The "Fatima Secret" has given rise to many discussions.  It has aroused the curiosity (though often not the zeal.)  of many people.  Let us read what the Bishop of Leiria tells us in his Pastoral Letter of July 25, 1966:

    "We feel well, dear diocesan people, how difficult it is, and even dangerous, to broach this subject.  But we cannot help doing so, although in few words, because now and then there appear certain affirmations and they assume certain attitudes which can only prejudice the Message of Fatima, which is all light.  In Her apparitions Our Lady came from the Orient in a perfect symbolic demonstration that She came from Christ, unfading light of the Father, which only leads to Christ.
    "More than once, not without certain difficulty as it was disagreeable, we had to give serious warnings over certain illusory and spectacular hopes which we need not repeat here.
    "Fatima's mission is not to fill with fantasies those who live, or wish to live, in dreams or hallucinations.  Fatima is a diaphanous light that comes from the East.
    "Neither is Fatima in accord with auguries of universal catastrophies.  Fatima cannot be seduced to sensational prophecies of terrible wars.  Much less can Her message, essentially pacific, be directed against any country, particularly, that well beloved nation Russia--a victim, alas, of doctrine that is very contrary to Her dearest traditions.  Fatima can never be a name given to party factions in which more earthly values and politics are at stake.
    "We affirm that Fatima is something far more serious than all that.  Fatima, in this, really exercises the whole meaning of a Church set eschatologicallly towards a future which is safe in the hands of God, but which is also comprised by the mystery of iniquity which is already at work. (2 Thess., 2, 7.)
    "We wish to say, dear diocesans that nobody can place in Fatima, in spite of all its immense power of intercession before God Our Lord, an illusory hope that has not been consolidated in the holy fear of God, the beginning of His love; (Ecc., 25, 16.) in perserving prayer, based on the infinite merits of Christ, and in the intercession of Our Lady.  It is always within these great Christian truths that Fatima works the prodigies of divine mercy in these times for the Church.
    "It is in this meaning that the Church's eschatologic future has to be unrolled.  It is in this perspective that Fatima must be understood, and in this acquire the full significance of those consoling words: 'In the end my Immaculate Heart will triumph.' "

    Cardinal Ottaviani, on the 11th of February, 1967, said:

    "She (Lucia.) has written in Portuguese, on a sheet of paper, what the Holy Virgin has asked her to say to the Holy Father.
    " . . . The envelope containing the secret of Fatima was handed to the Bishop of Leiria and, though Lucia has told him that he might read it, he wouldn't do it.  He wanted to respect the secret, perhaps as a sign of respect to the Holy Father.  He delivered it to the Apostolic Nuncio, then Msgr. Cento present here.  Msgr. Cento transmitted it carefully to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and, always closed, it was given to Pope John XXIII.  The Pope opened the envelope, and read its contents.  Though the text was written in Portuguese, he told me that he had understood it thoroughly.  Then he himself put it into another envelope, sealed it and laid it in one of those archives which are like a deep and black, black well in the bottom of which no one sees anything at all.  So it is very difficult to say where the secret of Fatima is now.
    "Meanwhile, what matters is the public message.  The secret is a matter for the Holy Father, to whom it was addressed.  It was he who was the addressee.
    "If the addressee of the secret has not decided to declare: 'Now is the moment to make it known to the world,' we must be content with his wisdom which wished it to remain a secret.
    "What matters, is that we should know how to conform our life, our actions and our activities with the spirit of the public message, as Lucia was not only charged to transmit the secret to the Pope, but to make known the public message to all the world; the public message, which is condensed into these two words: Prayer and Penance."

   (From the address of Cardinal Ottaviani given on the 11th of February, 1967, when the 50th Anniversary of the Apparitions of Our Lady at Fatima was celebrated in Rome at the Antonianum.)

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