Possibly at the center of the Prophecy of the Popes and a “Vatican cover-up” of the complete vision of Fátima (and related prophecies) is a potential papal contender for the role of Petrus Romanus or “Peter the Roman”—Cardinal Tarcisio Pietro (Peter) Bertone, who was born in Romano (the Roman) Canavese (“Peter the Roman”).
Among other things, Cardinal Bertone is, at the time Exo-Vaticana heads to the printer, second in command at the Vatican. As the Secretary of State and the Pope’s Camerlengo (Italian for “Chamberlain”), he is responsible during a papal vacancy to serve as acting Head of State of the Vatican City until “the time of agreement” and the election of a new pope. This means, if even only for a few weeks, a man whose name literally means "Peter the Roman" will hold the most powerful position at the Vatican starting in a few days. Our interest for the moment is with his 2007 book, The Last Seer of Fátima that appears to have accomplished exactly the opposite of its primary objective, mainly, to refute another work by famous Italian media personality, journalist, and author Antonio Socci, whose manuscript The Fourth Secret of Fátima claims the Holy See has repressed information concerning the true secrets delivered in Marian apparitions to three shepherd children in the rural Portuguese village of Fátima in 1917. The three young people were Lúcia (Lucy) dos Santos and her cousins Francisco Marto and his sister Jacinta Marto, whose visions—containing elements of prophecy and eschatology—are officially sanctioned by the Catholic Church.
In his uncharacteristically explosive response to Cardinal Bertone—Dear Cardinal Bertone: Who Between You and Me is Deliberately Lying?—we first discover how, after significant time and investigation, Mr. Socci concluded the Vatican had withheld an important part of the Fátima revelation during its celebrated press conference and release of “The Message of Fátima,” June 26, 2000.
Socci describes in the introduction to his book how at first he truly believed the Vatican’s official version of the Fátima Message, prepared at that time by Cardinal Ratzinger (current Pope Benedict XVI) and Monsignor Tarcisio Bertone (possible next and final pope), which with its release to the public claimed to be the final Secret. Then Socci came across an article by Italian journalist Vittorio Messori, entitled “The Fátima Secret, the Cell of Sister Lucy Has Been Sealed,” and a series of questions cast suspicions on the Vatican’s authorized publication for which Socci had no answers. Why would Messori, whom Socci describes as “a great journalist, extremely precise…the most translated Catholic columnist in the world,”[i]want to challenge the Church’s official version of the Third Secret without good cause, he reasoned. Not long after, Socci came across a second similar thesis published in Italy by a young and careful writer named Solideo Paolini, which convinced Socci to begin a probe of his own focusing on the biggest question of them all—was a portion of Lucy’s hand-written document, which contained the principal words “of the Blessed Virgin Mother” concerning end-times conditions at Rome, being withheld from public view by the Vatican due to its potentially explosive content?
Socci’s suspicions only deepened after he requested an interview (well ahead of his work,The Fourth Secret of Fátima which later cast doubts on Rome’s official story) with Cardinal Bertone, who, together with Joseph Ratzinger, had coauthored the June 26, 2000 Vatican document that purportedly released the final segment of the “The Message of Fátima.”[ii]
“I’ve searched many influential authorities inside the Curia, like Cardinal Bertone, today Secretary of State in the Vatican, who was central to the publication of the Secret in 2000,” Socci says. “The Cardinal, who actually favored me with his personal consideration, having asked me to conduct conferences in his former diocese of Genoa, [now] didn’t deem it necessary to [even] answer my request for an interview. He was within his rights to make this choice, of course, but this only increased the fear of the existence of embarrassing questions, and most of all, that there is something (extremely important) which needs to be kept hidden.”[iii]
Though not expecting to uncover such a colossal enigma, in the end Socci was left convinced that two sets of the Fátima Secret actually exist: one which the public has seen, and another, which for reasons yet unknown, the Vatican is keeping buried.
At the beginning of this possible plot was a description of the Third Secret given by Cardinal Angelo Sodano a full five weeks before the June 26, 2000 “Message of Fátima” was delivered by Rome. Sodano’s comments came during Pope John Paul II’s beautification of Jacinta and Francisco at Fátima, when he surprised many in a speech, saying the vision of a “bishop clothed in white” who makes his way with great effort past the corpses of bishops, priests, and many lay persons, is only “apparently dead” when he falls to the ground under a burst of gunfire.[iv]
Using the added language “apparently dead,” Cardinal Sodano went on to suggest the Fátima vision had been fulfilled in the 1981 assassination attempt against John Paul II. “It appeared evident to His Holiness that it was ‘a motherly hand which guided the bullet’s path,’ enabling the ‘dying Pope’ to halt ‘at the threshold of death.’”[v]
Though some applauded Sodano’s presentation that day, others saw in it, and him, a concerted cover-up, as the Fátima prophecy and the alleged fulfillment in 1981 bore significant differences. The Washington Post was happy to point out these glaring contradictions on July 1, 2000 when under the stinging headline, “Third Secret Spurs More Questions: Fátima Interpretation Departs from Vision” the newspaper opined:
On May 13, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, a top Vatican official, announced the imminent release of the carefully guarded text. He said the Third Secret of Fátima foretold not the end of the world, as some had speculated, but the May 13, 1981, shooting of Pope John Paul II in St. Peter’s Square.
Sodano said the manuscript…tells of a “bishop clothed in white” who, while making his way amid corpses of martyrs, “falls to the ground, apparently dead, under a burst of gunfire.”
But the text released Monday (June 26) leaves no doubt about the bishop’s fate, saying that he “was killed by a group of soldiers who fired bullets and arrows at him.” Everyone with the pontiff also dies: bishops, priests, monks, nuns and lay people. John Paul survived his shooting at the hands of a single gunman, Mehmet Ali Agca, and no one in the crowd was harmed in the attack. [vi]
Other facts the Washington Post did not point out is how according to the prophecy the pope is killed in “a big city half in ruins” while walking to the top of a mountain and kneeling at the foot of a cross. John Paul was riding in the pope’s car through St. Peter’s square, not walking, there was no big mountain or kneeling at a cross, and the city was not half-destroyed. And then there is the contradictory testimony by Cardinal Ratzinger (current Pope Benedict XVI) himself from 1984, which he gave in an interview with the Pauline Sisters’ newsletter (Jesus Magazine) and which was re-published a year later in The Ratzinger Report, titled “Here is Why the Faith is in Crisis.” In this discussion, Ratzinger, who had read the actual Fátima Secret, said the vision involved “dangers threatening the faith and the life of the Christian and therefore [the life] of the world” as well as marking the beginning of the end times.[vii]Additionally, he said, “the things contained in [the] Third Secret correspond to what has been announced in Scripture and has been said again and again in many other Marian apparitions” and that, “If it is not made public, at least for the time being, it is in order to prevent religious prophecy from being mistaken for a quest for the sensational.”[viii]
Concerned Catholics have since contrasted this 1984 testimony with the more recent report by Ratzinger, and have wondered when, where, and under what circumstance his account changed. The 1981 assassination attempt against John Paul II certainly did not fulfill the published parts of the Fátima vision nor correspond to the “last times” as depicted in the Bible. And then there is the affirmation by the Vatican’s most respected scholars who had deduced from years of studying the Fátima prophecy that it concerned an end-time global crisis of faith emanating from the highest echelons at Rome. Celebrated Cardinal Mario Luigi Ciappi (1909–1996) served as the personal theologian to five popes including John Paul II and unreservedly held that in “the Third Secret it is foretold, among other things, that the great apostasy in the Church begins at the top” (emphasis added).[ix] Cardinal Silvio Oddi added in a March, 1990 interview with Il Sabato magazine in Rome, Italy: “…the Third Secret alluded to dark times for the Church: grave confusions and troubling apostasies within Catholicism itself… If we consider the grave crisis we have lived through since the [Vatican II] Council, the signs that this prophecy has been fulfilled do not seem to be lacking.”[x] Even more impressive in his testimony was the late Father Joaquin Alonso who knew Sister Lucy personally, had conversations with her, was for sixteen years the archivist at Fátima, and who before his death in 1981, stated the following concerning the Third Secret:
…the text makes concrete references to the crisis of faith within the Church and to the negligence of the pastors themselves [and the] internal struggles in the very bosom of the Church and of grave pastoral negligence by the upper hierarchy… terrible things are to happen. These form the content of the third part of the Secret… [and] like the secret of La Salette, for example, there are more concrete references to the internal struggles of Catholics or to the fall of priests and religious. Perhaps it even refers to the failures of the upper hierarchy of the Church. For that matter, none of this is foreign to other communications Sister Lucy has had on this subject.[xi]
Perhaps most unvarying among those who actually had access to and read the Fátima message was Jesuit Malachi Martin, a close personal friend of Pope Paul VI who worked within the Holy See doing research on the Dead Sea Scrolls, publishing articles in journals on Semitic paleography, and teaching Aramaic, Hebrew, and Sacred Scripture. As a member of the Vatican Advisory Council and personal secretary to renowned Jesuit Cardinal Augustin Bea, Martin had privileged information pertaining to secretive church and world issues, including the Third Secret of Fátima,which Martin hinted spelled out parts of the plan to formerly install the dreaded False Prophet (Petrus Romanus?) during a “Final Conclave.” Comparing the conflicting statements between Cardinal Ratzinger and Malachi Martin, Father Charles Fiore, a good friend of the murdered priest Alfred J. Kunz (discussed elsewhere in this book) and the late eminent theologian Fr. John Hardon, said in a taped interview: “We have two different Cardinal Ratzingers; we have two different messages. But Malachi Martin was consistent all the way through.”[xii]
Wikipedia’s entry on the Three Secrets of Fátima adds:
On a syndicated radio broadcast, Father Malachi Martin was asked the following question by a caller: “I had a Jesuit priest tell me more of the Third Secret of Fátima years ago, in Perth. He said, among other things, the last pope would be under control of Satan… Any comment on that?” Fr. Martin responded, “Yes, it sounds as if they were reading, or being told, the text of the Third Secret.” In a taped interview with Bernard Janzen, Fr. Martin was asked the following question: “Who are the people who are working so hard to suppress Fátima?” Fr. Martin responded, “A bunch, a whole bunch, of Catholic prelates in Rome, who belong to Satan. They’re servants of Satan. And the servants of Satan outside the Church, in various organizations; they want to destroy the Catholicism of the Church, and keep it as a stabilizing factor in human affairs. It’s an alliance. A dirty alliance, a filthy alliance...” In the same interview, Fr. Martin also said with respect to Lucia [Lucy of Fátima] that, “They’ve (The Vatican) published forged letters in her name; they’ve made her say things she didn’t want to say. They put statements on her lips she never made.”[xiii]
One thing is certain; something unnerving did seem to be happening around and with Sister Lucy in the lead-up to the release of the so-called Final Secret. After all, the first two parts of the Message of Fátima had been publically issued by her Bishop in 1941, and the Third Secret sent to the Holy See with instructions that it be made public in 1960. That year was chosen according to Lucy because the “Holy Mother” had revealed to her that it would then be when “the Message will appear more clear.” And lo and behold it was immediately following 1960 that Vatican II set in motion what many conservative Catholics today believe is a crisis of faith in the form of Roman heresies. And though there could have been much more to the revelation than just a Vatican II warning, and the Secret was not released in 1960 as it was supposed to be anyway (so we may never know), when Pope John XXIII read the contents of the secret, he refused to publish it, and it remained under lock and key until it was supposedly disclosed in the year 2000. If the first two Secrets were any indication of the scope and accuracy of the Third one, they had been amazingly insightful including the “miracle of the sun” that was witnessed “by over 70,000 persons (including non-believers hoping to dispel the apparitions), whereby the sun itself [seemed to be] dislodged from its setting and performed miraculous maneuvers while emitting astonishing light displays; the end of World War I; the name of the pope who would be reigning at the beginning of World War II; the extraordinary heavenly phenomenon that would be witnessed worldwide foretelling of the beginning of World War II; the ascendance of Russia (a weak and insignificant nation in 1917) to an evil monolithic power that would afflict the world with suffering and death.”[xiv]
But something about the Third and Final Secret was different, a phenomenon evidently to be avoided and obfuscated at all costs by the hierarchy of Rome. At a minimum, it spoke of the apostatizing of the clergy and dogma that followed Vatican II. And yet perhaps these were simply devices to lead to something more sinister, elements so dark that it was keeping Lucy awake at night. When she finally had written down the Secret in 1944 under obedience to Rome, she had a hard time doing so because of its terrifying contents. It had taken a fresh visit from the “Holy Mother” herself to convince Lucy it was okay. Then in the years following, she had been ordered by the Vatican to remain silent concerning its disclosure. Visits to her for hours at a time were made by Cardinal Bertone under orders from the pope during which the two of them would go over the diminutive aspects of the vision in private. This happened in 2000, again in 2001, and again in 2003. When at age ninety-seven the Carmelite nun finally passed away (2005), taking whatever secrets remained with her to the grave, her behavior at the last seemed odd to Catholics who understood Roman doctrinal “salvation” implications. Antonio Socci comments on this, pointing out how the long visits with the aged seer were not videotaped or recorded for posterity because viewers would have seen for themselves the psychological pressure that was being exerted on the cloistered Sister. “These thoughts came back to my mind while I was reading a passage of Bertone’s book, in which the Cardinal remembers that at one point the seer was ‘irritated’, and she told him ‘I’m not going to confession!’” About this, Socci wonders, “What kind of question could Sister Lucy answer to so strongly? Maybe someone was reminding the old Sister of the ecclesiastical power, and hinting that she would ‘not get absolution’? We don’t know, because the prelate [Bertone]—who knows and remembers the Sister’s (quite tough) answer very well—says he literally ‘forgot’ what his question was.”[xv]
It appears in truth that poor Lucy was trapped inside a sinister ring of Romanita Omertà Siciliani or “Mafia Code of Silence” imposed by Rome. Yet Socci believes the full truth of Fátima may have gotten out anyway, and based on his investigation he offers a brave theory in his book The Fourth Secret of Fátima about what actually transpired in 2000 behind the Vatican’s walls. John Vennari summarizes Socci’s shocking hypothesis this way:
Socci believes that when John Paul II decided to release the Secret, a power-struggle of sorts erupted in the Vatican. He postulates that John Paul II and Cardinal Ratzinger wanted to release the Secret in its entirety, but Cardinal Sodano, then Vatican Secretary of State, opposed the idea. And opposition from a Vatican Secretary of State is formidable.
A compromise was reached that sadly reveals heroic virtue from none of the main players.
The “Bishop dressed in white” vision, which is the four pages written by Sister Lucy would be initially revealed by Cardinal Sodano, along with his ludicrous interpretation that the Secret is nothing more than the predicted 1981 assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II.
At the same time, at the May 13 2000 beatification ceremony of Jacinta and Francisco, Pope John Paul II would “reveal” the other part—the most “terrifying part”—of the Secret obliquely in his sermon. It was here that John Paul II spoke on the Apocaplyse: “Another portent appeared in Heaven; behold, a great red dragon” (Apoc. 12: 3). These words from the first reading of the Mass make us think of the great struggle between good and evil, showing how, when man puts God aside, he cannot achieve happiness, but ends up destroying himself… The Message of Fátima is a call to conversion, alerting humanity to have nothing to do with the “dragon” whose “tail swept down a third of the stars of Heaven, and dragged them to the earth” (Apoc. 12:4).
The Fathers of the Church have always interpreted the stars as the clergy, and the stars swept up in the dragon’s tail indicates a great number of churchmen who would be under the influence of the devil. This was Pope John Paul II’s way of explaining that the Third Secret also predicts a great apostasy.[xvi]
If Socci is correct in this analysis, Bishop Richard Nelson Williamson, an English traditionalist Catholic and member of the Society of St. Pius X who opposes changes in the Catholic Church brought on by Vatican II, may have verified his hypothesis in 2005 when he related how a priest acquaintance of his from Austria shared privately that Cardinal Ratzinger had confessed: “I have two problems on my conscience: Archbishop Lefebvre and Fátima. As to the latter, my hand was forced.” Who could have “forced” Ratzinger’s hand to go along with a false or partial statement on the final Fátima Secret? Was it pressure from the papal office, or, as Williamson questions, “Some hidden power behind both Pope and Cardinal?”[xvii] If Pope John Paul II’s sermon at Fátima did in fact speak to the “terrifying part” of the Final Secret—as in the Dragon’s tail sweeping down a third of the clergy to do his bidding—we are left with the unsettling impression that at least 33 percent (Masonic marker) of the Vatican’s hierarchy are committed to a Satanic Plan.
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