Only once before have I written about any of Mary's purported visitations. That was last New Year's Eve, when I posted about Our Lady of Guadalupe.
Although I do find Our Lady of Guadalupe to be the most compelling of her visits, there are of course several candidates for that title, and today marks the 109th anniversary of the climactic moment associated with one that tops many people's list: Our Lady of Fatima.
The appearances known as Our Lady of Guadalupe took place over a span of days around Tepeyac Hill in what is now Mexico City. The ones known as Our Lady of Fatima took place over a span of months in central Portugal, near the village of Fatima, which is named after a Moorish woman who converted from Islam to Christianity in the nearby Serra de Aire during the Middle Ages. Interestingly, Fatima was also the name of Muhammad's youngest daughter.
Before I dive in, I want to say that although I used the word "purported" in the opening sentence, I do not think that qualifier applies to either Fatima or Guadalupe. These cases are backed by abundant evidence and I believe they are real.
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In 1917 Europe was deep in the throes of World War I, a conflict the likes of which mankind had never experienced. Portugal's troops were fighting and dying for the allied cause while their nation, consisting of 15 percent of the Iberian Peninsula and already one of Europe's poorest, was cut off from assistance partly by the fact its only neighbor, Spain, had turned inward and insisted on strict neutrality.
1917 was also the year Russia's Bolshevik Revolution forced Tsar Nicholas II from the throne, thus setting the stage for communism to take over Eastern Europe and eventually wield influence in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Strange though it may seem, that revolution on the opposite side of Europe, far from Fatima and not of any obvious international significance at the time, was very much on the radar God allowed Mary to speak of when he sent her to the Portuguese countryside.
On May 13th of that year, three children - 10-year-old Lucia dos Santos, along with her cousins Francisco and Jacinta Marto, 8 and 7 - reported encountering a woman while watching sheep in a field known as the Cova da Iria. Appearing after a flash of lightning on a cloudless day, the woman was dressed "in white, more brilliant than the sun" and said she was sent "from Heaven." Assuring the children "I'm not going to harm you," she asked them to devote themselves to God, to pray, and to "say the Rosary every day" to bring about "an end to the war."
This was not the kids' first experience with something unusual, however, for during the previous year they had seen at least one angel and declined to tell anyone. Lucia initially said they should keep this experience to themselves as well, but Jacinta told her immediate family. Jacinta's mom, assuming the story was a prank, casually mentioned it to neighbors and it quickly became the talk of the town.
From here on, I am going to start referring to Mary by name instead of as a "woman," since she did end up revealing her identity.
* * * * *
Amidst the ensuing hubbub, Lucia told her mom the apparition was real and that Mary had asked the children to return on June 13th. Less skeptical than the other mom, Lucia's spoke with the local priest, Father Manuel Ferreira, who advised her not to stop the children from returning.
Going forward, Mary came to the field to meet them on the 13th of each month through October. There was one hiccup on the morning of August 13th, when the region's municipal administrator, who harbored a known hostility to religion and distaste for local chatter, had the kids arrested and jailed before they could reach the field. Unable to maintain such abuse in the face of public outcry, he released them and they proceeded to meet up with Mary on the 19th rather than 13th before getting back on track.
Today's post is obviously about the October visit, but the others were major events in and of themselves, and I would be remiss if I failed to mention that Mary:
- Revealed Francisco and Jacinta would "soon" be taken to Heaven, but that Lucia "must remain on Earth" to spread devotion. Francisco and Jacinta wound up perishing during the Spanish flu pandemic at the ages of 10 and 9, whereas Lucia grew to become a Carmelite nun and lived to be 97 years old, residing at this convent from 1948 until her death in 2005.
- Prophesied that "if people do not cease offending God" after the war, "not much time will elapse" before the commencement of "another and more terrible war" (in hindsight, this sure sounds like World War II comin' round the bend a mere 21 years after the Armistice).
- Said that if Russia did not turn to God, "she will spread her errors throughout the entire world, fomenting wars and persecution of the church" (in hindsight, this sure sounds like Soviet communism comin' round the bend with its enforced atheism, military invasions, and puppet regimes).
Those are but a few of the highlights, if there's any way for that to be the right word.
For each apparition after the initial one, increasing numbers of people came to the field every 13th, hoping to see the Lord's mother for themselves. By September they numbered in quadruple digits despite the rural and out of the way location, and though it was only Lucia, Francisco, and Jacinta who proved able to see and interact with Mary, people kept coming; obviously, they were convinced the kids were not acting.
Finally, on September 13th Mary told the children that when she returned in October there would be a "miracle so that all may believe." Those words set the stage for what is widely considered the most captivating thing humans have witnessed in the modern era.
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Please remember that although 1917 was in humanity's modern era, it was not at all like today's world. What we think of as modern media did not exist, as there was no such thing as television, computers, or the Internet. Cameras were cumbersome luxury items that few people owned, nobody carried around, and could not be relied upon even when present; they depended on finicky film that could easily be damaged even before making it to the darkroom, where there was still no guarantee of good images in any event.
Telephones existed but were rare. So too with radios. Long distance communication happened by snail mail or telegraph, and although the latter allowed it to arrive at its destination fairly quick, it often died there. Sure, if a telegraph's destination was a newspaper, the info it carried might make it to print, but the vast majority of newspapers were circulated only locally and got thrown away after being read, so stories tended not to spread very far.
In other words, news traveled slow, if at all, and needed word of mouth. Be that as it may, news of the happenings at Fatima was already drawing visitors before September, as mentioned above, and once word got out that a miracle to convince "all" had been promised, it spread farther than any of the previous buzz.
The throng that arrived at the Cova da Iria on October 13, 1917 was enormous: Some estimates placed it as high as 100,000 and some as "low" as 30,000, with most pegging it at 70,000. That size is even more remarkable when you consider that not only was the location remote, and not only was travel difficult given limited infrastructure, scant resources, rampant poverty, and a world war sucking up everyone's attention and energy - but on top of all that, heavy rains swamped the countryside for three days leading up to the 13th.
It was still raining on the morning of the 13th, yet those scores of thousands still made it to the field. And Lucia, Francisco, and Jacinta were of course right there, faithful and expectant as always, when the rain stopped and the clouds parted to reveal the sun looking "like a disk of white fire" against a sky of "clear blue." What happened next has become known to history as the Miracle of the Sun.
* * * * *
Among the crowd were not only farmers, peasants, and devout Christians, but also journalists, skeptics, and devout atheists, many of whom expected to see nothing and wanted to use it as an excuse to mock believers confirmation of their superior supposed intellect. Instead, if I may borrow one of the words most commonly used by those who were present, they saw the sun dance.
Witnesses described the sun spinning "rapidly with dizzy and sickening speed, flinging out all sorts of brilliant colors that reflected on the faces of the crowds." It dropped downward in a zigzag course, then zigzagged back up. This continued for several minutes. Notably, people several miles away reported the same thing. At the Cova da Iria itself, clothes wet from rain became dry.
To be sure, there were some who did not report seeing the sun dance, but the vast majority did, including many who, as stated above, had come as skeptics - and even among those who did not claim to see it dance, most said it was different in that it threw off "brilliant colors" and they could keep their eyes fixed on it without being forced to blink or look away.
The multitude on hand was almost entirely from Portugal, as you would expect given the state of things. World War I meant newspapers from foreign countries, even if they heard a miracle was predicted, certainly weren't going to entertain sending their reporters all the way to isolated Fatima based on the say-so of three peasant kids. Nevertheless, reporters from secular Portuguese newspapers were on hand and recorded the events as factual; these included O Dia and O Seculo, the latter of which was avowedly anti-church in addition to being the nation's largest paper.
The former reported that "the silver sun, enveloped in the same gauzy grey light, was seen to whirl and turn" and "the light turned a beautiful blue, as if it had come through the stained-glass windows of a cathedral." Writing in the latter's pages, Avelino de Almeida - who came as an on-the-record skeptic expecting to watch the crowd be disappointed - reported the sun "appeared free from clouds and at its zenith. It looked like a plaque of dull silver and it was possible to look at it without the least discomfort...the sun trembled, made sudden incredible movements outside all cosmic laws - the sun 'danced' according to the typical expression of the people."
Separately, when a friend and fellow skeptic privately wrote to de Almeida and essentially asked what really happened, his letter back said: "The rain, at the pre-announced hour, ceases to fall; the dense mass of clouds breaks up and the king star - a frosted silver disc - at the height of its zenith appears and begins dancing in a violent and convulsive ballet, which a large number of people imagined to be a serpentine dance, so beautiful and brilliant colors successively covered the solar surface. Miracle, as the people shouted? Natural phenomenon, the wise would say? I don't want to know now, but just want to tell you what I saw."
A lawyer named Jose Almeida Garrett wrote that the sun "spun round on itself in a mad whirl" and "seemed to loosen itself from the firmament." He continued that while this "solar phenomenon" was occurring, "there were changes of color in the atmosphere...I saw everything an amethyst color. Objects around me, the sky and the atmosphere, were of the same color...I turned away and shut my eyes...I opened my eyes and saw that the landscape was the same purple color as before...All the phenomena which I have described were observed by me in a calm and serene state of mind and without any emotional disturbance."
* * * * *
Many aspects of the Fatima story bear a striking parallel to patterns we see in Scripture. For any anti-Catholics out there, I have to begin by stressing that Mary, at Fatima, warned people they must turn to God (i.e., not to her) before I go on to note that:
- God sent her not to rulers, generals, or clergy, but to children (cue Matthew 18:3-4 and Mark 10:14-15).
- Those children were watching sheep in a field when she appeared (cue Luke 2:8).
- There were three of them (a la three patriarchs, three people in the furnace, three named angels, three days in the belly of the great fish, three times denied, et al).
- Before they were visited by her, they received angelic visits (cue Genesis 19:1-3 and 15-17, Matthew 1:20, Matthew 28:5-7, Mark 16:6-7, Luke 1:11 and 26-27, Luke 2:9, Luke 24:4-7, Acts 10:6, and Acts 12:7-8).
- Her first words to them were an assurance she would do no harm (i.e., "don't be afraid," cue pretty much every time in Scripture that a figure from the other realm appears to humans).
- She did not shield them from troubling ideas, but instead told Francisco and Jacinta their deaths were imminent; seemed almost apologetic when telling Lucia she "must" remain alive on Earth; and warned that mass misery and calamity would soon come if mankind failed to mend its ways (again, cue seemingly countless spiritual injunctions all the way from Genesis to Revelation).
- And sure enough, misery and calamity did come when people failed to take heed (again, cue examples aplenty from Genesis to Revelation).
As with Our Lady of Guadalupe - and as with some other compelling apparitions I've not written of - reasons to affirm the truth of Our Lady of Fatima continued beyond the dates of her 1917 appearances.
For starters, there is the fact that World War II and expansionist Soviet Communism did come to pass.
There is also the matter of inexplicable healings occurring at the Cova da Iria in subsequent years.
Also, there is the matter of inexplicable healings occurring at other locations where soil and water from the Cova da Iria have been taken and applied for that very reason. While this notion of physical ground/elements becoming holy and getting moved from one place to another with tangible effects might at first sound strange to some of us non-Catholics, it does have a biblical basis that is explained well in this eight-minute clip by Michael Heiser.
If your knee jerks uncomfortably over Mary being at the center of what happened at Fatima, please pardon me for sounding like a broken record by again asking you to remember that: 1] both the Catholic and Orthodox churches teach that she only does what God wills; 2] you certainly agree with them about that; 3] both the Catholic and Orthodox churches teach that she directs people to God, not herself; and 4] her own words at Fatima say the same.
And finally, let me add something else. In Mary's third visit to Lucia, Francisco, and Jacinta, the one on July 13, 1917, she asked that the following words be spoken when praying the Rosary: O my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell, and lead all souls to heaven, especially those in most need of Thy mercy.
Those words were later made an official (though not mandatory) part of the Rosary and are now recited, 109 years later, by hundreds of millions of Christians around the world.
Like Lucia, Francisco, and Jacinta would have said in their native tongue: Que a paz de Cristo esteja convosco.
Note #1: The prior posts in this series are as follows:
Part I: Introduction
Part II: The New Eve
Part III: Genesis to Revelation
Part III-b: The Ark of the New Covenant
Part IV: Historical Perspective
Part V: Perpetual Virginity
Part VI: Prayer
Part VI-b: Worship
Part VII: Involvement and Femininity
Part VIII: Our Lady of Guadalupe
Part IX: On Good Friday
Part X: Queenship
Note #2: The photo at the beginning of this post was taken in the Our Lady of Fatima Garden at Christ the King Catholic Church in Tampa, Florida.
Note #3: There is much I did not include in this post, so I recommend googling away if you have the time. If you are interested in visiting any of the sources I consulted when researching, some of them are here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
