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...visit the by-then 93-year old Lucia at her convent, and confirm John Paul II's interpretation that he had been the Bishop in her vision - which she did. In May, the pontiff beatified Lucia's two deceased playmates. And in June he made public the third secret, and had it announced that his hair's-breadth escape "seems also to be linked...
...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...
...Cardinal Bertone's book helps make clear, the announcement served several purposes. The double beatification and the publication of the third secret endorsed the kind of potent popular piety inspired by Marian apparitions, a trend in popular Catholicism that had gained momentum in the 20th century. But the Vatican response also reined in the flip-side of such enthusiasm: unfettered religious hysteria that can occur when white-hot supernaturalism seems to rupture the staid rhythms of modern institutional religious life...
...Apparitions represent a [necessary] provocation for both theologians and the church," Giuseppe De Carli, whose interview with Bertone is the core of The Last Secret, told TIME. In the book, Bertone seems relieved that all the Virgin's prophecies were now safely in the past tense, and could no longer be seen as portending the world's end: "It's all quite different from the massive carnage certain fevered brains like to imagine taking place," he writes. Then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger must have felt the same. In a "Theological Interpretation" that accompanied the publication of the third secret, he suggested...