Did devotion to Our Lady, following the messages of 1917, save the world from total nuclear destruction? Let us review some events. Spanish journalist Joaquín Navarro Valls recalls that John Paul II led the world to the end of the Cold War, which threatened the destruction of the human race. He believes that an astonishing turn of events occurred when on March 25, 1984 in St. Peter’s Square, John Paul II entrusted all peoples to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Afterwards, John Paul II asked Sister Lucia of Fatima if this consecration fulfilled what Our Lady had requested in Fatima, and she said “yes.” Five years later, the Berlin Wall and the Soviet bloc collapsed.

The same journalist, being spokesman for the Vatican Press Office, dined with Saint John Paul II on the same day that the Pope visited his attacker in prison, the Turk Ali Agca, who shot and wounded him in 1981. The Pope explained to him that Ali Agca had not asked for forgiveness, but had merely insisted: “Explain to me the third secret of Fatima.” “When John Paul II was recovering from the attack by Ali Agca, he remembered that it happened on May 13, the feast of Fatima, and he said: ‘bring me the text of the Third Secret of Fatima’, and he convinced himself that he was talking about it.”

It is attributed to the Virgin of Fatima that the Church in Poland was not as harassed as in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania or Bulgaria and that it functioned with a certain autonomy: was it because the Primate consecrated the country to the Immaculate Heart of Mary? And in Portugal there was a severe secular and Masonic persecution against the Church in 1917, when Our Lady appeared, but in 1918 that government collapsed and the persecution ceased. The Portuguese believe that Our Lady was the one who prevented Portugal from entering the Second World War. What about the prophecy of Our Lady of Fatima that Russia would be converted when it was consecrated to the Immaculate Heart? Catholic priests in Russia maintain that this has been fulfilled.