Fatima: What did the little shepherds see?

A Lady dressed in white, more brilliant than the sun
“Dressed in white with a chain of gold around her neck extending down to her breast… her head was covered with a white mantle, yes, very white… I don’t know but it was whiter even than milk… which covered her to the feet… all embroidered with gold… Ah how beautiful! She kept her hands together, in this way” – and then the child rose from the stool, joined her hands at the breast, imitating the vision. (Jacinta)

Jacinta, the one more expansive and sensitive to beauty, could not contain within her the overwhelming supernatural joy that made her exclaim unceasingly, “Ah, what a beautiful Lady! Ah, such a beautiful Lady!” It was too great a joy to stay contained within such a small body and therefore it did not take long for her to tell her mother who was incredulous about seeing the beautiful Lady at the Cova. Her father, however, believed her story from the very beginning because knowing his child well, he knew that such a lover of truth would not lie.

How can we conceptualize the apparitions both of the Angel which took place one year earlier as a way of preparation and of Our Lady from May to October of 1917?

Apparition or vision?
The theory of autosuggestion says that in an environment where people expect apparitions then there will be apparitions. These are not consistent with the appearances of the risen Christ to the apostles, or to Paul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus, nor with the Marian apparitions approved by the Church. Common in all of these is the fact that the “appearance” took the seers by surprise.

It is not a vision, however, because a vision is always private and an expression of a deep religious experience without the public and without a message to others. Furthermore, it implies an earlier religious experience, and is frequently a mystical phenomenon that indicates a long process of ascetics.

Contrary to a vision, an apparition is always prophetic because it is confined to a specific time and a specific place like in Fatima, Lourdes or Guadalupe, and there are witnesses from the very beginning. There is always a prophetic message for that particular time and place, and it is always accompanied by phenomena or miracles that do not have a scientific explanation.

It was, therefore, an apparition that the little shepherds experienced in Fatima, but was this like that of the risen Christ to the apostles? We are working with the principle that the transfigured humanity of Jesus Christ, his glorious body after his resurrection and ascension to heaven, never again appeared directly on earth in his corporeal reality like the apostles saw him. This same principle can be said of Mary, his mother. Therefore, the little shepherds did not have an apparition of Mary in her bodily reality but rather an imaginative one, a fantasy, a hallucination. Jacinta, in fact, in one of the interrogations stated that Our Lady was little more than one meter tall.

In order to explain the fact that during the last apparition that while the crowd’s attention was captivated by the miracle of the sun, the little shepherds saw part of the celestial court imagined each in their own way. They saw St. Joseph with the Child Jesus in his arms, Our Lady of Sorrows, Jesus Christ blessing the world and finally Our Lady of Mount Carmel.

We reject the petty presumption that anything that is not natural or “normal” is therefore pathological; the geniuses are not normal, and yet they are not pathological. Before allowing or supporting any apparitions, the Church verifies the following criteria: 1. The message is in line with the Gospel and the doctrines of the Church, 2. The seers are of perfect physical and mental health, and 3. The seers are honest and humble, and their lives are exemplary from the spiritual and moral point of view.

Divine hallucination
Hence this is how we classify the experience of the little shepherds at Fatima. Hallucination because Our Lady did not actually and objectively appear; if she had indeed been there, then all those present would have seen her also. Divine because it was not provoked by any illnesses of mind on the part of the little shepherds since they were perfectly sound of mind and body, but rather by God in order to pass through them a message for Portugal and the rest of the world.

Hallucination is a perception that occurs in the absence of the physical or corporeal state of the object perceived; it is similar to what occurs in nocturnal dreams where the sensation of reality is so alive that it is only when we wake up that we realize that it was not real. Therefore in the case of the seers of Fatima, they perceived the presence of Our Lady without her being really or bodily present.

So what is supernatural about this experience? The supernatural is in the reality that it was not the little shepherds who brought about this experience, but rather it was caused by God. This is the principal criteria for its authenticity. The children did not bring about the experience, they did not seek it and have done nothing to have it. This is where the scope of divine intervention is situated as well as later in the content of the message which in no way could have been invented by the children, given their condition of being rude and ignorant as the Canon Fr. Manuel Formigão called them.

I do not mean this to be the final word on the subject; what makes me one hundred percent certain that the children did experience something supernatural is that, in line with all people who have had divine encounters, it changed their lives so radically and dramatically. They did not only see an apparition and heard a message, but they also lived and embodied that message for the rest of their lives.

The vision of hell
Quidquid recipitur ad modum recipientes recipitur. (St. Thomas Aquinas)
What is received, is received according to the capacity of the receiver. This Thomist principle helps us to understand and conceptualize the visions and in the case of Fatima, it is fundamental to the explanation of the vision of hell. When Our Lady showed the children the vision of hell, she could not show them the true reality of what hell is really like. It would have been like putting the sea inside a hole in the sand on the shore, paraphrasing the tale of St. Augustine in understanding the mystery of the Holy Trinity.

What the children saw was a re-creation in their own mind of all the preaching that up until then they had heard from priests, who in those days never tired of frightening people with the fire of hell; also, from the graphical representation in holy pictures and small land posts or monuments representing the souls in purgatory that even today abound along our pathways in the countryside.

Once again, what is there in this experience that points out divine revelation? Certainly not the way the children saw hell, but rather that the the vision was provoked by the Lady. In other words, the experience in itself was initiated by Our Lady; the particular way this experience was brought to life by the children has to do with their capacity to comprehend hell and with the way they have always imagined it which was formed by catechesis and the priests’ preaching. Paraphrasing Saint Thomas Aquinas’ principle, what the children saw, they saw it according to their mental capacity, and the images of their world view.

The miracle of the sun
After having suffered very much from the unbelief and the pressure from her mother and the parish priest to recant her story, Lucia asked the Lady at the July 13th apparition to perform a miracle “so that all may believe that Your Grace appears to us”. The Lady promised that she would and renewed that promise at the two subsequent apparitions on August 19th and September 13th. And so, this was how a large multitude of people came to gather at the Cova da Iria on the 13th of October, 1917. Here are some excerpts taken from O Século Newspaper, a liberal anticlerical and masonic daily of Lisbon:

And, precisely at the appointed time in July – at noon --- something amazing starts. Unexpectedly-- because a torrential rain had filled Cova da Iria with mud--, Lucia tells the crowd to close their umbrellas (…) (then) the sun shook, the sun took on never seen sudden movements, outside of all cosmic laws, -- the sun danced, according to the common expression of the peasants…

«It was like a ball of snow, revolving on itself » (Fr. Lorenzo)

«This sun’s disc moved vertiginously. This was not the sparkling of a heavenly body. It spun around on itself in a mad whirl. .» (Dr. Almeida Garrett)

«At some point, the sun stopped and then started to dance, and dance; stopped again and again started to dance» (Mr. Marto, Jacinta’s and Francisco’s father)

«A light, whose colors changed from one moment to the next, saw itself reflected in the people and in the things» (Dr. Pereira Gens – who saw it from 40 km away)

Once more we say it again that something happened, not nothing, and that this time, something which had been announced three months earlier, happened on the day and the hour indicated. The phenomenon was witnessed this time not only by the three poor, illiterate, rude and ignorant peasants, but also by teachers, priests, medical doctors and professors of the local university. So what exactly happened?

Of all the explanations available to explain this phenomenon, the one that appears to us to be the most plausible is given by the physicist and Benedictine monk, Fr. Stanley Jaki (1924-2009) who was a professor at Princeton University in New Jersey where Einstein was also teaching. Fr. Jaki actually bothered to go to Portugal to interview some of those who had experienced the phenomenon firsthand, and here is his conclusion:

It is a very rare meteorological phenomenon, resulting in the convergence and interaction between cirrus clouds (at high altitudes, consisting of ice crystals), with the low altitude clouds (made of particles of water in liquid state), the wind  that made the particles of water and ice interact in a twirling spiral wheel, which in turn generated simultaneously a beam of shimmering colours (resulting from the refraction of sun’s rays on the water and ice particles) and a rare “lens” effect, which explains the amazement of the people in Cova da Iria, who thought that the sun, appearing to increase in size, was going to plunge on them… Stanley L. Jaki, God and the Sun at Fatima, Real View Books, 1999.

If it was not an astronomical phenomenon, if the sun did not dance and the laws of physics were not violated, but was only a meteorological phenomenon, rare but possible, then where is the miracle? The miracle lies on the fact that it had been foreseen by the little shepherds five months before and it was pointed out by Lucia the very day and the exact moment when it was to happen and indeed it did happen.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

Fatima: How did it "impose" itself on the Church?

On the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the 

apparitions, May 13, 1967, after the mass, the crowd 

cried out to Pope Paul VI. “We want to see Lucia!”.

«It is not the Church that imposed Fatima on the faithful, it is Fatima that imposed itself on the Church», by Cardinal Cerejeira in 1943

The Church does not and would never declare Fatima with the infallibility of a dogma. What took place there occurred in an intermediate domain between the natural and the supernatural. Therefore, as everything related to matters of faith, it cannot be proven in a fully convincing manner to rational thinking just as it cannot be refuted. The Church confines herself to declaring that whatever happened in Fatima can be accepted with a reasonable certainty. It is plausible because faith can never be rational or rationalised; it must, however, always be reasonable.

Fatima took a long and arduous road to be accepted by the ecclesiastical authorities and tolerated by the ruling power. A road where, certainly more than once, God intervened in order not to be ignored. Yes God, because the three little shepherds were not at all passionate in defending their testimony. On the contrary, in some way or so it seems from the numerous cross-examinations that it mattered very little to them whether or not they were believed.

Voice of the people, voice of God
People continue to flock to Fatima on the 13th of each month by the hundreds of thousands even after the death of Francisco in 1919 and of Jacinta in 1920. This despite being ridiculed by the secular newspapers and hampered by the civil authorities and even after the original chapel was bombed in 1921 by the Freemasons.

Because Jacinta was not able to keep the May 13th apparition a secret as she had promised Lucia, the children were no longer alone during the remaining five apparitions occurring on the 13th of each month, ending in October. On June 13th, fifty people were with them and on July 13th, around three thousand were there surrounding the little shepherds. On the 13th of August despite the seers been thrown into prison, some 18,000 people gathered at the place of the apparitions; in that month, the seers saw the Lady on the 19th at another place after they were released from jail. On the 13th of September, a sizeable crowd of 30,000 people were present and finally, on the 13th of October, the day of the last apparition, up to 70,000 witnessed the miracle that was announced well in advance, just as the Lady had promised Lucia three months before on July 13th.

It was not just faith that led the masses of people to Cova da Iria from the second appearance onwards, but also the participation and preparation just prior to each apparition that always began with the praying of the Rosary led by Lucia. It is true that only the seers saw Our Lady. Among them, only Lucia could converse with her, but the rest of the people could sense or hear something...

All of them were unanimous in declaring that at the solar midday of every 13th of the month, including August when the children were absent because they were detained by authorities, the sunlight intensity was lowered, a breeze of fresh air could be felt and a small cloud would descend on the holm oak where the little shepherds said that Our Lady stood.

During the course of the apparitions, everyone could see Lucy in ecstasy and heard her speak; in answer to her questions, they could hear a noise similar to a "buzz of bees". Lucia always gave a warning when the vision ended and the moment when the Lady was withdrawing to the East from where she would always come.

One day Jacinta cut a sprig of the holm oak on which Our Lady had stood and everyone who smelled it experienced a delightful unknown scent. Finally, the Miracle of the Sun sealed in the people’s minds the authenticity of Fatima which since then is visited by the hundreds of thousands and even millions of faithful.

"Voice of the people, voice of God". - Who promoted and defended Fatima, imposing it on a perplexed Church and prevailing against the insidious attacks of the atheistic, anticlerical and freemasonry republicanism, were the common people.  They started flocking to Fatima by the thousands from the very beginning. Without the people, Fatima would have been ignored and long forgotten. The paradigm of the Bible that the ignorant confuse the sages is once again verified. (Matthew 11: 25)

Those who argue, without any proof, that it was the Church who invented Fatima, ignore the historical documentation that proves precisely the contrary. Fatima was not approved until 1930, after 13 long years of careful and thorough investigation. The initial reluctance of the Church in relation to Fatima is notorious as shown by the testimony of Fr. Lacerda, the director of a newspaper of that time called "the Messenger", about the parish priest of Fatima:

As a last bit of enlightenment, I have to say that the parish priest of Fatima, my friend Fr. Manuel Marques Ferreira, was kept oblivious of everything, making sure to never go to the Cova da Iria on the days of the apparitions. Finally, he gave in to peer pressure and went there only on the last day.

Speaking still about the parish priest of Fatima, Mr. Marto, the father of Francisco and Jacinta who unlike Lucia’s mother was the first to believe in the testimony of his children, stated that the parish priest doesn’t believe nor does he allow anyone to believe. The incredulity of the parish priest influenced and partly explains the refusal of Mrs. Maria Rosa, Lucia’s mother, to admit until almost at the end of her life the grace that the Blessed Virgin had granted her daughter. She had in fact given Lucia a very hard time regarding her testimony of the apparitions.

It was the people who ran to the Cova da Iria by the thousands who kept the flame of Fatima alive to compel the civil authorities to respect it and the ecclesiastical authority to take a positive stand. That took place on May 13, 1922, the day when Dom José Alves Correia da Silva, bishop of Leiria, published the “Provision on the events of Fatima”.

It summarizes the events that took place in Fatima in recent years, pointing out precisely the massive public support despite the persecution of the civil authorities and the aloofness of the religious authorities and appointing a commission to study the extraordinary occurrences according to the canon laws.

It also calls on the faithful of his and other dioceses to “give account of everything you know either in favor or against the apparitions or extraordinary facts, to say with respect to them, and to testify especially whether in them there was or is any exploitation, superstition, doctrines or damaging things against our Holy Religion.” 

How were the apparitions seen by the authorities
Again, those who say that Fatima was invented by the Church do not have the documents to prove their slanders and surely have not read the Critical Documentation of Fatima which describes:

It is not plausible that three children of such tender ages, (…) rude and ignorant, lying and persisting in lies for so many months, despite been harassed with questions and interrogations (…) and threatened by representatives of ecclesiastical and civil authority (…) No fear is capable of deterring them from affirming that they see Our Lady (…) The naturalness and frankness with which they express themselves, the simplicity and candor with which they present themselves, the indifference and disinterest that they show as to whether or not they are credible. – Critical documentation of Fatima

This is the conclusion reached by the Canon Fr. Manuel Nunes Formigão after countless interrogations carried out by himself, his friend Fr. Manuel Marques Ferreira the parish priest of Aljustrel and Fatima at the time, and a countless number of other clerics. They were critical and sometimes even sarcastic but never abusive in their cross-examinations of the children seers, although at times would drive them to exhaustion, especially right after the miracle of the sun.

Much more condescending were the civil authorities, as they went to the extreme of submitting the children to psychological torture. They kidnapped them and threatened to throw them into a huge pot of boiling oil that was waiting for them in the next room unless they recanted their testimony. The first to be questioned was Jacinta, followed by Francisco and then Lucia. One by one all three entered the dreadful room certain that they would be fried. Francisco thinking that his beloved sister was already dead, and Lucia thinking that her dear friends and cousins were already in heaven as the Lady had promised that she would take them soon.

Adding to this torture was the constant pressure from the people; some tried to cajole and bribe the children out of their secret while others made fun of them. It was almost impossible that anyone let alone three young children could withstand so much badgering and harassment if what they declared was just a lie and the apparitions were only make-believe. Because of the threats and fearing the worse, Jacinta's parents thought of taking the children away from Fatima, but the children refused saying, “If they kill us, it's okay! We will go to heaven more quickly!"

On the 13th of October a large crowd was expected because Lucia had said since the July 13th apparition that the Lady was going to perform a miracle for everyone to believe. As the day approached, the fear and pressure on the seers’ families mounted; so unbearable it became that Lucy's mother early in the morning of October 13th suggested that she and her daughter should go to confession in case the miracle does not happen and the mob kill them all.

Calmly and self-assuredly Lucia consoled her mother by saying that if she wanted they could indeed go to confession, but she was sure that the Lady would perform the miracle because not only had she promised that she would, but she had also restated the promise at the August and September apparitions.

Alone and against all odds, only the divine providence mattered to them, because even their closest families especially those of Lucia contributed to their suffering for considering them liars. They were certainly willing to pay with their lives for the testimony that they gave because they not only proclaimed the message of Our Lady as their own but also incarnated it in their lives. (…) they will arrest you and persecute you; (…) putting you into prisons. (…) This will give you an opportunity to testify. So make up your minds not to prepare your defence in advance; for I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict. (Luke 21:12-15)

On one hand, the strategies followed by the civil authority to discredit and silence the children and prevent them and the people from going back to Cova da Iria, the place of the apparitions.

On the other hand, the rigorous process that was followed by the ecclesiastical authority that in addition to the interrogations and cross-examinations carried out by the parish and canon priests had set up a commission that instituted an official canonical inquiry to ascertain the veracity of the apparitions. Finally on October 13, 1930, thirteen years after, with the knowledge and approval of Pope Pius XI, Bishop Dom José Correia da Silva announced the results of the investigations in a pastoral letter:

(…) humbly invoking the Divine Spirit and placing ourselves under the protection of the most Holy Virgin, and after hearing the opinions of our Rev. Advisors, we declare worthy of belief the visions of the shepherd children in the Cova da Iria, parish of Fatima, in this diocese, from 13th of May to the 13th of October, 1917… We permit officially the cult of Our Lady of Fatima.

Fatima and the popes
On May 5th, 1917 when World War I was still at its height, Pope Benedict XV in a letter addressed to the Secretary of State, Cardinal Gasparri, the Holy Father prayed vehemently for Heaven’s help through the intercession of the Mother of God,

In consequence, we call upon you, Eminence, to make known to the entire episcopate our ardent desire that all have recourse to the Heart of Jesus, throne of graces, and that they have recourse by the mediation of Mary (…) the pious and devout invocation and let it bear to Her the anguished cry of mothers and wives, the wailing of innocent little ones, the sighs of every generous heart; that her most tender and benign solicitude may be moved and the peace we ask for be obtained for our world that has gone mad, the aspired peace, and may it be remembered in the future centuries the efficacy of Her intercession and the greatness of the benefit that She has obtained for Her children”.

Eight days later Our Lady appeared in Fatima announcing to the Pope and to the world her plan for peace. A year later that same Pope in his letter to the Portuguese bishops to re-establish the diocese of Leiria, referred to the occurrences at Fatima as “an extraordinary aid from the Mother of God”.

Pius XI, the successor of Benedict XV, personally distributed holy cards of Our Lady of Fatima to the seminarians.  Pius XII publically spoke of Fatima for the first time in 1940 in his encyclical the Saeculo exeunte; in 1950 he addressed the Superior General of the Dominicans: “Tell your friars that the Pope’s thought is contained in the Message of Fatima”.

In 1964 at the end of the Second Vatican Council, Pope Paul VI gave his Golden Rose to Fatima, commissioned the whole Church to the care of Our Lady of Fatima, and even visited the Cova da Iria on the 50th anniversary of the first apparition. Pope John Paul II visited Fatima three times – in 1982, 1991 and again in 2000. During his final visit in 2000, he beatified the two deceased seers, Jacinta and Francisco. He also made it universal the feast day of Our Lady of Fatima, ordering it to be included in the Roman Missal. Finally, Pope Francis asked the Patriarch of Lisbon to consecrate his pontificate to the Virgin of Fatima, and that happened on May 13, 2013.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC