It was also the period when the atheistic and nihilistic philosophies of the late 19th century sought their historical fulfillment. Just thinking of authors like Darwin, Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Freud and Nietzsche and we will notice that their theories have formed the minds and public opinions in the Western world.
Fatima is, in some way, God’s answer to the humanity of the twentieth century. A God who is not dead, despite what those philosophies predicted, nor lost or petrified in the minds of primitive humans. On the contrary, in these post-modern times more than ever, He is very much alive and makes His presence felt through His Word of Life which is eternal henceforth valid at all times and all places.
When it comes to choosing the place and the time for God to reveal Himself, some questions may arise: Why in 1917 and why Portugal? Why Fatima? Why those children and why Cova da Iria? There are no coincidences in God’s plan, nor do I think as Einstein used to say, that God rolls the dice. God always chooses thoughtfully the time, the place and the messengers or catalyzers of His message, just as He chose the land and the people of Israel to incarnate into the history of mankind.
Why Portugal?
The Land of Holy Mary – This was the name given to the lands between the Douro and Vouga Rivers in the 9th century by Alfonso III, King of Leon. The Castle of Santa Maria da Feira was probably the military fortress and the administrative center of these lands. The veneration of the Blessed Virgin Mary in these lands predates the Portuguese nationality. In fact, the invocation of the Immaculate Conception dates all the way back to Afonso Henriques the first king of Portugal with the conquest of Lisbon in 1147. Since then Portugal has been known as the Land of the Holy Mary. Therefore, it makes all the sense that Mary would visit where it has always been considered one of her domains.
The Immaculate Conception is the Queen of Portugal – Since 1640, the kings of Portugal have stopped wearing crowns on their heads. As such, the coronation ceremony was replaced with another and came to be called the “acclamation”, in which the king receives the crown which he places by his side, not on his head. This practice was started by King John IV who had asked for Mary’s intervention in a battle for the restoration of independence; and upon success in the battlefield, the king proclaimed Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception as the Queen of Portugal.
This is therefore long before the Immaculate Conception of Mary was declared a dogma by Pope Pius IX in his Apostolic Constitution Ineffabilis Deus on the 8th of December, 1854. Already in Portugal Mary was venerated by her title of the Immaculate Conception and in choosing Fatima for her apparitions, Mary was visiting her kingdom.
Why Fatima?
But you, O Bethlehem of Ephrathah, who are one of the little clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to rule in Israel... (Micah 5:2)
The Biblical paradigm of choosing the least, the unknown and the unimportant, is also upheld here. Fatima, where the population was little over two thousand at the time, was a rustic parish, located in the irregular plateau of Serra de Aire, with a windy and humid climate, and poor rocky dry soil without watercourse. The people of that region, uncultivated and rustic like the land, made their living by agropastoral activities.
Despite the oppressive anticlerical, secular and liberal campaigns at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, the vast majority of the people remained faithful to the Catholic faith, with the daily practices of prayer such as praying the family Rosary in the evenings and regular participation in the sacraments of Penance and Eucharist. The people were humble and lived by the liturgical calendar, living intensely the liturgical seasons of Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter, Ascension, Pentecost, Corpus Christi… as well as the veneration of popular saints like St. Anthony of Lisbon.
Why those particular children?
God chooses the humble to confound the wise – Fatima follows this paradigm of the Gospel to the letter. How is it possible that such an important message, both to Portugal and the rest of the world, has been entrusted to three simple and illiterate peasant children?
At first glance Lucia who was 10, and her cousins Francisco and his sister Jacinta, 9 and 7 respectively, were perfectly ordinary children like so many other children in that part of the country, both in their flaws as in their virtues. But they had certain gifts and aspects of their personality that God was certainly going to use to get His message across.
Lucia – was quite plain in appearance, but she was amusing, cheerful and extroverted. She looked after, taught and entertained other children; and knew how to tell stories amazingly well especially the ones from the Bible, as to thrill little hearts like that of Jacinta’s. She was creative, high spirited and a natural born leader. She was therefore naturally qualified to be the speaker for Mary, the messenger and the bearer of the message for many years until her death in 2005.
Jacinta – unlike Lucia was physically graced, she was dainty, pretty and refined; but was psychologically the complete opposite of her cousin. She was shy, introverted, very sentimental and sensitive. She was qualified to be the heart of the message of Fatima, to be its suffragette, to embody that part of the message which gives account and meaning to the everyday sufferings by taking advantage of them for the greater good, for “the conversion of the poor sinners”.
Francisco – was neither like his cousin Lucia, nor like his sister Jacinta. He was less sentimental, more visceral or instinctive. He was not guided by the head like Lucia, nor by the heart like Jacinta, but by instinct. He was the most contemplative of the three, detached from life, from everything and everyone, had his mind and eyes set on the “Hidden Jesus” in the tabernacle as the three called the Blessed Sacrament; used to spend long hours in prayer and contemplation. He incarnated from the message of Fatima his love of the Eucharist.
Ironically, Francisco only received his Holy Communion on his deathbed at the hands of a new priest because the local priest who had refused to give him the sacrament was absent at the time.
Why the Cova da Iria?
The legend has it that Iria, or Irene, was a maiden born in a Roman village on the banks of the Nabão River in Tomar; she received her education in a monastery of Benedictine nuns. Endowed with great beauty and intelligence, the young Iria attracted the attention of both the monk Remigio, her spiritual director, and the young Earl Britaldo. Motivated by jealousy, the former gave her a potion to make her appear pregnant; upon seeing her in this condition the latter killed her. From Nabão River to Zêzere River, from Zêzere River to Tagus River, her body was found to be incorruptible in the locality called by her name Saint Irene, or Santarem.
The place where Our Lady appeared was on a private property which belonged to Lucia’s family, if this had not been so, the authorities would probably have closed the site and prohibited the people from going there.
The relevance of Fatima to Portugal
I live in a conflict between the emotional need for belief and the intellectual impossibility to believe. (…) The fact is that there is in Portugal a place that can compete, and advantageously, with Lourdes. There are wonderful cures, at cheaper cost.“ (Fernando Pessoa, 1888-1935).
This most internationally renowned Portuguese poet embodied very well the philosophical, social and political thinking of the Portuguese people at the time of the apparitions. Pessoa chanted with most Portuguese thinkers, and by imitating his European counterparts, made fun and satirized the faith of the common people, which was considered to be both the cause and the consequence of their ignorance and lack of culture.
Rising against the Catholic nationalism, which already had Fatima as its epicenter, Pessoa was already at that time part of a current, still in force today, which aimed to deny Europe of its Christian roots and to return to its pre-Christian paganism.
The incoherence is well expressed by Pessoa as the phrase above demonstrates. For example, he exalts the Portuguese discoveries and forgets or ignores that these would not have been possible without the faith that animated and motivated these discoverers. Furthermore, Camões who wrote the history of Portugal within the account of the discovery of the seaway from Europe to India acknowledged that the reason for the discoveries was “to expand the faith and the empire”.
The cross that was painted on all the sails on the Portuguese ships was the Cross of the Knights Templar; in fact, the great motivator and mentor of the discoveries, Prince Henrique, was himself a Templar.
With the seizure of power by Afonso Costa in 1910, the State saw the Church as an enemy to be eliminated; he inculcated the ideology of militant secularism and instead of engaging in dialogue with the Church, he imposed himself on the Church, beginning with the expulsion of her wisest and most intellectual order, the Jesuits, those who overshadowed him the most.
He banned religious ceremonies outside the Church, the ringing of the Church bells, legalized divorce, removed religious holidays, repressed and restricted as much as he could of the Christian press, and prohibited priests and religious from wearing their robes and habits in public. For the first republic, Fatima was an obscurantist belief, that is, one opposed to the increase and spread of knowledge.
Little did this secular policy last because, providentially, in 1917 the same year of the apparition, the Jacobean and antireligious government of Afonso Costa fell apart. Rising to power in his place was Sidonio Pais who introduced the New State, and put an end to the anti religious laws but, on the other hand, closed the parliament. The regime hardened further with the rise to power of Salazar in 1928 as the minister of finance and later as the prime minister. Portugal went from a liberal secular communist regime to the fascism of the New State without a war.
In 1931, the Portuguese bishops consecrated Portugal to the Immaculate Heart of Mary to be spared, as indeed it was, of the encroachment of communism that devastated the neighbouring country, Spain, with a fratricidal civil war from 1936 to 1939. Unlike Portugal, the transition in Spain to Franco’s fascism was by way of a bloody civil war, with the persecution of the Church where hundreds of bishops, priests, and religious men and women were killed.
Salazar was not clerical, but instead of attacking the Church he skillfully made use of her and, more specifically, of Fatima to demonize and attack communism, and to prevent any kind of political and social reforms. Fatima was nationally and internationally used as a weapon against the advancement of communism. However, the true message of Fatima never mentioned communism as a social political system, but rather exclusively made reference to militant atheism.
“In Portugal the dogma of Faith will always be preserved”
(…) when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth? (Luke 18:8)
This sad and enigmatic question of Jesus, left hanging in the air, seems to suggest that faith is being passed from generation to generation in an increasingly weaker form, and it runs the risk of being lost in time, long before Christ comes the second time to judge the living and the dead.
We, the Portuguese, the inhabitants of the Land of Holy Mary, have the promise from Our Lady at Fatima to the little shepherds during the July 13th apparition and which was included as the second part of the Secret, that in these lands faith will remain until Christ comes to meet us… Come, Lord Jesus come!
Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC
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