Professor Maria Jose Azevedo Santos, an expert in paleography, has examined the manuscript of the third part of the secret of Fatima and found “no doubts about the authenticity of the document.”
The news was published on January 6 by Ecclesia Agency, the news agency of the Catholic Church in Portugal. It derives from an interview that the scholar gave to Voz de Fatima, the official newspaper of the Marian Shrine, which will be published this coming January 13.
In reality, the authenticity of the document has never been doubted, although some scholars of the subject theorized that another part of the Fatima message could exist which was yet to be published.
“The Church never doubted the authenticity of the document and if she asked science to analyze it, it was not because she feared to find a contradictory element. This, of course, did not happen, as the document is authentic and true, and it came from the hands of Sister Lucia,” said Azevedo Santos.
The titular professor of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Coimbra added in the interview: “We have been able to compare the writing with other handwritten documents by Sister Lucia and have come to the conclusion that, although it is not signed, it is by the same author.”
The manuscript, of the third part of the secret of Fatima, is the property of the Vatican, but at present it is in the Fatima Shrine, in the temporary exhibition “Secret and Apocalypse,” open to the public until the end of October of this year. Professor Azevedo added that “the assignment I received is unique. I am the first lay woman to come into direct contact with the document in question, with the previous approval of His Holiness Pope Francis, sent to the delegates of the Bishop of Leiria-Fatima.
To carry out the study, Professor Azevedo was in Rome with other professionals in September of last year. Over a week she collected the necessary elements for the study, from the archives of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, where they are usually kept. The manuscript was taken out of the archives twice: at the request of Pope John Paul II, after the attack of May 13, 1981, and in the year 2000, when the Prefect of the Congregation went to Coimbra as papal emissary to identify the manuscript with Sister Lucia.
