Although they would later be given private apparitions, it was on October 13, 1917, that the Virgin Mary made her last official, simultaneous appearance to all three seers at the famous site of Fátima, Portugal, where Jesus and Saint Joseph were also witnessed in conjunction with a “miracle of the sun.”
In addition to that solar marvel, the apparitions there are most well-known for the three sets of “secrets” dispensed by Heaven.
Those secrets had to do with wars and particularly Russia.
To prevent a massive war, said one part of the secrets, “I shall come to ask for the Consecration of Russia to my Immaculate Heart, and the Communion of reparation on the First Saturdays. If my requests are heeded, Russia will be converted, and there will be peace; if not, she will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church.”
Unfortunately, the request was not completely fulfilled and Russia in fact spread its errors far and wide and persecuted the Church.
On March 25, 1984, in Saint Peter’s Square, while recalling the fiat uttered by Mary at the Annunciation, the Holy Father, in spiritual union with the Bishops of the world, who had been convoked beforehand, entrusted all men and women and all peoples to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, in terms that the eldest seer, now ensconced in a convent, said fulfilled the Virgin Mary’s request.
Remarkably, just weeks after that consecration — on May 13, 1984, another 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 World War II.
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, Ivy League academic, political leader, and or 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.
During a 1992 meeting with clerics, Sister Lucia remarked that “the news speaks for itself.”
She further stated that the collapse of Communism 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 — the seer-nun 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) an “ongoing process.”
Pope Francis in 2022 repeated the consecration but took it steps further, hewing more closely to the literal request and doing so with the world’s bishops. He also added Ukraine to the prayer.
The question now is whether we are in a new phase and whether the quelling of the Soviet threat has given way to a Russia that once again seems like a threat to global peace, for that nation has not fully converted to active Christianity, a requirement for peace, according to Our Lady.
Time will tell. Prayers obviously are still needed. Are we at the cusp of a third world war?
As we have noted before, ironic it was that during the French test of a nuclear bomb over a Pacific atoll in 1969, the photograph above was taken and published in Newsweek, which did not seem to note the uncanny resemblance in the stem of the cloud to the Crucified Christ on the Cross and above, to the left, in the wider reddish part of the mushroom, what look quite distinctly like a famous image of the Blessed Virgin.
[resources: Books on Fatima]