In 1917, Lucia Santos and her cousins
Jacinta and Francisco Marto claimed to have seen visions, the three
young shepherd children from the town of Fatima in Portugal claimed
to have received words of prophecy from the Virgin Mary and they were
shown terrible visions of which they refused to share. Within three
years, two of the children had died, and the third decided to share
the secrets in the prophecies with the Vatican, with-holding the last
of the three till 1943.
The secrets have since been released by
the church, yet many people believe that these could be false and
that the church has chosen to withhold the true secrets that had been
revealed. The first secret is of a vision of hell, seeing the demons
and the tormented souls suffering the great fire. The second
announces that the war (World War 1) will soon end, but that if
people don't change their ways that a bigger and more devastating war
will break out (World War 2). The third foretells blood of many
religious people being spilt and some point to this as predicting the
attempted assassination of the Pope in modern times.
The controversy is centred around the
third secret, as it was supposedly written on only one sheet of
paper, where-as four sheets were released, leading to claims that the actual secret had not been released. People who had spoken to the
author and people who had seen the secret referred only to one piece
of paper. The Vatican did not help themselves as they held back from
releasing it, as the author had wanted it revealed in 1960, yet they
held out, making some guess at what it could have said and that it
may suit the church to hide the real secret for some reason. Either
way, we will never know for sure.
