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| Fatima |
Mrs. L.S.D. poses the question, "And finally, what, if anything, is in the last Fatima Letter?" to the Question Box moderator [St. Fidgeta & Other Parodies, 40].
Fatima is yet another famous Catholic shrine in Portugal where the Blessed Virgin Mary reportedly appeared several times to three young peasant children, two girls and a boy, from May 13 to October 13, 1917. The Blessed Virgin Mary either gave or dictated to the children three sealed letters, with instructions that each should be opened on a certain date by whomever happened to be Pope at the time and though the children were subjected to heavy and skeptical interrogation, nothing could shake them from their story. The first letter predicted the imminent end of the war and victory by the Allies. The second predicted the fall of communism if the faithful led virtuous lives and prayed hard enough. The third letter was given in a sealed envelope to the local bishop, who by now was convinced of the validity of the children's visions and was afraid to open it for what it might have foretold. He passed it along to the Vatican, which sat on it for several decades.
Bowen says that during his childhood a story went around that Pope Pius XII had sneaked an early peek of the Third Fatima Letter and fainted dead away. "Obviously the news was very, very bad. However, I'm not aware of any announcement being made when the letter was finally opened. I like to think that it said 'April Fool!'"
Myers says that the Fatima promise and third letter had a major impact on Catholic children of my age, who were in grade school during the height of the cold war. "So-called Fatima devotions were common throughout the Church. And there the matter stood even up to the time that Bellairs wrote St. Fidgeta. Bellairs once joked that a Jewish friend of his at the University of Chicago suggested that the third letter was a bill for the Last Supper. Quite surprisingly, a couple of years ago, Cardinal Ratzinger (then head of the Vatican's Congregation of the Holy Office, now Pope Benedict XVI) opened the third letter and announced its contents. Amazingly, under some interpretations it seems to have foretold the assassination attempt on the Pope back in the early 1980's. But the wording is ambiguous, sort of Nostradamus-like, and is therefore not of much use in planning your investment strategies" (also see Lourdes). |
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| http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Lady_of_Fatima |
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