“Let’s not talk about it,” replied the Pope. Oddi said he had already delivered a hundred sermons and speeches on the subject. “I told you not to mention it,” said the Pope.
When recently going through to archives of my husband, Dr. Robert Hickson, with regard to another matter, I happened to find a file on the Fatima debate. In it, there was to be found the famous interview which Cardinal Oddi gave, in April of 1990, to the international monthly journal 30 Days. Since the interview is not available on the journal’s own website, I shall quote from the hard copy from my husband’s archive, but here is a link to the same interview, even though this link says that the interview was published by another journal, Il Sabato magazine. I shall present parts of this interview to our readers who might be still in the process of learning more about Fatima, just as I do.
No, on the contrary, I remain very skeptical. I believe I knew John XXIII quite well, since I spent a number of years at his side when he was at the nunciature in Paris. If the Secret had concerned realities consoling for the Church like the conversion of Russia or the religious rebirth of eastern Europe, I believe that he would have brought pressure to bear to make the Secret public.
From the attitude Pope John showed during our conversation, I deduced – but it is only an hypothesis – that the Secret might contain a part that could have a rather unpleasant ring to it. John XXIII had convened the Council with the precise intention of directing the forces of the Church toward the solution of the problems that concern all of humanity, beginning from within. That is, he intended the work to begin with the evangelical perfection pursued by consecrated persons … But we all know that, despite the great merits of the Council, many sad things have also taken place. These sad things are not due to the Council, but they took place in conjunction with the Council. I am thinking, for example, of the number of priests who have abandoned the priesthood: it is said that there have been 80,000. But one only has to recall the anguish with which the Holy Father, Paul VI, in 1968 cried out against the “autodemolition” taking place in the Church [to include the “smoke of Satan” quote].
As we continue to see our historic Catholic Faith attenuated, diminished and undermined by the day – much of it still being done in the name of the “Spirit of the Council” – and often by high-ranking prelates themselves, we cannot stop reflecting upon what Cardinal Oddi’s own well-considered theory about the Third Secret was. The Third Secret – that is, the vision – as we now have seen it putatively fully revealed in 2000, does not explain to us the danger of apostasy, nor the other dangers threatening the Faith.
I myself cannot imagine that Our Lady, in 1917 and afterwards, would not want us to be forewarned about what was to come in the years after 1960, if certain things were not loyally done. May there, pray God, soon be more truth and light to come to us in this important matter, at the end of the 100th Anniversary of the apparitions of Fatima.