Quote:“As Our Lady spoke these last words, she opened Her hands once more, as she had done during the two previous months. The rays of light seemed to penetrate the earth, and we saw as it were a sea of fire. Plunged in this fire were demons and souls in human form, like transparent burning embers, all blackened or burnished bronze, floating about in the conflagration, now raised into the air by the flames that issued from within themselves together with great clouds of smoke, now falling back on every side like sparks in huge fires, without weight or equilibrium, amid shrieks and groans of pain and despair, which horrified us and made us tremble with fear. (It must have been this sight which caused me to cry out, as people say they heard me.) The demons could be distinguished by their terrifying and repellent likeness to frightful and unknown animals, black and transparent like burning coals.”

Quote:“This vision only lasted a moment, thanks to our good Mother in heaven who, in the first apparition, had promised to take us to heaven. Were it not for that, I believe we would have died out of fright and fear. Terrified and as if to plead for succor, we looked up at Our Lady, who said to us, so kindly and so sadly" :

“You have seen hell, where the souls of poor sinners go. To save them, God wishes to establish in the world devotion to My Immaculate Heart. If what I say to you is done, many souls will be saved and there will be peace. The war is going to end, but if people do not cease offending God, a worse one will break out during the reign of Pius XI.

When you see a night illumined by an unknown light, know that this is the great sign given you by God that He is about to punish the world for its crimes, by means of war, famine and persecutions against the Church and the Holy Father. To prevent this, I shall come to ask for the consecration of Russia to My Immaculate Heart, and the Communion of Reparation on the First Saturdays.

If my requests are heeded, Russia will be converted and there will be peace; if not, she will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions against the Church. The good will be martyred, the Holy Father will have much to suffer, various nations will be annihilated.

In the end, My Immaculate Heart will triumph. The Holy Father will consecrate Russia to me, and she will be converted, and a certain period of peace will be granted to the world. In Portugal, the dogma of the Faith will always be preserved, etc. [This marks the third part of the secret, not yet not revealed] Do not tell this to anybody. Francisco, yes, you may tell him.

When you say the Rosary, say after each mystery: O my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fire of hell. Lead all souls to Heaven, especially those who are most in need.“

Quote:The secret of the secret is that God wills to give us everything through the mediation of the Blessed Virgin, in response to our devotion to Her Immaculate Heart, not only spiritual goods but even temporal peace, and this for the whole world. Has anyone noticed that one of the words of Our Lady, faithfully reported by Lúcia to her parish priest the next day, has the same vigor, the same exclusivity? "Continue to pray the Rosary every day… to obtain peace for the world and the end of the war, for only she can help you." It is equivalent to saying: there is no salvation for us except from Jesus through the Blessed Virgin; this was already the essential core of the secret of Fatima which was disclosed as early as July, 1917.

Quote:THE OBSESSIVE FEAR FOR THE SALVATION OF SOULS - which is the other key of the secret, with its terrible first part, the gripping vision of hell, was clearly manifested at the very moment of the apparition, inscribed on the faces of the seers. All the witnesses in fact noticed the great sorrow which suddenly overwhelmed them. Those who were very near were very much moved by the sudden cry which fell from the lips of Lúcia. "At this moment", says Ti Marto, "Lúcia took a deep breath, went as pale as death, and we heard her cry out in terror to Our Lady, calling her by name."

Photograph after the Vision of Hell

Quote:AN URGENT SUPPLICATION FOR THE SALVATION OF SOULS

Right after the end of the secret, Our Lady continued:

“When you say the Rosary, say after each mystery: ‘O my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fire of hell; lead all souls to Heaven, especially those most in need.”

O MY JESUS

The two prayers taught by Our Lady are addressed to Her Son, to Jesus Christ our Savior. This alone suffices to destroy the calumnies of the reformists opposed to Fatima under the fallacious pretext that her message is not Christo-centric enough! What an error! At Fatima, Our Lady willed to add to the Rosary, the great prayer in her honor this short invocation addressed to Jesus the Savior. Inserted between the Gloria Patri to the Holy Trinity, the Our Fathers and the Aves, which supplicate God our Father and our Blessed Mother in heaven, this little prayer enlarges the divine horizon of our Rosary.


FORGIVE US

The thought of our sin, this sin so profoundly rooted in us and which threatens to cause our ruin, is present everywhere in the message of Fatima. There is not one of the nine apparitions of the Angel and the most Blessed Virgin which does not make some allusion to sin. Each of the four prayers taught to us, brief as they are, all make some mention of it. This prayer, which is no exception, echoes the litany of Paters and Aves: Forgive us our trespasses (the Our Father), and pray for us sinners (the Hail Mary).


DELIVER US FROM THE FIRE OF HELL

This supplication, the most urgent, refers of course to the vision of hell. The concrete evocation of its terrifying fire was willed expressly to call to mind the description of hell sketched by Lúcia. Yes, it is willed by Our Lady, who is the sovereign teacher, that this word hell will always remind us of this devouring fire, which most exactly expresses its terrible reality. [Editor’s note: this was also a warning against the heretical notion that hell is empty that is so prevalent today.]

‘Livrai nos do fogo do inferno!’ The expression is strong and vigorous, and deliberately so. Not only ‘preserve us’, but more exactly, ‘deliver us’! It makes explicit the last request of the Our Father, with the same verb, but ‘deliver us from evil’. This is to say that hell is not for us an imaginary and far off danger, from which we can escape by ourselves.

No, it is the just and certain culmination of rebellions against God and hardening of hearts, where we would go without the pardon of Jesus, our Savior, and without the help of His grace full of mercy. Without Him, without His Passion and His redeeming Blood we are already lost. We owe our salvation to Him alone, and He desires that we ask Him: ‘O my Jesus, deliver us from the fire of hell!’

The prayer of Fatima is very close to what the liturgy says: ‘From eternal death, deliver us, O Jesus!’ implore the litanies. And the prayer of the Roman Canon, stating clearly the intention of the Eucharistic Sacrifice, says: ‘Deliver us from eternal damnation - ab aeterna damnatione nos eripi - and number us in the flock of Thine elect.’

The same vigorous expression is found in the Litany of the Saints, and this time it makes quite clear who is meant by the ‘us’: it is we ourselves and all our dear ones who have the faith, and we implore pardon for ourselves: ‘That You would deliver our souls and the souls of our brethren, relations and benefactors, from eternal damnation, we beseech You, hear us! Ut animas nostras ...ab aeterna damnatione eripias, te rogamus audi nos.’

It is an urgent supplication, but it is also full of an immense trust. For in hope we are already sure of obtaining the forgiveness of Our Savior, and eventually reaching the happiness of heaven… Thus, our horizons are enlarged, leading us to the second part of the prayer:


LEAD ALL SOULS TO HEAVEN

Our ardent desire to be saved, ourselves and our dear ones, is necessarily extended to all souls. Christ offered His life for all men, without exception, and God His Father wishes to save all men; so why shouldn’t all souls go to heaven? The little prayer becomes… a universal prayer. It is mystical, and it expresses a true and ardent charity.

‘Lord’, Father de Foucauld loved to repeat, ‘if it could be possible, make all men go to heaven!’ [Ed: Indeed, that is true, Christ our Savior made salvation possible for all, but few there are who choose it. However, we are called by charity to pray for all poor sinners, for we may not judge; that is for Christ alone to do.]

‘All souls’, ‘as almas todas’, or in the version most often quoted by Sister Lucia, ‘as alminhas todas’, with this diminutive of commiseration, ‘all these poor souls’, just as we would say, ‘poor sinners’. ‘Levai para o Ceu!’ ‘Lead them to heaven!’ The word can hardly be translated: take them, carry them, and lift them right up to heaven!

And perhaps even better, as Father Simonin and Dom Jean-Nesmy translates: ‘Draw all souls to heaven.’ It reminds us of the words of Jesus on the evening of Palm Sunday, just before entering into the work of His redemptive Sacrifice: ‘Now is the prince of this world cast out; and I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to Myself.’ He said this to show by what death He was going to die. ‘Omnia traham ad me ipsum.’


ESPECIALLY THOSE MOST IN NEED

These last words bewildered Canon Formigao. Indeed they are surprising: How can we ask Jesus to lead all souls to heaven, and thus all without exception, and then immediately add a formula which on the contrary is partial and restrictive? The words, ‘all… especially’ seem to defy simple logic.

And yet the formula is surely authentic, and the difficulty disappears when we consider that it concerns the salvation of souls, which is always a pure and infinite mercy of God. The logic here is one of love, full of implications which cause the too narrow framework of the exact relation of the concepts to explode.

The suppliant soul, in the zeal of its love, would like to obtain from the Sacred Heart the salvation of all souls… but it knows that its request cannot be heard in all its extension… it does not merit it. In this case, it immediately clarifies its request, and says to God: ‘I ask You to have mercy at least on some souls, and most especially, as a priority, on the souls of the greatest sinners, who most surely risk being lost!’ Such is the logic of the saints…

This is how the three seers understood this prayer, in the light of its immediate context, the vision of hell. A striking passage from Lucia's Memoirs shows us how the little prayer of Our Lady often returned to the lips of Blessed Jacinta, and not only between decades of the Rosary, but to implore often the salvation of souls:

“Jacinta often sat thoughtfully on the ground or on a rock, and exclaimed: ‘Oh, hell! hell! How sorry I am for the souls who go to hell! And the people down there, burning alive, like wood in the fire!’ Then, shuddering, she knelt down with her hands joined, and recited the prayer Our Lady had taught us: ‘O my Jesus! Pardon us, save us from the fire of hell. Lead all souls to heaven, especially those most in need.“

‘Now’, Sr. Lucia continues, ‘Your Excellency will understand how my own impression was that the final words of this prayer refer to souls in greatest danger of damnation, or those who are nearest to it.’

These last words turn our attention towards those in their last agony. In all the myriads of Ave Marias we shall have prayed all during our life, we ask the Mother of Mercy to pray for us ‘at the hour of our death’. But all these hardened souls who outraged her unceasingly and never invoked her? It is for them, in their place that Our Lady has us pray during our Rosary.

This priority accorded the greatest sinners, was not understood, and was the principal reason why the original version of the prayer was abandoned for so long in favor of another, more classical one. Yet this prayer brings us to the full reality of the Gospel. It is the priority given to the erring sheep for the twofold reason that it is lost, and that its salvation will show more strikingly the untiring Love of its Good Shepherd!

It was St. Therese of the Child Jesus who, ‘devoured by a thirst for souls, burned with the desire to snatch from the eternal flames the souls of the greatest sinners’. Hence her decision ‘to prevent at any price from going to hell’ the horrible criminal whose three murders had monopolized the news. On him also, ‘this poor unfortunate Pranzini’, did she wish to pour out the salvific and ‘divine dew’ of the Blood of Jesus.

We will see that this concern for the salvation of the greatest sinners is a frequent theme in later revelations granted to Sr. Lúcia. It was equally the constant thought of Jacinta:

“Jacinta remained on her knees like this for long periods of time, saying the same prayers over and over again. From time to time, like someone waking from sleep, she called out to her brother or myself: ‘Francisco! Francisco! Are you praying with me? We must pray very much, to save souls from hell! So many go there! So many!“

THE LITTLE PRAYER OF REPARATORY OFFERING

Sr. Lúcia humbly confesses in her second Memoir: ‘During this month (June 13th – July 13th), I lost all enthusiasm for making sacrifices and acts of mortification… To reawaken my fervor which had grown cold, Our Lady told us:

‘Sacrifice yourselves for sinners, and say often to Jesus, especially each time you make a sacrifice: O Jesus, it is for love of You, for the conversion of sinners, and in reparation for sins committed against the Immaculate Heart of Mary."

Here is a very simple prayer, whose significance is immediately grasped. Again it is to Jesus our Savior that our offering is addressed, but in addition to the desire to please Him through love, in accomplishing the action we offer Him, two other intentions are added. And the whole richness of this prayer consists precisely in their indissoluble bond of reciprocal implication, which causes each of these intentions to remind us of the other two.

Note how the thought of the salvation of sinners is found inserted there like a wedge between the two acts of love for Jesus and Mary. This shows to what extent the missionary intention is at the very heart of the message of Fatima, as necessarily flowing from the true love of the Holy Hearts of Jesus and Mary.

Since many have erroneously commented on their aversion for the Fatima Decade Prayer, this commentary by Frère Michel seemed most opportune to share. The two Fatima Prayers recommended by Our Lady of the Rosary at Fatima urge us to reparation for the conversion of sinners, and it cannot be stressed enough the importance of this at this particular time. Our Lady of Fatima has promised that there is nothing, nothing at all, which we cannot accomplish by means of her Rosary.

Quote:“After the two parts which I have already explained, at the left of Our Lady and a little above, we saw an Angel with a flaming sword in his left hand; flashing, it gave out flames that looked as though they would set the world on fire; but they died out in contact with the splendor that Our Lady radiated towards him from her right hand: pointing to the earth with his right hand, the Angel cried out in a loud voice: ‘Penance, Penance, Penance!’"

“And we saw in an immense light that is God: ‘something similar to how people appear in a mirror when they pass in front of it, a Bishop dressed in White; we had the impression that it was the Holy Father. Other bishops, priests, men and women religious going up a steep mountain, at the top of which there was a big Cross of rough-hewn trunks as of a cork-tree with the bark; before reaching there the Holy Father passed through a big city half in ruins and half trembling with halting step, afflicted with pain and sorrow, he prayed for the souls of the corpses he met on his way; having reached the top of the mountain, on his knees at the foot of the big Cross he was killed by a group of soldiers who fired bullets and arrows at him, and in the same way there died one after another the other bishops, priests, men and women religious, and various lay people of different ranks and positions. Beneath the two arms of the Cross there were two Angels, each with a crystal aspersorium in his hand, in which they gathered up the blood of the Martyrs and with it sprinkled the souls that were making their way to God.” 2