Pope in Fatima

Half a million pilgrims chanting “Viva o Papa” braved the rain to hear Pope Benedict XVI condemn the world’s “petty egoisms” at an overflowing open-air mass at Fatima, the Portuguese Lourdes.

The mass, the highlight of the Pope’s four-day trip to Portugal, marked the anniversary of the day in 1917 when three shepherd children reported seeing visions of the Virgin Mary as the sun “spun” in the sky.

They claimed that the Madonna confided to them three “secrets” foretelling the Second World War, the conversion of Russia to Christianity and the attempt on the life of John Paul II in 1981. John Paul believed that the Virgin Mary saved him from the attempted assassination, which took place on the Feast of Our Lady of Fatima.

In his homily a weary looking Pope Benedict, dressed in white and gold vestments and sounding hoarse, said: “We delude ourselves if we think that the prophetic mission of Fatima has come to an end.”

On the plane from Rome to Lisbon on Tuesday he said that the so-called Third Secret of Fatima referred not only to the attack on John Paul II by a Turkish gunman on 13 May, 1981, but also to the “sufferings of the Church” in general, including the current crisis over clerical sex abuse.

He has not referred directly to the sex abuse scandals in his speeches since arriving in Portugal, where few abuse cases have come to light. However in a policy reversal the Pope acknowledged that the abuse scandals did not come from a conspiracy by the Church’s enemies and the media, as Vatican officials had claimed, but from “sins inside the Church itself”.

At a candlelit evening prayer service on his arrival at Fatima from Lisbon on Wednesday the pontiff said that he was bringing the suffering “of a wounded humanity, of the problems of the world” to the shrine, constructed in the 1950s.

Praying before a statue of the Madonna, the Pope referred to the bullet that his predecessor had placed in the statue’s crown in gratitude for her intervention. “It is a profound consolation to know that you are crowned not only with the silver and gold of our joys and hopes but also with the ‘bullet’ of our anxieties and sufferings,” he said.

The cult of the three shepherd children and their visions was first opposed by the then anti-clerical Portuguese authorities and viewed with scepticism by the Church. However, it flourished later after the miraculous nature of the visions was authenticated by the Vatican.

On a visit to Fatima in 2000, Pope John Paul disclosed the Third Secret and beatified two of the shepherds who had reported apparitions and who died young. The third of the children, Lucia dos Santos, became a nun and died five years ago. She too is headed for beatification, the step before sainthood.

Many Portuguese pilgrims at Fatima had walked more than 100 miles from towns and villages, and some travelled the last few hundred metres on their knees. Others flocked to Fatima from neighbouring Spain.

Eavan O’Donoghue, an English teacher in Valencia, said that she had seen the Pope before “but Fatima holds a special meaning”.

In his homily the Pope, 83, told pilgrims that they would be returning in seven years time to mark the 100th anniversary of the apparitions, but did not say whether he expected to be present.

He said that the “human family” appeared all too ready to “sacrifice its most holy bonds on the altar of the petty egoisms of nation, race and ideology”.

Earlier he told hundreds of priests, nuns and seminarians at the sanctuary that dedication to their calling required “courage and trust”. He told the clergy to be wary of “those situations where there is a certain weakening of priestly ideals or dedication to activities which do not fully accord with what is proper for a minister of Jesus Christ”.

He also held a 30-minute meeting with Portugal’s Prime Minister Jose Socrates, a supporter of gay marriage legislation recently passed by the Portuguese Parliament and due to be signed into law next week. (Times).