Keys of This Blood (108 page)

Unmistakably, the “Third Secret” was formulated as an ultimatum, an “either-or” proposition.

In 1978, shortly after becoming Pope, when John Paul read Lucia's text of the “Third Secret,” he had drawn the obvious conclusion. The Pope of 1960, John XXIII, had not satisfied those two requests of Mary. “These [predictions],” John had noted for his successors, “do not concern our times.” John had refused to publish the text of the “Third Secret.” He had not organized the collegial consecration of Russia to Mary—although he had a made-to-order opportunity to do so when 2,500 Roman Catholic bishops assembled in the Vatican on October 11, 1962, for the opening of his Second Vatican Council. He did not accept the “either.”

Therefore, the fateful timetable of spiritual and physical chastisements was locked into place and, in that August of 1981, was running full tilt. The Roman Catholic Church and the society of nations were now operating under the sign of that dire “or” proffered in the Fatima message. John Paul needed no one to tell him the initial results of Pope John
XXIII's refusal of those two requests of Mary. Already whole sections of the Church in France, Austria, Holland, Germany, Spain, England, Canada, the United States and Latin America had fallen precisely into unfaith. There subsisted only a faithful remnant of practicing Catholics. His own Vatican chancery and the various diocesan chanceries throughout the Church were in the hands of the anti-Church partisans. Heresy and grave error resided in the seminaries. An intricate and self-protective network of actively homosexual priests, nuns, bishops and some cardinals now throttled all attempts to reform morals. Contraception was advocated explicitly or implicitly by a plurality of bishops, and abortion, together with divorce, was connived at. A Swiss bishop went on television with a valise in hand and opened it, cascading thousands of condoms before the eyes of viewers. “This,” he said, “is the answer to overpopulation and AIDS!”

Most frighteningly for John Paul, he had come up against the irremovable presence of a malign strength in his own Vatican and in certain bishops' chanceries. It was what knowledgeable Churchmen called the “superforce.” Rumors, always difficult to verify, tied its installation to the beginning of Pope Paul VI's reign in 1963. Indeed, Paul had alluded somberly to “the smoke of Satan which has entered the Sanctuary”—an oblique reference to an enthronement ceremony by Satanists in the Vatican. Besides, the incidence of Satanic pedophilia—rites and practices—was already documented among certain bishops and priests as widely dispersed as Turin, in Italy, and South Carolina, in the United States. The cultic acts of Satanic pedophilia are considered by professionals to be the culmination of the Fallen Archangel's rites.

No. John Paul needed no one to tell him the Fatima timetable was running in vigor. Already in 1980, speaking to a group of German Catholics about the “Third Secret,” he had been quite explicit. Yes, he responded to one question. Lucia's text does speak of such chastisements. No, he said in answer to another question, those chastisements cannot be averted now. The die is cast. But they can be mitigated by praying the Rosary, he asserted.

Why, one questioner asked, did John XXIII refuse to obey the requests of the “Third Secret”? John Paul's answer was pregnant with his own pre-1981 reading of the text. “Given the seriousness of its [the “Third Secret's”] contents,” he explained, “my predecessors in the Petrine Office [John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul 1] diplomatically preferred to
postpone
publication [of the text] so as not to encourage the world power of Communism to make certain moves.”

This attitude toward the “Third Secret” and its demands for papal action was quite consistent with the original Wyszynski-Wojtyla time
calculation, according to which they reckoned that the huge geopolitical change in the offing would run a gradual course of many years. John Paul's answers to the questioners at the 1980 Fulda meeting also threw light on why he has not undertaken any serious, papal-directed and comprehensive effort to reverse the continual and rapid deterioration of his institutional organization. No, he said in response to one question, the Church cannot be reformed at the present moment.

Manifestly, John Paul had accepted the fait accompli that inevitably followed the decision of John XXIII not to follow the dictates of the “Third Secret.” He accepted the fact that the Church was now in the period of the Fatima “or,” since the “either” had been refused by John XXIII.

His words also point to a mortal danger facing the capitalist nations, about which Lucia is quite explicit in the text of the “Third Secret.” Understood in its depth and extent, John Paul's reference can be shocking: “so as not to encourage the world power of Communism to make certain moves.” The Pope and the grizzled men who run the Vatican are not quixotic idealists living in a dream world of superstition and irrational fantasies. In fact, their realism can be numbing. If they or he could come to such a conclusion and make such a statement, it must be accurate and based on objective facts.

In that “Third Secret,” indeed, Lucia's words are so explicit and so
verifiable
—and therefore so authentic—that, were the leaders of the Leninist Party-State to know those words, they would in all probability decide to undertake certain territorial and militaristic moves against which the West could have few if any means of resisting, and the Church would be plunged into further and deeper subjugation to the Party-State. Lucia's words underline a terrible vulnerability in the capitalist nations. That is the “seriousness” of Lucia's words. The capitalist West could be entrapped by the USSR. In Vatican parlance, Lucia's words have a dire geopolitical meaning. They must not be treated as pious and devotional outpourings. Her words from the Fatima happening are primarily related to the fierce politics of nations. Ever since John XXIII opened and read those words, the Vatican has treated them gingerly. Fatima has been politicized. John Paul, from the start, has gone along with that politicization. In Vatican foreign policy since the opening of the envelope, the cardinal principle has been to foment devotion to Mary as Our Lady of Fatima but never to make political decisions very obviously in the light of the “Third Secret.” The “Secret” has to be buried, as Cardinal Ottaviani said in 1957, “in the most hidden, the deepest, the most obscure and inaccessible place on earth.”

It must also be added, however, that the anti-Church partisans in the
Vatican bureaucracy and throughout the Church abhor anything savoring of devotion to Mary, to Fatima and to divine revelation. For they have forsaken the divine faith of Catholicism, of which Mary, the Mother of God, is an integral part. They also know the present Pope is under the special protection of Mary.

As he convalesced in the Policlinico Gemelli that August, the concrete facts of the situation worked a change of attitude in John Paul. Those facts were: the growing crisis in Poland between Solidarity and the government; the new twist in Moscow's attitude to Solidarity, as something dangerous and to be crushed; the gap left by Wyszynski's death, a gap that the new Primate of Poland, Jozef Cardinal Glemp, could not fill; the significance of his own attempted assassination on May 13, feast day of Our Lady of Fatima, and—as he firmly believed—his own deliverance from sudden death by Agca's bullets through the protection of Mary as Our Lady of Fatima.

John Paul could not put all those details into a coherent order without coming to the conclusion that the geopolitical timetable was much shorter than he and Cardinal Wyszynski had thought. The (for him) obvious intervention of Mary in preserving his life placed him—in his own eyes—in a direct relationship with Fatima and its “Third Secret.” If there was one dominant element in that “Third Secret,” it was Russia. The provisos of the “Third Secret” made sense only in relation to Russia.

He had accepted as fact that John XXIII's decision not to do as the “Third Secret” asked—to publish the actual text, and to undertake a collegial consecration of Russia to Mary—had placed the Church and therefore the world in the “or” situation. He had no difficulty in accepting the predictions of dire physical and spiritual chastisements, and that Russia would spread its errors throughout every nation. But all of that, he had assumed—up to that August of 1981—was gridded on a long-drawn-out timetable. Now he saw that the geopolitical timetable had been inaccurately calculated. The geopolitical change implied by the “Third Secret” was not far off. It was imminent. It was about to take place. Russia was its womb. Russia was its focal point. Russia was to be the main agent of change. Russia was to be the source of a universal blindness and error.

A certain febrile character entered John Paul's behavior now. From his sickroom in the Policlinico, he sent over to the Apostolic Palace for that envelope. He read and reread portions of Lucia's testimony before diocesan commissions inquiring into the Fatima happening, and he studied
some of her other writings. He called in for consultation a certain Sister Mary Ludovica, an expert on Fatima, and after some discussion, he dispatched her posthaste over to Portugal, to speak with the retired and saintly bishop of Leiria-Fatima and with Lucia in her convent at Coimbra.

Into September and the fall of that year, 1981, events in Poland took on a correspondingly febrile and ominous character. Relations became more and more strained between the Polish government and Solidarity. The KSR-KOR elements associated with Solidarity had pushed the organization's demands beyond the limits of stated Soviet tolerance. The Moscow masters now feared Solidarity harbored ambitions that went far beyond the field of labor relations and culture. By November, the crisis in Central Europe was at its height; rumors of a Soviet invasion were rife.

The Cardinal Primate, Jozef Glemp, acting as
Interrex
, met with Solidarity's Lech Walesa and the head of the Communist Party, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, on November 4. The proposal: to form a triumvirate that would calm the situation, cool tempers on both sides and halt the slide into an anarchy requiring Soviet intervention. Walesa refused. By December 10, the crisis was full blown. The Moscow Politburo sent a last warning note to the government, advising the Poles that the situation must be cooled down and Lech Walesa must be beaten back. Walesa, on behalf of Solidarity, stated categorically: “We cannot retreat anymore.” The war of nerves extended to the two Germanys; Helmut Schmidt of West Germany and Erich Honecker of East Germany held a summit of their own—what happened in Poland would have great import for them. They wanted no part of Lech Walesa and his miserable Solidarity.

On December 12, the straw that broke the camel's back: Solidarity proposed a national referendum on four major issues—all of which boiled down to an open invitation to Poles to vote the Communists out of office. General Jaruzelski spoke successively to Walesa and to Glemp by telephone. John Paul was alerted in Rome. At 6:00
A.M.
on December 13, Jaruzelski declared martial law. Marshal Viktor Kulikov, Soviet commander of Warsaw Pact forces, threw a ring of steel around all neural points in Poland. Solidarity was suspended, as were all civic rights, all educational institutions, all telephone and telex communications. Poland was once more a prisoner nation.

As if in imitation of the former Pacts of Polish extinction, Western bankers in Paris rescheduled Poland's national debt. West Germany together with other European leaders assured the Soviets and Jaruzelski that no sanctions would be imposed, no matter what happened to Poland
and Solidarity. Business would be as usual. After all, by now all Solidarity leaders had been imprisoned. Solidarity's activities were now confined to midnight Masses throughout Poland. Only President Reagan's U.S. administration applied sanctions against the Polish Communists.

John Paul could read the handwriting on the wall of his times. His beloved Poland was not destined to achieve independence in, as it were, a solo flight. Its fate was tied to a much vaster geopolitical development, involving all of the USSR and all its captive nations. And, to be logical, if all those were involved, then all of Europe and the Americas would be involved.

Thus, as 1981 ended, his own fate as Pope and Poland's fate as a nation were seen by him as mere functioning parts in a new geopolitical pattern already setting in. Russia, indicated as the key factor by the “Third Secret,” constituted the dominant orientation of that new and vaster pattern. And, suddenly, it became of vital importance to John Paul that the text of that “Third Secret” had not been published, and that the Pope with his bishops had not consecrated Russia into the care of Mary.

For now, immediately looming on his papal horizon, he could see the shape of things to come. The decreasing vibrancy of faith in Catholic communities, the darkening of European minds, the betrayal by his Churchmen of their proper pastoral function, the spreading net of Eeninist-Marxist deception looping in all the nations in a geopolitical trap, the onslaught of physical chastisements to come—disease, disorder, earthquakes, tidal waves, all kinds of natural catastrophes from the hand of nature's Creator.

But during his examination of the Fatima material the previous autumn, he had come across the papal records of what Pope Pius XII had done in 1954. Pius had been in close touch with Lucia through intermediaries. He had learned from her that, failing a publication of the text of the “Third Secret” and a collegial consecration of Russia by Pope and bishops, some mitigation of the coming tribulations—but only a mitigation—could be achieved by merely consecrating the world to Mary, “with a special mention of Russia.”

John Paul's immediate step was to write to all his bishops, telling them he would do just that on May 13, 1982, in Fatima, and inviting them to join him. A small minority answered him positively. A still smaller minority joined him on that actual day, May 13, 1982—either by their physical presence or by parallel actions in their home dioceses. The bishops of his Church were not at one with their Pope, either in his devotion to Mary and Fatima or in his solicitude for the survival of the Roman Catholic institutional organization.