Fatima: one hundred years on

This month sees the centenary of the first of the apparitions of Our Lady to the three children of Fatima. As I reflect on the event in this period after the Resurrection, I find myself marveling at divine logic, so different from what one might call the spirit of the age we live in.

I mean why would the Creator and Lord of the Universe subject himself to the horrors of the Passion as described in the various Gospel scenes we meditated on so recently? Why did He choose the time and place He did for His intervention in human history and that most marvellous miracle, the Resurrection – one thinks of the lines in the musical Jesus Christ Superstar which go: “Why’d you choose such a backward time and such a strange land? … Israel in 4 BC had no mass communication…”.

Fast forward to the Marian apparitions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries such as those at Lourdes, Knock and Fatima – these were in pretty out of the way places too, and to people far from high on the social ladder. Yet like the Gospel story, news of the extraordinary events filtered out in each case and we have, in those three places Basilicas which are permanent reminders to us of what happened and why they are relevant to us today and will always be.

In the particular case of Fatima, the first apparition of Our Lady was preceded by a vision the three shepherd children Lucia, Jacinta and Francisco had of the Angel of Peace who prepared the children for the Marian apparitions that would follow. He taught them several prayers, and, in his final apparition in autumn 1916, he gave the children holy Communion. Then on 13 May 1917 the children were tending their sheep near the Cova da Iria in Fatima, a few miles from their home. A beautiful young woman dressed in white appeared to them. The Lady said she was from heaven and wanted the children to return to the same place at the same hour on the 13th of each month for six months. She asked the children to pray the Rosary every day.

The children did as Our Lady asked them, but did miss one appointment in August. Why? Because as news had travelled throughout their region and beyond, the civil authorities tried to force the children to deny the apparitions had taken place, and even imprisoned them, though they were release on 15^th August, the Feast of the Assumption and Our Lady appeared to them again on 19^th August at the Cova da Iria. She asked them to come to the Cova da Iria on the 13th of each month and to pray the Rosary every day. She told them that she would perform a miracle on the 13^th October. And what a miracle it was! Despite terrible weather and the cynicism and disapproval of the authorities, thousands descended on the locality and while the three visionaries saw Our Lady, all those who gathered saw something very spectacular:

The sun stood forth in the clear zenith like a great silver disk which, though bright as any sun they had ever seen, they could look straight at without blinking, and with a unique and delightful satisfaction. This lasted but a moment. While they gazed, the huge ball began to “dance” – that was the word all the beholders applied to it. Now it was whirling rapidly like a gigantic fire-wheel. After doing this for some time, it stopped. Then it rotated again, with dizzy, sickening speed. Finally there appeared on the rim a border of crimson, which flung across the sky, as from a hellish vortex, blood-red streamers of flame, reflecting to the earth, to the trees and shrubs, to the upturned faces and the clothes all sorts of brilliant colors in succession: green, red, orange, blue, violet, the whole spectrum in fact. Madly gyrating in this manner three times, the fiery orb seemed to tremble, to shudder, and then to plunge precipitately, in a mighty zigzag, toward the crowd (William Thomas Walsh, Our Lady of Fatima, Image Books, New York, 1954, p.145-6).

An extraordinary occasion. But, just like those who saw the apparition at Knock in 1879, doubters suggested mass hallucination among other explanations, but they could hardly explain away the fact that what happened was seen in various parts of Portugal.

More important than the spectacular event was the message Our Lady was bringing to the children, and by extension to the world. The so-called secret of Fatima contained three parts – the first and second of which referred to the vision of hell which the three children were granted and to the second world war and the spreading of the errors of Communism from Russia (the October revolution in Russia took place in 1917). The envelope containing the third “secret” of Fatima was opened by Pope John XXIII in 1960, but he and his successor Pope Paul VI chose not to reveal it to the world. After the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul in 1981 (on the sixty-fourth anniversary of the first apparition of Our Lady at Fatima) and the fall of Communism and the break up of the Soviet Union near the end of the twentieth century, Pope John Paul chose to speak of it. Again, one could say that the world was not listening, as if anything, it would appear that in many ways the world is moving further away from God.

The following lines from an Osservatore Romano article in 2000 by the then Cardinal Ratzinger helps us understand the core purpose of the Fatima apparitions and their relevance to us a hundred years on. It should be noted that at that stage, Sr. Lucia was still alive – she died in 2005 aged 97.

Thus we come finally to the third part of the “secret” of Fatima which for the first time is being published in its entirety. …[T]he interpretation offered by Cardinal Sodano in his statement of 13 May was first put personally to Sister Lucia. Sister Lucia responded by pointing out that she had received the vision but not its interpretation. The interpretation, she said, belonged not to the visionary but to the Church. After reading the text, however, she said that this interpretation corresponded to what she had experienced and that on her part she thought the interpretation correct. In what follows, therefore, we can only attempt to provide a deeper foundation for this interpretation, on the basis of the criteria already considered.

“To save souls” has emerged as the key word of the first and second parts of the “secret”, and the key word of this third part is the threefold cry: “Penance, Penance, Penance!” The beginning of the Gospel comes to mind: “Repent and believe the Good News” (Mk 1:15). To understand the signs of the times means to accept the urgency of penance – of conversion – of faith. This is the correct response to this moment of history, characterized by the grave perils outlined in the images that follow. Allow me to add here a personal recollection: in a conversation with me Sister Lucia said that it appeared ever more clearly to her that the purpose of all the apparitions was to help people to grow more and more in faith, hope and love—everything else was intended to lead to this.