Is the Fatima phrase 'in Portugal the dogma of the faith will always be preserved' a mistranslation?
Robert Sungenis answers that it is likely a mistranslation: in Sister Lucia's 1941 Portuguese the word is guerra, war or fight, not doutrina or dogma, a word she uses elsewhere to mean war. He reads the line as the fight for the faith being preserved in Portugal, which fit Salazar's Portugal in 1941 and removes the puzzle of a seemingly broken promise.
A viewer struggles with the Fatima line 'in Portugal, the dogma of the faith will always be preserved' now that Portugal has become as liberal as the rest of Europe, and asks how to interpret it.
Answer
I have had a problem with this from the beginning, so I went back to Sister Lucia's original 1941 Portuguese in the fourth memoir. The word translated 'dogma' is guerra, which means war or fight, and she uses that same word guerra elsewhere in the third memoir where it plainly means war, as when it says God will punish the world by means of war. Portuguese does have a word for doctrine, doutrina, and even a word for dogma, but she used neither; she used guerra. So the line should read something like 'in Portugal the fight, or the war, for the faith will always be preserved,' which fits 1941 exactly, when Salazar had been banning the Freemasons since 1935 and Portugal was holding fast while other nations fell. That reading also relieves us of the puzzle of a heavenly promise that seems broken today, and it fits the larger Fatima story, where the delayed consecration of Russia, finally done by Pius XII in 1952, pushed the promised peace far into the future.