Remarkably, just weeks after that consecration — on May 13, 1984, the Fátima anniversary — an explosion at the Soviets’ Severomorsk Naval Base destroyed two-thirds of all the missiles stockpiled for the Soviets’ Northern Fleet. It also destroyed workshops needed to maintain the missiles and killed hundreds of technicians. Western military experts called it the worst naval disaster the Soviet Navy had suffered since WWII.

The consecration was also followed, in an even more astonishing way, with the collapse in 1988 of Communism in Poland, followed in 1989 by the fall of atheistic Communism in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. (Remember the “Berlin Wall” and the “Iron Curtain”?).

No state department specialist, no Ivy League academic, no political leader, and no television analyst would have dared to have predicted this.

Within two years, Communism was falling in the Soviet Union itself: Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Ukraine, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, followed by the fall of the Communist dictatorship in Russia.

No one expected such a thing in his or her lifetime — never mind a few short years. Albania and Yugoslavia soon joined the others.

Sister Lucia noted, during the 1992 meeting, that “the news speaks for itself.”

We respect those who have a contrary viewpoint. We report, you discern. Sister Lucia, during such talks, specifically singled out a Canadian priest, Father Nicholas Gruner, who she said needed to be corrected.

She further stated that the collapse of Communion in Soviet-held territories constituted a “period of peace” predicted during the apparitions if the consecration was accomplished. She said this peace pertained to the greatly lessened tensions between the Soviet Union (or now just “Russia”) and the rest of the world. It was a “period” of time that had been foreseen, she said — not an “era” (as many have interpreted the message).

Most remarkably, in a second meeting exactly a year later — on October 11, 1993 — she reportedly told Cardinal Ricardo Vidal of the Philippines and eight others (including two priests) that “the consecration of 1984 prevented an atomic [nuclear] war that would have occurred in 1985.” She said the Triumph of Our Lady’s Immaculate Heart had begun but was (in the words of the interpreter, Carlos Evaristo, above left) an “ongoing process.” [See his Youtube report]