Third Fatima secret 'in full'

The Pope had talks with the surviving visionary

The Vatican is planning to release further details of the third secret of Fatima.

It broke decades of silence on the secret during Pope John Paul ll's visit to the Fatima shrine in Portugal last month, declaring that it foretold the shooting of the Pope in 1981.

On Monday, it plans to issue the full text and a commentary at a news conference in Rome.

Francisco and Jacinta Marto died in childhood

Cardinal Ratzinger, one of the Pope John Paul II's closest advisors, said he wanted to put rumours to rest about the third secret being a doomsday prophecy.

But he warned that the text contained no great surprises beyond what had already been revealed.

"On the contrary it will put it into proportion," he said.

He said belief in the secrets or apparitions of the Virgin Mary at Fatima in Portugal, at the French town of Lourdes or elsewhere, was not Church ruling.

Many have speculated about the secret since 1917, when three shepherd children said the Virgin Mary appeared above an olive tree and told them three prophecies.

The first two were made public; they foretold the end of World War I and the start of World War II, and the rise and fall of Soviet communism.

Doomsday

But the Vatican kept the third secret under wraps, adding fuel to speculation that it predicted a doomsday scenario too terrible to make public.

At the Beatification last month of two of the young children who claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary, Cardinal Angelo Sodano said the third vision spoke of "a bishop clothed in white" who "falls to the ground, apparently dead, under a burst of gunfire."

Pilgrims light candles near the Basilica

The Church says it foretold the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul, who was severely wounded by a Turkish gunman in St Peter's Square.

That shooting happened on 13 May - the same day as the first of the Fatima visions in 1917.

The details to be disclosed on Monday will include a handwritten account by the only survivor of the children - Sister Lucia de Jesus dos Santos who is 93.

"This is all part of Christian mythology," Italian philosopher Emanuele Severino said.

"If the third secret is limited to the shooting of the Pope, it is pretty disappointing to me."

Some have said the "bishop clothed in white" could have been Oscar Romero, the Salvadoran archbishop assassinated in 1980.

And Vatican scholar Vittorio Messori says the original text does not in fact talk of a "bishop fallen to the ground as though dead," but of "the bishop clad in white who falls dead to the ground."

"If it really was a prophecy of the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II, how can it be explained that he emerged unscathed?" he asked.