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
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