The "secret of Fatima" is a rapid photograph with a symbolic language that is difficult to decipher. It is a quick vision of the «Church of the martyrs of the past century. No great mystery is revealed; the veil of the future is not torn."

Thus began the speech that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, made on 26 June 2000 in a crowded Vatican press room.

The event was awaited and announced. Not long before in Fatima, on May 13, John Paul II had beatified Francis and Jacinta and at the end of the mass the cardinal secretary of state Angelo Sodano had announced that the "third secret" would be published and explained. «This text – he said – constitutes a prophetic vision comparable to those of the Holy Scripture, which do not describe in a photographic sense the details of future events, but summarize and condense on the same background facts which extend over time in a succession and duration do not specify. Consequently, the key to understanding the text can only be of a symbolic nature."

Cardinal Ratzinger explained the difference between public and private revelation, and who the "seer" is, the history, the reason also for an apparition which in the case of Fatima is «a timely but unusual intervention; which arrives in the hour of need, but in a remote location to people who are not protagonists of the great religious and cultural debates of the moment. And it is carried out not so much in the form of long, articulated and documented speeches, but in the form of visions, short, incisive, highly suggestive, with a characteristic symbolic language".

In a communication read on 13 May 2000 in Fatima, in the presence of the Pope: «This text constitutes a prophetic vision comparable to those of the Sacred Scripture, which do not describe in a photographic sense the details of future events, but summarize and condense facts on the same background which extend over time in an unspecified succession and duration. Consequently, the key to understanding the text can only be of a symbolic nature. The vision of Fatima concerns above all the struggle of atheistic systems against the Church and Christians and describes the immense suffering of the witnesses of the faith of the last century of the second millennium. It is an endless via crucis guided by the popes of the twentieth century. According to the interpretation of the shepherd children, an interpretation also recently confirmed by Sister Lucia, the "Bishop dressed in white" who prays for all the faithful is the Pope. He too, walking laboriously towards the cross among the corpses of the martyred (bishops, priests, men and women religious and numerous lay people) falls to the ground as if dead, under gunshots."