On June 26, 2000 the Vatican published the enigmatic vision of "the Bishop dressed in white" and claimed it was the entirety of the Third Secret of Fatima. Since then, a growing number of Catholics have become convinced that something is missing. What is missing are
the words of the Virgin Mary which would explain how the Pope in the vision comes to be executed by soldiers outside a ruined city filled with corpses.
In this book, attorney and Catholic commentator Christopher A. Ferrara conducts a meticulous examination of a mass of evidence--including many recent admissions, inadvertent disclosures, inconsistencies and sudden about-faces on the part of the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone--to arrive at the inescapable conclusion that a text of the Virgin's words in the Third Secret has yet to be revealed.
This book is the first full-length examination of the grounds for rejecting Cardinal Bertone's version of the facts in the Third Secret controversy. The Cardinal's own statements, including his book and radio and television broadcasts in 2007, are shown to demonstrate beyond any doubt that a text of the Secret has been suppressed, evidently under an unjustifiable mental reservation that the text is not "authentic."
Among other things, the evidence presented here demonstrates that-- The Secret has two parts, as Pope Pius XII's own investigator revealed, one of which contains words of the Virgin that are not found in the published vision.
There are two different Third Secret envelopes, each bearing its own warning, in Sister Lucia's handwriting, that by "express order of Our Lady" the envelope is not to be opened before 1960.
There are two different locations for these envelopes: the Holy Office archives for one, the papal apartment for the other.
A text of the Secret was inside an outer envelope bearing dictation by Pope John XXIII and kept in the papal apartment--an envelope the Secretary of State has never produced even though he now concedes that the envelope exists.
There are two different Third Secret translations in Italian, neither of which has been made public by the Vatican.
Three different Popes since 1959 read texts of the Secret on two different dates--years apart--even though the Vatican's official explanation claims there was only a single reading by each Pope.
And yet the Catholic faithful are still being asked to believe that there is only one text of the Third Secret, and that the Virgin had nothing to say about the meaning of the ominous vision she herself confided to the Fatima seers. Whoever still believes this will have no good reason to continue believing it after reading this book. And, given the absolute urgency of the Secret for every inhabitant of the planet, the case presented here should motivate Catholics and non-Catholics alike to demand that the Vatican reveal the hidden words of the Virgin to the whole world---before it is too late.
...is an attorney who serves as President and Chief Counsel for the American Catholic Lawyers Association, a religious organization dedicated to the defense of the rights of Catholics by way of litigation, public discourse and debate. Mr. Ferrara is also a widely published author on Catholic issues whose writings have appeared in The Latin Mass magazine, The Remnant newspaper, Christian Order, The Fatima Crusader magazine, the Catholic Family News, and in his regular Internet column, Fatima Perspectives. He is the author of EWTN: A Network Gone Wrong, and co-author of The Great Facade: Vatican II and the Regime of Novelty in the Roman Catholic Church, internationally acclaimed as one of the most incisive studies ever written of the post-Vatican II crisis in the Roman Catholicism. Mr. Ferrara resides in New Jersey with his wife, Wendy, and four of their six children, where he is currently at work on his next book Liberty: the God that Failed.
