“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)
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
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