Fatima: Something must have happened, Not nothing

Fatima has come a long way since right from the very beginning, it has had its share of enemies both at national and international level. In reading the writings of the detractors concerning the events and the message, it is clear to me after a thorough investigation of the facts that their claims are too frivolous, biased and ignorant of the reality and the well-documented facts. Those assertions are so cheap, and easy to refute that I am not going to waste my time discussing them. I prefer to spend my time and energy on the facts and the message which will give the readers plenty of elements to refute the critics of Fatima should they come across them.

Among the adversaries of Fatima, there are some who think that everything was made up by the Church of that time while there are others who latch onto the contradictions of the children subjected to the wearisome interrogations like a dog with its bone.  There are also those from within the Church who use their leverage on the incongruities of the theological message of Fatima in order to refute it entirely. 

There is gold in the river sand, but not all sand is gold
This is the metaphor that I use whenever I want to explain how the Bible contains the Word of God, but that not everything which is written in the Bible is the word of God. Just as we need to sieve the sand in the river to find the gold hidden in it, so we need to sieve the Bible to find in it the Word of God.

When we pass the Bible through literary and historical criticism, exegesis, and many fields of science such as archeology, psychology, philosophy etc., we can then distinguish and put aside what are beliefs, usages and customs, history of that time, the personality and character of the author, and his prejudices. When all this is evidenced and separated, it is then that we find what is purely the inspiration of God, that is, the ipsissima Dei verbum or the exact word of God.

The criteria that we use for the Bible, as the public Revelation of God, can also be used for the private revelation at Fatima, especially for the theological incongruities that the message of Fatima seems to contain, for example:

...lead all souls to heaven especially those who are in most need – It is true that the ending of this prayer in Portuguese makes no sense since we all need God’s salvation. The prayer is complete in English as it ends with “…especially those in most need of thy (divine) mercy”. Those who are the furthest from God, who are in the most misery, are in need of God’s mercy more than those who are closer to Him.

Penance and prayer for the conversion of sinners – This seems to imply that whoever prays and does penance for the forgiveness of sinners, need not to include himself in that category, meaning that he is no longer a sinner. This would contradict the word of God which states, If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. (1 John 1:8)

But in actual fact, the young seers did indeed recognize themselves as sinners, and also had their own conversion. For example, after the apparitions they found themselves unable to recite the rosary the way they did before which was to reduce the entire prayer to a string of just four words “Hail Mary, Hail Mary”. Instead, they started to recite the rosary slowly and in its entirety.

But of course more than that, after the apparitions they did everything in their power not to sin because they loved God so much that they feared offending Him as they knew He was already sufficiently offended on account of other sinners.

“Something must have happened, not nothing”
Going back to the time when I was a student of positivist theology, after having read all the theories of the resurrection of Jesus from the boldest to the most unreasonable and literal as told by the Gospels, I grasped on this formula of the then “best seller” theologian, Hans Kung. For Kung, the resurrection took the apostles by surprise, just as the apparitions at Fatima did to the three young shepherds.

It is difficult for anyone, not just for Kung, to describe the type of experience the apostles had, but for sure “something must have happened, not nothing”. Out of nothing only God can create; humans can only create from things that have already been created by God.

 Something must have happened to transform those fearful and cowardly disciples, who had already gone back to their ways of life before they met Jesus, into fearless and courageous evangelizers, as shown by Peter’s discourse in the Acts of Apostles (Acts 2:14-36). It is true that the apostles’ experience of the risen Lord may not have all the realism that is described in the Gospels; nevertheless, it had to be somehow real for if this was not the case then it would not have been described so realistically, instead it would have been presented in a more mystical way.

I bring forth this very same rationale concerning the apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary to the three young shepherds at Fatima. Something must have happened there because these three young shepherds could not possibly have made up on their own both the event and the content of the message.

The same radical change that the apostles experienced was also experienced by these three children. Something really big must have happened that transformed their lives so drastically, not only outwardly as they started to live under the gaze and scrutiny of everyone there, but also inwardly as they configured their lives to the message of the Lady thus experiencing a real conversion.

There are details of the Fatima phenomenon that can have a merely human or natural explanation, such as the vision of hell, and the visions in the form of flashes of Our Lady of Sorrows, St. Joseph and the Child Jesus, Christ blessing the people and Our Lady of Mount Carmel; however, the main events of Fatima, as well as the message itself, are not humanly or naturally explainable. Something supernatural out of the everyday experience must have happened.

The seers knew nothing of what was going on in the world at the national and international level; even if they did know something, they would not have been able to conceptualize or understand it; they did not even know that there was a country named Russia; in fact, Lucia thought it was a bad woman that needed to be converted.

So, something somewhat objective and real must have happened, for mystical experiences are never collective but tend to be intimate and individual. It also tends to happen at the end of a long process that always involves ascetics, contemplation and prayer.

Very much like the appearance of the risen Lord to the apostles, the vision of the Angel in 1916 and of the Blessed Virgin Mary on May 13, 1917 took the three children by surprise. At the time of the first Mariam apparition, the children were not even praying but simply tending their flock. 

When they heard thunder and saw lightning they ran for cover and as they did, they witnessed something unusual and unexpected -- a Lady more brilliant than the sun stood up above a tree, and as in all theophany, both in the Old and New Testament, the Lady told them not to be afraid as she meant them no harm.

As it was the case with the apostles, in Fatima we are faced with not one or two but three witnesses to the first apparition. Many more were present at the subsequent apparitions, until over 70,000 were gathered at the last one on October 13, 1917 to witness “the Miracle of the Sun” as the Lady had promised the young shepherds.

In all these apparitions, there were people who testified having felt and seen something. The three seers as well as the rest of the people all witnessed the same supernatural phenomenon each in his or her own fashion but yet the same event. Not even the young seers experienced it in the same way: Francisco could see but not hear the Lady, Jacinta could both see and hear her, but only Lucia had full communication with the Lady as she was able to see, hear and talk to her, and the Lady would respond.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

Fatima - Lourdes - Guadalupe

The Church accepts as true and worthy of consideration these three Marian apparitions. It is probable that there are many others, but it is not for me to judge their authenticity and therefore I am referring to only these three. As someone has said, it is better to be wrong as a community than to be right alone.

To fully understand Fatima, we cannot just frame it within its national, international and theological domain but we also need to look at it in the context of Our Lady’s previous apparitions at Guadalupe and Lourdes, also approved by the Church.

In these three apparitions which took place at different places and times, there are similarities and differences, but first we will seek to assure ourselves that there are reasons to affirm that they were indeed theophanies.  In other words, whatever happened in each of these places cannot be explained merely in human terms, and we are left but to conclude that they were supernatural events. We will examine the reasons for Our Lady’s visit to these places, and the message that she came to bring.

Maria – Ambassadress, Special Envoy, Spokeswoman
Before we examine each of these apparitions individually, let us look into the reasons behind all of them. Why does Mary come to see her people from time to time in different places? Following Luther’s saying of “solus Christus, sola fide, sola Scriptura”, we know that the Protestants only give value to what is in the Bible and discard all that is not. How then can we reason Mary’s visits with someone formed in this mentality?

Mary’s visitation to her cousin Elizabeth, Luke 1:39-45 – Our faith was never grounded in religion – the effort of man to relate to a superior being, God, seeking His approval – but rather, it is based on a Revelation, that is, it is God who comes to us. “You did not choose me but I chose you.”(John 15:16) Already in the prehistory of our faith in Judaism, God visits His people, and like Mary at the wedding feast at Cana who felt compassion for they had no wine, God felt compassion for His people’s oppression in Egypt and sought to free them from slavery.

Mary came to know by an Angel that her cousin needed help and she hastily went to visit her. Since that time, she has never ceased to visit us; it is her whom God sends, because when Jesus left for his Father’s house he gave his mother to us. Being the image of femininity and motherhood of God, she exercises these qualities of God in a sacramental way; therefore, she acts in the person of God.

Why is Mary sent? Because she is the flesh of our flesh; she is totally human and born like us from an act of human love with the difference of her immaculate conception, because she was destined to be the mother of the Son of God made man and the beginning of a New Humanity.

The wedding feast at Cana, John 2:1-11 – Mary is the best ambassadress between heaven and earth. She represents humanity in heaven because she is like us, fully human; she also represents God on earth because she was conceived without the original sin, that is, she is the human being whom God originally intended to create, the Eve before the fall, the human nature not yet adulterated by sin.

As the ambassadress, the special envoy or the spokeswoman for God and humanity, her task is to refer to God the matters of men and to men the matters of God. Thus to God, she refers the needs of humanity, like in Cana she said, “They have no wine”; in Guadalupe, she probably said the evangelization is not progressing; in Lourdes, she might have said they have no health, and in Fatima, she likely said they have no peace. To men, in Cana she said, “Do whatever he tells you”; in Guadalupe, build a church; in Lourdes, pray the rosary; in Fatima, offer yourselves to God in penance and prayer.

Guadalupe – Missionary Intervention
On the 9th of December, 1531, ten years after the conquest of the city of Mexico, when peace had already been established between the Indians and the Spaniards, Mary appeared to an Indian named Juan Diego.

Proofs of God’s intervention through Mary
As always and with prudence whenever faced with this type of claim, the ecclesiastical authorities manifest first perplexity, and in the case of Guadalupe, the Bishop Frei Juan de Zumarraga even demanded a proof. Our Lady accepted the challenge and sent Juan Diego with his cloak or tilma full of fresh and lush roses that were out of season because it was winter. As the cloak was unrolled to expose the flowers before the bishop, the very same image of Our Lady of Guadalupe which we venerate today was revealed on the tilma as the flowers tumbled out.

The Tilma on which the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe is imprinted has already been analyzed by numerous highly qualified scientists, and many findings continue to baffle them as well as the skeptics. For example, the source of the pigments remains unknown -- not natural, animal, vegetable or mineral, and the way the painting was painted on the Tilma has never been seen before as there are no brush strokes, sketches or corrections. Also, it is not understood how the painting and the natural fabric of the Tilma, which usually lasts only 20 to 30 years, have stayed in mint condition after almost 500 years without any treatment or preservatives.

To this day the image has not ceased to amaze us. Lately, it has been discovered that Our Lady’s eyes on the Tilma reflect the image of what happened historically; that is, in the pupils of the eyes a photographer discovered the photographic image of the Indian unrolling the cloak in front of the bishop. So, Our Lady not only left us a printed image of her apparition but also captured as in a photo the astonishment of the bishop upon seeing the proof he had requested. This message has remained hidden for centuries so that it could be discovered when new technologies surfaced, just when faith in the veracity of Mary’s visit may have faltered.

The Reason for the Visit
The Evangelization of the Americas was very difficult. The Mayans, the Aztecs and the Incas were peoples proud of their cultures and their gods; their temples and pyramids showed a civilization advanced for its time. For this reason they would not willingly accept a foreign religion, especially a religion that presented the idea of a God who would sacrifice himself for his people, contrary to their gods who demanded human sacrifices.

Furthermore, the conquest of the Americas had been violent and had been followed by massacres; if this had happened today, it would have been considered crimes against humanity. How then could these indigenous peoples accept the religion of those who dominated and enslaved them? God’s intervention through Mary was providential for the great success of the Mission in the Americas.

“The Guadalupe Event”, as the Mexican Episcopate has pointed out, “meant the beginning of evangelization with a vitality that surpassed expectations. Christ’s message, through his Mother, took up the central elements of the indigenous culture, purified them and gave them the definitive sense of salvation”. And the Pope added, “Consequently Guadalupe and Juan Diego have a deep ecclesial and missionary meaning and are model of perfectly inculturated evangelization”. (Canonization Mass of Juan Diego on July 7, 2002)

The Message
The word Guadalupe means ‘that which crushes the serpent’, and coincidentally, the serpent is a reference to the god Quetzalcoatl, or feathered serpent, to whom the Aztecs offered human sacrifices. In 1487, due to the dedication of a new temple in Tenochtilan, about 80,000 captives were sacrificed in one ceremony that lasted four days. Mary crushed the serpent god Quetzalcoatl and guided the Indians to the one true God, to the God of Life not death and to the God who sacrifices himself, who gives his own life for his people.

If we understand abortion as the new human sacrifices to the gods of selfishness, of pleasure, of my own conveniences, then the message of the Virgin of Guadalupe did not stay in the 16th century but is still valid today.

Lourdes – Theological Intervention
In Lourdes, France, Mary appeared to a young girl of fourteen named Bernadette Soubirous who came from a very poor family. The Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to her eighteen times with the first appearance occurring on the 11th of February, 1858, and the last one on the 16th of July, 1858.

Proofs of God’s intervention through Mary
On February 25, 1858, the day of the ninth apparition, the Beautiful Lady ordered Bernadette to drink the water from the stream and bathe in it. A difficult task for Bernadette since in the grotto there has never been any spring. Nevertheless, she started to scratch the ground with her fingers and soon a small pool of water began to collect and bubbles rose from it, and on the following day, it had become a small stream.

At the sixteenth apparition, the Beautiful Lady identified herself as the Immaculate Conception; Bernadette conveyed this information to her parish priest, who concluded that the apparitions must be authentic because he was certain that this illiterate girl knew nothing about the proclamation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception by Pope Pius IX four years before.

At the seventeenth apparition on April 7th, Bernadette unconsciously placed one of her hands over the flame of a lighted candle while continuing to pray and the crowd screamed in horror as they witnessed the flame burning through her fingers but she remained unharmed.

Bernadette died on the 16th of April, 1879; her body was exhumed on September 22, 1909, in the presence of two doctors and it was found to be without any stench and to be incorruptible, that is, the body did not decompose. The cures that took place during the time of the apparitions and all these years after bear witness that in Lourdes, Heaven came down to earth, as in the times of Jesus, to bring healing and salvation.

The Reason for the Visit
The important part of the message of Lourdes is the confirmation from Heaven, in the year 1858, of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. One other reason, and in common with Fatima and other Marian apparitions, is the dual request of Penance and Prayer, the two important realities that we easily forget in our Christian life. Therefore Mary, the one who says “do whatever he tells you”, reminds us again and again, especially in Lourdes and in Fatima, that Jesus her son tells us to embrace our cross daily and to pray not to give in and fall into temptations or tests that we face in life.

Lourdes from the very beginning was associated with the concept of purity by means of the water from the miraculous spring. Many indeed have found healing there. When comparing Lourdes with Fatima, one could easily conclude that while Lourdes is the shrine of the miracles of the body for the many healings that have been taking place there ever since the time of the apparitions, Fatima is the shrine of the miracles of the soul for the many conversions that have been happening there to this day.

The Message
Four things can summarize the message of Our Lady of Lourdes:
Poverty - God chose Bernadette for her extreme poverty in every sense of the word. God never abandons the poor; far from being impartial, God always takes the side of the poor against those who cause their poverty.

Prayer - It points out the importance of prayer especially the rosary; in fact, at some of the apparitions the only thing that the Lady and Bernadette did was to pray.

Penance – The offering of sacrifices for the salvation of sinners; something that is contrary to our tendency of running away from suffering, pursuing pleasure, and rejecting the cross which the Master told us to embrace.

Immaculate Conception - Finally, the most intriguing phenomenon and that which gave credibility to the apparitions at Lourdes was the fact that Our Lady presented herself to a girl with no religious or school education as being the Immaculate Conception, thus confirming the dogma proclaimed four years earlier.

Fatima – Political intervention and that’s not all…
Preceded by the apparitions of the Angel one year earlier, Mary appeared at Fatima on the 13th of each month from May to October in 1917, between the two World Wars with a message and a plan for peace, during the bloodiest time in human history, the 20th century.

Fatima is the most complete of all the Marian apparitions; it not only influenced Portugal, but also the rest of the world, not only for some time but for the entire twentieth century, and not only spiritually, but also socio-politically. Some would go as far as to say that one cannot speak about the history of the twentieth century without mentioning Fatima.

Proofs of God’s intervention through Mary
There are many proofs of authenticity of the apparitions at Fatima. Mary chose three children who had the habit of not lying under any circumstance without exception. They did not know as we do today the idea of pious lying that cause no harm to anyone and somehow protects our privacy. This was the reason Mr. Marto, the father of Francisco and Jacinta, believed in the apparitions from the very first moment he became aware of them from Jacinta, because he knew that his children were incapable of lying.

The lives of the little shepherds changed drastically after the apparitions. They were converted, and they incarnated the message in their lives in such a way that they neither needed to tell nor prove anything to anyone. Jacinta knew the details of what was going to happen to her when she became ill. In fact, she and her brother knew that soon they would go to Heaven and of this they spoke without the slightest tear or sadness, but instead they longed for it to come soon.

From the second apparition onward all the remaining ones were a public event, although experienced differently by those present. Only Lucia had a full communication with the Lady, and while Jacinta could see and hear her, Francisco only saw her. As for the other witnesses to the apparitions, there were those who said that at the time of the Lady’s appearance the sun always shone with strange colors, the air temperature always dropped and there was a mist hovering the tree where the Lady stood -- instead of a mist, some say it was a cloud while others say it was a fog and still others say it was a smoke.

Above all this, there is the so-called “miracle of the Sun” witnessed by 70,000 people among whom were priests, doctors, University professors, journalists and even atheists. This atmospheric phenomenon is perfectly explainable, but what cannot be explained is that Lucia had predicted the day and the hour that this would happen, six months earlier.

From the social and political point of view, the little shepherds prophesied much of what happened in the twentieth century. The aurora borealis on January 25, 1938, as the sign of the beginning of a worse war, the Second World War; the militant atheism of Russia and the consecration of this country to the Immaculate Heart of Mary to stop this militant atheism which would cause so much suffering to the faithful in many countries. The beginning of the Soviet Union in the same year of the apparitions and its end on the 8th of December, 1991, on the feast day of the Immaculate Conception, and a victory for Mary because she had said that at the end her Immaculate Heart would triumph.

The Reason for the Visit
The visit of Mary to Fatima may not have been from a solely divine initiative. It is a fact that Pope Benedict XV exhorted all Christians to ask for the intercession of Mary for the “aspirated peace for this world gone mad”.

Mary then appeared to the three children only eight days later with a plan for peace, but that’s not all. The militant atheism was a much more difficult problem than the two World Wars and lasted much longer. Today it is not militant but continues to exist more in an agnostic way.

Fatima, for this reason, aside from its political connection, is a call for a New Evangelization avant la lettre. The conversion of sinners, those living without the light of faith is a central theme of the message of Fatima and perhaps the principal purpose of Mary’s visit.

The Message
Between the two World Wars Mary proposed at Fatima, among other things, “Penance and Prayer” as means to cope with the materialistic and atheistic communism, as well as the materialistic and consumerist capitalism we see today and, therefore, no less atheistic.

The third secret, or the third part of the one single secret, was revealed along with its interpretation. It has been said that Fatima is a thing of the past and that it was intimately and exclusively linked to the twentieth century, but the message of penance and prayer is perennial and timeless. In this sense, Fatima is and will always be an echo of the Gospel.

Furthermore, the name “Fatima” could contain a fourth secret. Because it is a well-loved name in the Muslim world, and because the Muslims venerate Mary, could Our Lady of Fatima still have a word to say in our present century dominated by Islamic fundamentalism and the reaction to it?

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC