The Third Secret

Steve Berry

New York: Ballantine Books, 2005. ISBN: 978-0-345-50440-1. Pp. 433, interview

In this Vatican conspiracy thriller, Berry attempts to square the novelist circle of crafting a pontifical coverup of a divine dictum but only achieves an unconvincing rhomboid that is a weak mix of a country-trotting travelogue spiced with the occasional murder or inept attempt at one. The fundamental problem is simple: one cannot have a revelation by God that is being covered up by someone who knows it to be a revelation from God, cardinal, pope-to-be, or pope-who-is alike. Heck, even an avowed atheist like me would be plastering walls with notices of such a revelation. But that's precisely what Berry wants us to believe. He wants us to think that the Vatican would come to learn of the Third Secret of Fatima, that the pope would manage to compel a vow of silence from at least two obviously pious people -- the nun who had received the revelation and a Bulgarian priest (really? Catholic? from Bulgaria? working on Romania? Berry clearly does not know that part of the world well). Why would people like that ignore a a divine order and submit to temporal authority? So what if it would be "premature" to reveal it? So what if the revelation would be "bad for the Church"? What is the Church without God? And if God commands it, the Pope, the Church, and all the Catholics in the world must obey, right? Oh well, I admit my theology might be a bit shaky.

The thriller revolves around the mysterious Third Secret delivered by the Virgin to Lucia in Portugal in 1917. The first two secrets were revealed immediately, and the Second sounds so incredible given the next 70 years or so that I would have converted had I not known that any prediction that fingers Russia as the source of some world problem is almost a 100% bet over any random century. (For those not in the know about the Fatima visitation, the second secret predicted that unless the country was consecrated to the Immaculate Heart, whatever that means, Russia would become a scourge for the Church. Pretty uncanny: the prophecy was delivered to an illiterate peasant girl who could not have known about Russia much less having been able to foretell the coming of the communists and their subsequent depredations. Russia was consecrated, several times I might add, until finally it collapsed in what some people believe to be the aftermath of yet another consecration, this time by a Polish pope. It is, of course, unprovable that the Virgin had nothing to do with Gorbachev.) The Third Secret was to remain secret until the 1960s, at least that's what the Virgin told Lucia. Unfortunately, the Vatican refused to publicize it when it was unsealed right on the deadline. The pope said the world was not ready. When it was finally released in 2000, it was a major letdown. It was basically a revelation of bad things to come: Church persecution and such. The Vatican put a metaphorical gloss claiming that this should not be taken as a prophecy of things to come, at least not in the literal "soldiers shooting with bullets and arrows" (guess the Virgin did not foresee precision-guided missiles or had trouble explaining the concept to the child).

Given the mysterious silence and then the astonishingly deflating text of the Third Secret, it is little wonder that intense speculation has swirled around it since. The major conspiracy theory is that the published text is not the whole of the Third Secret, and perhaps not even any of it. The discrepancy is with Lucia's memoir where she quotes the first line of the secret, but that line does not appear anywhere in the version published by the Vatican. Of course, I prefer to have my popes slightly more competent than missing such an obvious clue, but conspiracy-nuts' mileages obviously vary. Berry concocts a slightly more plausible tale: the text is genuine but it's not the whole story. The rest of it was so explosive that the Vatican was too afraid to make it known. Well, OK, Berry's story is more involved: there's a conservative Pope who nearly has a heart-attack upon reading the super-secret text, then an ambitious cardinal steals the damaging parts and tries to keep them under wraps. He almost succeeds but another, more progressive Pope, gets wind of it courtesy of a puzzled Bulgarian priest tending an orphanage in Bulgaria (the translator of the original from Portuguese). Unfortunately, said Pope commits suicide (!, yes, you read that right, and it was apparently divinely sanctioned too) and leaves the whole mess to a successor... who happens to be said unscrupulous cardinal.

Did I miss something? Oh yes, I did: God. Am I to believe that a cardinal would conceal a divine message? Or that a priest would stay silent when the Vatican publishes a lie? Berry makes a half-hearted attempt to justify this by having the main villain basically an unbeliever of sorts, but still. And even if people had failed so miserably, would God screw up his entire Church (and keep doing it for many centuries) just on account of a few failures who by all accounts must not have even believed in him to do what they did. Either God does not compute or Berry needs a refresher in logic. Or God is illogical. Given that he has shown an unaccountable predilection for dispatching the Virgin to a succession of illiterate shepherds instead of marching into CNN headquarters and speaking through a flaming camera, there might be something to that.

My other problem with the novel was with Father Colin Michener, the main protagonist. He managed somehow to do several incredibly idiotic things which somewhat cramp his style as a bright guy. Take, for instance, his encounter with Katerina in Romania. He is on a secret mission from the pope (almost everything in this book is "secret" so perhaps I should just drop the qualifier). He is in Romania, a country off the tourist maps unless one is a vampire lover, and even then one would be going to Transylvania, and not some dinky village around Bucharest. He checks into a hotel... and then Katerina presents herself to him. Aside from a fleeting encounter in Rome a few days earlier, they had not seen each other in years, and they did not part on what you might call amicable terms. If I were Colin, I'd be suspicious, especially because I know she has delusions of journalistic grandeur. But Colin? No, bless his simple soul, he is not. In fact, he divulges his mission and takes her to speak to the Bulgarian priest! If that is not enough, he then pisses off Valendrea (the scheming pope-designate) so that the latter could have his murderous henchman (there's always a murderous henchman) off the poor Bulgarian. And why Romania, of all places? No motivation whatsoever!

The novel really is just a plain thriller, the Vatican angle is not sufficiently develop to be of any interest. There's a minor twist with the Prophecy of the Popes attributed to St Malachy and the coming of the last pope, Peter Roman. Leaving aside the doubtful authenticity of the document and the strenuous post-dictum in identifying the popes with the murky one-liners, that's one thing that has yet to come to pass. Since the last pope is #112 and Benedict XVI is #111, maybe we shall yet see the fall of the Catholic Church. Of course, I think it is more likely that I will spontaneously combust before finishing this paragraph. Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Hahaha, a little firefighter joke here.

At any rate, given the lack of symbols to mull about or interesting locations to explore vicariously through the narrative, the occasional murder and suicides simply do not add up to sustained tension. And I did not even bring up the worst whooper, the supposed actual content of the Third Secret, which reads like a pathetic wishlist of the progressive ultra-left wing of the Catholic church. Check this out: the Virgin appears to an illiterate peasant girl and tells her that women should be priests, priests should marry, abortion is ok, and homosexuality is fine too. Now, I agree with the last two, and have no opinion on the first two, but come on! Did the Virgin also mention something about the age of consent? Or gun control? Did God just had this revelation about women or was this something he kind of wanted to have done for a while but the obscurantist popes did not oblige? Why didn't the Virgin also reveal something about the other religions? I mean, is Islam another path to God? If so, why not tell us. If not, why not. I am sure with all those ecumenical councils for world toleration and mutual admiration, something like the convergence of all official faiths is probably high on the agenda despite the fundamental differences that only a determined and wilfully blind politician can paper over. If Berry wrote this novel a decade from now, the Third Secret would have probably included a call for a universal (hehehe: catholic, I know) religion.

The writing is bad, the plot is as mindless as it is breathless, and I did not buy most of the characters. The main story makes no sense, and there is no twist to make one's reading through hundreds of pages worth one's while. I say give it a pass.

May 1, 2009