One of the young visionaries from a French village near the Swiss border, La Salette, was a fifteen-year-old shepherdess. Mélanie Calvat was so poor that her parents had sent her out to beg in the street from the time she was three years old. Despite her lack of education, it was the perspective of history that she had given this verbatim report of her vision to the Church:
The clothing of the Most Holy Virgin was silver-white and quite brilliant. It was quite intangible. It was made up of light and glory, sparkling and dazzling. There is no expression nor comparison to be found on earth…She had a pinafore more brilliant than several suns put together. It was composed of glory, and the glory was scintillating and ravishingly beautiful. The crown of roses which she placed on her head was so beautiful, so brilliant, that it defies imagination. The Most Holy Virgin was tall and well proportioned. She seemed so light that a mere breath could have stirred her, yet she was motionless and perfectly balanced. Her face was majestic, imposing. The voice of the Beautiful Lady was soft. It was enchanting, ravishing, warming to the ears.
Maureen thought about this for a moment. She didn’t know any fifteen-year-old girls in the twenty-first century who used words like scintillating or intangible, much less spoke in this type of prose. It simply didn’t seem possible that these words could have been spoken by an illiterate and terrified girl in 1851. This was the equivalent of a press release from the Vatican: an obvious marketing tool.
She noted one interesting sentence in Mélanie Calvat’s testimony, one that invited deeper exploration. This was the sentence referring to the “second secret”:
Then the Holy Virgin gave me the rule of a new religious order. When she had given me the rule of this new religious order, the Holy Virgin continued the speech in the same manner.
As Maureen searched for further documents on Mélanie Calvat’s statements, she found no further information on this “new religious order,” nor did it appear that the Vatican had elaborated on it in any detail. Could the Virgin have been referring to the Order of the Holy Sepulcher? Was the “new” religious order in fact a reference to restoring the true teachings of her son—and his wife?
One more critical element that Maureen took note of: virtually every account of a secret revealed during an apparition had some discrepancy or objection around it. Either the child recanted later or claimed that he or she was misrepresented. Some refused ever to speak of the revelations that were entrusted to them by Mary.
And some were never allowed to speak.
Most famous of these was Lucia Santos, the oldest child to witness the multiple apparitions in the Portuguese hamlet outside Fátima. Lucia was a special child with a sunny disposition, and by the accounts of her relatives there was “something magical” about her. She took her first communion at six, years earlier than usual, because hers was such a spiritual nature that she was known to lecture other children on the nature of God. At the age of ten the little shepherdess, along with her two cousins, Jacinta and Francisco, witnessed an apparition of Our Lady while walking through the fields near their home. The date was May 13, 1917. Lucia would later describe her vision in terms similar to the apparition from the Book of Revelation, chapter twelve, “And a great portent appeared in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun.” The apparition identified herself as Our Lady of the Rosary and emphasized the importance of reciting the rosary daily. The lady explained to the children that it was the key to personal salvation but also to world peace. From May to October of 1917, the Lady appeared on the thirteenth day of each month, at the same time.
More than 70,000 people witnessed the final apparition on October 13, 1917. Although it had dawned dark and rainy that day, by the time of the Lady’s appearance the sun had burst through the sky in a show of light and color, and it appeared to be moving back and forth across the sky. This dazzling astronomical event became known in Portugal as the Miracle of the Sun, and it converted many skeptics into believers on that day. Of all the Marian apparitions, Fátima remained the most famous because this miracle, in which the sun was said to dance, was witnessed by so many.
Key to the Fátima apparitions were the three secrets that the Lady imparted to the children. These were not immediately revealed to the public. They were, in fact, kept as secrets between the children and their religious advisers for many years following the apparitions. Sadly, both of Lucia’s cousins, Jacinta and Francisco, died shortly after the events at Fátima. It is believed that they were merely two of many children who were lost to a flu epidemic spreading through the Iberian Peninsula at the time.
Lucia Santos became the only surviving child to know the truth of the Lady’s secrets. She was subsequently committed to a series of convents for the duration of her long life and took vows of silence as a Carmelite nun. Lucia’s deep spirituality would indicate that her vows were voluntary and a part of her calling; however, Maureen wondered about the vows of silence, which appeared extreme. Lucia was not only under a traditional monastic vow of silence, she was under restrictions from the Vatican not to speak to anyone about the apparitions without express approval from the Holy See. As she grew older, these restrictions were tightened to the point of strangulation, as Lucia was forbidden to have any visitors who were not deemed acceptable by the Church. Even her personal confessor of twenty years was ultimately denied the right to visit her. In the final years of her life, no one except Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger were allowed to gain or grant access to Lucia Santos, who now lived in an imposed solitary confinement. Despite Church claims that Lucia was an esteemed and venerated member of their community, she died in 1995 from complications of an upper respiratory infection because the cell she lived in was damp and mildewed and her aged body could not recover from the multiple, prolonged infections she suffered.
Immediately upon her death, an edict was issued by Cardinal Ratzinger, who was the head of the Inquisition—now known by the politically correct term Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The order called for Lucia’s monastic cell to be sealed off as if it were a crime scene. It had been reported throughout her life that Lucia never stopped having visions, and that perhaps she never stopped writing about them. It appeared that the Church was taking no chances that this visionary may have been hiding accounts of her experiences somewhere within her cell. What they found was unknown to anyone except the pope, his congregational general, and the select council of clerics who were committed to the preservation of the holy apparitions. While a number of books claiming to be Lucia’s personal memoirs were released during the course of her life, these came out under the direction of the Church. As Lucia was never allowed to discuss any aspect of Fátima freely, it was impossible to know if these Vatican-approved biographies truly represented her visions and experiences, despite the fact that they had her name on the cover. Not surprisingly, the Fátima secrets as they were ultimately revealed focused on the conversion of the world to Catholicism, beginning with Russia, and other issues very specific to Catholics and the preservation of the faith in its traditional and established form.
The screen of Maureen’s laptop blurred as the tears began to stream down her face. This girl’s story touched her deeply. There was something terribly wrong here, an injustice that screamed to be examined. Lucia Santos had witnessed one of history’s most famous and accepted miracles, was by many accounts an exceptional mystic and visionary—perhaps the greatest of her time. And yet she had been imprisoned for seventy-eight years under an imposition of silence and often in terrible conditions by the very institution that claimed to revere her. As an elderly woman plagued by illness, she was not even allowed the comfort of a warm and dry place to sleep.
Maureen burned with Boudicca’s battle cry of the Truth Against the World. There could only be one reason to keep such a woman from talking, one reason to deny her the comfort of friends, family, and even her personal confessor at the end of her life: someone was afraid of what she was going to say. That someone was the hierarchy of the Catholic Churc
h. What was the Church so afraid of with regard to Lucia that her jailer was none other than the pope and his right-hand man, the right-hand man who succeeded Pope John Paul II to become Pope Benedict XVI? Would her truth contradict the carefully crafted history of the Fátima visions? Or was there something greater, something truly shocking and dangerous to the Church that had been revealed to this very special little girl?
And was it true that Lucia never stopped having visions?
The world would never know. Lucia Santos had been successfully silenced, and all that remained of her story was the sanitized official version, the version created by those who imprisoned her. The Church completely controlled the documented events to ensure that their agenda was served. Truth would not be allowed to get in the way of politics, power, and economics. Historically, it never had. Perhaps it never would, Maureen mused.
As Maureen prepared to close out her research, one final detail leaped from the page, something about Lucia’s life that she had not noticed before. She caught her breath as she saw this one shocking fact in the girl’s biography.
It was now obvious to her why the blessed Lucia Santos had been treated like a danger to the Church.
According to Portuguese documents, the recorded date of Lucia Santos’s birth was March 22, 1907.
Lucia Santos was an Expected One.
Confraternity of the Holy Apparition
Vatican City
present day
“I NEED TO KNOW about Lucia Santos. Please.”
Father Girolamo had been pleasantly surprised when he received the phone call first thing this morning advising him that Maureen Paschal was anxious to see him immediately. Peter made the arrangements.
“Ah. I see our presentation on Knock has inspired interest in the apparitions of Our Lady. But why do you come to ask about Lucia specifically?”
Maureen met his gaze squarely across the desk. “You tell me.”
He smiled at her. “You have done a good deal of homework in a short period of time, my dear. I see that there will be no need for pretense, so let us agree to be completely honest with each other. I knew Lucia Santos.”
Maureen was startled by this. While she knew that Father Girolamo was considered the expert on apparitions, she hadn’t expected him to have had personal experience with the famous witness of Fátima.
“Do you remember when we discussed your dream? I was aware, before you told me, that the book that Our Lord appeared to be writing radiated with blue light, and you asked me how I knew this?”
Maureen nodded but said nothing, intent to see where he was taking this.
“I knew because Lucia had the same dreams.”
Maureen gasped before catching herself. “So we are…connected. Beyond the birth date.”
“Yes, you are. Lucia Santos was one of the most remarkable visionaries of all time. You should feel it an honor to be in her company.”
Maureen felt the tears brimming, hot behind her eyes, as she nodded in acknowledgment of the honor.
“Then why?” she asked when she found her voice. “If you believe that she was so great a visionary…then why was she silenced for so long? And treated so poorly?”
“It was not as harsh as you believe it to be. Lucia was not like you, aside from the visions. You are, in fact, a rare case. Do you know that? Most women who had these experiences were not able to function in everyday life as you do. They entered convents voluntarily and for their own protection. Many of them became completely unable to lead lives outside their visionary experiences and had to be cared for. Lucia was one of these. She did not live in our world much of the time, and she needed solitude. She requested it. I assure you, she was very well provided for by all around her.”
Maureen had a million questions, but knew she had to consider the next one carefully. “The secrets. Were any of them about the Book of Love?”
The old priest’s reply was firm but not harsh. “You venture into territory that you must know I am not allowed to discuss with anyone. For now, I think it is enough that you know that Lucia had the same dream of our Lord as you have had. Perhaps you should pray about this. You have much in common with Lucia Santos, and she was a great help to the Church. She inspired many faithful then as she still does to this day. Perhaps you should change your focus. Turn your attention to all the good that has come from her legacy, and stop trying to find the ill. That is what Lucia would want from you, if she were here today. Of that I am certain.”
As Peter walked with Maureen back to her hotel, they discussed Father Girolamo’s revelation. They were to meet Bérenger in his suite and finish reading through the final pages of Matilda’s autobiography.
Maureen needed to duck back into her room to grab her laptop and her notebook for their meeting. She opened the small closet to retrieve the leather carry-on bag where she stored her writing materials.
The bag was gone, and so were her laptop and her notebook.
It was the last straw for Maureen’s nerves, strung as taut as they were in the aftermath of the last weeks.
“What next?” She looked at Peter as she sat on the edge of the bed. “I’m not sure how much more I can take.”
Peter put his hand on her shoulder. “Breathe, Maureen. Just breathe. It’s terrible, but it isn’t the worst thing that has happened. And you got through all that.”
Maureen nodded. “I’m trying, Pete. But it’s getting harder. What happened in Orval was really scary. And now this. I’m starting to feel very exposed. And I’m really struggling with the fact that I feel like I have no control over my own life.”
“But you do. You have free will.”
“I’m not sure that’s true.”
“Of course it is. Right now you’re here in Rome, chasing the clues and trying to find the truth about the Book of Love, which I believe is exactly what God wants you to do. But that’s your choice. Your free will. You can tell God right now to get another storyteller and grab your passport and get on the next flight back to L.A. You can walk away from this entire process at any moment that you want, simply by choosing to do so. That’s what free will means.”
Maureen snapped at him as her exhaustion got the better of her. “But what about the time returns? If this is my mission—to do this work—then I can’t walk away from it, no matter how much I may want to.”
Now it was Peter’s turn to raise his voice. He could feel his own anger and frustration building within him. Those emotions had been churning for the better part of two years, and now they were finding expression.
“Why do you think there is even a need to say the time returns? It’s because humans can’t get it right. If we accomplished what we were put here to do in the first place, the time wouldn’t have to return. But we can’t do that. We can’t be obedient and follow God’s plan, as simple as it is, because all our human rubbish gets in the way when the going gets tough—our ego, our anger, our envy, our greed. That’s what Jesus was trying to tell us. That was his real message: that this is all so simple. It’s about love and faith and community. And that’s it. Do you know what I consider the most important thing I have learned in all my years as a priest? The only piece of spiritual wisdom that really matters? It’s this: you can throw away the entire Bible if you just keep what Jesus tells us in Matthew twenty-two, verses thirty-seven through forty. ‘Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law of the prophets.’ Done. Finito. That’s all you need to know. And they’d throw me out of the Vatican for saying this, but we can make Bible study courses three minutes long, because that’s the entire teaching right there. Everything else just gets in the way and obscures the message.”
He took a breath, but he was far from finished. “This is easy stuff, right? It should be—it was meant to be. But the human race has made a mess of it for two thousand years and wreaked the worst havoc and wrought the most horrific destruction, in our Lord’s name, because we can’t live by those two most basi
c commandments. So God has to keep sending souls to earth who he thinks might be right for the task of reminding us how to live in that simple love. But the free will factor does us in every time. Every time. And we can’t create heaven on earth with just a few people having that intention. We need to get the whole world on board with these simple understandings. It’s a ridiculous, daunting, insane task, but one that God clearly thinks can be done, which is why we have to keep trying. It’s why we have to keep searching and why you have to keep writing, no matter what. It’s your job and your mission—and, yes, it was apparently your promise. But it’s still your free will to do it or not.”
She was listening to him, as she always did, and he was making a lot of sense. But she was overtired and overwrought. What she really needed right now was someone like Tammy, a girlfriend who would let her cry and tell her that it wasn’t her job to save the world. Because she just wasn’t up to it. Not tonight.
“Sometimes, I just feel so…used.”
“Really? How tragic for you. God has chosen you for a task so special that his own son speaks to you in dreams, and you feel used. Miracles happen all around you, things literally fall out of the sky to provide you with what you need, and you feel used. Your work changes lives, maybe even saves lives, and you can’t be bothered to think that’s a good thing because you’re too busy being immersed in your own personal pity party. Knock it off, Maureen. I’m sorry this is upsetting for you, but you need to snap out of it. We have work to do.”
Peter waited in the silence that followed. The last speech was a calculated risk. Sometimes that approach with her worked and she did, indeed, snap out of it. Sometimes, she just cried harder. At other times, she threw things at his head and didn’t speak to him for weeks at a time.