If you saw it, it may have given you pause. Right there in the wake of the last Fatima seer's death, and right there the same week as Pope John Paul II -- the Pope of the Fatima secret -- struggled again in a hospital, was a new survey indicating which nations are the most religious in Europe.

Was Italy, home to the Vatican, among them; or Spain, with such a rich Catholic tradition (or perchance France, where Lourdes is located)?

No; according to a "representative survey" conducted by Reader's Digest of 8,600 people in 14 European countries; the most believing nations, it said, are Poland, where 97 percent of interviewees said they believe in God; Portugal, at 90 percent; and Russia, at 87 percent.

While Poland was no surprise (and while it ties in with the Pope), Portugal was interesting not so much because as any sort of surprise but because it is what was foreseen in the first two parts of the Fatima secret. In fact, it was part of the very last phrase known from the secrets before the third one was revealed decades later, by Pope John Paul II in 2000.

"In Portugal, the dogma of the Faith will always be preserved," ended the first two secrets cryptically -- a true prophecy that we now appreciate as spelled out in that recent European survey (and bolstered by Portugal's resistance to the type of modernism and tolerance of evil afflicting its Spanish neighbors).

The dogma of the Faith has been preserved in Portugal, as the Blessed Mother predicted to Lucia in 1917, and according to the secrets, Russia was about to turn atheistic (another true prophecy) but would eventually convert if that nation was consecrated to her Immaculate Heart and if there was "the Communion of Reparation on the First Saturdays."

Back to the Pope: this Polish-born pontiff took a bullet that his new book, announced just last week, attributed to an "ideological" conspiracy. In other words, it was Communism's last desperate bid to stop a holy man from leading the world from the errors and tyranny of Soviet Russia. The Communists knew they had to stop him, but the Pope -- shot on the Fatima anniversary of May 13, 1981 -- survived due to the intercession, he has said, of Our Lady of Fatima, and went on to inspire and even fund Lech Walesa and Solidarity to rise against the Soviets -- the crucial act that led to the fall of Communism first in Poland, then in Eastern Europe and miraculously the Soviet Union itself.

The third secret of Fatima showed a "bishop in white" (which fits the description of a pope) gunned down.

We see a pattern forming a perfect circle.

The collapse of Communism occurred in the years immediately following the Pope's 1984 consecration of the world to her Immaculate Heart and as the First Saturdays devotion indeed took hold.

Now, Russia, less than two decades ago an officially atheistic nation, is listed -- with Portugal and the Pope's homeland -- as among the most believing! No one can attribute this to coincidence. Does it mean the game is over? Hardly. There remain deep spiritual problems in Russia. Abortion is rampant, and atheism -- Communism -- could rise again. Moreover, the Orthodox Patriarch has stubbornly resisted a visit from John Paul II.

But as a prophesied, a period of peace, at least between superpowers, was the result, and the Russians have taken the remarkable step -- one the West would never consider -- of proposing a ban on the occult! In addition, the Russian president openly worships at an Orthodox church that honors the Blessed Virgin.

It doesn't stop there. At Medjugorje in former Yugoslavia, where the Blessed Mother has been appearing in apparitions that have gained the most fame of any since Fatima, and which may now present forth its secrets, Mary was once quoted as saying the following in 1981 (in October of that year, just months after the Pope was shot):

"The Russian people will be the people who will glorify God the most. The West has made civilization progress, but without God, as if they were their own creators."

Stunningly, in the same book by the Pope released in part last week -- just days after Sister Lucia's death in Coimbra, Portugal -- John Paul II writes that "in our times evil has developed outside all limits. The evil of the 20th Century was of gigantic proportions, an evil that used state structures to carry out its dirty work, it was evil transformed into a system."

In one chapter of the book, the Pope describes how "anti-evangelical currents" strike at the foundations of human morality, "influencing the family and promoting a morally permissive outlook: divorce, free love, abortion, contraception, the fight against life in its initial phases and in its final phase, the manipulation of life."

He pointed to Eastern Europe as upholding the faith and fingered the West as having institutionalized the "ideology of evil" (including through homosexual marriage) and lamented -- in words that could have come out of Medjugorje or Fatima -- that man has "remained alone: alone as creator of his own history and his own civilization; alone as one who decides what is good and what is bad."

02/28/05