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The Church clearly distinguishes between public and private revelation, teaching that private revelations do not require the same assent that is due to the public revelation completed before the death of the last Apostle. But at the same time there is contained in public revelation the admonition of St. Paul: “Despise not prophecies” (I Thess. 5:20-21). And St. Bonaventure used the concept of a final revelation to explain not a new revelation, but the fulfillment of prophecies contained in Sacred Scripture.1 Saint Bonaventure saw events throughout the history of the Church as a continual realization of such prophecies, and authentic apparitions and private revelations are an integral part of the history of the Church.
Today the role of private revelations is facing a new challenge after the promulgation of a recent Vatican document, on the magisterium in its response to alleged apparitions and revelations. In the Latin Mass magazine, Father Brian Harrison chose to give a favorable analysis of the document, while at the same time taking the opportunity to challenge the authenticity of the Secret of La Salette, arguing that it was an example of an alleged private revelation rejected by the magisterium of the Church.2 The argument suggests that Father Harrison is insufficiently familiar with the facts concerning Melanie and her Secret, for in 2002 two French priests, Father Michel Corteville and Father René Laurentin, published a book demonstrating the authenticity of the Secret, based on discoveries that Father Corteville made in the Vatican Archives in 1999. Their book followed a more extensive work of over a thousand pages by Father Corteville published in 2000. Two studies have been written on their documentation by traditionalist authors, a priest and a layman respectively.3
The Secret of Melanie is understandably controversial. It speaks of widespread infidelity among priests and religious, but the most sensitive of its statements seems to be the one affirming that “Rome will lose the faith and become the seat of the Antichrist.” This is seen as contrary to the Catholic Faith by opponents of the Secret’s authenticity, in that it would appear to contradict the indefectibility of the Church and the Papacy. But such an objection against the Secret of La Salette as a private revelation overlooks what is contained in public revelation. One of the most reputable Catholic Scripture scholars of modern times, Cornelius a Lapide (1567-1637), in his commentary on the seventeenth chapter of the Apocalypse, refutes the error of the Protestants who claim that the great harlot of that chapter is the Catholic Church; but he acknowledges that its city of seven hills is indeed Rome, and that the prophecy contains a mystery that can only be understood at the time of its fulfillment.4
The present controversies in the Church about the question of private revelations are a consequence of two different perspectives among Catholics, regarding the crisis of modern times and its effects within the Church. The various apparitions of Our Lady are warnings about the sins of the modern world, and the punishments that they are bringing upon the world if mankind does not repent. For precisely this reason the 1960s, the decade of the Second Vatican Council, became a time when those two opposing perspectives confronted one another within the Church. When the Vatican published the Third Secret of Fatima on June 26, 2000, Cardinal Ratzinger was asked by a Polish Vaticanologist at the press conference why the Holy See had waited so long to publish the Secret, rather than doing so at the expected time in 1960. The future Benedict XVI explained that the preparations for the Council at that time, and the desire for cordial relations with governments, including Communist ones, prompted the Vatican to delay. This optimism toward the contemporary world, reflected in the Council’s document on the Church in the Modern World, was analyzed in detail by the late Brazilian Fatima scholar Antonio Borelli Machado.5
The vision described by Sister Lucia in the third part of the Secret of Fatima is one of profound devastation for the Church. What are seen are Catholics representing all the members of the Church and all are killed, an impossibility if taken in a purely physical sense, because the death of every Catholic would represent the total destruction of the Church on Earth. Taken in a spiritual sense, however, the vision is correctly interpreted through the Biblical symbols it contains. The official translation mentioned the “big city half in ruins,” but the more exact translation of the Portuguese “grande cidade” is “a great city,” which according to the Catechism of the Council of Trent is a Biblical symbol of the Church.6 And this great city is merely “half in ruins,” not totally in ruins because the Church cannot be destroyed. Furthermore, it is a city on a mountain, which further reinforces the Biblical representation of Our Lord Himself and the Church, because this term also is a Biblical symbol.
Both La Salette and Fatima, as well as other Marian prophecies, speak of immense trials for the Church. And seen in relation to the vision of Pope Leo XII, and a diabolical assault against the Church described in that Pope’s Exorcism and the St. Michael prayer, these modern private revelations are a warning and an explanation to Catholics of the gravity of the modern crisis for the Church. Catholics therefore turn especially to the apparitions of Our Lady – not to replace the truths of the Faith already revealed when the Church was founded by Our Lord Jesus Christ, but to understand those revealed truths that concern the Church in the last times. The Church today is divided – between those who question the interpretation of Biblical prophecies and the private revelations relating to them, and those Catholics who follow both the Fathers and Doctors of the Church and their interpretations, further explained by private revelations that describe the fulfillment of the Biblical prophecies.
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1 Cf. Father Joseph Ratzinger, The Theology of History in St. Bonaventure (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1971). Writing this work in the 1950s, the young Father Ratzinger explained part of St. Bonaventure’s doctrine as follows: “Scripture…is not simply a product of a past history, but is simultaneously a statement about and a prediction of the future” (p. 83). Proponents of the “new theology” have used such teaching to advocate a progressive revelation and evolution of doctrine. But the teaching of St. Bonaventure was very different. History for St. Bonaventure represents the fulfillment of prophecies regarding the future of the Church, which reveals a “passion” of the Church in the last times, not a conformity of the Church to the spirit of the modern world.
2 Father Brian W. Harrison, O.S., “The Vatican’s New ‘Apparition’ Norms: Cancelling the Supernatural?” Vol. 33, no. 3 (Fall 2024), 11-12. Father Harrison incorrectly states regarding the Secret of Melanie, “…the Church has explicitly rejected it as inauthentic and heterodox.”
3 Father Dominique Bourmaud, FSSPX, “Discovery of the Secret of La Salette”:
(https://www.sspxasia.com/Newsletters/2003/Jul-Dec/Secret_of_La_Salette.htm).
In 2002 Father Bourmaud wrote a more extensive review of the book by Fathers Corteville and Laurentin for the French Dominican journal Le Sel de la Terre.
TFP author Luis Eduardo Dufaur is the author of La Salette and Its Prophecies, in which he makes use of the documentation of Father Corteville and Father Laurentin:
https://aparicaodelasalette.blogspot.com/p/ingles.html
4 “Alioqui dicere possem arcanum aliud in hac prophetia latere mysterium, quod Deus latere nos voluit, ut opportuno tempore quo reipsa haec complebit, patefaciat, ut in priscis Prophetarum oraculis eum fecisse scimus.” (“Moreover, I could say that in this prophecy there is another hidden mystery, which God wanted to hide from us, so that at the appropriate time when He will actually complete these things, He will reveal them, as we know that He did in the ancient oracles of the Prophets.”) Cornelius a Lapide, Commentaria in Scripturam Sacram: T. XXI Apocalypsis Sancti Joannis (Parisiis: Ludovicus Vives, 1866), p. 309.
5 “Why Was the Third Secret of Fatima Not Released in 1960? An Interview with Antonio Augusto Borelli Machado,” in Fatima and the Third Secret (Boonville, NY: Preserving Christian Publications, 2017), pp. 43-62.
www.pcpbooks.net/docs/fatima-and-third-secret.pdf
6 “Another figure presents itself in the great city of Jerusalem, which, in Scripture, often means the Church.” Catechism of the Council of Trent for Parish Priests (Boonville, NY: Preserving Christian Publications: 2023), p. 107.
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