Word: lucia
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...John Paul, aware of Fatima's earlier Russia prophecy and already in 1981 deeply engaged in his own fight against world communism, became convinced that he was the Bishop in white in the vision described by Lucia; that Our Lady had prophesied that he would be shot, but had then turned the path of the bullet at the last instant. In 1982, he made the first of several pilgrimages to Fatima. In 1990, he donated the near-fatal bullet to the shrine there, a gesture that sent fatimists into a renewed frenzy of speculation. In April of 2000, he resolved...
...Unlike other famous apparitions of Mary, such as the one at Lourdes, the Fatima message was focused less on holiness than on geopolitics. And in 1952, Lucia sent an even more dramatic "third secret" - rumored among millions of "fatimists" to predict a schism in church or even the world's end - which she sent to Rome in 1952, where three successive popes remained either indifferent, or ambivalent enough to keep it under wraps...
That changed with the 1981 near-assassination of John Paul II by a Turkish gunman. According to The Last Secret, it was while in the hospital recuperating from a bullet that had improbably bypassed his most vital organs that John Paul first asked to be shown Lucia's third secret, and in it read these words: "We saw... a Bishop dressed in white," who reminded the children of "the Holy Father... killed by group of soldiers who fired bullets and arrows...
...centrality of Fatima to the second, "suffering servant" stage of John Paul II's papacy, and his involvement with the two men who would become the Vatican's numbers one and two after his death, may help explain why Lucia's cause has been fast-tracked for beatification. Of course, there are other reasons: Fatima still receives 5 million pilgrims a year, and there is no real downside in pleasing them. And since the Vatican had already carefully vetted the circumstances of Fatima to beatify Lucia's two companions, how much more work need be done to establish the heroic...
...While the end of the 20th century and the death of Communism may have reduced Sister Lucia's profile among Western Catholics far below those of Mother Teresa or Pope John Paul, the most powerful men in the Catholic Church remember her significance. In a forward to the The Last Secret, Pope Benedict waxes nostalgic about how he and Bertone had "lived" the chapter "that addresses the publication of the third part of the Secret of Fatima in that memorable time of the Great Jubilee of the year 2000." He ends his thoughts thus: "I invoke upon all who approach...