Fatima: Private Revelation, but not for private use

Revelation – public, private, or what else?
The Church calls public revelation the coming of Christ, the Son of God who came into the world and was incarnated in the womb of Virgin Mary. It is his Life, Word and Work amongst us, his death, resurrection and ascension to Heaven, and the coming of the Holy Spirit. In contrast to this are the private revelations, the apparitions of Our Lady in Guadalupe, Lourdes, Fatima as well as the mystical visions of the saints in the 2000 years of Christianity.

If we stop and think, we will realize that public revelation is not really public nor is private revelation truly private; rather, both are at the same time public and private. Every revelation is public because the recipient of that revelation is never alone, and exclusively the person or persons to whom the revelation is given. On the other hand, all revelations are private because they are never made “urbi et orbe” to the general public, but rather in private to a person or group of people. What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops. (Matthew 10:27)

Judas (not Iscariot) said to him, “Lord, how is it that you will reveal yourself to us, and not to the world?” Jesus answered him, “Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them…” (John 14:22-23)

God raised him on the third day and allowed him to appear, not to all the people but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses, and who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. (Acts 10:40-41)

The public revelation of Jesus of Nazareth was given in private to the intimate inner circle of those who lived and came with him from Galilee and those who saw him in his glory after the Resurrection. Like Judas Thaddeus, when I was young I thought that the risen Jesus should have shown himself to all the people, especially to Annas, Caiaphas, Herod and Pilate, and to all those who had shouted “crucify him”! It was only later that I understood the response that Jesus gave to Judas. Only love and faith can lead to knowledge, to the revelation of Jesus Christ. Jesus only reveals himself to those who love him and believe in him.

Therefore the aforementioned public revelation was, in fact, private as Jesus revealed his identity only to his disciples. The recipient of this revelation, however, is all of the humanity, men and women of all races, tongues, nations and places of all times.

The private revelation of Fatima, in the same way as that of Christ, despite it having public aspects from the beginning since the children after the first apparition were never there alone, was a private revelation because only the three little shepherds were visited by Our Lady. Yet, the recipient of the revelation was the whole world of the twentieth century and if we think of the devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary that Lucia had been charged to propagate, then it is for all peoples of all times and places.

Private revelations as echoes of the Gospel
If it was not for prophecy, people would degenerate. For this reason, in all ages, men have been divinely instructed in matters expedient for the salvation of the Elect. – St. Thomas Aquinas

“Since the beginning of the world, Our Lady has appeared many times, in different ways… And that is what counts… the world is bad, but if there were not many cases like this, the worse it would have been… The power of God is mighty! We do not know what it is, but it is something… It is whatever God wants it to be.” Mr. Marto (Father of Francisco and Jacinta, and the first to believe in the apparitions)

From his academic ignorance, Mr. Marto has practically said the same thing as the greatest theologians of all times, Saint Thomas Aquinas. People have forgotten that even during biblical times God had raised prophets to correct and redirect the people back to Him from concrete historical situations.

During my days as a theology student, we used to say that Heaven has already spoken once for all times through Jesus Christ the eternal Word made flesh, so it will not speak again. In those days, we understood that Heaven has closed not for three and a half years like in the days of Prophet Elijah (Luke 4:25) but for all eternity.

The Marian apparitions as well as all sorts of private revelations have never been the object of theological reflection, not even in the subject called Mariology. Main stream theology looks at these revelations with disdain and relegates them to popular piety. I'm glad that the Holy Spirit does not always blow through the hierarchy, but rather He blows wherever He chooses (John 3:8) and in the case of Fatima, the voice of the people was the voice of God that stood up to the doctors of the Church.

It is true that after Christ nothing new will be revealed to replace what has been revealed in Christ, but something needs to be done to make sure that this revelation of Christ is not lost in time. This is, moreover, the role of the Holy Spirit, to repeat, to inculturate, and to apply the Gospel amid the idiosyncrasies of each place and time.

In this sense, the apparitions and the visions are like an echo of the Gospel; they remind or pinpoint to us any aspects that we may have forgotten or have not yet put into practice. Like cell phone antennas that carry our messages and voices from one to the next, private revelations, apparitions or visions, provide a service to the Gospel so that its transmission is not lost in time or space; and so that, one day in the future, we may be able to respond positively to that puzzling question the Lord has left us in the Gospel of Saint Luke: But when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth? (Luke 18:8)

The apparitions in the context of a more comprehensive Revelation
While many theologians discredit the visions and apparitions, calling them “private” and giving them a secondary and optional stand in the sense that we do not need them for our salvation, Karl Rahner who is without a doubt the greatest theologian of the twentieth century, considers them an amplification of the Revelation in the manner of an accurate and/or a clarification of the divine will, related to a specific action of the Church or to a particular historical situation.

In this way, Rahner overcomes the diatribe on public/private revelation and their mutual exclusion by merging the two into one single Revelation that occurs by and large throughout the history of mankind. After all, the Church is herself the Revelation or the subject of the revelation insofar as she is the realization of the Gospel of Christ here and now.

“The divine Words grow together with the one who reads them,” said Saint Gregory the Great. God’s revelation is not something immutable that was frozen in the past; it is a continuous process and is in some way interactive. This interaction is not only between the Scriptures and whoever reads them but also between Scriptures, the process and the historical context in which they are read and incarnated.

The function of the Church at the core of the history of mankind is to make this history a story of salvation. In this sense, the Church is the leaven of the Kingdom of God, a yeast intended to raise the entire mass – a world that is to be gradually transformed into the Kingdom of God on earth.

Just as there are evolution and revolution in the world so there are evolution and revolution in the interior of the Church; evolution is the ordinary activity while revolution is the extraordinary one. The ordinary has to do with the gradual evolution of the world with the view of becoming the kingdom of God. The extraordinary or revolutionary has to do with the prophecy through the action of the Holy Spirit who blows wherever and whenever he desires.

Prophets are not only characters of the Old Testament. We are all baptized into a common priestly, prophetic and kingly vocation and in real life, each Christian develops within one or the other of this common vocation. In the Old Testament, the prophets were the catalysts for the will of God in times of needs. Both in that time as in the present time, a prophet is always the bearer of a concrete message of God. The prophet does not only proclaims this message but also embodies it, making it his life. It is in this sense that we must regard the seers of Fatima, Lucia, Jacinta and Francisco; the three, depending on their personalities, embody different aspects of the message of Fatima.

General revelation and particular revelation
Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds. (Hebrews 1:1-2)

Public revelation is, therefore, the Word of God stated by and incarnated in the person of Jesus the Nazarene. This Word beckons to our unchanging human nature. What was love two thousand years ago will still be love ten thousand years from now and beyond. The values like love, truth, and justice upon which human life is anchored, are timeless and so they do not change with the passage of time.

If human nature was susceptible to change over time then Christ would have to be incarnated many times throughout human history in order to be the way, the truth, and the life for human beings at each generation. But since human nature does not change, then at the right moment according to His divine providence, God incarnated into the History of mankind once and for all. In this sense, Heaven has spoken and will not speak again.

Whether you are an agnostic, an atheist, or a member of another religion, all those who want happiness and self-fulfillment here and now, and thereafter, must measure themselves to Jesus of Nazareth as he is the sole role model, the only human paradigm for all who strive to be fully human.

Fatima, Lourdes, Guadalupe and many other private revelations are not strictly necessary for the salvation of the human race, but they may be complementary. For this to be the case, the elements that they contain cannot be contrary to the Gospels. This is, in fact, the main criterion used to discern the veracity and validity of these revelations.

Perhaps there is not a single word or concept outside of public/private that does justice and defines exactly the two types of revelation:

Public, general or essential - because it is for the peoples of all times and places, and the one we cannot do without if we are to attain salvation.

Private, particular or non-essential - because it is, to a certain extent, restricted to a particular place and time and to a particular group of people, so is not indispensable for the salvation of the human race.

Pe. Jorge Amaro, IMC

FATIMA: The Extraordinary extraordinarily

Positivist theology
The theology that I studied in the eighties, in a Jesuit university, was noticeably positivist, and it has greatly influenced my way of understanding the faith and God’s actions in human history. Even up to today, I can still remember some of the maxims that are engraved in my mind and that at any moment, act as a benchmark to measure and evaluate the things of God in a way that is perhaps too rationalistic, where Fatima would certainly not belong.

Faith is a reasonable gift – This is the definition of faith given by the First Vatican Council. It is true that faith cannot be rational, but it has to be humanly credible and plausible. If this is not the case, then it is not faith, but superstition. Because God created us as rational beings, He cannot ask us to sacrifice reason entirely in order to believe in Him.

The extraordinary within the ordinary – The extraordinary does not occur extraordinarily, that is, in a dazzling and objectively obvious way in everyone’s eyes so that faith is not needed to believe. On the contrary, the extraordinary happens within the ordinary, in a hidden way that is only perceivable or visible through the eyes of faith.

God does not infringe on the laws of nature – If God created the laws of nature then it will not be Him who will break them first. During my days as a theology student, with this maxim, we sanctioned many of the miracles that Jesus did in the Gospels and sought more plausible explanations for them. For example, the multiplication of the loaves was a miracle of sharing, because many had most probably brought their own provisions.

God does not interfere – God neither punishes nor rewards; he does not interfere in the lives of men; he lets them roam and fare freely. He is not a fireman who comes to put out the fire; should an intervention be needed, He would do it indirectly in a discreet and mysterious way, through mediators inspired by Him, but never directly.

Resurrected was the doctrine not the person – The highest exponent in positivist theology can maybe be found in the Protestant theologian Rudolf Bultmann’s theory on the resurrection of Christ. For him what was raised from the dead was not the person of Jesus of Nazareth, but the "kerygma", Jesus’ doctrine, for being truly revolutionary. Saint Paul would certainly oppose this theologian by saying:  if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile. (1 Corinthians 15:17)

I also recall in those days the existence of a certain theological schizophrenia; the historical Jesus of Nazareth and the Christ of faith, he in whom we believe, were not the same person. In fact, they were studied as two different subject matters and taught by two different teachers, Jesus of Nazareth was studied in Christology and the Christ of faith was studied in Dogmatic Christology.

“A todos los tontos se les aparece la virgem” – A Spanish expression that I heard many times during my years at a university in Madrid. It means: all fools claim to have seen the Blessed Virgin Mary. It is a fact that many of the supernatural experiences, that some people claim to have had, are nothing but manifestations of mental illnesses such as schizophrenia. That is why there is this expression to dispel all types of paranormal phenomena.

“It was not the Church that imposed Fatima on the faithful but it was Fatima that imposed itself on the Church!”
Many years have already passed since I studied theology, and life and experience have led me to review some of these positions. For one thing, there are miracles that, for all we know, seem to contradict the laws of nature; it is true that God created these laws, but it is also true that His actions ought not to be limited by them. There is no sense in God creating His own limitations or being limited by anything that He Himself has created.

Even science itself does not look at the laws of nature within the framework of the mechanist physics of Newton. According to Newton, nature by its laws functioned like a precise clock. Afterward, Einstein with his quantum mechanics blew away the determinism of the laws of nature, and they are now understood as not being fixed, certain and absolute. Furthermore, in the laws of nature, the uncertainty principle of Heisenberg substituted the inflexible certainty for fluctuant probability.

What all this means is that things may indeed happen the way we have always seen them happening, but there is still a chance that they may not happen the way we have envisioned thus far. The determinism of Newton’s physics is substituted by chance in quantum physics.

Within the frame of mind of Newton’s physics, it was very difficult to understand miracles since these seem always to go against the laws of nature. However, everything changes when we try to conceptualize miracles within the frame of mind of quantum physics. Trying to understand miracles within the framework of this advanced physics, it then becomes clearer that not only can they happen, but they even do so without contradicting the laws of nature. Therefore the only thing we need to change is our understanding of these laws.

In so doing, it makes it easier for us to understand that the extraordinary can indeed occur extraordinarily. This is the frame of mind by which we can understand and accept the miraculous events that took place in Fatima, Lourdes, and Guadalupe and in hundreds of other private revelations throughout history.

The phrase quoted above was first said by Cardinal Cerejeira of Portugal in 1943 and has since been repeated by many people, including popes. It is probably because it encompasses the experience, or the change of position, of many people with respect to the revelation at Fatima. This is the very same process I myself followed: Fatima imposed itself on me by the depth and meaning of its message and by the candor, simplicity, and goodness of the three young seers, Jacinta who was only 7, her cousin and intimate friend Lucia was 10, and her beloved brother Francisco was 9.

In the midst of the generalized war in Europe with the tragic participation of Portugal and in the social national context of an illuminist and atheistic republican revolution whose purpose was to secularize the society, a beam of light breaks out from the sky.

The supernatural erupts into the natural; the extraordinary takes place extraordinarily to bring life and to strengthen the small battered flock of Christians who fell victims to the wolves of rationalism and atheism and to confuse these very same atheists, leaving them stunned in amazement before a reality they could not understand as it did not conform to their prejudiced ideologies.

The “ignorant” confuse the sage
“I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants.” (Matthew 11:25)

As much in the message as in the message bearers, Fatima follows the paradigm of the Gospel to reveal to the poor and the ignorant those things that still today confound the wise theologians, whose rationalism aims to limit the action of God.

And again, the very same paradigm of the Gospel is also followed with regards to the identity of the message bearers of Fatima –shepherds were the first ones who saw God becoming man in Bethlehem, and shepherds were Lucia, Jacinta and Francisco, the seers and message bearers of Fatima.

“Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 18:3) – Since the message bearers were children, only those who are children in the evangelical sense can understand. Fatima only makes sense to the simple of hearts and to those disarmed of intellectual prejudices.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC