The secret is out.

When I read that the third and final secret of Fatima had finally been revealed by the Vatican a few months ago, many memories returned. Prior to Vatican II, Fatima was a substantial cottage industry of Catholicism. Every child who then attended a Catholic school learned about the story of three children who were said to have experienced six visions of Mary in 1917. To this day many can still remember their names--Francisco, Jacinta, and Lucia. Most know that two died young and that Lucia became a nun. She is still alive at 93.

But it was the three secrets of Fatima that most captured the imagination. The first two--the end of World War I and the start of World War II, and the spread and collapse of communism--were revealed by Sister Lucy in the 1940s. The third secret, written in a letter, was in the possession of the papacy.

Incredible stories surrounded these alleged apparitions. Most striking was the "Miracle of the Sun," a noonday occurrence during the last apparition. Some people reported the sun swirling and swooping downward. Connected to this event was the story that Pope Plus XII--then only a newly minted bishop--was one of 70,000 in the crowd when the sun whirled and dried everyone's clothes that had been soaked by an earlier rainstorm. Another story claimed one pope, upon reading the third secret, went to his chapel and wept for several days.

This third secret gave rise to great speculation. Some believed it predicted the date of the world's end, and that it would be sooner rather than later. Others thought it was a condemnation of the capitalistic American way of life.

And, of course, anything so hyped as the third Fatima secret gave rise to jokes, such as: "When the pope opened the envelope containing the secret, he found a bill for the Last Supper." Ha-ha. Such was a strain of pre-Vatican II ecclesial humor.

Not everyone held Fatima in the same high regard. When the renowned biblical scholar John L. McKenzie published The Power and the Wisdom in 1965, he wrote about the bogus apparition of Mary in Necedah, Wisconsin: "Our Lady of Necedah turned out to be something else than the Mother of God. And we still stand abashed before the world because our soil is not good enough for her blessed feet. This, of course, is sheer and errant nonsense. But that such nonsense is seriously uttered may be cause for concern. We have to face the fact that nothing was needed except a few clergy who knew the meaning of promotion to make of Necedah another Lourdes or Fatima. I think we can afford to be proud of the fact that such clergy did not appear."

I remember asking McKenzie about that passage. I understood what he was saying about Necedah, but was he suggesting the same about Lourdes and Fatima? He smacked his lips before muttering, "My, you are a perceptive reader." McKenzie believed that knowledge of the Bible and the celebration of the Eucharist were worth far more to the Christian life than the stories of Fatima. He had no interest in secrets.

But now the secret is out--it supposedly prophesied the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II. And the church can no longer claim the old TV show title, "I've got a secret"--unless, of course, a fourth secret miraculously appears.

PETER GILMOUR ([e-mail]) teaches at the Institute of Pastoral Studies of Loyola University Chicago.