Lucia dos Santos, the eldest and only long-lived survivor of the three children who reported the 1917 apparitions, wrote down what she said the Virgin had told them in three parts, the first two in a 1941 memoir and the third in a sealed document in 1944. The first secret was a vision of hell. The second predicted that the First World War would end but that a worse one would follow, during the reign of Pius XI, unless people stopped offending God, together with a sign to precede it, an unusual night lit by an unknown light, which believers later matched to a bright aurora borealis seen across much of Europe in January 1938. The same text asked that Russia be consecrated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, warning that without it Russia would spread its errors through the world.
Lucia sealed the third part and gave it to the Bishop of Leiria, who forwarded it, unopened, to the Vatican in 1957. John XXIII read it in 1959 and chose not to publish it; Paul VI and John Paul I likewise left it sealed. John Paul II read it shortly after the 1981 attempt on his life and, in 2000, had the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith release the full text with a theological commentary. It describes a symbolic vision of a bishop dressed in white walking through a ruined city and being killed by soldiers, which the Vatican's published commentary reads as the assassination attempt on John Paul II, which took place on 13 May, the anniversary of the first apparition.