Readers might remember Catholic writer, researcher and commentator Kevin J. Symonds from a previous interview I did with him for his book Refractions of Light (En Route Books and Media, 2015) 10 years ago. I’m back with Kevin as he has a new, or rather updated, book out titled On the Third Part of the Secret of Fatima (En Route, 2024). Below is an interview with him to talk about his new book.

Abbott: To begin, can you briefly tell us about yourself?

KJS: Sure. I grew up in the Greater Boston area and became Catholic in 1997. I entered into theological studies from 1999-2006, having received my B.A. and M.A. degrees from Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio. While becoming Catholic, I learned about apparitions of Our Lord and Our Lady and they fascinated me. I started to write about apparitions while studying theology, so I’ve been into this field for over 20 years now.

Abbott: Your latest book is about Fatima. What interested you in this apparition?

KJS: My interest in Fatima goes back to some of the earliest days of my conversion. I’d like to name three particular resources. First, there was a little booklet published by the Blue Army of Our Lady of Fatima (now known as the World Apostolate of Fatima, USA, [or WAF-USA]) titled Lucia Speaks. Second, there was a book by Fr. Robert Fox titled Rediscovering Fatima. Thirdly, I read some of the literature from Fr. Nicholas Gruner of Canada and his organization The Fatima Center.

Abbott: How did you come to write about Fatima?

KJS: I think it best to answer in terms of my first pilgrimage to Fatima in May of 2005. My friend, Richard (“Rick”) Salbato, lived there at the time. He invited me to stay with him for 10 days and we had a wonderful time. Seeing the places in person about which I had only read or seen in pictures was amazing. I learned a lot from Rick, not the least being the fact that he knew some of Sr. Lucia’s relatives. He even spoke with her at her convent in Coimbra a few times because he drove her relatives to visit her. Rick has since gone to his eternal reward, but the lessons he taught me over the years remain with me.

Abbott: Could you tell us what one of those lessons is?

KJS: Absolutely. One of those lessons was to think critically about stories and/or claims of apparitions and visions. From Rick’s background, research, and knowledge, he learned well that famous saying “all that glitters isn’t gold.” He showed me more of the “ins and outs” of discernment in accordance with the mind of the Church. I don’t think it necessary to spell out the specifics here because the Church has already done that in her 1978, and, more recently again, in her 2024 revised Norms. I’ll simply say that Rick brought me deeper into how these norms and criteria work, and I’ve applied them ever since in my writings and larger work in life and theology.

Abbott: How would all of that apply to Fatima specifically?

KJS: In the prologue to his book On Being and Essence, St. Thomas Aquinas wrote that a small mistake in the beginning leads to bigger ones in the end. As this applies to Fatima, even though it is approved by the Church, we still need to be careful when speaking about it. Rick had a hand in helping me to develop this kind of caution in my own thinking processes with apparitions in general, Fatima included.

Abbott: Can you give us an example?

KJS: In the 1980s, there was a French writer named Frère Michel de la Sainte Trinité. He wrote a three-volume opus in French that was translated into English through the earlier-mentioned Fr. Gruner as The Whole Truth about Fatima. Rick once claimed that he had looked up some of Frère Michel’s references and found some faulty translations.

Abbott: That’s a fairly serious claim. So, you took what Rick said and made a study out of it?

KJS: Not exactly. My focus was broader than simply reviewing Frère Michel’s scholarship.

Abbott: How so?

KJS: My more recent work with Fatima didn’t start until many years after Rick’s allegation of faulty translations. Between 2012 and 2014, I was working on my book Pope Leo XIII and the Prayer to St. Michael when I had found a connection between the history of this prayer and the message of Our Lady at Fatima.

Abbott: What was that connection?

KJS: The connection concerned the evils the Church and the world faced from the 19th Century going into the early 20th Century.

Abbott: Can you elaborate on that?

KJS: In short, Pope Leo was concerned about the rise of evil and its assault on the Church, especially as they concerned the Apostolic See of Rome. He composed the Prayer to St. Michael as a means to help combat the rise of those evils. Those evils continued, in one form or another, through the period of the apparitions of Our Lady in Fatima in 1917. Her warnings about the “errors of Russia” and “the Holy Father will have much to suffer” demonstrated an organic connection between the events in Leo’s time and now in the early 20th Century.

Abbott: And from this connection you decided to write a book about Fatima?

KJS: It was part of why I ended up writing a book. There was another development that happened around 2014 that also inspired me. In October of 2013, the Carmelites of Coimbra in Portugal published a biography of Sr. Lucia titled (in English) A Pathway Under the Gaze of Mary. I’ve written in detail about how this book made a very large disclosure that forever changed the direction of a controversy that had arisen years prior known as the “Fourth Secret” controversy. The impetus of this disclosure helped to pave the way for my own book.

Abbott: What is the “Fourth Secret” controversy?

KJS: Before explaining that, I think it is best to provide a brief historical background. In 1917, Our Lady had communicated a Secret in three parts to the three visionaries of Fatima, Lucia dos Santos, and her two cousins, Francisco and Jacinta Marto. It wasn’t until late 1941 that Lucia wrote down the first two parts. The third remained unwritten until early January of 1944 when Lucia received permission from Our Lady to write it down.

Abbott: Our Lady actually told her to write it down?

KJS: Yes. Lucia then placed this text in envelopes and sealed them. They ended up being sent to Rome in 1957 and remained unopened until August of 1959. At that time, Pope St. John XXIII opened and read Lucia’s text. He discussed it with some close associates, including his personal secretary Msgr. Loris Capovilla, but decided against publishing the text. A lot of speculation ensued for the next 40 years. Then, John Paul II published the text, with accompanying documentation and commentary, on June 26, 2000 in a booklet titled The Message of Fatima (TMF).

Abbott: So, what was the third part of the Secret according to the booklet?

KJS: Lucia’s text was a description of a vision given to the three visionaries on July 13, 1917. The images showed many people (clergy, religious, and laity) making their way toward a cross through a city half in ruins. Along the way, they were being shot at and killed by soldiers. An angel with a flaming sword was also present, calling for penance, and Our Lady was there with her Immaculate Heart quenching the fire emanating from the sword. Specific mention of a “bishop dressed in white” is made, largely interpreted to depict the pope, who is shot and falls down dead.

Abbott: How was this text received?

KJS: It was received to mixed reviews, and this is where we get into the “Fourth Secret” controversy. Among some others, the earlier-mentioned Fr. Nicholas Gruner and his associates at The Fatima Center were dissatisfied with the publication. The ink was hardly dry on TMF when Gruner et al. argued that the published text was not the only one. They believed there was a second, unpublished, text with words of Our Lady that explained the vision.

Abbott: Wasn’t it also part of the “Fourth Secret” controversy that this alleged second text contained damning words of Our Lady toward evils in the Church, if not the world, and that the Vatican was deliberately hiding this text from the public to protect the Second Vatican Council?

KJS: Yes, the hypothesis grew in scope over time, but your characterization is essentially correct when viewed from its totality.

Abbott: What do you mean the “hypothesis grew in scope over time?”

KJS: After TMF’s publication, from 2000 to 2002, the criticisms were being developed and put forth for consideration. In 2002, they were marshalled into a book edited by Fr. Paul Kramer titled The Devil’s Final Battle. The arguments received a notable boost in the year 2006 with the publication of the book The Fourth Secret of Fatima by the Italian journalist Antonio Socci.

Abbott: Ah, I see, so Socci’s book is the reason for the term “Fourth Secret?”

KJS: Yes, though Socci was not the first to use it. That’s another story for another time, perhaps.

Abbott: If Socci wasn’t the first to use the term, was there something distinctive about Socci’s book that made it stand out?

KJS: Yes, two things. First, Socci is a respected journalist. For him to write about the two-text or “Fourth Secret” hypothesis afforded it some credibility to a larger audience. Second, Socci included a new document from the now Archbishop Capovilla that had come to light via an Italian researcher named Solideo Paolini. This document, and the story that accompanied it, allegedly confirmed the existence of a second, unpublished text, thus renewing interest in the matter.

Abbott: We’ve covered a lot of history and I can tell you’ve only barely scratched the surface. So, let me ask you, what did your research turn up on this controversy?

KJS: It became clear that I needed to return to the sources and not simply depend upon other peoples’ interpretation of those sources. I also prioritized statements from Sr. Lucia in the light of the Church’s teachings on private revelation and theological anthropology. In following this methodology, one of the things that I discovered was that some writers were not as diligent in understanding the sources and thus some interpretations from these writers were questionable.

Abbott: For example?

KJS: Well, using what I said a moment ago about prioritizing Sr. Lucia’s statements, let’s go back to Frère Michel. Lucia wrote four different Memoirs in the late 30s into the early 40s that recounted the events of 1917 and others. At least some of these Memoirs were written under hurried conditions with no time for editing. In the Fourth Memoir, she recorded a statement from Our Lady about how “In Portugal, the dogma of the Faith shall always be preserved.”

Michel argued that the sentence was the opening words to the third part of the Secret, as in the first words of Our Lady to the third part. He neglected to mention that Lucia had, at the beginning of the Fourth Memoir, directly stated that she wouldn’t write anything about the third part. In fact, she even put an “etc.” as a placeholder after the above phrase for the content of the third part. So, we know exactly where the second part ended and where the third part began, at least as Lucia understood and marked it. Yes, the question of where the second part ended and the third part began is something I address at some length in my book. It was a point of contention for a while, but not so much anymore.

Abbott: Speaking of your book, we said earlier that it’s now in its second edition. What’s new?

KJS: I specified some of the new material on my website. For our purposes, I gutted a few chapters and wrote on new subjects in them. I like to highlight chapter 7 in particular.

Abbott: Why this chapter?

KJS: In the new chapter 7, I engage in a critical examination of the various testimonies Capovilla gave over the course of 3-4 decades about the third part of the Secret of Fatima.

Abbott: Can you give a sneak peek into what you found?

KJS: Yes. Socci et al. made the grave methodological error of isolating Capovilla’s disclosures to Solideo Paolini instead of reading him within the panoply of numerous other statements Capovilla made over 25-30 years. In chapter 7, I took all of the known and available testimonies of Capovilla and examined them—including the ones to Paolini. A different picture arose than that painted by Socci et al.

Abbott: Two final questions for you. First, can you tell us where readers can find your book?

KJS: I encourage people to visit my website, www.kevinsymonds.com, or my publisher’s website, En Route Books and Media. The book is also available on Amazon in hardback, paperback and Kindle.

Abbott: Do you have any other books in the works?

KJS: I’m preparing an anthology of the recorded lectures of the former communist lawyer Dr. Bella V. Dodd, who returned to the Catholic Faith under the influence of Archbishop Fulton Sheen. For more information about Bella Dodd, one can visit www.belladodd.net. As it becomes available, information on the anthology will appear on this site.

Abbott: Thank you, Kevin. I look forward to interviewing you again.