At the same time that the curia of Coimbra, Portugal published its notice about Father Fuentes published 1957 interview of Sister Lucy, and claiming that she denied his testimony, Sister Lucy herself was being made inaccessible and thus silenced by higher authorities. Behind the grille of her Carmelite convent, Sister Lucys visits were strictly regulated, so that from 1960 on, only her family could visit her. Even her former confessor and spiritual director for many years (1926 to 1938), Father Aparicio, who had been in Brazil for over twenty years, was not given permission to speak with Sister Lucy while he was visiting Portugal in 1960.
Upon his return to Brazil, Father Aparicio stated:
I have not been able to speak with Sister Lucy because the Archbishop could not give the permission to meet her. The conditions of isolation in which she finds herself have been imposed by the Holy See. Consequently, no one may speak with her without a license from Rome. The Archbishop has only a very limited number of those licenses.
Why did the Holy See take such drastic measures? Apparently they believed them necessary in order to prevent Sister Lucy from again making the declarations she had made to Father Fuentes. Also, it was 1960, a critical year it was the year the Third Secret of Fatima was supposed to be revealed to the world. Without question, Lucy was silenced in order to prevent her from repeating the requests of the Blessed Virgin, and declaring that God wished the Secret to be divulged to the world that year. Was Pope John XXIII referring to Sister Lucy when he denounced, in the opening speech of the Second Vatican Council, the “prophets of doom” for “slowing the progress of the Church”?
The silencing of Sister Lucy would become even more odious in 1966. That year, Pope Paul VI revoked canons 1399 and 2318 (of the Code of Canon Law), which had prohibited and penalized the publication of any material concerning any apparitions (approved or not) without beforehand obtaining a bishops imprimatur. After the revision, therefore, anyone in the Church was permitted to publish freely on Marian apparitions, including those at Fatima. Sister Lucy alone (out of hundreds of millions of Catholics) was still forbidden from commenting on the Fatima apparitions without prior permission from (in our day) Cardinal Ratzinger. Thus, the present Church policy allows any person, regardless of competence or even orthodoxy, to publish whatever ill-informed blather he wishes on the Fatima apparitions in complete liberty, while the one who actually received the Message is not allowed to speak openly on the subject.