Keys of This Blood (107 page)

Besides, from long association, they had their own shorthand. No one can even imagine, nor should anyone try to imagine, the very last words of that quiet conversation—what they were, who spoke them, and finally who hung up first. Only those two knew. Only they could with equanimity say goodbye for all the time that remained to each one—hours for Wyszynski, years for Wojtyla.

Wyszynski went up to his Maker and to his Maker's Mother in the small hours of May 28—that day, forty days after Easter, which Christians call Ascension Day. The theme of the ancient Roman Church in celebrating that day of Christ's Ascension could not have been more apt:
captivam duxit captivitatem
(he took captivity captive). A very old and weary warrior had surmounted the last barrier to his freedom. He had defeated all earthly captivity.

While John Paul lay convalescing that summer in the Policlinico, in the aftermath of Wyszynski's disappearance from this world, the first period of his sorrow and bereavement, we are told, gave way to a feeling of gratitude that he was still in life and could look forward to further years at his work. The deterioration of relations between the ever-burgeoning Solidarity and the ever more confused and fearful Communist government in Poland only emphasized his gratitude. In that June, July and August of 1981, wildcat strikes, public denigration of the government in straw polls, food shortages, defacing of Soviet war memorials in Poland, public demonstrations acclaiming Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz (an archcritic of Marxism) in Gdansk—the birthplace of Solidarity—bitter infighting between the “hard-liners” and the liberals in the Communist Party, repeated growls from the Kremlin: all indicated a growing crisis.

Not able personally to exercise any effective monitoring and direction of Polish affairs, John Paul turned more and more intently to prayer. Prayer, especially, to Mary as the geopolitical hope of Poland and of the world. Because, he was now sure, Mary had saved him from intended death in St. Peter's Square that May 13—the official feast day of Mary as Our Lady of Fatima—he fell into a mode of prayer to her as the Lady of Fatima. She would save Poland from destruction—autodestruction or destruction by the ever more restive Soviets. From across the Atlantic came the head-on condemnations by President Ronald Reagan of the “evil empire” and news that the United States was rearming and repositioning its military forces.

It was in this mode of prayer and this mood of total trust in Mary that John Paul had what has been, as far as is publicly known, his only supernatural vision of things to come. There is no gainsaying that he did have that vision. What he finally understood by it will be a matter of opinion and speculation until the day that he himself speaks openly, if ever, about it.

Apart from the incidental fact that he received that vision while convalescing in the Policlinico, the most noteworthy trait of the vision was that it came as an exact repetition of a miraculous happening recorded sixty-four years before at the hamlet of Fatima in Portugal. It was just as if he had been present at Fatima around midday, October 13, 1917.

We have no difficulty in knowing all the details of that 1917 happening in Portugal. All was seen and recorded by press photographers, media reporters from Portugal and other countries, writers, scholars, government officials, and a substantial crowd estimated by the press of the time to have topped 75,000. What those on-the-spot witnesses saw and recorded is what John Paul saw in the luminous skies of Lazio above the Seven Hills of Rome, in August 1981.

The happy circumstance that so many witnesses were present at Fatima that day was due to a simple fact: As of the previous July, the October 13 happening had been predicted.

Involved as chief actors in the whole Fatima event were three peasant children, a brother and sister—Francisco and Jacinta Marto, nine and seven years old, respectively—and their ten-year-old cousin, Lucia dos Santos. The brother and sister were illiterate. Lucia could barely read or write. They spent their days herding their families' sheep. These three children claimed that on the thirteenth day of each month, beginning with May 13, 1917, Mary had appeared to them at a particular spot called Cova da Iria in the neighborhood of their sheep pastures; that she told them she had an important message for all the nations and all men and women; and that, after coming to see them each thirteenth day of the coming months, on October 13 she would by the power of God perform a miracle in order to substantiate the authenticity and vital importance of her message.

By one means or another, news of the successive appearances spread throughout Portugal, Europe and the two Americas. Hence the throng of people gathered at Cova da Iria in Fatima at midday on October 13. Not only the month and day and place were predicted by the children; the exact hour—midday—was foretold. What happened at that precise hour was a cameraman's dream, something even Cecil B. DeMille could not have fantasized.

It had rained torrentially all that night of Friday, October 12. On the morning of the thirteenth, the hamlet of Fatima was blanketed in driving rain beneath a cloudbound sky. Everyone and everything was sodden; the dirt roads were quagmires of mud; there was a good three inches of water at Cova da Iria, where the three children were waiting with their families, surrounded by those thousands of visitors. Toward midday, the voice of Lucia, the eldest child, was heard: “Look up at the sun!” All looked up. The rain suddenly stopped. The heavy veil of clouds broke asunder. The sun appeared. At the sight of that sun, uncontrollable waves of surprise, awe, fear, panic, joy swept through the crowds. The sun they now clearly saw was the same sun John Paul II later saw in August 1981.

This was not the unbearably bright midday sun normal in the skies of Portugal and Rome, the sun you cannot stare at without damaging the eyes. This sun was a fast-spinning plate of brightly shining silver, a giant pinwheel turning on its own axis, casting off beams of colored lights—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet—that tinted faces, clothes, cars, carts, umbrellas, animals, ponds, grass, mountaintop and horizon in all the successive hues of the rainbow. Everyone was able to stare fixedly at this brilliant disk, but yet without pain and without being blinded. All were fascinated by the rim of color around the spinning disk of that sun. At first deep red, the rim's color changed successively to all the colors in the rainbow.

That was the first part of what the onlookers later described picturesquely as the “dance of the sun.” It lasted two or three minutes.

The second part of the “dance” started with a cessation of the spinning motion. Now the sun roamed back and forth among the clouds, seeming to tremble and pulsate within itself, appearing and half disappearing behind puffs and strips of cloud, occasionally stopping and spinning again on its own axis and throwing off those brilliant shafts of multicolored light, then resuming its roaming among the clouds.

The third part of that exotic dance came when the roaming stopped. That brilliant disk was stationary for a while, trembling, pulsating, rotating on its own axis. Then, without warning, it plunged from its position above the clouds, hurtled in zigzag fashion toward earth and toward the upturned faces of those tens of thousands. One observer described later how the smiling look of wonder on the faces around him in that crowd changed first into looks of puzzlement, then immediately into white-faced fear according as that solar disk, ever rotating and pulsating, came closer and closer, appearing bigger and bigger in its reeling descent, the heat increasing as it came nearer and nearer.

As this molten mass of light and heat zigzagged downward, cries of anguish and horror, prayers and exclamations, rose up: “It's the end of the world!” “We will all die!” “God forgive me my sins!” and the like. But in the middle of the downward plunge of that blazing sun, the voices of the three children were heard above the cries of anguish: “Pray and pray hard! Everything is going to be all right!”

But for a time it did look as if that disk was going to smash into the crowds, crushing and burning all before it. At the peak of these fears and horror, the disk halted, reversed its path, ascended back to the sky. It stopped moving. The spinning ceased. There were no more colors thrown off. The people could no longer look at the midday sun. It had just its usual unbearable noonday glare. The winds started to blow with noticeably greater force. All noticed the rise in the force of the wind. They noticed, too, that there was no movement whatever in the branches of the trees. No sooner was it noted that the leaves and branches were motionless in the middle of strong winds than they noticed—again, all together—that there was no water on the ground, no mud. All was dry and dusty.

Then someone shouted: “I'm dry! Bone dry!” The cry suddenly became universal. Everybody's clothes, a few minutes before heavy and cold from rainwater, were now dry and light and crisp and warm. “They looked as though they had just come from the laundry,” one still-surviving witness recalled in 1989.

There is one more set of facts about the Fatima happening that is relevant to John Paul's August 1981 vision.

From the beginning of their reported conversations with Mary, the three children insisted she had given them three messages. Before their early deaths, Francisco Marto on April 4, 1919, at age eleven; Jacinta Marto on February 20, 1920, at age ten—the two Martos and Lucia dos Santos were questioned extensively about the Fatima happening and their six extended conversations with Mary. They never wavered or changed in their testimony, but they would not reveal the contents of the three messages immediately. They maintained that Mary had also given them precise instructions on this point. Since the death of the Martos, Lucia, now eighty-two and living as a Carmelite nun in Coimbra, Portugal, has been the sole living source of information about those three messages of Mary.

The first two messages of Fatima became very well known in the years since 1917. The first put the Church and all men on notice that the world
as a whole society was following a path of sin along which a multitude of men and women were being led to the eternal punishment of Hell. The second message was a prediction about the outbreak of World War II. In that message, Mary also spoke about Russia and asked that the Pope and all the bishops of the Church consecrate it in an especially solemn manner to her. If this was not done, the children reported Mary as saying, Russia would spread error and evil throughout the world; many human beings would suffer and die as a consequence.

The third Fatima message still remains officially a secret. Lucia was adamant about its being kept secret. In 1944, under orders from her bishop, she wrote down on one sheet of paper the bare details of that secret, sealed it in an envelope and gave it to him. She told the bishop it was to be opened in 1960, because “by 1960, things will be clearer.” But rumors spread about the contents of that envelope, to the effect that it concerned the USSR and other nations. Geopolitical-minded Vatican authorities began to feel queasy about the “Third Secret,” as the contents of that envelope were now called. Under Vatican order, the envelope was brought to Rome and deposited in a small humidor-type box on a mantelpiece in the Pope's private apartments in the Apostolic Palace, there to await the man who would be Pope in 1960.

That Pope was John XXIII. He opened and read the contents of the envelope in the course of 1959–60 and decided those contents had no relevance to his pontificate. The envelope was returned to the box. His successor, Paul VI, read the contents and decided to do nothing about the matter. John Paul I also read Lucia's document, but he lived only thirty-three days as Pope. One of the first things John Paul II did on becoming Pope was to take out that envelope, read the document and place it back in that box. He, too, like John XXIII and Paul VI, decided it was not directly relevant; there was nothing to be done about the message. That was in late 1978.

The actual contents of that “Third Secret” remained by and large a secret until the pontificate of John Paul II. By that time, the contents had been revealed to a sufficient number of people on a private basis, and both John Paul himself and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger had spoken with sufficient frankness about the contents so that at least the essentials could be reliably outlined.

Lucia's single-page written formulation of the “Third Secret” covers three main topics. A physical chastisement of the nations, involving catastrophes, man-made or natural, on land, on water and in the atmosphere of the globe. A spiritual chastisement, far more frightening and distressing—especially for Roman Catholics—than physical hardship,
since it would consist of the disappearance of religious belief, a period of widespread unfaith in many countries. A central function of Russia in the two preceding series of events. In fact, the physical and spiritual chastisements, according to Lucia's letter, are to be gridded on a fateful timetable in which Russia is the ratchet.

The chastisements were meant to punish the nations for their ungodliness and abandonment of God's laws. The whole dire process could be averted—need not happen, in fact—if two requests of Mary were granted. One: that whoever would be Pope in 1960 (actually it was John XXIII) should publish the text of the “Third Secret” for the whole world to read and know. Two: that then the Pope, with all his bishops acting collegially, should consecrate Russia to Mary. Russia, according to the text of the “Third Secret,” was the regulator of the timetable.

If those two basic requests were satisfied, then the two chastisements—physical and spiritual—would not be inflicted on mankind. Russia would be converted to religious belief, and a period of great peace and prosperity would ensue. If the requests were denied, the chastisements would then follow as surely as night follows day. Russia would spread its errors throughout all nations. Many millions would die. The practice of religion and the profession of true faith would diminish to a shadow of what they were. Widespread corruption would infect the Church's clergy and laity. The Holy Father would have much to suffer. A little glimmer of hope existed: In the end, after all this dreadful devastation, there would be a restoration of faith and tolerable living conditions.