the Third Secret

that purpose I will always be at your side.

His hands shook. It wasn’t Sister Lucia’s words, provocative as they were. It was something else.

He reached into his pocket and found the message Jasna had written two days before. The words the Virgin told her on a Bosnian mountaintop. The tenth secret of Medjugorje. He unfolded and read the message again:

Do not fear, I am the Mother of God who talks to you and asks you to make public the present Message for the entire world. In so doing, you will find strong resistence. Listen well and pay attention to what I tell you. Men have to correct themselves. With humble petitions they have to ask forgiveness for sins committed and those they will commit. Proclaim in my name a great punishment will fall mankind; not today, not tomorrow, but soon if my words are not believed. I have already revealed this to the blessed ones at La Salette and again at Fatima and today I repeat it to you because mankind has sinned and trod upon the Gift that God has given. The time of times and the end of all ends will come, if mankind is not converted; and if all should stay as it is now, or worse, should it worsen even more, the great and the powerful will perish with the small and the weak.

Heed these words. Why persecute the man or woman who loves differently from others? Such persecution does not please the Lord. Know that marriage is to be shared by all without restriction. Anything contrary is the folly of man, not the word of the Lord. Women stand high in the eyes of God. Their service has too long been forbidden and that repression displeases heaven. Christ’s priests should be happy and bountiful. The joy of love and children should never be denied them and the Holy Father would do well to understand this. My last words are most important. Know that I freely chose to be the mother of God. The choice of a child rests with a woman and man should never interfere with that decision. Go now, tell the world my message, and proclaim the goodness of the Lord, but remember that I shall always be by your side.

He slid out of the chair and fell to his knees. The implications were not in question. Two messages. One written by a Portuguese nun in 1944—a woman with little education and a limited mastery of language—translated by a priest in 1960—the account of what was said on July 13, 1917, when the Virgin Mary supposedly appeared. The other penned by a woman two days ago—a seer who had experienced hundreds of apparitions—the account of what was told to her on a stormy mountain when the Virgin Mary appeared to her for the last time.

Nearly a hundred years separated the two events.

The first message had been sealed in the Vatican, read only by popes and a Bulgarian translator, none of whom ever knew the bearer of the second message. The receiver of the second message likewise would have possessed no way to know the contents of the first. Yet the two messages were identical in content—and the common denominator was the messenger.

Mary, the mother of God.

For two thousand years doubters had wanted proof God existed. Something tangible that demonstrated, without a doubt, He was a living entity, conscious of the world, alive in every sense. Not a parable or a metaphor. Instead, the ruler of heaven, provider to man, overseer of Creation. Michener’s own vision of the Virgin flashed through his mind.

What is my destiny, he’d asked.

To be a sign to the world. A beacon for repentance. The messenger to announce that God is very much alive.

He’d thought it all a hallucination. Now he knew it to be real.

He crossed himself and, for the first time, prayed knowing God was listening. He asked forgiveness for the Church and the foolishness of men, especially himself. If Clement was right, and there was now no longer any reason to doubt him, in 1978 Alberto Valendrea removed the part of the third secret he’d just read. He imagined what Valendrea must have been thinking when he saw the words for the first time. Two thousand years of Church teachings rejected by an illiterate Portuguese child. Women can be priests? Priests can marry and have children? Homosexuality is not a sin? Motherhood is the choice of the woman? Then, yesterday, when Valendrea read the Medjugorje message, he’d instantly realized what Michener now knew.

All of that was the Word of God.

The Virgin’s words came to him again. Do not forsake your faith, for in the end it will be all that remains.

He squeezed his eyes shut. Clement was right. Man was foolish. Heaven had tried to steer humanity on the right course, and foolish people had ignored every effort. He thought about the missing messages from the La Salette seers. Had another pope a century ago accomplished what Valendrea had attempted? That might explain why the Virgin subsequently appeared at Fatima and Medjugorje. To try again. Yet Valendrea had sabotaged any revelation by destroying the evidence. Clement at least tried. The Virgin returned and told me my time had come. Father Tibor was with Her. I waited for Her to take me, but She said I must end my life through my own hand. Father Tibor said it was my duty, the penance for disobedience, and that all would be clear later. I wondered about my soul, but was told the Lord was waiting. I have for too long ignored heaven. I will not this time. Those words were not the ramblings of a demented soul, or even a suicide note from an unstable man. He now understood why Valendrea could not allow Father Tibor’s reproduced translation to be compared with Jasna’s message.

The repercussions were devastating.

To be called to the service of the Lord is not a masculine endeavor. The Church’s stand on women as priests had been unbending. Ever since Roman times popes had convened councils to reaffirm that tradition. Christ was a man, so priests would be, too.

Christ’s priests should be happy and bountiful. The joy of love and children should never be denied them. Celibacy was a concept conceived by men and enforced by men. Christ was deemed a celibate. So should be His priests.

Why persecute the man or woman who loves differently from others? Genesis described a man and woman coming together as one body to transmit life to another, so the Church had long taught that only sin came from a union that could not foster life.

Just as God entrusted me with His son, the Lord entrusts to you and all women their unborn. It is for you alone to decide what is best. The Church had absolutely opposed birth control in any form. Popes had repeatedly decreed that the embryo was ensouled, a human being deserving of life, and that life must be preserved, even at the expense of the mother.

Man’s concept of God’s Word was apparently far different from the Word itself. Even worse, for centuries, unbending attitudes had proclaimed God’s message with a stamp of papal infallibility, which by definition was now proven false since no pope had done what heaven desired. What had Clement said? We are merely men, Colin. Nothing more. I’m no more infallible than you. Yet we proclaim ourselves princes of the church. Devout clerics concerned only with pleasing God, while we simply please ourselves.

He was right. May God bless his soul, he was right.

With the reading of a few simple words penned by two blessed women, thousands of years of religious blundering now became clear. He prayed again, this time thanking God for his patience. He asked the Lord to forgive humanity, then asked Clement to watch over him in the hours ahead.

There was no way he could give Father Tibor’s translation to Ambrosi. The Virgin had told him that he was a sign to the world. A beacon for repentance. The messenger to announce that God was alive. To do that, he needed the complete third secret of Fatima. Scholars must study the text and eliminate the explainable, leaving only one conclusion.

But to keep Father Tibor’s words would jeopardize Katerina.

So he again prayed, this time for guidance.

SIXTY-SIX

4:30 P.M.

Katerina struggled to free her hands and feet from thick tape. Her arms were folded behind her back and she lay sprawled on a stiff mattress draped with a scratchy quilt that smelled of paint. Through a solitary window she could see night approaching. Her mouth was covered with tape, so she forced herself to stay calm and breathe slowly through her nose.