"Prophets of Doom: Vatican II and the Secrets of Fatima" / OCCULT READS PRESENTS: "What Happened at Vatican II"
ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
October 11
Prophets of Doom: Vatican II and the Secrets of Fatima
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On October 11, 1962, Pope John XXIII walked into St. Peter’s
Basilica to open the Second Vatican Council, and in his opening address he
dismissed, by name, the prophets of doom who are always forecasting disaster.
He could not have chosen a more loaded phrase. Two years earlier, in that same
Vatican, he had quietly read a sealed letter containing what the world would
come to know as the Third Secret of Fatima,
and decided not to tell anyone what was in it…
The irony only sharpens the longer
you sit with the actual sequence of events. In 1917, three shepherd children in
Fatima, Portugal, reported a series of apparitions of the Virgin Mary,
culminating in what tens of thousands of witnesses described as the Miracle
of the Sun that October. Decades later, one of those children, by then a
cloistered nun named Sister Lucia dos Santos, wrote down a third and final
secret message at her bishop's instruction, sealed it, and specified it should
be opened and read to the world no later than 1960. The Holy Office had the
letter delivered to Rome in 1957. John XXIII read it in 1960, the year Sister
Lucia had named. He showed it to one cardinal, Alfredo Ottaviani, and then the Vatican
issued an anonymous communique stating plainly that the Secret would not be
revealed, adding only that the Church did not wish to guarantee the
apparitions' authenticity with its own authority.
On October 13, 1917, somewhere between thirty and seventy thousand people gathered in a field at Fatima, many of them skeptics and journalists sent specifically to debunk the children's claims, after months of advance publicity promised a sign from heaven. Numerous accounts, including ones published in secular and anticlerical newspapers hostile to the whole affair, describe the sun appearing to spin, change color, and plunge toward the crowd before returning to its place, all after a period of heavy rain had suddenly stopped. Scientific explanations proposed since then range from mass hysteria to optical effects caused by staring at the sun to genuine atmospheric phenomena, and no consensus exists. What's undisputed is the sheer number of witnesses and the contemporary, not retrospective, newspaper coverage, which is more documentary weight than most reported Marian apparitions ever receive.
That decision to stay silent landed
in the middle of the very same years John XXIII spent planning his council. He
announced his intention to convoke Vatican II on
January 25, 1959, just months after becoming pope, and the council he opened on
October 11, 1962, deliberately fell on a date with its own Marian resonance: in
the calendar used at the time, October 11 was the Feast of the Maternity of the
Blessed Virgin Mary. John XXIII said as much himself in the speech's opening
lines, noting that Mary's own feast day lent its protection to the Council's
solemn opening. None of this is speculation. It's documented in the Vatican's
own record of the day.
What is speculation, openly acknowledged as such even by the people proposing it, is any claim that the Secret and the Council were connected in content rather than merely in timing. The theory has real pedigree inside the Church, not just among internet conspiracy pages. Cardinal Silvio Oddi, a senior Vatican official, said in a 1990 interview that he would not be surprised if the Secret had something to do with the convocation of the Council, specifically citing the timing of events in 1960. Traditionalist Catholic writers and organizations have gone considerably further, arguing the Secret foretold what they call a great apostasy beginning at the top of the Church, a reading explicitly tied to Vatican II's reforms. When the Vatican finally published the Secret's text in 2000, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, wrote the official commentary and stated plainly that the document contained no great unrevealed mystery and did not unveil the future, describing it instead as a vision tied to twentieth-century persecution of Christians, widely interpreted as referring to the 1981 assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II. Not everyone who has read it has accepted that interpretation as final, and the argument continues within Catholic circles to this day. This column has no standing to settle it, and won't pretend otherwise.
Over the next three years, 1962 to
1965, Vatican II produced sixteen documents that genuinely reoriented the
Catholic Church’s relationship to the modern world: formal commitment to
ecumenical dialogue with other Christian communities and, in the landmark
declaration Nostra Aetate, with non-Christian religions as well, including an
explicit repudiation of the old charge of collective Jewish guilt for the
Crucifixion; a declaration on religious liberty; and sweeping liturgical reform
that moved the Mass from Latin into the vernacular languages spoken in parishes
worldwide. Supporters have called it the most significant religious event of
the twentieth century. A real and committed minority within the Church,
including the traditionalist Society of Saint Pius X, has spent the six decades
since arguing the opposite, that the Council represented rupture rather than
renewal. Both camps claim Fatima as evidence. Neither can produce the one
document that would actually settle the argument, because whatever certainty
the Secret might have offered was set aside, deliberately, by a pope who had
just finished telling the assembled bishops of the world not to listen to
prophets of doom.
What Happened at Vatican II
By
John W. O'Malley | Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
(A note before we begin: this one
isn't from our affiliate shelf. Given how contested the Fatima material in
today's post remains, even within the Church itself, we didn't want to
recommend a devotional book that implicitly takes a side on an open theological
argument. Instead, we're pointing readers toward the most respected neutral
history of what the Council actually did.)
John W. O'Malley’s What Happened
at Vatican II, published by Harvard University Press's Belknap imprint in
2008, is widely regarded as the standard accessible scholarly account of the
Council, written by a Jesuit church historian who was present in Rome for parts
of the proceedings himself. O'Malley doesn't adjudicate Fatima or any other
supernatural question; his book stays entirely within the documented historical
record, tracing the Council from John XXIII's 1959 announcement through its
1965 conclusion, with real attention to the theological fights, the outsized
influence of the Belgian delegation, and the sixteen documents the bishops
ultimately produced.
O'Malley treats the Council's
reforms, on ecumenism, religious liberty, and liturgy, as the genuinely
significant historical event they were, without either celebrating them as
inevitable progress or mourning them as rupture, the two postures that dominate
most popular writing on Vatican II. Reviewers across the political and
theological spectrum, including in traditionally more conservative Catholic
publications, have praised the book's balanced judgment and lucid prose.
This is a serious work of history, not a quick read, and it assumes some baseline familiarity with Catholic institutional structure. Readers wanting the fullest possible account, inter-session politics and all, are sometimes directed toward the five-volume Alberigo-Komonchak History of Vatican II instead, though that's a considerably larger undertaking. For readers who finished today's post wanting to understand what the Council actually changed, independent of whatever Sister Lucia's letter may or may not have had to say about it, O’Malley's book remains the place to start.
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today’s many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we’ll bring the best stories and latest trends to today’s own modern occultists everywhere.)
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