About The Secret of Fatima

A teaser on what is to come...

Photo by James Coleman on Unsplash

This is my first post so I hope I’m doing it right.

I thought I’d start by answering a question I got a number of times about why I chose to write a novel about one of the most celebrated miracles of the Catholic Church. For starters, I am intrigued by real unsolved mysteries. An earlier novel I wrote, “The Earhart Mission,” (which by the way was quite successful!) fictionalized an answer to what really happened to the great aviator who was lost in the Pacific on her around-the-world flight in 1937. To this day, efforts are being made to find Earhart’s plane and her remains.

Likewise, “The Secret of Fatima” attempts to answer the question of what the Holy Virgin Mary really said to those children when she appeared to them outside a village in Portugal in 1917. For many years, Catholics and others were intrigued by the third secret told to Lucia which reportedly spoke of an apocalyptic event that would overtake the world. When she fell ill in 1940, her bishop told her to send the secret to the Vatican, which she did. Thereafter, only the Pope was authorized to read the secret and through many decades, the current Pope did indeed read the secret but kept it to himself, deciding for whatever reason that he could not release it.

Then in 2000, Pope John Paul II decided that the time had come to share the secret with the world. Lucia, who was one of the children who had been told the secret by the Virgin Mary, was still alive, a 93-year-old retired Carmelite nun. The Pope consulted her about releasing the secret and then proceeded to do so. To indicate the importance of this move, the story appeared on the front page of the New York Times on May 14, 2000. I’ll write a bit later about what happened after that. Thanks for being here!