Fatima message 'more relevant and more urgent'

POPE JOHN PAUL reconsecrated the world to Mary at Fatima last Thursday and declared • that her message in apparitions here in 1917 is "still more relevant than it was 65 years ago. It is still more urgent".
As he celebrated Mass for an
estimated million pilgrims on the east o Sur a y o Fatima, which also marked the first anniversary of the assassination attempt in Rome last year, the Pope said he saw in that "mysterious coincidence ... a special call to come to this place ... to thank divine providence in this place which the mother of God seems to have chosen in a particular way".
The reconsecration also came a day after another attempted assassination of the Pope, but one which caused him no physical harm.
The evening before, during a candlelight ceremony in Fatima's sanctuary, a man dressed as a priest ran toward the altar screaming slogans against the Pope, Vatican It and communism.
Later police identified the man as a 32-year-old Spaniard, Juan Fernandez Krohn. They said the man claimed to be a priest living near Paris and said he was once a follower of dissident French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre.
In his homily on Thursday the Pope appealed to Christians to accept the message of Our Lady of Fatima and do penance for "the sins of the world". "The message of Fatima is, in its basic nucleus, a call to conversion and repentance, as in the Gospel," he said.
That message is "strong and decisive. It sounds severe", he added. "It sound like John the Baptist speaking on the banks of the Jordan. It invites to repentance. It gives a warning. It calls to prayer. It recommends the Rosary."
He said that as Pope he reads the message of Fatima "with trepidation" because he sees "how many people — how many Christians — have gone in the opposite direction ... Sin has thus made itself firmly at home in the world and denial of God has become widespread in the ideologies, ideas and plans of human beings."
"The successor of Peter presents himself here also as a witness to the immensity of human suffering, a witness to the almost apocalyptic menaces looming over the nations ... My heart is oppressed when I see the sin of the world and the whole range of menaces gathering like a dark cloud over mankind," Pope John Paul said.
Among the pilgrims at the papal Mass in Fatima was Carmelite Sister Lucia dos Santos, 75, the only survivor of the three children who saw the apparitions of Mary at Fatima in 1917.
Pope John Paul spent the night of May 12 in a Carmelite religious house near Fatima, where he met with the nation's bishops the next morning.
Addressing the bishops on May 13, the Pope praised Portugal's "deep religious sentiment" throughout history, but gave warning that the country is threatened by secularising tendencies affecting other countries.
He made specific mention of agnosticism in intellectual and university life and among many youths, "a certain concept of life or a certain humanism without God".
The Pope also warned against "grave problems in the family environment, especially in respect for the indissolubility of marriage, the slackening of moral conscience and consequent relaxation of customs — demand for wellbeing at any price".
While the crowd outside the sanctuary awaited the Pope, eight men carried a statue of Our Lady of Fatima, resting in a bed of flowers, around the squwe, where it was greeted by a sea of waving white handkerchiefs.
By the time the Pope ended his visit to Portugal on Saturday evening, he had established himself as the hero of the farmworkers.
Hundreds of thousands gathered in Oporto where the Pope met industrial workers. They chanted enthusiastically "The Pope of the workers", for minutes at a time.
Portugal, while retaining a firm pious tradition, has a strong socialist movement, and after the revolution of 1974 Communist clashes and land-confiscation accentuated social divides.
But the Pope has been careful to condemn both unjustified expropriation of land and the exploitation of rural and urban workers.