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
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