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FATIMA-AGCA Feb-21-2005 (610 words) xxxi
Papal assailant calls on Vatican to reveal all parts of Fatima secret
By John Thavis
Catholic News Service
ROME (CNS) -- The man who shot Pope John Paul II in 1981, jailed Turkish terrorist Mehmet Ali Agca, has called on the Vatican to reveal what he claims are undisclosed elements of the secret of Fatima.
Agca made the request in an "Open Letter to the Vatican" following the death of Carmelite Sister Lucia dos Santos, the last visionary from Fatima, Portugal. Agca's letter was sent to the Rome newspaper La Repubblica, which published it Feb. 20.
For years, Agca has maintained that his shooting of the pope was tied to the secrets of Fatima and to the end of the world. At his last Italian trial for the shooting in 1986, Agca interrupted proceedings repeatedly with unintelligible ramblings about Fatima and at one point proclaimed himself to be Jesus Christ.
In his latest letter, written from an Istanbul prison where he is serving time for his role in a previous shooting, Agca expressed his sadness at Sister Lucia's death and said, "The secret of Fatima is connected with the end of the world."
He called on the Vatican to "reveal to the world the name of the man considered by the Vatican as the 'final Antichrist,' so that humanity can repent and prepare in a better way for the end of the world."
At the Vatican, Portuguese Cardinal Jose Saraiva Martins, head of the Congregation for Saints' Causes and a longtime acquaintance of Sister Lucia, dismissed Agca's letter as pointless.
"In the writings of Sister Lucia there is no reference to the Antichrist. As we know, the writings refer to the persecutions against the church of the last century, of anti-Christian ideologies, of many Christian martyrs who gave their lives, especially missionaries, but not of an Antichrist or similar figure," the cardinal told La Repubblica.
He said Agca's talk about an Antichrist was "the fruit of fantasy."
In 2000, Pope John Paul, who met Sister Lucia three times, ordered the publication of the so-called "third secret" of Fatima, which he believed referred to the 20th-century persecution of the church under Nazism and communism, and spoke of the 1981 attempt to assassinate him.
Agca shot the pope May 13, 1981, the anniversary of the first of the Fatima apparitions. The pope has long credited Mary with saving his life; in 1984, he had the bullet fragment that was removed from his body placed in the crown of the Marian statue at the Fatima shrine.
The pope mentions Agca several times in a new papal book that was to be published Feb. 22, according to news reports from Poland, where early copies were circulating.
In the book, titled "Memory and Identity: Conversations Between Millenniums," the pope describes being shot in St. Peter's Square and being rushed to the hospital, saying he did not remember much because he was "almost on the other side."
He said that when he met with Agca in his prison cell in 1983, the papal assailant began asking him questions about the secret of Fatima. It was "what he wanted to find out most of all," the pope said.
In the end, the pope wrote, Agca seemed to understand that above the power of violence was "a greater power."
"He began looking for it. I hope for him that he finds it," the pope wrote.
In his book, the pope also expresses his belief that Agca was a professional assassin and that the assassination attempt was "not his initiative." The pope did not say who he thought was behind the shooting, but described it as an episode in the "last convulsions of 20th-century ideologies of force."
END
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