When I read Sister Lúcia’s letter about the third secret of Fátima, now made public for the first time, it struck me as being familiar. Then I realized: the good sister’s text, written not in 1917 when she was an illiterate child but in 1944 as a grown-up nun, is interwoven with immediately recognizable references to the book of Revelation.
Lúcia sees an angel with a flaming sword that appears as though it will set the world on fire. The book of Revelation speaks of angels that spread fire in the world, as in chapter 8, verse 8, with reference to the angel of the second trumpet. It’s true this angel doesn’t have a flaming sword, but we shall see later where this sword might have come from, although traditional iconography has a fair number of archangels with flaming swords.
Then Lúcia sees the divine light as in a mirror. Here the idea comes not from Revelation but from Saint Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians: heavenly things we now see “through a glass,” and only later will we see them face-to-face.
After which comes the bishop dressed in white. There is just one, whereas in various parts of Revelation (6:11, 7:9, and 7:14) there are several servants of the Lord in white robes, elected to martyrdom.
Then bishops and priests are seen going up a steep mountain, and we are now at Revelation 6:15, where the powerful men of the world hide in the dens and rocks of the mountains. Then the Holy Father arrives in a city “half in ruins” and encounters the souls of corpses along the way. The city, along with the corpses, is mentioned in Revelation 11:8, while it falls into ruins in 11:13 and again, in the form of Babylon, in 18:19.
We continue on. The bishop and many other followers are killed by soldiers with arrows and guns, and though Sister Lúcia brings matters up to date by introducing guns, massacres are carried out in 9:7, at the sound of the fifth trumpet, by breastplated locusts with spiked weapons.
Finally, two angels appear who sprinkle blood from a crystal watering jug (in Portuguese, a regador). Now, there are many angels in Revelation who sprinkle blood, but in 8:5 they do it with a censer, in 14:20 the blood comes out of a winepress, in 16:3 it is poured from a vial.
Why a watering jug? It occurred to me that Fátima is not far from the Asturias region where those splendid Mozarabic miniatures were created in the Middle Ages. And in them angels appear pouring jets of blood from cups that are difficult to identify, as though watering the world. That Lúcia may have been remembering the iconographical tradition is suggested by the angel with the flaming sword mentioned earlier, since the trumpets held by the angels in those miniatures sometimes look like scarlet blades.
It is interesting that if we go beyond the brief newspaper reports and read the full theological commentary by Cardinal Ratzinger, we can see that this man, while he stresses that a private vision is not a matter of faith, and that an allegory is not a prophecy to be taken literally, specifically notes similarities with the book of Revelation.
Furthermore, he states that a person sees things in a vision “insofar as he is able, in the modes of representation and consciousness available to him,” so that “he can arrive at the image only within the bounds of his capacities and possibilities.” By which, in rather more secular terms, though Ratzinger heads the section “The Anthropological Structure of Private Revelations,” he means that, if Jungian archetypes don’t exist, every seer sees what his culture has taught him to see.
2000