A Pope and a President: John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, and the Extraordinary Untold Story of the 20th Century

Prologue

MAY 13, 1981

MOSCOW TAKES ITS SHOT

On May 13, 1981, sixty-year-old Pope John Paul II, two and a half years into an already historic papacy, hopped into his open-air vehicle to ride through Saint Peter’s Square and greet the ecstatic crowd. Thousands from all over the world had gathered for the pontiff’s weekly public audience: American and Italian, Chinese and German, English and African—Turkish and Bulgarian.¹

It was a beautiful Wednesday in Rome. It was also a special day spiritually. May 13 was the Feast Day of Our Lady of Fátima, harkening back to the day in 1917 that began a series of remarkable events connected to the Virgin Mary, to whom this pope had dedicated his life and papacy.

The fact that this pontiff was Polish had alone made his papacy historic. When Karol Wojtyła was chosen the 264th heir to the chair of Saint Peter in October 1978, the Polish cardinal was the first non-Italian pope in 455 years and the first Slavic pope ever. More powerful still, his native Poland was the heart of the Communist Bloc in Eastern Europe, and the one spot in the Soviet atheistic empire—which the American president would unforgettably call an Evil Empire—where the communist war on religion had failed.

If you choose the example of what we Poles have in our pockets and in our shops… communism has done very little for us, said Lech Wałęsa, the hero of Poland’s anti-Soviet Solidarity movement, and one of millions of Poles whose admiration of John Paul II bordered on veneration. But if you choose the example of what is in our souls, I answer that communism has done very much for us. In fact our souls contain exactly the opposite of what they wanted. They wanted us not to believe in God, and our churches are full.²

These were powerful words that Wałęsa’s favorite American president, Ronald Reagan, would invoke as an indictment of the Moscow menace.³

The Poles’ fidelity to the Church rather than to Moscow angered communist authorities; the stunning selection of this Polish pope made them even angrier. In the 1970s, under the détente presidencies of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter and the Ostpolitik papacy of Pope Paul VI, the Soviets picked up nearly a dozen satellite states around the world. These were major Cold War victories.

Then the Vatican conclave chose the Polish pope. The advent of this pontiff threatened the Soviets’ global ambitions, particularly when paired with the new leadership that came to Washington under President Reagan two years later. With characteristic vitriol, one Soviet publication in early 1981 denounced John Paul II as malicious, lowly, perfidious, and backward and as a toady of the American militarists who was seeking to undermine communism with his overseas accomplices and new boss in the White House.⁴

That was Moscow’s take on this future saint and his emerging partner in the Oval Office. But these leaders were not accomplices, and neither was the other’s boss. Their relationship would be a partnership of equals.

Make no mistake: Pope John Paul II and President Ronald Reagan scared the Kremlin. And with good reason. The pope implored his people to choose God’s side over what the Protestant Reagan and the Roman Catholic Church both called godless communism. The Soviets dubbed Reagan The Crusader.⁵

Soviet officials knew that this Polish pontiff was a grave affront to their existence. They wanted him dead. And now, on May 13, 1981, two and a half years into his papacy, they were ready to take their shot.

CONSPIRATORS

Carrying out this evil plan was a cabal of plotters primarily from Muslim Turkey and communist Bulgaria. Not since the First World War had Turks and Bulgarians found a way to overcome bitter differences and partner for the cause of murder and mayhem. In World War I, the partnership meant unprecedented death, precipitating the appearance of a Lady in Fátima. Back then, too, the Turks and Bulgarians had the support of the Bolsheviks—all of them violently confronted Czarist-Christian Russia. Now there was common ground again: the Bolsheviks, the Bulgarians, and the Turks all violently confronted the Slavic-Christian man in Rome.

Mehmet Ali Agca of Turkey had been commissioned to deliver a fatal blow. Later he would name seven accomplices, all working under a plan conceived by the Bulgarian secret service, one of the communist world’s most restrictive intelligence services, and the one most subject to Moscow’s control.⁶

At 9 A.M. on May 13, Agca gathered with his collaborators. The driver was a Bulgarian named Zelio Vasilev. He gave instructions to Agca and his Turkish friend Oral Çelik, telling them that Sergei Antonov, another Bulgarian conspirator, would help them escape after they finished their bloody assignment. Antonov, according to the plan, would whisk away the assassins to a large delivery truck concealed as a Bulgarian household-goods company, a front for the communist state’s secret service. At 10 A.M., the Bulgarians drove off, leaving the Turks.⁷

The Turks would wait a while. At 3 P.M. Antonov reconnected with Agca and Çelik in the Piazza della Repubblica. He was driving a blue sports car. With him was another Bulgarian, Todor Aivazov. They handed the Turks two packages, one with a 9-millimeter handgun and the other with a panic bomb to scatter the crowd after the shooting and facilitate their escape.⁸

The four men made their way toward the Vatican, arriving at 4 o’clock. Agca and Çelik took their positions among a crowd of faithful seeking repentance and reconciliation. Reports on the precise plan of action vary, but it seems Agca was supposed to fire all or most of the shots, with Çelik perhaps firing if necessary but at the least setting off the panic bomb.⁹

The Polish pontiff came out in his small, white Fiat Popemobile, waving to the excited gathering, grabbing hands and giving kisses, lifting children in his arms, smiling joyously.

As John Paul II’s vehicle moved slowly along, the twenty-three-year-old Agca anxiously clutched his concealed 9-millimeter semiautomatic. It was well after 5 P.M. before the pope finally came within a few yards of Agca. The pope’s vehicle passed the ancient obelisk in the center of Saint Peter’s Square. Two millennia earlier, Peter himself would have passed the same obelisk on his way to his execution at the hands of the enemies of Christ’s Church.¹⁰

As John Paul II edged closer, the Turkish national lifted his pistol. Loud cracks of gunfire filled the air. Four shots were fired, two of which hit the pope, one in the left hand and another in the abdomen.¹¹

It was roughly quarter past the hour, a time that some have pinpointed as 5:13 P.M.—when the numbers on the clock stood in perfect harmony with the numbers on the calendar on this Feast Day of Our Lady of Fátima.¹²

The strong, physically fit pope folded and collapsed, his white figure sinking into the arms of his aides. Cradling his sagging frame were his loyal Polish secretary, Father Stanisław Dziwisz, and his personal assistant, Angelo Gugel.

Mary, my mother; Mary, my mother, said John Paul II, who had lost his earthly mother as a child. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, he prayed, imploring the mother of Christ for her intercession at the heavenly throne of the Lord, the Lord she had watched be murdered by executioners. Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

IT WAS YOU!

After the gunshots were fired, Oral Çelik fled the scene in panic, failing to ignite his diversionary bomb. He would not be seen again.

Gunman Mehmet Ali Agca tried to flee as well. Here was a veteran terrorist who, in the words of the Italian judge who later prosecuted him, harbored a natural vocation for crime and was an exceptionally gifted killer used for exceptional assignments and paid accordingly. But this paid assassin, a menacing and calculating figure, was nabbed—by a nun.

Sister Letizia, a sturdy and resourceful Franciscan nun from the Italian city of Bergamo, grabbed Agca, and a Vatican security official and bystanders soon joined her in subduing the would-be assassin. Why did you do it? the nun asked the shooter. Agca lied: Not me! Not me! She responded sternly, Yes, you! It was you! as Agca struggled to break her grip.¹³

Agca had been apprehended, but he was safer than he realized in the clutch of Sister Letizia. Unbeknownst to Agca, his own life was in as much danger as the pontiff’s: his communist friends were intending to murder him as soon as he got away from Saint Peter’s Square.¹⁴

It was part of their plan.

It was how communists did things. It was how they valued life.

THE SOVIET CONNECTION, REVEALED

The fallen pope was rushed into an ambulance that sped through the interior of the Vatican to Porta Sant’Anna, the Port of Saint Anne, a side gate named for the mother of the Virgin Mary. From there, the ambulance headed straight for Gemelli Hospital, the teaching hospital of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart. It was one of Rome’s best hospitals, only four miles away, though traffic was almost impassable. Providentially, a Gemelli physician just happened to be nearby and jumped inside the ambulance.

Back in Saint Peter’s Square, the shocked faithful listened as the loudspeaker delivered a message in Italian, English, French, Chinese, and several other languages: The Holy Father has been wounded. We will now offer prayers for him. The assembled did just that, amid tears. The flock sang. A Polish hymn played over the loudspeaker.¹⁵

John Paul II was barely conscious when he got to the hospital. How could they do it? he asked a nurse before losing consciousness.¹⁶

Who he meant by they was not specified. But this Polish pontiff, Public Enemy No. 1 to the communist empire, apparently had a hunch.

His first word to Dziwisz, who had lost himself in intense prayer to the hands of God and to the intercession of Our Lady, was a whispered Thirsty, reminiscent of the suffering Christ’s words of agony on the cross. Then the pope added: Just like Bachelet. This was a reference to Vittorio Bachelet, a Catholic politician murdered by Italian Red Brigade communists the year before.¹⁷

The pope was badly hurt. He underwent five and a half hours of emergency surgery, hemorrhaging much worse than anyone knew at the time. In this and other ways, he was mirroring what had happened to Ronald Reagan just six weeks earlier, when a gunman tried to take the new president’s life. John Paul suffered a severe loss of blood, requiring a transfusion of six pints. Sections of his mangled intestine were removed. He had watched his dearest friends, some of them fellow Polish priests, die from Nazi bullets and Soviet bullets. Was it now his turn, too, for a martyr’s death? And who, ultimately, was responsible for the bullet?

At that moment, only Agca’s involvement was known. That would remain the case for weeks, even years. In fact, to this day many observers insist that only Agca’s role can be confirmed.

But at the time and ever since, many suspected that Moscow was behind the assassination attempt. A few years after the shooting, Agca fingered the Bulgarians as his accomplices. Agca’s claim only intensified suspicion that Moscow was involved. As the pope’s friends in the Reagan White House could eagerly attest, Bulgaria’s secret service was a dutiful stooge of the Soviet KGB (political intelligence) and GRU (military intelligence). Bulgaria’s loyal party apparatchiks did practically everything with the supreme comradely confidence of the USSR. It is difficult to conceive that they would attempt a major assassination without Moscow’s go-ahead, if not full participation.

Early on, Italian investigators began gathering critical information that appeared to trace the crime to the Kremlin. Many eyes looked in the direction of the KGB. Both Bulgaria and Russia adamantly denied any such accusations and condemned the claims of Italian judges.

A quarter century after the assassination attempt, an Italian commission brought us close to the truth. That commission had access to tens of thousands of pages of documents that Italian investigators had collected, plus some twenty-five thousand highly classified Soviet documents that a KGB archivist had smuggled out of Moscow in 1992. All those documents provide vital evidence not available until years after the shooting.

Yet there is one last piece of this puzzle that has never been reported.

This book will affirm what many have suspected: the Soviets ordered the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II. The crime is traceable to Moscow—but not, it turns out, to the KGB.

What has not been known—until this book—is that the CIA director under Ronald Reagan secretly investigated the case and discovered the Soviet role. William J. Casey suspected Moscow to the point that he ordered an extremely sensitive CIA investigation known only to a few highly trusted individuals, many of whom took to the grave their knowledge of what really happened that May 13. That investigation, conducted by a tight-knit group under Casey’s command, concluded that the GRU had ordered the assassination.

Four years after the shooting, President Reagan learned what had transpired in the lead-up to May 13, 1981. He was informed by Casey alone, just the two of them in the room. The information was so explosive that the report and its dramatic conclusion have never been released or even acknowledged. To this day, it remains the most secret report of the Cold War.

Keep in mind the context: Tensions in the Cold War had never run higher. The Soviets had been on the advance in the 1970s, but now President Reagan and his partner in the Vatican were standing up to the threat of Soviet communism. The 1980s intensified fears of World War III between two nuclear-armed superpowers. Now imagine if news broke that the U.S. government had discovered a Soviet-orchestrated assassination attempt on the leader of the world’s largest religion, who was a voice for those suffering under Soviet communism.

One source with knowledge of the report told me, I’ve never, ever, in all my years, seen anything as secretive as that document. Speaking of those privileged few who had seen it, most of whom are now deceased, the source added jokingly, This was so classified that they nearly shot the secretary who typed it. Few reports, if any, have been so thoroughly kept from view.

That report exists, I have been assured. If someone can find it, you’ve got the most explosive report of the twentieth century.

I have searched tirelessly for the report, examining numerous archives and pursuing many other avenues. I have not found the document, but I know its conclusion, based on eyewitness accounts that high-level sources gave me. I hope this book compels action that leads to the release of the report.

THE BOND

Over the past quarter century, historians have increasingly given President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II due credit for their roles in ending the Cold War. But despite the fine work of previous chroniclers,¹⁸

few appreciate the depth or significance of the bond between the president and the pope. That bond drove the two men to confront and ultimately defeat what they knew to be the great evil of the twentieth century: Soviet communism.

The bond between Reagan and John Paul II began forming well before they met. In June 1979, candidate Reagan was moved to tears as he watched news footage of the pontiff’s first trip to his homeland.¹⁹

The excited Polish crowds thronging the pope spoke not simply to pride in a native son but also to the enduring religious faith and yearning for freedom behind the Soviets’ Iron Curtain. Reagan resolved that as president he would reach out to the pope and the Vatican and make them an ally.²⁰

Nothing intensified the bond as much as the assassination attempts, which occurred only six weeks apart in the spring of 1981. Each man was shocked upon receiving news that the other had been shot. Reagan, still recovering from his own wounds, was so stricken by the news of the attempt on the pope’s life that every day for weeks he would ask his national security adviser, Richard V. Allen, for updates on John Paul II’s health. The president had a message delivered directly to the pontiff, saying that he happily joined him in their dubious distinction of surviving assassins’ bullets.

The Soviets had worried about an anticommunist, anti-Moscow kinship between the president and the pope. Now, in the space of just weeks, these two men suffered assassination attempts and strikingly similar near-death experiences. The experiences—a unique shared suffering and sacrifice—brought them much closer together.

That connection became apparent when Reagan and John Paul II met for the first time, in June 1982. There, in the Vatican, the president and pope confided their conviction that God had spared their lives a year earlier for the divine purpose of defeating the communist empire.

This book will explore that June 1982 meeting and many other aspects of the partnership between Reagan and John Paul II. It is important to understand the character of their relationship. This book does not suggest that the two men were painstakingly coordinating, day in and day out, their tactical efforts to take down an atheistic empire. But their partnership must not be underestimated, either. As this book will show, the two leaders had common goals, visions, and motivations, and they eagerly worked together where and when they could, with much mutual support and respect. The extent of their communications, including telegrams, phone calls, and private meetings, will surprise some readers.

Just as important, the former Hollywood actor and the Polish priest shared rather remarkable similarities. This book will examine another surprising but crucial element of the story: the deep spiritual bond between the Protestant president and the Catholic pope. Inspired by that bond, they worked together toward a grand objective, one that would benefit people of all stripes, religious or not, from East to West: to take down communism.

Reagan’s single most trusted aide throughout his political career was William P. Clark, who succeeded Dick Allen as national security adviser in 1982. Clark was Reagan’s closest adviser on fighting the Cold War. A devout Catholic, he often discussed spiritual matters with Reagan. The two of them privately spoke of the DP: the Divine Plan to defeat communism.

Reagan and John Paul II saw God’s hand not only in their own roles but also in that of Mikhail Gorbachev, who became the Soviet general secretary in 1985. The final Soviet leader consistently perplexed and attracted Reagan and the pope. Gorbachev’s political and spiritual journey remains a complicated subject, with details that have eluded public knowledge. It contains more than a few faith-based elements, beginning with Gorbachev’s secret baptism in the Stalin era by his Orthodox mother and grandmothers. Reagan and John Paul II hoped and prayed that the new Soviet leader was a closet Christian rescuing an officially atheistic state. A Protestant, a Catholic, and perhaps a man of the Orthodox Church—all part of the DP.

Perhaps the most surprising part of this story relates to Reagan’s fascination with the secrets of Fátima, which date to the reported apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Fátima, Portugal, starting on May 13, 1917—sixty-four years to the day before the attempt on John Paul II’s life.

It is hardly news that the pope connected the shooting and many of communism’s crimes to the events of 1917. What is new is that the Protestant Reagan, who had a fondness and appreciation for the Virgin Mary, developed an intense interest in Mary’s appearance at Fátima and the suggested connections to the Soviet Union, the Cold War, and the shooting of the pope. Reagan discussed the matter with close aides and perhaps even with the pope himself, who was devoted to the Blessed Virgin.

And so this story begins not in 1981 but on May 13, 1917.

Part 1

WARNINGS AND BEGINNINGS

1

MAY 13, 1917

AN ECHO

The sounds of the bullets that pierced the afternoon air of Saint Peter’s Square on May 13, 1981, were an echo of a message that began resounding sixty-four years earlier, on May 13, 1917. The message was said to have come from Mary, the mother of Christ.

Before we go any further, an explanation is in order. This book is a work of historical investigation, not a religious apologetic. Given that, it may seem odd to examine the role of the Virgin Mary in crucial events of the twentieth century. To some readers it will be off-putting. But I ask you to stick with me, even if you do not believe in the supernatural or are a religious person skeptical of Catholic claims of Marian apparitions. The fact is that many of the figures in this book believed devoutly in what I am about to share. They believed that these forces underlay important political and historical developments. John Paul II, in particular, connected the appearance of the Virgin Mary at Fátima to his attempted assassination and to the crimes of communism. Non-Catholics like Ronald Reagan lent their ear to this account.

And so the Virgin Mary features prominently in this book for the simple reason that key players saw her as being significant to how the long story of communism played out. This book does not seek to convince you of the Marian connection. The point is that you must understand the role the secrets of Fátima played in the thought of John Paul II and Ronald Reagan to gain a full understanding of how the special relationship between the pope and the president changed world history.

I am reporting nothing new when I say that John Paul paid special heed to Our Lady of Fátima. He consecrated himself and his papacy to the Virgin Mary, because doing so brought him closer to her divine Son and His will. Her mediation, John Paul wrote in his classic encyclical on Mary, Redemptoris Mater, comes in the nature of intercession. The pope argued that the Church had great trust in Mary, just as God himself, the Eternal Father, had trusted the Virgin of Nazareth, giving her his only begotten Son. That is why Karol Wojtyła entrusted himself to the Virgin Mary, the God-bearer, for her special and exceptional mediation.¹

The sainted pontiff’s papal motto was Totus Tuus, which is Latin for Totally Yours, meaning totally Mary’s, and totally Jesus’s via Mary. In a 2003 Angelus address, the pope affirmed his commitment to entrusting everything to Mary. He stated unhesitatingly that the Blessed Virgin directs our daily journey on earth and makes comprehensible certain events in human history. Her hand helped him comprehend events from 1917 to 1981, from his first to his final days on earth.²

But if this Marian dedication to Jesus is something we have long known about John Paul II, we have not known the interest Ronald Reagan had in the Virgin Mary. In 2004 I published a bestselling book on the faith of Ronald Reagan without knowing the intriguing Marian element to his thinking. I learned it only later.

The story begins a century ago, in 1917.

THE THREE SECRETS OF FÁTIMA

Between May 13 and October 13, 1917, three children in a tiny Portuguese village called Fátima claimed to have had six encounters with the Virgin Mary—with the actual spiritual-physical presence of the Mother of Christ. Through the centuries innumerable faithful have claimed encounters with Mary, but it is rare for the Roman Catholic Church even to investigate such claims, and far rarer still for the Church to certify them. The Church approaches claims of apparitions with a prudential skepticism that would surprise a Richard Dawkins or the late Christopher Hitchens. Of nearly four hundred serious claims of Marian apparitions in the twentieth century, in less than a dozen instances the Church gingerly concluded that some supernatural character was apparent.³

Non-Catholics cannot conceive of the frustration many Catholics feel over the Church’s delay or rejection of this or that perceived appearance that a large number of Catholics are convinced is genuine.⁴

Fátima is one of the few approved apparitions, having survived the highest level of rigor. The three children who claimed that the Virgin Mary appeared to them faced a barrage of interrogations, often cruel, and sometimes by outright hostile clergy. Thousands of eyewitnesses offered testimony in support of the claims. No less an authority than Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, who as Vatican secretary of state was the second highest-ranking official, behind only the pope, said that what happened at Fátima has been studied, microscopically scrutinized, and thoroughly analyzed.⁵

That is why John Paul II and so many others accorded these events the utmost seriousness.

The three children, Lúcia dos Santos and her younger cousins Jacinta and Francisco Marto, said that Mary first appeared to them on May 13, 1917, a Sunday. At the time, May 13 was the Catholic Church’s liturgical celebration of Our Lady of the Most Blessed Sacrament—that is, Mother of the ongoing Real Presence of Jesus in the world. Only eight days earlier, on May 5, Pope Benedict XV had made a direct appeal to Mary to intercede in ending the Great War, which would claim some seventeen million lives.

The three children had gone to Mass before taking their flock of sheep to a spot outside the village called the Cova da Iria, which means Cove of Irene or Cove of Peace. They ate their lunches and played. It was a beautiful afternoon, but then they saw a flash of lightning. Turning to head home to escape what they thought was an impending storm, they saw another flash. This time they were shaken by the sudden manifestation of a lady in white, whom Lúcia later described as more brilliant than the sun, radiating a clear and intense light. The most radiant light of all emanated from a crucifix on a rosary the Lady held, a rosary with beads glimmering like stars. Lúcia later estimated the young woman’s age to be about seventeen.⁶

Sensing the trepidation among the children, the Lady repeated the words that a startled earthly Mary had received from the Angel Gabriel. Do not be afraid, she told them.

Lúcia, at age ten the oldest of the three children, was the only one who communicated with the Lady. Where are you from? Lúcia asked. The woman answered, I am from heaven. The girl then asked what she wanted; the Lady replied that she wanted the children to come to the same spot on the thirteenth day of each month for six consecutive months. Later, she vowed, I will tell you who I am and what I want.⁷

On that May 13, Mary asked the children whether they were willing to endure the trials that lay ahead, the divine plan that God had in store. Were they willing to suffer as sacrifice and in reparation for the sins of the world that were offending Him? If so, would they provide supplication in a way that would convert sinners? The children gave their assent.

During each of the next five months, typically on the thirteenth day, the Lady returned. On June 13 she told the children something they must have struggled to assimilate: she said that Jesus Christ wanted the world to make special devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, which had pumped blood into His earthly body as it formed in the womb. On July 13 the Blessed Lady gave the children a vision of hell. As she did, the children were allegedly infused with a protective grace that enabled them to observe the vision without being so terrified as to perish at the sight.

More than that, the Lady provided predictions. According to Lúcia, the Blessed Mother delivered three dramatic prophecies:

First, the Lady of Fátima predicted that the earthly hell of the Great War would soon end but would be followed by an even deadlier war.

Second, she warned about the coming eruption of atheistic communism: Russia will spread its errors throughout the world, said the Lady, raising up wars and persecutions of the Church in the century ahead. Russia would be an instrument of chastisement. She reportedly shared this prophecy on July 13, only three months before the Bolsheviks shocked the world by taking power in Russia. Over the next several decades, Lenin and his disciples fulfilled the warning of wars and persecutions and chastisement.

Thus, this book will explore not only the extraordinary events that Ronald Reagan and John Paul II faced but also the crimes and errors that the communists committed throughout the twentieth century. Communism made victims of priests, cardinals, bishops, reverends, nuns, rabbis, Buddhist monks, and Muslim imams, and also of leaders like John F. Kennedy, Pope Pius XII, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Lech Wałęsa, and Pope John Paul II. It is crucial to understand this history of communist persecutions and errors to grasp why both Pope John Paul II and Ronald Reagan saw communism as the great evil of the twentieth century and came together to confront it.

What was the third secret of Fátima? As we shall see, the Vatican sealed that secret in a vault, where it stayed for the remainder of the long century. Some feared it predicted a third world war, or Armageddon. It turns out that it envisioned another communist crime: the assassination, or at least an attempted assassination, of a man robed and hatted in white—that is, a pope.⁸

The Lady also told Lúcia that her two cousins would be leaving this world soon, whereas Lúcia was to stay here some time longer. Both Jacinta and Francisco died within three years, victims of the influenza epidemic that followed the war. Lúcia did live longer—to the age of ninety-seven, in fact, long enough to see the three predictions come true. As an adult—by which point she was Sister Lúcia, a Carmelite nun—she would record the three secrets in writing.

THE MIRACLE OF THE CENTURY

The last of the Virgin Mary’s six alleged apparitions in Fátima occurred just a week and a half before the outbreak of the Bolshevik Revolution.⁹

What materialized on October 13, 1917, became the most significant Church-approved miracle of the century. Some enthusiasts among the Catholic brethren contend that it was the greatest supernatural feat since the Resurrection.

A miracle, by its nature, is hard to believe; it’s a miracle, after all. But it is imperative to recall the rigorous, skeptical approach that the Roman Catholic Church takes to investigating reports of Marian apparitions. And after having microscopically scrutinized and thoroughly analyzed the Fátima case (in Cardinal Bertone’s words), the Church concluded that something miraculous transpired in that tiny Portuguese village.

On October 13 a crowd of some seventy thousand, pilgrims and skeptics alike, descended on Fátima. Lúcia, Jacinta, and Francisco had told people to expect a miracle, and word had gotten around. Some four thousand people had been present for the July 13 visitation and twenty-five thousand for the September 13 appearance, though only the children could see and communicate with the Lady. Now there were so many more because the Lady had promised a miracle for all to see in October.

It had rained all morning. Throughout the dreary day, the throng was getting antsy, angry. Where was this miracle? Surely this was a hoax. How could these mere children mislead so many?

Then something suddenly changed. The children became locked in, fixated, staring upward. Something was there, communicating to them. Fulfilling her July 13 promise to Lúcia that she would eventually reveal her true identity, the mystical woman told the children, I am the Lady of the Rosary. Reiterating what she had said earlier, she told them that the current war would end soon, with fathers returning from the frontlines. She urged reparation and penance.

Then came what everyone was waiting for. As Lúcia later described it, the Lady of the Rosary opened her hands and made them reflect on the sun, and as she ascended, the reflection of her own light continued to be projected on the sun itself. Lúcia cried out to the gathered to look at the sun.

Two unbelievable things happened. The three children watched the Lady vanish into the immense distance of the firmament (as Lúcia later explained it), only to behold in the sky Saint Joseph with the Child Jesus aside the Lady robed in white with a blue mantle. It was the Holy Family. The Christ child and His earthly father traced the Sign of the Cross with their elevated hands as if to bless the world.¹⁰

This was surreal enough, but as the three children were mesmerized, the stunned thousands were felled by another spectacle altogether: they saw the sun do incredible things, beyond scientific explanation.

THE WITNESSES

If the children had been the only witnesses, no one would remember the scene today. But what happened next was backed by the testimonies of those who were there.

Here are merely a few eyewitness accounts among the many collected and published. One witness was Dr. José Maria de Almeida Garrett, a professor in the Faculty of Sciences at the prestigious University of Coimbra, the oldest institution of higher education in Portugal. Dr. Garrett had gone to Fátima a skeptic, but what he witnessed changed his outlook. He recounted:

It must have been 1:30 P.M.… The sky, which had been overcast all day, suddenly cleared; the rain stopped and it looked as if the sun were about to fill with light the countryside that the wintery morning had made so gloomy.… The sun, a few moments before, had broken through the thick layer of clouds which hid it and now shone clearly and intensely.

Suddenly I heard the uproar of thousands of voices, and I saw the whole multitude spread out in that vast space at my feet… turn their backs to that spot where, until then, all their expectations had been focused, and look at the sun on the other side.

With all spectators shifting their gaze, Dr. Garrett did the same. He was amazed at what he watched unfold:

I could see the sun, like a very clear disc, with its sharp edge, which gleamed without hurting the sight. It could not be confused with the sun seen through a fog (there was no fog at that moment), for it was neither veiled nor dim.… The most astonishing thing was to be able to stare at the solar disc for a long time, brilliant with light and heat, without hurting the eyes or damaging the retina. The sun’s disc did not remain immobile, it had a giddy motion, not like the twinkling of a star in all its brilliance for it spun round upon itself in a mad whirl.

During the solar phenomenon which I have just described, there were also changes of color in the atmosphere. Looking at the sun, I noticed that everything was becoming darkened. I looked first at the nearest objects and then extended my glance further afield as far as the horizon. I saw everything had assumed an amethyst color. Objects around me, the sky and the atmosphere, were of the same color.…

Then, suddenly, one heard a clamor, a cry of anguish breaking from all the people. The sun, whirling wildly, seemed all at once to loosen itself from the firmament and, blood red, advance threateningly upon the earth as if to crush us with its huge and fiery weight. The sensation during those moments was truly terrible.

As he recorded his account, the professor knew that he now would be among those that nonwitnesses would forever dismiss or disrespect. In affidavit-like language, he sought to assure future readers that he had not been overcome with madness or hysteria:

All the phenomena which I have described were observed by me in a calm and serene state of mind without any emotional disturbance. It is for others to interpret and explain them. Finally, I must declare that never, before or after October 13 [1917], have I observed similar atmospheric or solar phenomena.¹¹

As this testimony suggests, Garrett was no wailing zealot. He was a refined and respected scholar, the son of a prominent Portuguese family. Even as he witnessed something miraculous, he opted to describe it clinically, in the language of a scientist. Not given to hyperbole, he nonetheless saw and reported precisely what countless others attested.

Another hardened skeptic who offered an eyewitness account was Avelino de Almeida, editor in chief of O Seculo, an atheistic, anticlerical newspaper in Lisbon. Almeida had ventured to Fátima with the intent of mocking the wild expectations of the superstitious. He was shocked at what he encountered, which he shared in his newspaper:

One could see the huge crowd turning toward the sun, which, standing at the zenith unobstructed by clouds, looked like a piece of opaque silver. One could gaze at it without the least difficulty. It could have been an eclipse, but all of a sudden there was a great cry, and the nearby spectators started shouting, A miracle! A miracle! Before the stupefied eyes of the people, who anxiously peered into the sky with uncovered heads like the multitudes described in the Bible, the sun trembled and darted this way and that. Its brusque movements, which were truly astonishing to behold, defied every known law of astronomy. The sun danced, as the people typically put it.

The secular journalist recorded how the people scrambled to assimilate what they had just experienced:

At that point, the witnesses began to ask one another what they had seen. The overwhelming majority claimed to have seen the sun tremble and dance. Others claimed to have seen the face of the Holy Virgin. Still others swore that the sun had spun on its axis like a giant windmill and that it had plummeted downwards as if to scorch the earth with its rays. A few said that they had seen it change several colors in succession.¹²

Another doubter was the reporter for O Dia, who likewise went to Fátima to debunk the mob’s fanciful claims. Like O Seculo, O Dia was an anticlerical newspaper from Lisbon, the organ of choice for the intelligentsia. O Dia’s readers prided themselves in not smoking the opium of the masses. And yet here is how a chastened O Dia described what was unveiled at Fátima:

The silver-colored sun… was seen to whirl and wheel about in the circle that had opened up among the clouds. The people all shouted in unison and then fell to their knees on the muddy ground.… The light took on a beautiful blue tint, as it does when it filters through a stained-glass window of a cathedral, and it spread over the people, who were kneeling with outstretched hands. As the blue color slowly faded, the light seemed to sweep across the yellow grass.… The people were weeping and praying with uncovered heads in the presence of the miracle for which they had hoped. Each second was so vivid that it seemed like an hour.¹³

These events lasted several minutes, and they were visible for miles around. The eyewitness testimonies cited here are just a few of many. In fact, as many as seventy-five thousand people witnessed the phenomena of October 13, 1917.¹⁴

This was no mass illusion or group hallucination. The sheer volume of witnesses made such a deception impossible. Those witnesses talked, with their many testimonies captured at the time and available for us to read today.¹⁵

WHY 1917?

To modern eyes and ears a hundred years later, accounts of what happened at Fátima in 1917 can seem difficult to accept. I understand that. But again, what is important to this story is how these accounts influenced Pope John Paul II and Ronald Reagan and their understanding of the crimes of communism.

When we look at Fátima from that perspective, a few questions arise. First: Why would such a message be delivered at this particular time?

In 1917 the world was three years into the Great War. On June 28, 1914, in Sarajevo, Gavrilo Princip had set this conflict in motion with his shot heard ’round the world, which murdered the pious Austrian archduke and his wife.

On one side of the fight were the Allied Powers, including Russia, Britain, France, Japan, Italy, Belgium, Serbia, Romania, Greece, Portugal, and the United States, the last of which had entered the conflict only a month before the first Marian apparition at Fátima. On the other side were the Central Powers: Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Turks, and Bulgaria. How odd it was that Bulgaria and Muslim Turkey, two unlikely allies who had battled one another as recently as the Balkan Wars (1912–13), would team up in this murderous mayhem. It would not be the last time. A Muslim Turk would work with Bulgaria to fire another shot heard ’round the world seven decades later.

The Great War brought with it the horrors of mechanized warfare: tanks, air power, submarines, machine guns with names like the Devil’s paintbrush, and poison gas, the largest-scale use of chemical weapons in history. Winding through this agony were death-strewn trenches: thousands of miles of wet, freezing, disease-ridden, lice- and rat-infested tunnels where men lived an awful existence below the earth. The condemned creatures arose from this pit only to be thrust into no-man’s-land and enter the human meat grinder.

It was a war that Pope Benedict XV had publicly declared unjust. The pontiff judged that there was no compelling moral justification or imperative dividing the combatants; these countries should not have been on the battlefield.

An atheist-leftist intellectual named Sidney Hook might have best summed up the moral catastrophe when he referred to World War I not as the Great War, or the War to End All Wars, or, in President Woodrow Wilson’s line, the war to make the world safe for democracy, but as something considerably less inspiring: World War I was, said Hook, the second fall of man.¹⁶

Yes, religious metaphor captures it best. The historian Michael Hull, who argues that the horrors of World War I exceeded those of World War II in terms of the sheer futility of squandered lives,¹⁷

invokes O Cristo das Trincheiras, The Christ of the Trenches, as an appropriate symbol for the millions who gave their lives in the war. This life-size statue of Jesus Christ on the cross was erected on the Western Front; Hull describes it as soiled, bullet-scarred, its legs blown off by shellfire. Years after the war, the French gave it to the government of Portugal to memorialize the thousands of Portuguese killed at the Battle of Flanders. Today, the Christ of the Trenches looks down on the Tomb of the Portuguese Unknown Soldier at the Priory of Santa Maria da Vitoria (Saint Mary of Victory) in Batalha, Portugal.

This terrible war, this Great War in which no great moral issues seemed clear, not only produced millions of dead young men but also led to World War II and the Cold War. The punitive peace that the French imposed on the surrendering Germans at the Versailles Conference created the chaotic conditions in Germany that Hitler would exploit in his rise to power. As the British historian A. J. P. Taylor put it, The first war explains the second and, in fact, caused it, in so far as one event causes another.¹⁸

The First World War also enabled the fall of Czar Nicholas II in Russia. The reasons for the czar’s fall and the takeover by Lenin and his vicious minions are complex, but one thing is certain: it is difficult to imagine the Bolsheviks supplanting the Romanov dynasty if the Russians had not become embroiled in the Great War. The Russian army entered the war with the rest of the Allied Powers in August 1914 but did not finish the fight. Russia experienced more bloodshed than any other combatant, despite withdrawing from the conflict before its conclusion. The Russian economy was devastated, a situation made all the worse by the fact that, having pulled out of the war, Russia would taste no fruits of victory.

More than anything, World War I unleashed death on the twentieth century. Many millions were killed in the Great War, but World War II would dwarf it in deaths, and the Soviet global communist ideology undergirding the Cold War would kill still more.

WHY PORTUGAL?

Another question arises: Why would the Marian apparition occur in Portugal? A few possibilities come to mind.

Portugal was first touched by Christianity some two thousand years ago, as Saint James, one of the original disciples, is said to have traversed its lands.

Many years later, in the eighth century, the Muslim Moors invaded the Iberian Peninsula and subdued the Portuguese and Spanish. Portugal fought back with a decisive victory over the Moors in the 1100s, becoming an independent nation around the year 1143. King Afonso I, Portugal’s first king, secured the victory and gave thanks to the Blessed Virgin Mary. In gratitude, he constructed a glorious church and monastery called the Santa Maria de Alcobaça.

The Portuguese again turned to Mary’s intercession when Spain came demanding territory. In 1385 they thwarted the Spanish. In gratitude to the Blessed Mother, King John I erected the cathedral at Batalha, Saint Mary of Victory.

These were just two of many times that Portugal turned to the Blessed Mother for her intervention before the throne of God. The country would long be known as the Land of Holy Mary, entrusting itself to her for intercession, intervention, protection, and patronage.

This became an even greater imperative for the Portuguese when they came under siege not from vandals at the gate but from inside. In the early 1900s, militant secularists toppled the Portuguese monarch and installed a repressive government that persecuted the Catholic Church specifically and religious people generally. It was one of the darkest periods in Portugal’s long history. The new government implemented a series of anticlerical measures, culminating in the Law of Separation of Church and State in 1911. The architect of that law boasted that in two generations Catholicism will be completely eliminated in Portugal.¹⁹

In short order, Pope Pius X, who three years later would anguish over his Church’s inability to stop the continent from leaping into the Great War, issued a scathing encyclical condemning Portugal’s Law of Separation, blasting it as heinous, absurd, and monstrous, as an incredible series of excesses and crimes… enacted in Portugal for the oppression of the Church. Why, asked Pius X, had the new government promulgated measures breathing the most implacable hatred of the Catholic religion? We have seen religious communities evicted from their homes, and most of them driven beyond the Portuguese frontiers. We have seen, arising out of an obstinate determination to secularize every civil organization and to leave no trace of religion in the acts of common life, the deletion of the feast days of the Church from the number of public festivals, the abolition of religious oaths, the hasty establishment of the law of divorce and religious instruction banished from the public schools.²⁰

Pope Pius X gave his statement from Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome on May 24, 1911, the Feast of Our Lady Mary. He closed by invoking the intercession of Mary, the Help of Christians.

The persecution in Portugal was a forerunner of the far more repressive and vile attacks Soviet communism unleashed in October 1917, after the appearances at Fátima. Against those attacks, too, the Church would seek Mary’s intercession.

WHY FÁTIMA?

Still, a question remains: Why the tiny village of Fátima, of all places?

The village was given its name during the Moorish occupation. The name is an Islamic one derived from the much-loved princess of the nearby Castle of Ourem. Like many Muslim girls, the princess was named Fátima after the favorite daughter of Muhammad. Born to Muhammad’s first wife, Khadijah, she stood at her father’s side through his greatest turmoil. Muslims view her as an exemplar. She eventually married Ali ibn Abi Talib, Muhammad’s cousin, and became mother to five of his children. Few men were so influential in Islam as Ali, who was a direct successor to Muhammad. Shiites regard him as the vaunted First Imam. Fátima’s spouse and father alone made her extremely influential.

In a quotation that could be apocryphal, Muhammad is alleged to have said of his beloved Fátima, She has the highest place in heaven after the Virgin Mary.

Muhammad had a deep love for his daughter and the utmost respect for the Virgin Mary. Mary is the only woman mentioned in the Koran. No woman in the Koran is accorded her respect. Quite the contrary, Sura (chapter) 4 in the Koran, titled Women, states, Men have authority over women because God has made the one superior to the other (4:34). It continues, As for those [women] that you fear disobedience, admonish them, forsake them in beds apart, and beat them. There is no such demeaning language directed at Mary, who occupies her own Sura (19), titled simply Mary. She is described as a paragon of purity, a holy virgin who gave birth to Jesus, a man portrayed in the Koran as an exalted prophet, an apostle of God, a holy son (19:12–28). Mary is the only woman with a Sura named for her in the Koran; the only men accorded such an honor are Muhammad, Abraham, Noah, Jonah, and Joseph (the Joseph of the Old Testament). In fact, the Koran makes more references to Mary than to almost any man, including Jesus. According to John Esposito, editor of the Oxford Dictionary of Islam, Jesus is mentioned twenty-five times in the Koran. By contrast, according to the scholar Giancarlo Finazzo, the Koran makes thirty-four direct or indirect references to Mary. Finazzo notes, quite remarkably, that the Catholic dogma of the Immaculate Conception seems to be implicitly recognized in certain verses of the Koran, and that certain elements of Muslim tradition speak of her ultimate ascension into heaven (Catholics call this the Assumption of Mary).²¹

Muslims believe that the Koran is the literal word of God, taken from an eternal book forever coexisting with the Creator. Thus, its words on Mary carry supreme weight. Muslims reject the notion that Jesus is the son of God, and even reject his crucifixion and resurrection. Yet they accept the birth of Jesus as miraculous, the blessed fruit of a virgin mother. The Koran has passages upholding the Nativity and what Catholics call the Annunciation (when the Angel Gabriel announced to Mary that she would conceive and give birth to the Son of God).

One who noticed the Muslim affinity for Mary, and in relation to Fátima specifically, was Bishop Fulton Sheen, the most influential Catholic American of the twentieth century. Sheen titled a chapter Mary and the Moslems in his 1952 book, The World’s First Love: Mary, Mother of God. He wrote:

The Koran, which is the Bible of the Moslems, has many passages concerning the Blessed Virgin.… Mary, then, is for the Moslems the true Sayyida, or Lady. The only possible serious rival to her in their creed would be Fátima, the daughter of Mohammed himself. But after the death of Fátima, Mohammed wrote: Thou shalt be the most blessed of all women in Paradise, after Mary. In a variant of the text, Fátima is made to say: I surpass all women, except Mary.

This brings us to our second point, namely, why the Blessed Mother, in this twentieth century, should have revealed herself in the insignificant little village of Fátima, so that to all future generations she would be known as Our Lady of Fátima. Since nothing ever happens out of heaven except with a finesse of all details, I believe that the Blessed Virgin chose to be known as Our Lady of Fátima as a pledge and a sign of hope to the Moslem people, and as an assurance that they, who show her so much respect, will one day accept her Divine Son, too.²²

As evidence to support these views, Sheen pointed to the events that occurred during the longtime Muslim occupation of Portugal. He added: At the time when they were finally driven out, the last Moslem chief had a beautiful daughter by the name of Fátima. A Catholic boy fell in love with her, and for him she not only stayed behind when the Moslems left, but even embraced the faith.

That is, the princess, Fátima, herself converted to Catholicism. She married the Count of Ourem in 1158. This is the onetime Muslim princess for whom the town of Fátima was named—the town where Mary repeatedly appeared in 1917.²³

As Sheen put it: The young husband was so much in love with her that he changed the name of the town where he lived to Fátima. Thus the very place where our Lady appeared in 1917 bears a historical connection to Fátima, the daughter of Mohammed.²⁴

Fulton Sheen was an incredibly influential priest. His books were huge bestsellers, and his widely watched weekly television show won an Emmy Award. Sheen was giving voice to and helping disseminate a fascinating and important message, one that would ultimately touch portions of the Muslim world.

Father Andrew Apostoli, vice postulator for the cause of the canonization of Fulton Sheen, states: Archbishop Sheen… saw in our Lady’s choice of Fátima a great significance for her message. She did not come down from heaven to the only place in all of Portugal with a Muslim name simply to convert Russia, he said. Unless we have the conversion of hundreds of millions of Muslims, there will never be world peace.²⁵

THE LEGACY OF FÁTIMA

The accounts of so many who insisted they saw and were transformed by a miracle at Fátima in 1917 influenced countless other believers in the years and decades ahead. The miracle redounded to Pope John Paul II, certainly.

And the extraordinary events at Fátima attracted the interest of a Protestant president of the United States named Ronald Reagan.

2

OCTOBER 26, 1917

THE DEVILS TAKE OVER

The place: Moscow.

The year: 1922.

The scene: a courtroom for the Church Trials—a classic Bolshevik show trial.

The purpose: Christianity in the crosshairs.

The courtroom is actually a Moscow museum, the Polytechnic Museum. It is a fitting choice. Museums are for things of the past. And things such as justice and religion are no longer of use in Moscow, where communism is the new arbiter of truth. The presiding judge is Comrade Bek. The prosecutors are Comrade Lunin and Comrade Longinov. The man who relates this story decades later, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, does not share the first names of this dubious trio of comrades. It does not matter. Their names—and roles and duties—are interchangeable in the Soviet system.¹

On trial are seventeen defendants from the Russian Orthodox Church, including the patriarch, archpriests, and laymen, accused of disseminating propaganda. In reality, the patriarch has disseminated not propaganda but a proclamation. He told his Orthodox Church officials that the state could not compel the Church to surrender relics, icons, and valuables.

It is the Church’s atheistic accusers who are employing propaganda: the Leninist machine portrays the Church as hoarding riches better served converted into rubles to feed the starving masses. The Bolsheviks do not acknowledge the fact that the people are starving because of communist central planning. Carrion has become a delicacy for the starving population, laments Patriarch Tikhon, but even this ‘delicacy’ is not to be found. The cries and moans are to be heard on all sides. It has even brought cannibalism. He estimates that thirteen million are suffering.

The Orthodox Church is not hoarding at all; the patriarch offers Church valuables (rings, chains and bracelets that adorn the holy relics, silver and gold staves) to help feed the dying, so long as believers donate the valuables voluntarily, not under compulsion by the state.²

But that is not good enough. The Bolsheviks do not want the consent of the religious. They want to coerce the religious. And most of all they want the Church’s fabulous treasures, as an aide to Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin hungrily describes them. Leon Trotsky agrees, rubbing his hands together and saying, The booty is enormous.³

And so the Church is told that it must give up everything to the state. Right now, without hesitation. The patriarch protests. Such forced requisition is sacrilege, he says. The Church cannot be compelled to surrender holy objects or materials used to dispense the Eucharist. This is prohibited by the canons of the Universal Church and is punishable as sacrilege, with excommunication for laymen and expulsion from holy orders for priests.⁴

Lenin views Patriarch Tikhon’s resistance as an outrage.⁵

Seeing Tikhon’s position as a challenge to the Bolshevik regime, he sets forth an official party policy to crush the Church. He instructs Trotsky to have the Politburo ensure that all churches are cleansed, or stripped of their riches. He has already called on the Politburo to shoot ringleaders and to levy the death penalty for priests. Lenin writes: There is a ninety-nine per cent chance of smashing the enemy on the head with complete success and of guaranteeing positions essential for us for many decades to come. He drools over the prospect of seizing what he estimates to be several hundred million gold rubles.⁶

And so on May 5—shortly after May Day, the high holy day of international communism—the esteemed patriarch is called to testify to his transgressions. Judge Bek bores in. In a tense moment, he asks whether the patriarch believes the all-powerful Soviet government has acted incorrectly.

Patriarch Tikhon answers bravely and succinctly: Yes.

Comrade Bek is astounded, or at least pretends to be: Do you consider the state’s laws obligatory or not? he barks.

Yes, I recognize them, answers the Church leader, to the extent that they do not contradict the rules of piety.

Which in the last analysis is more important to you, the judge asks, the laws of the Church or the point of view of the Soviet government? All know the expected reply, but the patriarch is unyielding. Bek pounces: So that means that we, the representatives of the Soviet government, are thieves of holy things? So you call the representatives of the Soviet government, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, thieves?!

The calm patriarch answers, I am citing only Church law.

The Soviet judge proceeds to lecture the head of the Russian Orthodox Church on a correct understanding of blasphemy. The patriarch tells his atheistic expert of an incident at Saint Basil the Great of Caesarea when thugs from the Cheka (Soviet secret police) smashed an icon that would not fit in their box of booty.

Bek calls the old man a liar. After all, the patriarch was not there to see this particular (one of millions) trampling of sacred things by the apostles of Marxism-Leninism. Who spread that repulsive slander? Bek shrieks. He wants a name.

Patriarch Tikhon wisely does not name the priest who witnessed the destruction at Saint Basil the Great.

That means you have made an unsubstantiated assertion, declares the man with the guns of the totalitarian state behind him.

After several minutes more of this, the jury orders criminal charges against the patriarch. He is arrested and removed from office. He is permitted to keep his life, but only because the Bolsheviks find his suffering more useful to their aims. He will not live more than a few years anyway, ultimately succumbing on the feast day of the Annunciation in the Orthodox Church. By that point he is a broken man living under house arrest.⁷

The Soviets deem the lesser-ranking men under the patriarch to be more expendable. On May 7, Judge Bek’s tribunal pronounces its sentence: of the seventeen defendants, eleven are to be shot.⁸

There is no need for witnesses.

To be fair to Bek and