Fatima: Coincidence or Providence?

“Kairos” – The opportune moment
Inspired by an article published in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera on December 14, 2011,  I realized that Fatima is protagonist of  numerous chance happenings in the twentieth century, linked to its message and meaning for the world. The skeptics will call them mere coincidences, and yet among the non-believers, there are more and more of those who claim that nothing happens by chance, a phrase that we see with increasing frequency on the Facebook applied to a thousand and one everyday situations.

When good comes out of which there is no plausible explanation, the non-believers call it good luck; similarly, when evil arises they call it bad luck. For the believers, on the other hand, the synonym for luck, whether good or bad, is providence. Believers do not get carried away in good times nor do they despair in bad because they know that “there is no evil that lasts forever nor goodness that always lingers”.

If the very hairs on our head are all numbered, as the Gospel says, then everything is Divine Providence. This means that all that happens, good and bad, is desired or permitted by God who “writes straight with crooked lines”. For those who place their trust and confidence in God, “no evil comes if not for a good purpose”.

The Church’s Yes to Fatima
The ecclesiastical process, the one in addition to the interrogations carried out by the parish priest of Fatima, Fr. Manuel Marques Ferreira, and the Canon Fr. Manuel Nunes Formigão, consisted of setting up a commission to initiate the official canonical inquiry to ascertain the veracity of the apparitions.

The commission started its work on the 13th of May, 1922, five years after the first apparition and ended on the 13th of October, 1930, exactly thirteen years after the closure of the apparitions. On that day, with the knowledge and approval of Pope Pius XI, the then Bishop of Leiria-Fatima, Dom José Correia da Silva, announced the results of the investigation, officially permitting the cult or the veneration of Our Lady of Fatima.

Long before the confirmation was given by the Church, the people who had never stopped flocking to Cova da Iria built a chapel in 1919 as the Lady had instructed the children. In 1922, criminals instigated by the politics of the time which were hostile to the Church and religion, placed two bombs in the chapel and another by the little oak tree where the Lady had stood during the apparitions. The bombs in the chapel exploded and destroyed its roof but the one placed close to the little oak did not explode.

Fatima and the popes
When World War I was at its height, on May 5th, 1917, Pope Benedict XV urged all Christians to plead for Mary’s intercession to obtain the “aspirated peace for this world gone mad”. Then only eight days later, Mary appeared at Fatima with her plan for the world peace. One year later in 1918, this same pope in a letter to the Portuguese bishops to restore the diocese of Leiria, to which the seers belonged, made references to the events in Fatima as “an extraordinary aid from the Mother of God”.

On that very day when Our Lady appeared at Fatima for the first time, May 13, 1917, Father Eugenio Pacelli was ordained bishop and was later elected pope under the name of Pius XII in 1939. Twenty-five years later when he celebrated his silver jubilee, he saw in this coincidence the secret designs of the Divine Providence.

Although she never met him in real life, Jacinta loved the Holy Father very dearly and prayed for him every day; in one of her private visions, she saw him praying very anxiously. Her love and desire to see the pope was so great that upon seeing so many people coming to Cova da Iria, during and after the apparitions, with a sense of disappointment and in her simplicity she came to say, “So many people come here, but the Holy Father never does!”

It is true that he did during Jacinta’s short lifetime, but he did go during her cousin Lucia’s. Pope Paul VI celebrated the 50th anniversary of the apparitions and met with Sister Lucia, who died on 13th of February, 2005. Five years earlier, on 13th of May, 2000, Lucia attended the beatification of her cousins, Francisco and Jacinta. The then Pope John Paul II recalled on that day the words of Jacinta and thanked her for her love, and her many prayers and sacrifices for the pope when he was not yet born.

The attack on Pope John Paul II
On the same day and at the same hour that Pope John Paul II was shot, 13th of May, 1981, sixty-four years earlier Our Lady had appeared at Fatima. It is not a secret to anyone that the bullet was fired by the Soviet Union because of the support this pope gave to the union called “Solidarity”, which acted as a Trojan horse inside the Soviet Empire and ended up being the Soviet’s downfall. It was not the Soviet Union that prevailed, however, but Our Lady of Fatima who miraculously deflected the bullet, and in the pope’s opinion “it was a mother’s hand that guided the bullet’s path”.

Of the three bullets fired at Pope John Paul II, two of them did not cause serious injuries. But the damages done by the third projectile however were great. The bullet pierced the pope’s abdomen, hit the small and large intestines, grazed the sacrum, the bone at the bottom of the spinal column, and exited through his back.

On this course, the bullet passed within the providential centimeters of vital organs narrowly missing the aorta. If this artery had been hit, it is unlikely that Karol Wojtyla would have survived the race from Saint Peter’s Square to the Agostino Gemelli Teaching Hospital. He arrived there suffering from shock due to severe blood loss, which was speedily taken care of with a 3-litre blood transfusion and a surgery that lasted five and half hours.

Pope John Paul II who up until then had not expressed much interest in Fatima, despite being a fervent lover of Mary to whom he had entrusted his apostolic motto “Totus Tuus”, ended up visiting it a year later in 1982 to thank Mary who had protected him. John Paul II visited Fatima two more times because he realized that he was the pope referred to in the third part of the Secret of Fatima; the secret that his predecessors had read and stored away.

 In fact, Pope John XXIII was so impressed with it that he always kept it in his bedroom, even after being convinced that the secret did not pertain to him nor to his pontificate.

The knowledge the little shepherds had of their future
Yes, I shall take Jacinta and Francisco soon, but you will remain a little longer, since Jesus wishes you to make me known and loved on earth. He wishes also for you to establish devotion in the world to my Immaculate Heart. Spoken by Our Lady at the June 13th apparition

Not long after the second apparition, while they were still in good health, the little shepherds already knew what was awaiting them in the immediate future. They knew that Francisco and Jacinta would soon die and be taken up to heaven, and that Lucia would remain for a while on earth to bear witness to the Message of Fatima and to promote the devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

Furthermore, in her own private apparitions of Our Lady, Jacinta knew in advance all the circumstances surrounding her own death including the day and the hour. She knew that she would be going to two hospitals to suffer more but not to be cured, and that at the hospital in Lisbon, she would be accompanied by her mother who would then leave her there by herself. What tortured her the most was the knowledge that, once gone to the Lisbon hospital, she would never see her dear friend Lucia again, and that she would die there alone.

Crown of glory and crown of thorns
The crown of Our Lady of Fatima is made of pure gold, weighs 1200 grams and is decorated with 950 diamonds, 313 pearls, one large emerald and 13 other smaller ones, 33 sapphires, 17 rubies, 269 turquoises, one amethyst and four aquamarines etc. It was made from the jewelries offered by hundreds of Portuguese women as a thanksgiving for Portugal not entering into the Second World War.

Initially when Pope John Paul II gave the bullet used in his assassination attempt to be placed in the crown of Our Lady of Fatima, it was not known where best to put it. So it came as a great surprise to the jeweler who made the crown in 1942 that this very bullet had precisely the same diameter as the washer that joins the stems of the diadem. It was there that the bullet was placed, almost half a century later. Remarkably when the crown was made it had already reserved at that very moment a place for the future.

This resplendent crown, the fruit of love and labour of the Portuguese people for Mary, had remained incomplete all these years for it was still missing a pearl. The bullet that struck the pope, and providentially the place that this would occupy was always waiting. To set it in its place, the crown of glory now becomes the crown of thorns, and thus corresponds more to the life of Our Lady and to the life that every Christian is called to live, the glory by way of the cross and suffering, as represented by the bullet.

Fatima and Russia
If my requests are heeded, Russia will be converted and there will be peace, if not, she will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church, the good will be martyred, the Holy Father will have much to suffer, various nations will be annihilated. In the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph. Spoken by Our Lady at the July 13th apparition

Three months after Our Lady declared this to the three little shepherds, Lenin grabbed the power in Russia and started the Bolshevik revolution which subjected neighbouring nations to violence and transformed them along with Russia into the great new Babylon, the Soviet Union.

“How many armies does the pope have?” – And so Stalin asked during his time, in order to ridicule the Vatican’s political and military potentials. History has shown that whoever laughs the last laughs the best. The spiritual power, even negatively, as the driving force of behaviour is always stronger than greed and all other worldly and earthly motives.

At the end, (said Mary in Fatima) my Immaculate Heart will triumph, and indeed at the end of the religious feeling, the belief in God has triumphed over the enlightenment, atheism and rationalism; faith has triumphed over reason, both in Russia as in Portugal and the rest of the world.

This is exactly what was said on May 10th, 1985, in a visit to Portugal by the then American President Ronald Reagan, surely inspired by God as he affirmed, “I venture to suggest that it is by the example of men like him (referring to Pope John Paul II) and in the prayers of the people from all over the world – humble people like the little shepherds of Fatima – that there resides a greater power than all the great armies and statesmen of the world”. Two years later, the first treaty of nuclear disarmament was signed between the United States and the USSR.

The Blue of Mary prevails over the red
Withdrawal of the Red Army from Austria -- on 13th of May, 1955 – This took place after 10 long years of campaign, promulgated by the Franciscan priest Petrus Pavlicek, which consisted of countless and constant processions and public recitation of the Rosary throughout the country, especially in Vienna. Faced with this silent, peaceful but proactive protest from the Austrians, the Russians withdrew from Austria which they had occupied since 1945.

The flag of the European Union – The flag of the Council of Europe, which today represents the European Union, was created on December 8 of that same year 1955, on the feast day of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The blue of the flag is the color of the Virgin Mary and the stars are those that surround the head of the woman described in the Book of Revelation, which is traditionally recognized as Virgin Mary.

The end of the Soviet Union – Finally, on the same day the 8th of December but in 1991, again on the feast day of the Immaculate Conception and seventy-four years after Mary had said in Fatima that in the end her Immaculate Heart will triumph, Russia, Ukraine and Belarus signed a document to put an end to the Soviet Union. On Christmas night of that year, the red flag with its hammer and sickle, was forever withdrawn from the highest summit of the Kremlin and in its place was hoisted the tricolor flag of the Empire of Peter the Great.

The consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart – One of the petitions of Mary, or condition for Russia to convert, was for the pope to consecrate Russia to her Immaculate Heart. After numerous incomplete consecrations since Pope Pius XII in which Russia was never named, finally on 25th of March, 1984, Pope John Paul II made the consecration that was found to be acceptable to Our Lady, before the seer Lucia.

Two years later Mikhail Gorbachev came to power and initiated a series of social and political reforms, one of which was to end once and for all the militant atheism and the religious persecution. To these reforms he himself gave the name of Perestroika, or conversion in Russian.

The Berlin Wall – The Wall which for years has divided the two Germanys began its construction by the Democratic Republic of Germany on August 13, 1961. Its demolition was officially started on 13th of June, 1990, and was completed two years later.

Not few are the coincidences between Fatima and the various historical facts that took place in the twentieth century. When there are so many chance happenings and all seem to be pointing in the same direction, it is unlikely that they took place without a purpose or a deliberate intention.  In Fatima, and by means of Fatima, the Divine Providence intervened in the most belligerent century of human history.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

Fatima: The Sociopolitical Intervention

Fatima is the greatest religious event of the first half of the twentieth century, an explosion, a violent eruption, of the supernatural world inside the borders of this agitated and materialistic earthly world. Paul Claudel -- French poet, dramatist and diplomat

Fatima – the most political of all the Marian apparitions. Clodovis Boff – theologian, philosopher, writer and professor
   
Through the course of history, the depictions of Mary in paintings and sculptures have gotten us used to a stereotyped image of her as the “humble servant of Zion”, passive, with a calm and serene expression who, instead of speaking openly to express her thoughts and feelings, ponders them in her heart (Luke 2:19). We do not deny that this is all true, but it is however only one facet of her personality.

I do not know for what reason that over the centuries the other aspect of Mary was never painted nor sculptured -- the woman of the Magnificat, who is full of energy and poised for action almost contradicting the paradigm described above. The one who exclaims, “He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.” (Luke 1:51-53)

The proactive Mary – When I recite these verses, the image that comes to mind is more like that of the legendary Joan of Arc of the Hundred Years’ War between France and England or with the bare-chested woman waving the victory flag in front of the troops in the Storming of the Bastille -- not the image the Church has us accustomed. I admit to exaggeration, mainly in the violent aspect implicit in these images of my fantasy, but there is also exaggeration in the stereotyped one, insofar as the truth is more likely a blend of these two images. In other words, a Mary who is clearly not aggressive but who is much more proactive than passive.

The apparition of Our Lady in Fatima being the most political of all Marian apparitions according to Boff, that even to crisscross its authenticity there was a need to check it against some political manifestation in the biblical figure of Mary. In so doing, we can conclude from the Magnificat that Fatima was not the first time Mary “got involved in the politics”. Thus the message of Fatima is truly revolutionary, in a magnificat-style, and unravels for us the other side of Mary, that of the sociopolitical intervention, as a pre-proclamation of the Kingdom that her Son came to bring to the world.

In Fatima, Mary the Mother of the Church, the Mother of Life, visits her children with a message of life and peace for a world immersed in war and genocidal and ideological death. She came to announce that God is alive and well to all those, like Nietzsche who proclaimed him dead, in historical and ideological materialism as well as in militant atheism which had spread from Russia to the rest of the world.

In Fatima, Mary visits her people as she had once visited her cousin, Elizabeth. She asks the little shepherds to offer themselves and to participate with God in a plan of salvation for a world that has fallen victim to itself. A world that was encased in the ideologies of rationalism and sadistic nihilism which has brought on horrors of war and cruelty of torture and irrationalism of the twentieth century ethnic and religious persecution and cleansing. And by way of hope, she came to console her children in these bitter hours, and to give them the assurance that in the end her Immaculate Heart would triumph.

(…) I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity (Deuteronomy 30:15).  Like Moses, Mary in Fatima places side by side the hope and the threat, the salvation and the destruction, the promise and the warning, the grace and the judgment, and also like Moses, she urges us to choose goodness and the way of the Gospel in order to get away from the horrors into which the world has fallen.

The historical and social context of the apparitions
The two World Wars –About 12 million people were killed in the First World War, and 60 million in the Second. Never in the history of mankind had any previous wars wiped out so many lives, and if we count the number of wounded, these numbers double, and of these, many lived with one kind of disability or another for the rest of their lives.

The totalitarianism, the Nazism, the fascism and the communism with their ethnic and religious genocidal and cleansing ideologies – In addition to those who died in combat in the two World Wars, we add millions of victims of the totalitarian regime, the scale never seen before, that practiced ethnic cleansing such as the extermination of the Jews, the gypsies and the disabled in the Nazi concentration camps, the ideological cleansing the communist regime practiced in the Siberian gulags, and the tortured and missing of the fascist regimes in Europe and Latin America.

The atheistic and militant communist regime and its religious persecution – Freedom of religion was non-existent in the former Soviet Union and the satellite countries belonging to the Warsaw Pact and the various communist African countries of Chinese or Soviet orientation. For decades, this militant atheism has been persecuting the faith and every kind of religious behaviour, private or public. To this day, this is still happening in China and Cuba. According to Eloy Bueno, in his book The Message of Fatima, the number of martyrs in the 20th century amounted to 26,685,000.

The nuclear arms race and the Cold War – An escalation of nuclear warfare and a constant threat to the world peace followed after the United States dropped the atomic bombs over the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II. In effect, at the end of the Cold War the stockpile of nuclear weapons was enough to destroy the world not once but ten times over.

In this dismal and dark environment, before the end of the First World War, comes Fatima as the light of peace that is possible in a world in disarray.  During her July apparition, Our Lady of Fatima forewarns that a second world war would be worse than the first and leaves a foreseeable possibility of a third one as she calls for the conversion of Russia, in a special way, for being responsible for the atheistic and militant ideologies, and in a general way, to bring all sinners out of hell, not so much the one the little shepherds saw in the vision, but of the hell that the lives of men had become.

“The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.” (Mark 1:15)

“To great evils, come great remedies” – With the same urgency as Jesus at the beginning of his ministry, through Mary in Fatima in 1917, God intervenes directly and visibly in human history to redirect men to Christ His Son. Mary helps and protects the agent of the Gospel of peace and goodness and asks three children to offer themselves for the conversion of sinners, for Russia, and for world peace. If in Cana Mary intervenes and says to her son that they have no wine (which biblically means to have no joy), in Fatima Mary says to her Son that they have no peace.

The triad appeal of conversion, penance and prayer is at the same time the center of the Gospel and the core of the message of Fatima. In this way, we can say that Fatima echoes, in the dramatic and dark twentieth century, the message of the Gospel of two thousand years ago.

“My Immaculate Heart will triumph”
The 1917 Fatima can be seen as the extension of the Lourdes of 1858, when Our Lady appeared to Saint Bernadette as the Immaculate Conception, the dogma declared by Pope Pius IX years before in 1854 and of which young Bernadette had no concept of its meaning when Our Lady told her about it.

Human beings are both mind and heart, and the exaggerated rationalism of the 20th century which led to the genocide and horrors of wars were perpetrated by people without hearts. God is the Father and the mother, is man and woman; if Jesus represents God as Father and man, because as he said to Philip that whoever sees him sees the Father, then Mary, the mother of Jesus, represents God as the woman and mother.

That is why in a world of excessive chauvinism and rationalism, cold and cruel, God had to send a woman, Mary, so that women would stop seeing themselves only as cooks and housekeepers, and would join the men in the governing of the world’s political destinies. So that they would bring to politics and to the social life their sensitive and feminine hearts. Because the heart, as Pascal says, has reasons which reason does not know. And it is precisely this that we have been witnessing in the second half of the twentieth century in the Western world, and to a lesser extent in the rest of the world.

Femininity and masculinity are like the two wings of a bird; a bird that flies with only one wing would be flying in circles, and indeed in vicious circles has the human race been flying, repeating the same mistakes again and again from generation to generation. Our hope is that with women side by side with men engaging in all cells of social life, the world will become more humane. The twentieth century has been a century of too much brain and too little heart. Therefore, an inclusive world of all God’s children regardless of gender, race, religion or sexual orientation will undoubtedly be a better world.

The Immaculate Heart of Mary will triumph – An immaculate heart always triumphs when politics is governed with the heart, that is, with generosity, compassion, mercy and love, and not only with reason. When this heart is pure and immaculate without the rot of corruption, is free of malice and pesky self-interest, then there will be equality and peace in the world because this heart will triumph over reason and its purity over corruption.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC