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Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò at the Rome Life Forum on May 18, 2018. Steve Jalsevac / LifeSiteNews

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April 22, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) – In a stunning new interview, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the former papal nuncio in Washington, D.C. and the prelate who accused Pope Francis of covering up the crimes of Theodore McCarrick, has now publicly stated that he does not believe that the Vatican up to today has published the full Third Secret of Fatima. This report has already found interest in Italy, by outlets such as Corrispondenza Romana and Stilum Curiae

Speaking to Dies Irae, a Portuguese website, Archbishop Viganò says, “The third part of the message that Our Lady entrusted to the shepherds of Fatima, so that they could deliver it to the Holy Father, remains a secret today.”

In 1917, Our Lady repeatedly appeared to three shepherd children – two of whom are now canonized – and gave them one secret with three parts, the first and the second to be revealed to the public.

The third part of the Secret – often called the Third Secret – was to be given to the Pope, who was then asked by Our Lady to make it known to the world not later than 1960.

The first and the second parts of the Secret show a vision of hell, speak about the spread of the “errors” of Russia, the need for penance, and for Russia to be consecrated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. The third part as it has been published shows a Pope who is being killed on a hill, together with clergymen and laymen.

Further explaining his position, the Italian prelate, who lives currently in an undisclosed location, then says, “Our Lady asked [the secret] to be revealed in 1960, but John XXIII published, on February 8 of that year, a statement in which he stated that […] ‘he does not want to assume the responsibility of guaranteeing the truth of the words that the three little shepherds say that the Virgin Mary addressed to them.’” 

With this departure from the Queen of Heaven's message,” Viganò continues, “a cover-up operation was initiated, evidently because the content of the message would reveal the terrible conspiracy of her enemies against the Church of Christ.” 

According to the archbishop, until a “few decades ago,” people would not have believed that we could even dare to “gag” the Blessed Mother, “but in recent years we have also seen attempts to censor the Gospel itself, which is the Word of His divine Son.”

The Italian prelate states that the Vatican, when officially presenting the Third Secret to the public in 2000, presented an “incomplete” version. 

He says:

“In 2000, during the Pontificate of John Paul II, the Secretary of State, Cardinal Sodano, presented as his Third Secret a version of himself that, in relation to some elements, appeared clearly incomplete. It is not surprising that the new Secretary of State, Cardinal Bertone, tried to divert attention on an event of the past, in order to make believe to the people of God that the words of the Virgin had nothing to do with the crisis of the Church and with the collusion between Modernists and Freemasonry carried out behind the scenes of Vatican II.”

Archbishop Viganò is referring then to the Italian journalist and author Antonio Socci, “who has thoroughly investigated the Third Secret, [and] has unmasked this malicious behavior on the part of Cardinal Bertone.”

Socci published in 2006 (in English in 2009) his book The Fourth Secret of Fatima, in which he argues that the Vatican did not publish the full Third Secret as it had been given to the shepherd children in Fatima in 1917. According to his research, the Vatican only published the vision of the secret which was then further explained by Our Lady. These words explaining the vision are still missing, according to this author. 

Archbishop Viganò, in his new interview, seems to follow this line of argument. He also insists that the full consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary – as it had been requested by Our Lady of Fatima – has not taken place, either. 

He says:

“Let us not forget Our Lady’s ignored call for the Pope and all the Bishops to consecrate Russia to Her Immaculate Heart, as a condition for defeating Communism and atheistic materialism: consecrating not ‘the world’, not ‘that nation that She wants Let us consecrate him’, but ‘Russia’. Did it cost so much to do it? Evidently so, for those who do not have a supernatural look.”

Instead of following Heaven's request, the prelate says, the Vatican wanted to take a peaceful approach with the Soviet regime, a “path of detente,” which had been “inaugurated precisely by Roncalli, without understanding that without God no peace is possible.” 

“Today,” Viganò adds, “with a President of the Russian Confederation who is certainly a Christian [Vladimiar Putin], the Virgin's request could be granted, avoiding further misfortunes for the Church and the world.”

LifeSiteNews reported in 2017 on a statement made by the German curial cardinal Paul Josef Cordes, who gave testimony to the fact that Pope John Paul II, in 1984, did not explicitly mention the name of Russia when consecrating the world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Cordes stated that the Pope “had made this act of consecration on 23 [sic – 25] March 1984, when the statue of Our Lady of Fatima had come to Rome. However, he held back to mention Russia explicitly; because the Vatican diplomats had urgently asked him not to mention this country because otherwise political conflicts might perhaps arise.”

Archbishop Viganò further explains that in the 1960s – exactly the time when Our Lady wanted to have the Third Secret made public – the apostasy that we are currently witnessing began. It is also the time when the Second Vatican Council took place, from 1962 to 1965.

Apostasy and ‘fulfillment’ of a 200-year plan?

The prelate says in his new interview that the message of the Third Secret is still valid for us today. Before we consider Viganò's words, let us remember that in May 2010, on his way back to Rome from his visit in Fatima, Pope Benedict XVI said about the Fatima message that “there is also the fact that attacks on the Pope and the Church come not only from without, but the sufferings of the Church come precisely from within the Church, from the sin existing within the Church.”

He continued, “This too is something that we have always known, but today we are seeing it in a really terrifying way: that the greatest persecution of the Church comes not from her enemies without, but arises from sin within the Church, and that the Church thus has a deep need to relearn penance, to accept purification, to learn forgiveness on the one hand, but also the need for justice.” 

The Pope then insisted that the message of Fatima is still valid for our time when he said: “We would be mistaken to think that Fatima's prophetic mission is complete.”

Viganò' states the following:

“Benedict XVI himself confirmed the timeliness of the Virgin's message, although – according to the interpretation spread by the Vatican – it must be considered fulfilled. Those who read the Third Secret clearly said that its content concerns the apostasy of the Church, which began precisely in the early sixties and that today it has reached a stage so evident that it can be recognized by secular observers. This almost obsessive insistence on issues that the Church has always condemned, such as relativism and religious indifference, false ecumenism, Malthusian ecologism, homo-heresy and immigration, found in the Abu Dhabi Declaration the fulfillment of a plan devised by the secret sects since more than two centuries ago.”

Here, the prelate makes an explicit reference to Freemasonry, which centuries ago developed plans on how to destroy the Catholic Church from within, by undermining her very own teachings and customs. Many of these historical matters are outlined in a recent book by Dr. Taylor Marshall, called Infiltration. This book had been supported by Bishop Athanasius Schneider, who authored a foreword for it. 

‘Neo-Church’ is ‘a deformed and monstrous creature that does not come from God’

Archbishop Viganò speaks of a “new church” that has been developed in the recent decades, a church that is “simply not the Church of Christ!”

He adds that “the post-conciliar, Modernist and Masonic church also aspires to transform, to overcome the Church of Christ, replacing it with a ‘neo-Church’, a deformed and monstrous creature that does not come from God.” 

“The aim of this neo-Church,” Viganò continues, “is not to lead the chosen people to recognize the Messiah, as [with] the Synagogue; it is not to convert and save all peoples before the second coming of Christ, as for the Catholic Church, but to constitute themselves as a spiritual arm of the New World Order and defender of Universal Religion.”

It is in this sense that, according to this Italian archbishop, “the conciliar revolution had to first demolish the Church's legacy, its millenary Tradition, from which it extracted its own vitality and authority as the Mystical Body of Christ, to later get rid of the exponents of the ancient Hierarchy, and only recently began to propose yourself, without pretense, to what it wants to be.”

It was Bishop Athanasius Schneider who, in 2019 in his book Christus Vincit, also raised critical questions and doubts about some select elements of the teachings of the Second Vatican Council that seem to go along with the words of Archbishop Viganò.

Speaking further about the Freemasonic plan to weaken and undermine the Catholic Church from within, Archbishop Viganò says that many bishops might not even be aware of these dangerous developments. He states:

“What you call utopia is actually a dystopia, because it represents the realization of Freemasonry's plan and the preparation of the advent of Antichrist. I am also convinced that the majority of my Brothers, and even more so, almost all priests and the faithful, are not aware of this hellish plan at all, and that recent events have opened the eyes of many.”

With this interview, Archbishop Viganò invites us to debate several key issues that have troubled many Catholics in the recent past and that have left many wondering how it could have happened that the Church lost so much of her moral integrity (see for example the McCarrick scandal) and missionary zeal. Even Pope Benedict XVI said in 2016:

“The missionaries of the 16th century were convinced that the unbaptized person is lost forever. After the [Second Vatican] Council, this conviction was definitely abandoned. The result was a two-sided, deep crisis. Without this attentiveness to the salvation, the Faith loses its foundation.”

Since publication of this article, Robert Moynihan has published a full translation of the interview here.

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Dr. Maike Hickson was born and raised in Germany. She holds a PhD from the University of Hannover, Germany, after having written in Switzerland her doctoral dissertation on the history of Swiss intellectuals before and during World War II. She now lives in the U.S. and is married to Dr. Robert Hickson, and they have been blessed with two beautiful children. She is a happy housewife who likes to write articles when time permits.

Dr. Hickson published in 2014 a Festschrift, a collection of some thirty essays written by thoughtful authors in honor of her husband upon his 70th birthday, which is entitled A Catholic Witness in Our Time.

Hickson has closely followed the papacy of Pope Francis and the developments in the Catholic Church in Germany, and she has been writing articles on religion and politics for U.S. and European publications and websites such as LifeSiteNews, OnePeterFive, The Wanderer, Rorate Caeli, Catholicism.org, Catholic Family News, Christian Order, Notizie Pro-Vita, Corrispondenza Romana, Katholisches.info, Der Dreizehnte,  Zeit-Fragen, and Westfalen-Blatt.