The Third Revelation

by Ralph McInerny

  “Do you know where all the former prefects are buried?” he asked her.

  “Only those who are dead.”

  “Is being Irish part of the job description?”

  “Oh no. Boyle’s predecessor was a German.”

  Donna thought Rodriguez was making quite a jump, linking Brendan Crowe to the Confraternity of Pius IX. “That’s a pretty weird outfit, you know. There were actually people who thought Paul VI was an imposter. The real pope spirited away and another put in his place. It turned on earlobes.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “The real Paul VI had longer earlobes than the man who took his place.” She laughed. “Andre Gide.”

  He waited.

  “The Caves of the Vatican. A terrible novel. A terrible author.”

  “The Vatican Library does seem an odd place for a weirdo.”

  “Crowe is a quintessential insider. Part of the bureaucracy.”

  “A mole would have to be plausible.”

  Had Rodriguez told her of the missing secret of Fatima? It didn’t come up.

  “The man Father Burke’s sister works for wanted a list of paintings of the Blessed Virgin. Crowe put it together. I assume that’s the purpose of the visit.”

  Traeger was trying to put together two motives for the murders in the Vatican. Chekovsky’s curious insistence suggested one, the missing Fatima secret, another. The third secret of Fatima and the reports on the attempted assassination of John Paul II were connected, because the secret had predicted an attack on the pope. Even so, Traeger didn’t know if there really were two problems and if so which of them was his. His experience with Anatoly the day before left the question up in the air.

  So he sat sipping Cinzano with Donna Quando and thought of Brendan Crowe off in New Hampshire. You might have thought that Crowe was on the run.

  II

  The number of mosques in Rome had grown.

  Cardinal Piacere awoke with the realization that he had been dreaming of the task that faced him today. It was four thirty. Immediately, when his eyes opened, he threw back the covers and swung his old legs over the side of the bed. The marble floor beneath his feet felt sharply cold. He stood, his feet pressed down more firmly against the marble, and the difference of temperature between flesh and stone began to diminish. He stood, palms pressed tightly together, eyes closed, and offered this day to God.

  How many trains of thought can the human mind accommodate simultaneously? He entered the routine of another day with little need to think of its stages. He shaved with an electric razor, then three minutes in the shower, the water as cold as he could bear, cleaning his teeth and anchoring his partial, then dressing. Trousers, shirt, Roman collar, and then the black soutane with buttons running from collar to shoe tops. But of course the buttons were ornamental; the cassock had a zipper. When he sank to his knees on his prie-dieu, it was as if his prayers were continuing, not beginning. His hand closed over his breviary.

  The Liturgia Horarum was the considerably reduced daily prayer of the clergy and religious. In becoming briefer, requiring half the time the Breviarium Romanum had taken, the new office had lengthened by providing choices, alternatives. All lovely readings, no doubt, but what is the basis for choosing between an excerpt from the Epistle of John and Augustine’s comments on it? Piacere had gone back to the old breviary for a time, but then decided that was an affectation. And it could have formed the basis for one of those pieces of gossip that went under the name of news. Vatican Official Refuses to Accept New Liturgy.

  Was it simply nostalgia? After reciting the first two hours of the office, Piacere rose and went down the corridor to the chapel. His five o’clock Mass was the first said there each day. He used the Novus Ordo introduced by Paul VI, in Latin, and the Roman canon, and Luigi the sacristan acted as altar boy, bringing the cruets of water and of wine, pouring water over Piacere’s fingers at the end of the offertory. The Latin words he murmured meant “Lord, wash away my iniquities and cleanse me of my sins.”

  Throughout all these familiar daily actions, done with attention and devotion, Piacere’s mind was also on today’s meeting with the Holy Father.

  Once he and Josef might have discussed the epistemological problem involved. How many thoughts can the mind entertain simultaneously? He could imagine the answer. An indefinite number. Once his old friend had said of another that he knows everything. Piacere had chided him for such hyperbole. He was fixed by the kind Teutonic eye and then:

  “Does he know animal?”

  Piacere lifted his hands.

  “In knowing animal he knows both man and beast. Does he know living thing? Then he knows both plants and animals. Does he know substance?”

  It was because the man knew being that Josef felt justified in saying that he knew everything.

  “But then it’s no longer praise. Ens est primum quod cadit in intellectu humano. We all know everything.”

  “Potentially.”

  They went on to angelic knowledge then, and how it differed from human. Piacere smiled.

  Mass said, thanksgiving made, he went to the refectory where he had his breakfast while standing. All over the city, Romans would be standing in bars having their coffee and croissants. Why should he sit down for his? Back in his rooms, he sat, cleared his mind of all competing thoughts, and concentrated on the problem of the day.

  Within the past weeks they had lost two cardinals: Rampolla, the secretary of state, and Maguire, the prefect of the Vatican Library. Murdered, both of them, and while at their daily tasks. Incredibly, the deaths had not aroused the suspicion of the corps of newsmen who lolled around the Sala Di Prenza much of the day. Wars, natural disasters, and political upheaval elsewhere had reduced events in the Vatican to the back pages.

  Vatican City, within the walls, seemed an island of peace and security, and so in many ways it was. But a pope had been shot in Saint Peter’s Square not long ago, and now an assassin had gained access to the Apostolic Palace and killed two cardinals. The guard, too, of course, and Buffoni the young priest who worked in the secretary of state’s office. Piacere murmured some prayers for them all. Can a bishop go to heaven? Can a Vatican bureaucrat be saved?

  Piacere had preached the Lenten retreat for the Holy Father the year before, and had based his conferences on Saint Augustine’s warning to those raised to the episcopate. It was an odd thought, that rising in the ecclesiastical hierarchy increased one’s spiritual danger. It was an odder thought that it increased one’s physical danger. Or was it? John alone of the apostles had died a natural death, doubtless because the Mother of the Lord had been entrusted to his care. The cardinal red that Piacere would wear when he kept his appointment with the Holy Father signified his willingness to die for the faith. There were long stretches of time when that seemed a quaint thought. But the world was once more a savage place.

  Anarchists and assassins there had always been, but the televised collapse of the twin towers in New York had brought home the vulnerability of the world’s sole remaining superpower to the attack of dedicated madmen. Mad with religion. The number of mosques in Rome had grown, the vast mosque down the Tiber from the Vatican was only the most obvious instance, a deliberate and hostile move, and there was talk of an eventual caliphate of Rome. The centuries-old war between Christendom and Islam after a long quiescent interval had entered a new phase. No wonder the Russians wanted the reports on the attempted assassination of John Paul II made public. Over the years it had become the common opinion that the USSR and the KGB had been behind that attempt. Piacere and the Holy Father knew it was not quite that simple. But what good would be served by making the truth known?

  But it was the absence of the third secret of Fatima from the archives that was on the agenda today.

  Who would have taken it, and why?

  Piacere had said to Rodriguez that he would not speculate when the head of Vatican security had come to him with the news. And he would not, not aloud. Except to Benedict.


  If the document written by Sister Lucia was gone, anything might be substituted for it. And there were those whose single-minded discontent would tempt them to supply the message they were sure had been suppressed when Josef had made public the secret in the year 2000. Forty years after it should have been made public.

  There was no point in second-guessing the prudent decision of others to withhold the secret. Josef had tried to mitigate the failure when, in 1985, he had spoken of it to Vittorio Messori. The reporter asked if the cardinal had read the Fatima document.

  “Si, l’ho letto.”

  He had read it. So why hadn’t it been made public? Speculation about it was everywhere. The reply had been that everything that need be known about the faith was known. Fatima merely recalled the need for conversion. And then he had said, “Pubblicare il ‘terzo segreto’ significherebbe anche esporsi al pericolo di utilizzaioni sensazionaliste del contenuto.” To publish the third secret would run the risk of sensational uses of its content.

  Further than that, he would not go. But why would the secret lend itself to sensational use?

  The reaction to those few remarks had made it clear that they would not suffice. They had waited for the skepticism to subside, but already they had known that nothing short of full disclosure could quiet those who did not hesitate to accuse the Vatican of duplicity. And so in 2000, the full disclosure had been made.

  The result had been a little book, beginning with a lengthy introduction by Tarcisio Bertone, then secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and ending with then Cardinal Ratzinger’s theological commentary. Sandwiched between, ut ita dicam, was a letter of John Paul II to Sister Lucia and a sermon preached at Fatima by Cardinal Sodano. In four short pages, written by Sister Lucia on January 3, 1944, the third secret, that is, what had previously been withheld, was published. Those pages were provided in facsimile in the document. The first part of the secret was a vision of hell the three children were given, where poor sinners go; poor sinners must be prayed for in the hope that they would repent and avoid such dreadful punishment. The second part was the key to preventing souls from going to hell and preventing earthly punishment of sin as well. Worse wars will come if people do not cease offending God. Devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, prayers and penance, but specifically the request that the Holy Father consecrate Russia to Mary, can prevent this. If this is not done, another and worse war will break out during the Pontificate of Pius XI.

  So much had been known for many years, World War II had come and devotion to Our Lady of Fatima had spread around the world. But for some, curiosity about what had not been made public became almost an obsession.

  And what was the third part of the secret? Piacere consulted the little booklet on his desk.

  The third part of the secret revealed on July 13, 1917 in the Cova di Lira, Fatima.

  After the two parts which I have already explained, at the left of Our Lady and a little above, we saw an Angel with a flaming sword in his left hand; flashing, it gave out flames that looked as though they would set the world on fire, but they died out in contact with the splendor that Our Lady radiated towards him from her right hand: pointing to the earth with his right hand, the Angel cried out in a loud voice: “Penance, Penance, Penance!” And we saw in an immense light that is God, something similar to how people appear in a mirror when they pass in front of it a Bishop dressed in White, we had the impression that it was the Holy Father. Other Bishops, Priests, men and women Religious going up a steep mountain, at the top of which there was a Big Cross of rough-hewn trunks as of a cork-tree with the bark; before reaching there the Holy Father passed through a big city half in ruins and half trembling with halting step, afflicted with pain and sorrow, he prayed for the souls of the corpses he met on his way; having reached the top of the mountain, on his knees at the foot of the Cross he was killed by a group of soldiers who fired bullets and arrows at him, and in the same way there died one after another the other Bishops, Priests, men and women religious, and various lay people of different ranks and positions. Beneath the two arms of the Cross there were two Angels each with a crystal aspersorium in hand, in which they gathered the blood of the Martyrs and with it they sprinkled the souls that were making their way to God.

  That was it. A prophecy of persecution of the Church, the killing of pope, bishops, nuns and priests, and laity. Had the assassination attempt on John Paul II been the fulfillment of that prophecy? Well, he survived the attack, and attributed that fact to the intercession of Our Lady of Fatima.

  Piacere had begun his career teaching ascetic theology at the Gregorianum, the university of his Jesuit order, an outgrowth of the Collegio Romano where luminaries of the Counter-Reformation had taught. From it had gone out over the world the Ratio Studiorum, the blueprint for higher education that had formed the Catholic mind in Europe and in the New World. It was as a professor that Piacere had learned that students, facing an examination, had an insatiable curiosity for any information as to what lay ahead. He had provided notes, outlines, sample questions. It was never enough. He should have known from that experience that for those whose minds were fixated on the third secret of Fatima, nothing would suffice to allay their doubts; not even the complete document, as the revelation of 2000 had proved.

  And now the document was gone. It was easy to imagine those who had gained possession of it poring over it and finding that what they sought simply was not there. All he had to do was put himself in their shoes. To call them zealots was not enough. They were fanatics. After the initial disappointment would come the supposed explanation. They had come into possession of an altered document, carefully planted in the archives against just such a theft as had occurred. Fatima zealots dismissed the assurances of Sister Lucia herself that the Holy Father had done all that the Blessed Mother had asked of him. In America, the intemperate Trepanier insisted that the dedication of the world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, with particular reference to Russia, had not been sufficient. Sister Lucia said otherwise. Of course she did. Sister Lucia was being manipulated by Church bureaucrats.

  Piacere’s advice to the Holy Father would be that they must prepare for the publication of a forged document that would contain the message desired by the zealots.

  More seriously, they could not counter it with the original, now that it was gone.

  Piacere’s eyes lifted to the picture on the wall between the two windows that looked out on the courtyard of his residence building. A Giotto. A copy. But it could be compared with the original. He glanced at his watch, unnecessarily; he was on schedule. He took out his rosary and began to tell the beads.

  The Annunciation. The Angel of the Lord declared unto Mary, and she conceived of the Holy Spirit. Here was the first chapter in the history of salvation, Mary’s acceptance of her role as the Virgin Mother of God. But he was distracted by the thought of what effect on the faithful the annunciation of a forged third secret of Fatima would have.

  The People of God had been put to the test during these decades since the Council; there was no need to deny that. The liturgy made banal, the loss of the common language of the Church, the ritual subjected to the silliest alterations. And confusion about the moral teaching of the Church, the long, sad history of Humanae Vitae. When contraception had been proposed as the remedy for marital difficulties, Piacere had been sure that the argument would fall of its own weight. How could the denial of the nature of conjugal union make marriages flourish? But the dissenters had succeeded in subverting the teaching of the Church, and the results were all around, at least in the so-called first world.

  What would the confused faithful make of the claim that the Church had deliberately suppressed the judgment of the Blessed Virgin, that the Council itself had been subversive, that the Church had been conquered by her enemies, enemies within the walls who would be made to seem far more menacing than those without?

  His phone rang. It was Rodriguez telling him that Brendan Crowe was nowhere to be
found. Crowe was to have accompanied him on his visit to the Holy Father.

  “You’re sure.”

  “He’s gone to the United States.”

  III

  “Is that an invitation?”

  In the Sala di Prenza on the Via della Conciliazione, questions were asked about the deaths of Cardinal Rampolla, the secretary of state, and Cardinal Maguire, the prefect of the Vatican Library. Two cardinals in one day. What would a slot machine pay off on that? Neal Admirari asked the question of Pescatore of the Corriere della Sera and got a smile. But then Pescatore always smiled when he hadn’t heard what was said. Pescatore began waving his hand at the Iberian smoothy who was spokesman for the Vatican. Opus Dei. A medical doctor. What was he doing here? Secret assignment? The press called him Ferdinand the Bull. Pescatore’s hand was ignored, but Neal’s was not.

  He stood. It seemed a sign of respect. But otherwise he might not have been visible to his cameraman. “As a medical doctor, what do you think is the likelihood of two prominent figures expiring on the same day, at the same hour, in the same place?”

  “Are they in an airplane?”

  Laughter all around. Neal joined in. He could be a good sport. “Say they have offices in the Vatican?” Neil asked.

  “And are well into their seventies? Even with the advances of modern medicine, those in their seventies are in the twilight of their lives.”

  The melodious voice dropped as he spoke, lids half lowered over dark eyes, portrait of a medical man lamenting the limits of his art.

  “What were the exact ages of Rampolla and Maguire?”

  “Copies of their obituaries are available in the back of the room. Next.” He looked brightly about the room in search of other questions not to answer.