The Three Secrets of Fátima () are a series of apocalyptic visions and prophecies which were given to three young Portuguese shepherds, Lúcia Santos and her cousins Jacinta and Francisco Marto, by a Marian apparition, starting on 13 May 1917. The three children claimed to have been visited by the Virgin Mary six times between May and October 1917. The apparition is now popularly known as Our Lady of Fátima. According to Lucia, around noon on 13 July 1917, the Virgin Mary entrusted the children with three secrets. Two of the secrets were revealed in 1941 in a document written by Lúcia, at the request of José Alves Correia da Silva, Bishop of Leiria, to assist with the publication of a new edition of a book on Jacinta. When asked by the Bishop in 1943 to reveal the third secret, Lúcia struggled for a short period, being "not yet convinced that God had clearly authorized her to act". However, in October 1943 the Bishop ordered her to put it in writing. Lúcia then wrote the secret down and sealed it in an envelope not to be opened until 1960, when "it will appear clearer". The text of the third secret was officially released by Pope John Paul II in 2000, although some claim that it was not the entire secret revealed by Lúcia, despite repeated assertions from the Vatican to the contrary. According to various Catholic interpretations, the three secrets involve Hell, World War I and World War II, and 20th-century persecutions of Christians. Background Of the hundreds of alleged Marian apparitions the Catholic Church has investigated, only twelve have received ecclesiastical approval, with nine having occurred between 1830 and 1933. Cultural anthropologists Victor and Edith Turner, who converted to Catholicism in 1958, at one time viewed the increase in Marian apparition "cults" as a post-industrial reaction of a "disenfranchised lower middle class to a rapidly changing culture." At the age of 14, Lúcia was sent to the school of the Sisters of Saint Dorothy in Vilar, near Porto. In 1928, she became a postulant at the Dorothean convent in Tui, just across the border in Spain. Lúcia continued to report private visions periodically throughout her life. In the mid-1930s the Bishop of Leiria encouraged Lúcia (religious name: Sister María Lúcia das Dores) to write her memoirs, so as to disclose further details of her cousins and the 1917 apparitions.