(LifeSiteNews) — In recent weeks LifeSite has reported two news items that revived once agin the debate about the apparition of Our Lady in Fatima and its still hidden message that pertains to our current crisis in the Church and in the world. The question still stands: Did the full Third Secret of Fatima warn us against the Second Vatican Council and a New Mass that would further the loss of Faith among Catholics? Let us first consider the new developments.

WATCH: Does the Third Secret of Fatima warn of Apostasy? Experts weigh in

First of all, Cardinal Raymond Burke made a stunning comment about the message of Fatima on July 13, 2025 during a Mass at the Blue Army Shrine of Our Lady of Fatima in New Jersey. He stated that “the message speaks about the practical apostasy of our time that is the going away from Christ by so many in the Church and the violence and death which are its fruit.” However, as Catholics familiar with the three Secrets of Fatima as published by the Vatican in June of 2000 know, the word “apostasy” does not appear there. But there have been prelates in the past, at least one of whom with knowledge of the Third Secret of Fatima, who revealed that the Third Secret of Fatima contains a warning against apostasy starting at the top of the Church. We will return to this topic later.

In light of the question of apostasy in the Catholic Church, let us turn to a LifeSite article on a new secular academic study that states that “Vatican II, in 1962-1965, triggered a decline in worldwide Catholic attendance relative to that in other denominations.” We see here a confirmation of a fact known to many, namely that the Second Vatican Council was the cause of the weakening of the Catholic faith worldwide.

Could it thus be that Our Lady of Fatima did warn us against a Council that would trigger a world-wide apostasy?

In this context, it is worthwhile to consider what the famous exorcist and traditional Catholic priest Father Chad Ripperger said in an 18 May 2024 interview conducted at the time by Radio Immaculata’s Marian Franciscan Friars. In it, the well-known priest discussed the Third Secret of Fatima and its missing parts. In his remarks, Fr. Ripperger showed himself open to the possibility that the Vatican has published perhaps “only part of the Secret.” He also revealed what he heard about the contents of the Third Secret from the circle around the secretaries of then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger while he lived in Rome. “When I was in Rome at the time,” Ripperger reported, “Cardinal Ratzinger had read the Third Secret, and he was talking about the contents of it to some of his secretaries.”

While Ripperger was not able to directly reveal what he had learned in Rome, it obviously influenced his position today and his being open to the possibility that Our Lady warned against the Second Vatican Council. In this 2024 interview, he said about the Council: “I think that there were certain things that she said about … things that are going to happen in the Church and as a result of that, that’s [what] she was warning about.”

 

Ripperger also said that there were Vatican officials who revealed in public that the Third Secret warned against “Vatican II” and against adding “extraneous elements to the liturgy” which Ripperger found “kind of interesting because supposedly Our Lady wanted it to be released in 1960 which would have averted a lot of the stuff that we have seen, I think.”

The Second Vatican Council took place from 1962-65, and not long after that, the new Mass, the so-called Novus Ordo Mass, was introduced worldwide.

With these interview remarks, Father Ripperger opened up the possibility that these warnings against a Council and changes in the liturgy did indeed belong to the Third Secret in part yet to be published. The priest added that the Third Secret “did make reference to what we are seeing now,” and called upon the Vatican to “be transparent and let the stuff [regarding the Fatima message] out.”

“Let’s just own up to it and have our reckoning and just deal with it and so we can move on,” Ripperger stated.

This is not the first time that this claim that Fatima had something to do with Vatican II and the Novus Ordo Mass has been made. It was in 2016 that Dr. Ingo Dollinger, a former close collaborator of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the later Pope Benedict XVI, confirmed to me that Ratzinger had told him in 2000 that they did not publish the full Third Secret when publishing the Fatima secrets in 2000 and that the Third Secret spoke about a “bad Mass and a bad Council” (as a sort of summary of theat part of the message). Even though Pope Benedict came out of his retirement in order to deny this story, Dr. Dollinger insisted that he had spoken the truth, and both his secretary and other sources confirmed to me later that they heard the same story from Dr. Dollinger right after his conversation with Cardinal Ratzinger in 2000.

What Father Ripperger now revealed based on his own sources (which seem not to have been first-hand) and with a different background seems to give new credence to the story of 2016. But independent of the exact accuracy of any of these reports, this new interview once more raises the need for the Vatican to come clean and reveal any possible additional documents related to the Third Secret that are still in its possession. Pope Leo XIV has now a new possibility for transparency here.

Let us consider here in detail this Ripperger interview from last year. When two Marian Franciscan friars interviewed Father Ripperger for Radio Immaculata, they spoke with him about a large range of topics. In the middle of the interview, they asked him whether he had a particular preference for Fatima, to which the priest replied: “I do in the sense that the parish I grew up in as a child was Our Lady of Fatima.”

“I always had a devotion to Our Lady of Fatima,” he added.

“La Salette was the key apparition in the 19^th century,” Ripperger went on to say, and in the twentieth century, Fatima “was the primary apparition, so I think it is the key apparition that lays everything out.” He also called Fatima the “hinge” connecting many other apparitions such as the one in Akita and that of Tre Fontane.

When then asked by the two friars about the Third Secret of Fatima officially published by the Vatican in June 2000 under Pope John Paul II, Ripperger first mentioned the “variety” of what people said who have read the third secret, adding that that has been “a bit all over the map.”

“What they gave us [in 2000], I think, is perhaps part of the third secret, or a separate one, or something,” he stated. “So I am not saying that that one isn’t authentic. But either people like Cardinal Ciappi, who said, well, part of the Third Secret is that there is going to be an apostasy that is going to start at the top, or you have a variety of things that were actually said in relationship to the content of this from those who had actually read it, then that indicates that either what they told us in the beginning of the guys who actually did see it wasn’t accurate or what we are getting now isn’t accurate. So somewhere there’s some type of conflict that I personally think the Vatican needs to come clean [about] and just lay the whole thing out very clearly.”

Ripperger also discussed the text that the Vatican did publish in the year 2000. “I find it odd that – and that is the reason why I think that there is probably more – when I read the Third Secret that they give us or the content that they did give us, I thought to myself: well, wait a minute: you held on to this thing for forty years and there is practically nothing in it, whereas in the past the recognition was this thing is pretty serious, they did not want it out because of the scandal for the faithful, etc.,” he said. He added that this does not “make a whole lot of sense.”

“So I think there is a whole lot of unanswered questions that eventually we will get [answered],” he concluded.

It was then in the interview that Ripperger revealed what he learned about the content of the Third Secret.

“I am not at liberty to talk about it,” the priest went on to say, “but when I was in Rome, Cardinal Ratzinger had read the Third Secret, and he was talking about the contents of it to some of his secretaries, and so via that channel I did hear some of the content; there [are] other low level prelates who actually have been talking about this, and so I can reveal these two things at least because they are out in the public sector.” Thereby, this priest implied that what he was about to reveal was confirmed by what he himself had learned when he was in Rome.

But he then also referred to the internet, where some of that content could be found, due to the statements of Vatican officials. LifeSite so far has not been able to retrieve those statements from a prelate that he himself mentioned in his 2024 interview:

So there was an archbishop in the Vatican who said that – and I am not making a judgment on this – one of the contents of the Third Secret of Fatima is that Our Lady warned about adding extraneous elements to the liturgy, so that was one thing, which is kind of interesting because supposedly Our Lady wanted it to be released in 1960 which would have averted a lot of the stuff that we have seen, I think. But then the other part was – and again, this is what that guy said, so don’t kill the messenger, I tell people – that actually she [Our Lady] warned against Vatican II, but I am not convinced that that’s exactly [what she said], I cannot imagine that she would have said: hey, Vatican II, don’t have it. I don’t think she would have said it quite that way, but I think that there were certain things that she said about the upcoming things that are going to happen in the Church and as a result of that, that’s why she was warning about, these are the things that are going to happen, whether it was the apostasy from the top and so that when Pope John XXIII said that these alleged things do not apply to our time, well, apparently, they might have.

Father Ripperger made it clear here that he gives credence to the revelations about the Third Secret since they confirmed the crisis that we have seen in front of our very eyes.

He concluded: “I think ultimately – as I mentioned, I cannot talk about these things specifically, but I do think that eventually we will reveal it, and my basic attitude is, it is better to be transparent and let the stuff out – it did make reference to what we are seeing now, then let’s just own up to it and have our reckoning and just deal with it and so we can move on.”

There are other prominent sources that speak also about a possible link between Fatima and the warning not to alter the Church’s faith and liturgy. In 1933, the later Pope Pius XII, as the then-Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, Secretary of State to Pope Pius XI, reportedly commented on the message of Fatima to his friend Count Enrico Pietro Galeazzi as follows:

I am concerned about the confidences of the Virgin to the little Lucia of Fatima. This persistence of the Good Lady in face of the danger that threatens the Church is a divine warning against the suicide that the alteration of the Faith, in its liturgy, its theology, and its soul, would represent.

I hear around me innovators who wish to dismantle the Sacred Chapel, destroy the universal flame of the Church, reject her ornaments, and make her remorseful for her historical past. Well, my dear friend, I am convinced that the Church of Peter must affirm her past, or else she will dig her own grave.

With these words, the future pope made a clear link between what Our Lady of Fatima told Lucia (and not the other young seers) regarding the danger of an “alteration of the Faith, in its liturgy, its theology, and its soul.” Is it not so that the Second Vatican Council, and the Novus Ordo Mass that was to be promulgated a few years later, effectively changed the Church’s theology and liturgy? And did that change not get close to the Church’s “suicide” or, in the words of other prelates, “apostasy”?

In 2004, years before the Dollinger story surfaced for the first time in 2009, the late Father Nicholas Gruner of the Fatima Center had the following to say:

From a close friend of Pope John Paul II, The Fatima Crusader has learned that Our Lady, in the Third Secret, warned against altering the Sacred Liturgy, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass especially. And She also warned against an evil Council that would take place (and which we know now has taken place, the Second Vatican Council).

It is not known who that “close friend of Pope John Paul II” was, but the wording is not that Dr. Dollinger was to use some years later. Dollinger is not known to have been a close friend of that Pope, either.

As mentioned earlier, there are other statements on the Third Secret made by prelates over the years. Cardinal Silvio Oddi, a one-time close collaborator of the later Pope John XXIII gave an interview in 1990, before the Vatican’s publication of the official version of the Third Secret in 2000, in which he opines that Our Lady wanted the Third Secret to be published in 1960 because it had to do with the Second Vatican Council. He said:

What happened in 1960 that might have been seen in connection with the Secret of Fatima? The most important event is without a doubt the launching of the preparatory phase of the Second Vatican Council. Therefore I would not be surprised if the Secret had something to do with the convocation of Vatican II.

Later in the interview, he added: “I would not be surprised if the Third Secret alluded to dark times for the Church: grave confusions and troubling apostasies within Catholicism itself … If we consider the grave crisis we have lived through since the Council, the signs that this prophecy has been fulfilled do not seem to be lacking.”

Another Cardinal, Luigi Ciappi, having read the Third Secret himself, once claimed in a private letter that the Third Secret of Fatima speaks of a “great apostasy in the Church” that will “begin at the top.” The Catholic philosopher Dr. Alice von Hildebrand later corroborated this story herself with a source unrelated to this cardinal from within L’Osservatore Romano.

That is to say, Cardinal Ciappi, having read the Third Secret, says that it speaks about “apostasy” starting at the top.

Moreover, Father Charles Murr, a close friend of Mother Pascalina, Pius XII’s secretary and author of a book on her, told LifeSite’s editor-in-chief, John-Henry Westen, that the word “apostasy” was heard by Pope Pius XII when he famously had the Fatima vision of the sun in the Vatican Gardens in 1954. Mother Pascalina told this to Father Murr, saying the Pope himself had told it to her decades earlier.

Again, the word “apostasy” does not appear in the official version of the three Secrets of Fatima.

That a reference to the Second Vatican Council as a contributor to the weakening of the Faith could have been part of the message of Fatima can be seen in the criticism of the gathering by solid churchmen such as Bishop Athanasius Schneider, auxiliary bishop of Astana, Kazakhstan. He has stated that the Second Vatican Council has weakened the faith of the Church. In his book Christus Vincit, he wrote:

From the point of view of the facts, of the evidence, from a global point of view, Vatican II did not bring real spiritual progress in the life of the Church. After the Council, a disaster occurred at almost every level of the Church’s life. The plan and intentions of the Council were primarily pastoral, yet, despite its pastoral aim, there followed disastrous consequences that we still see today.

In an interview in 2021 Bishop Schneider highlighted that the liturgical changes that came after the Council with the Novus Ordo Missae under Pope Paul VI were “revolutionary.”

“Therefore, the Church in 2,000 years never made in the liturgy drastic or revolutionary changes. It was for the first time in 1969 when Paul VI published his new really revolutionary order of Mass. And this is against the nature of the Church,” Schneider then said.

It is important to note here that Cardinal Virgilio Noè, a close collaborator of Pope Paul VI and his Master of Papal Liturgical Celebrations, revealed in 2008 that the pope’s words about the “smoke of Satan” having entered the Church referred exactly to abuses in the liturgy after the Second Vatican Council. While these comments were not made in the context of the message of Fatima, they confirm the connection between the Council, the Mass, and a massive loss of Faith in the Church. The Italian prelate said in an interview with the website Petrus:

I am in a position to reveal, for the first time, what Paul VI desired to denounce with that statement [about the Smoke of Satan having entered the Church].  Here it is.  Papa Montini, for Satan, meant to include all those priests or bishops and cardinals who didn’t render worship to the Lord by celebrating badly (mal celebrando) Holy Mass because of an errant interpretation of the implementation of the Second Vatican Council. He spoke of the smoke of Satan because he maintained that those priests who turned Holy Mass into dry straw in the name of creativity, in reality were possessed of the vainglory and the pride of the Evil One. So, the smoke of Satan was nothing other than the mentality which wanted to distort the traditional and liturgical canons of the Eucharistic ceremony.

The liturgist then called upon the Church to restore the dignity of the Mass: “Liturgy must be carried out always and no matter what with decorum: even a sign of the Cross poorly made is synonymous with scorn and sloppiness. Alas, I repeat, after Vatican II it was believed that everything, or nearly, was permitted. Now it is necessary to recover, and in a hurry, the sense of the sacred in the ars celebrandi, before the smoke of Satan completely pervades the whole Church.”

These numerous sources and comments certainly show that doubts still exist in the minds of many men about what Our Lady of Fatima tried to warn us against and whether her words were ever fully revealed to the Catholics in the world. In light of the fact that there is taking place an immense loss of faith right now, this question should become even more urgent.

Therefore, we can only join Father Ripperger who called last year upon the Vatican to publish everything relating to Fatima. Just as the archives now have been opened regarding the Vatican’s handling of challenges of World War II, it is time that it opens up the archives with regard to events that started unfolding in 1917 – more than 100 years ago.