According to the Vatican, the full text of the third secret was published in June 2000. According to a Zenit Daily Dispatch report based on a Vatican press release dated 20 December 2001, Lucia told then-Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone in an interview conducted the previous month that the secret had been completely revealed and published, and that no secrets remained. Bertone and Cardinal Ratzinger co-wrote The Message of Fatima, a document published by the Vatican in June 2000 that contains a scanned copy of the original text of the third secret.
Bertone, who was elevated to the rank of cardinal in 2003 and served as Vatican Secretary of State until September 2013, published The Last Secret of Fatima in 2007.The includes a transcribed interview between journalist Giuseppe De Carli and Bertone in which Bertone responds to various criticisms and accusations about the third secret’s content and disclosure.
At one point in the interview, De Carli made an unsubstantiated claim that the Vatican is hiding a one-page text of the third secret, which predicts a great apostasy in which Rome will “lose the faith and become the throne of the Antichrist.” Bertone responded saying:
“That’s absolutely crazy. Look, are you claiming that the prophecy of Fatima is about the apostasy of the Church of Rome? That Fatima is a prediction of Rome’s transformation into the throne of the Antichrist? Despite the love Our Lady has for the Pope and the Popes for Our Lady? Anyone can write books based on conspiracy theories, on biased interpretations. Anybody can take sentences out of context and present them as clues to some supposed plot to avoid divulging the truth and to transmit it in a code that only the initiates can understand. No, the whole theory you allude to is a fabrication. And this supposedly factual account is actually the sort of device the Masons used to invent to discredit the Church. I’m surprised that journalists and writers who claim to be Catholic let themselves be taken in.”
At another point in the interview, De Carli claimed that Cardinal Ottaviani had once stated, “the [third] Secret was written on a single sheet of paper. So we would be talking about twenty to twenty-five lines in toto….” He also mentions that one of Lúcia’s memoirs contains the words “In Portugal, the dogma of the faith will always be preserved etc”, words which some believe introduce the real third secret.
Describing these observations as “feeble bits of evidence that neither prove nor disprove anything”, De Carli asked Cardinal Bertone about the possibility of there being two texts, where the “first document” contains the words of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and the other contains the description of the vision published by the Vatican. Bertone answers in part “There is no first document. There never was any such text in the archives of the Holy Office.” Bertone also said “So I’m not sure what Cardinal Ottaviani was talking about.” Bertone also stated that “We have the word, better, the official confirmation of Sister Lúcia: ‘Is this the Third Secret, and is this the only text of it?’ ‘Yes, this is the Third Secret, and I never wrote any other’.”
Bertone returned to the question of whether a text with words attributed to the Blessed Virgin that were censored later in the interview, saying, “The part of the text where the Virgin speaks in the first person wasn’t censored, for the simple reason that it never existed.”My statement is based on Sister Lucia’s direct confirmation that the Third Secret is the text that was published in the year 2000.”
On September 21, 2007, Fatima authors Antonio Socci and Solideo Paolini attempted to disrupt a reception at the Pontifical Urbanianum University where Bertone was to launch his book The Last Fatima Visionary: My Meetings with Sister Lucia. They stated that they would like to take part in the reception’s question and answer session. They attempted to confront Bertone, the Vatican Secretary of State, after being told that the cardinal would not be taking questions. They were escorted out by security guards. Socci and Paolini later produced a tape recording in which they claimed Archbishop Loris Francesco Capovilla revealed that there were two texts of the third secret, despite Capovilla having stated otherwise less than two weeks earlier.
What is certain in all this is that someone is not telling the truth.