim-hipped man with a face that carried the weather-beaten patina of a hard-fought life. His wiry hair was sparse and gray, and a pair of wire-framed glasses outlined eyes that offered a perpetual look of intense concern. Though only sixty-two, he was the archbishop of Nairobi, senior of the African cardinals. He was not a titular bishop, bestowed with an honorary diocese, but a working prelate who’d actively managed the largest Catholic population in the sub-Sahara region.

His day-to-day involvement with that diocese changed when Clement XV summoned him to Rome to oversee the Congregation for Catholic Education. Ngovi then became involved with every aspect of Catholic education, thrust to the forefront with bishops and priests, working closely to ensure that Catholic schools, universities, and seminaries conformed to the Holy See. In decades past his had been a confrontational post, one resented outside Italy, but Vatican II’s spirit of renewal altered that hostility—as had men like Maurice Ngovi, who managed to soothe tension while ensuring conformity.

A spirited work ethic and an accommodating personality were two reasons Clement had appointed Ngovi. Another was a desire for more people to come to know this brilliant cardinal. Six months back, Clement had added another title—camerlengo. This meant Ngovi would administer the Holy See after Clement’s death, during the two weeks until a canonical election. It was a caretaker function, mainly ceremonial, but nonetheless important since it assured Ngovi would be a key player in the next conclave.

Michener and Clement had several times discussed the next pope. The ideal man, if history was any teacher, would be a noncontroversial figure, multilingual, with curial experience—preferably the archbishop of a nation that was not a world power. After three fruitful years in Rome, Maurice Ngovi now possessed all of those traits, and the same question was being posed over and over by Third World cardinals. Was it time for a pope of color?

Michener approached the entrance of the Riserva. Inside, Clement XV stood before an ancient safe that once bore witness to Napoleon’s plunder. Its double iron doors were swung back, exposing bronze drawers and shelves. Clement had opened one of the drawers. A wooden box was visible. The pope clutched a piece of paper in his trembling hands. Michener knew Sister Lucia’s original Fatima writing was still stored in that wooden box, but he also knew there was another sheet of paper there, too. An Italian translation of the original Portuguese message, created when John XXIII had first read the words in 1959. The priest who’d performed that task was a young recruit in the Secretariat of State.