– Yes, we are willing!
– Then you are going to have much to suffer, but the grace of God will be your comfort.
Central theme of the Fatima message
In the first apparition, soon after the presentation and the petition to the little shepherds to be there on the 13th of the following five months, Our Lady asks the children if they want to offer themselves for the salvation of sinners.
Fatima echoes the way the Christian community interprets the death of Jesus who offered himself as the Lamb without blemish to atone for the sins of mankind. Jesus not only gave his life for us by the act of his death, but also his entire earthly life was a life lived for others; he came not to be served but to serve (Mark 10:45). During his life, Jesus fought sin and every kind of evil, and in the end, it was this very sin that killed him. He died not only for our sins, but also for the cause of our sins.
Jesus fought sin analogically the way our body fights sickness. When a virus or harmful bacterium invades and infects our body, a type of white blood cell called neutrophil attaches itself to the germ because proteins called antibodies have marked the germ for destruction. When the neutrophil catches the germ, it engulfs it in a process called phagocytosis, and dies in the process for the sake of saving the entire body. Jesus took on himself the sin of humanity, dying in the process but saving us from eternal damnation.
What Mary asks of the little shepherds is the solidarity and participation in the passion of Christ, in his unique and most perfect act of reparation for the sins of humanity. The participation in the mystery of redemption of Christ with our voluntary sacrifice overcomes passivity and makes us proactive not only in our own salvation but also in the salvation of others.
This central theme of the Fatima message is also the most difficult to comprehend in our days, but just as Mary did in Lourdes when she came to reaffirm the dogma of her Immaculate Conception, in Fatima she comes to reaffirm the theology of expiation and reparation, which for many seems obsolete and retrograde.
Jesus' death is the expiation for the sins of humanity
The wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23) – It is the order of things that there are no innocuous or neutral acts; whatever does not promote life, leads to death. It is an undeniable truth that what is good promotes life and what is evil leads to death. We see proofs of this in every evil act we commit. As the saying goes, “evil stays with the one who commits it” and chastisement adheres to wicked actions like an attachment of an email.
There are no evil work that we practice that is not followed by a punishment, which does not come from God, but from the very order of things as the logical consequence of the wicked act committed. God forgives always, man sometimes, but nature neither forgives nor forgets. The evil that we do against human nature or Mother Nature will be paid in one way or another, sooner or later, and sometimes quite heavily.
If Jesus of Nazareth was only a prophet and nothing more then his death would have been seen as the death of a just individual. However, if Jesus besides being true man is also true God, then his death can no longer be interpreted or seen as merely a personal event, but rather an event that has repercussion on humanity represented and created by him. Since Jesus has resurrected, his death served to kill death – that death to which mankind was afflicted.
Jesus died for our sins, in the sense that it was our sins that killed him, but since Jesus did not stay dead but was resurrected, our sins killed themselves instead; his death is, therefore, the end of death resulting from sins.
God cannot deny the order of things that He created; as we have seen above, belonging to this order of things is the fact that with sin comes a penalty and this penalty is death. Without the divine intervention, we would be like a train running without brakes that is headed towards an irreversible mortal destiny.
John 15:5 – Apart from me you can do nothing – If by our own strength we were able to save ourselves, then there was no need for Christ to come into the world. Sin, however, put us in the bottom of a pit with no possibility of getting out; like being stuck in a quicksand, the more desperate we try to get out the deeper we sink, or in the frigid water of a frozen lake, the more we use the ice for support to get out the more it breaks. On our own, we can never get out from sin and evil.
John 1:29 – Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world! – John the Baptist who despite being the son of a priest worked outside the temple sacrificial system. He offered forgiveness of sins through a baptismal purification, and pointed to Jesus as the true Lamb of God who came to substitute himself for the sacrificial lambs of the Jerusalem Temple. Only He who has no sin can pay for the sins of others.
The sacrifice of Christ is the perfect sacrifice because he is the priest, the victim, the altar and the Temple where the sacrifice is offered. Even if something else can be found to be perfect, it can never measure up to Christ's sacrifice because only his sacrifice is sufficient to pay for the sins of all humanity, past, present and future.
In the sacrifice of Christ, the justice of God, the natural order of things is satisfied. Someone without the debt of sin pays the price for sin which is death; furthermore, the goodness, grace and love of God is also satisfied because it is not us who pay but His Son.
To join oneself with the sacrifice of Christ
The mystery of solidarity – We tend to work in solidarity or be united in doing evil as well as good. The idea that we all belong to the Mystical Body of Christ is not only pious but also scientific. Human beings come from a common descent; there are ties that unite the entire humanity from its first appearance on Earth. “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”, said Neil Armstrong upon stepping for the first time on the moon. It was not the work of a single man, a free entrepreneur, neither in its execution nor in its meaning; in reality, through Armstrong, for him and with him, did mankind arrive on the moon.
Collective spiritual unconsciousness – Freud discovered an instance within our personality called unconsciousness that is made up of what was lived, experienced, repressed, hidden, and forgotten during the first few years of our life when we were not yet aware of ourselves. This material influences our thoughts, feelings and actions in an automatic way that is out of our control; sometimes it comes to consciousness in the form of body language, lapsus linguae or slip of the tongue, and especially in dreams.
Beyond this individual unconsciousness, at a deeper level, Jung, a disciple of Freud, argues that there is a collective unconsciousness. The material that it is made of, no longer has anything to do with one’s individual experiences, but rather with what humanity as a whole experiences.
Each one of our deeds becomes part of a collective “database” in such a way that any individual of the human species is, from birth, capable of doing the most heroic as well as the most heinous and horrific act ever done without being taught. In this way, the individual influences the collective and the collective influences the individual.
The butterfly effect – Small and even miniscule causes can have great effects or consequences. The effects of a major hurricane that is felt here could have been caused by the fluttering of a butterfly thousands of kilometers away, which by disturbing the balance caused the first piece of domino to fall. This also explains the big snow avalanches that bury houses and villages. In human life, there are no innocuous, neutral and inconsequential acts that sooner or later will not have repercussions, positive or negative, on the rest of humanity.
Matthew 16:24 – If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me – Every sacrifice is an immolation of our Ego and everything we do for others is a total altruism which is a sacrifice of the ego. It is only by denying my ego that I can affirm the other, the alter ego. After the sacrifice of Christ, the sacrifices that are pleasing to God are not the gift of something that belongs to me, like the sacrifices of the Old Law, the immolation of lambs and goats, but rather the immolation of my own self.
Tertullian (197 AD) – The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Christians – Through martyrdom, a Christian configures his life to Christ's in an almost absolute way and as a direct path to the Kingdom of God. Furthermore, it is not him alone who gains individually, the Church also gains by his testimony in repeating, renewing and realizing in his life the passion of Christ in the here and now of history. It is above all edifying and encouraging for new Christians, for those who are still in the process of conversion to Christ.
I am now rejoicing in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the Church. (Colossians 1:24)
This is the text that has been quoted to give biblical foundation to the practice requested by Our Lady soon at the first apparition, to offer sacrifices for the conversion of sinners. It must be made clear that our sacrifices do not have the redemptive value of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, nor do they increase its effectiveness. Therefore, and in this sense, nothing is lacking in the sacrifice of Christ which is perfect and perfection is not perfectible or cannot be perfected further.
Our individual affliction, our cross, the suffering that life hands us can be lived either with meaning or without meaning. The Christian who in all aspects of life sees in Christ as the way, the truth and the life builds his life in Him, joins his sufferings to His. The apostles became joyous when they began to suffer for Christ. (Acts 5:41)
By joining our sufferings to that of Christ, we give them meaning, so that they become easier to bear, and are put to good use because we give them a redemptive value. The main point is that our sufferings are not wasted if we can join them to the sacrifice of Christ; they are in fact transformed to great value.
Hell is avoided with purgatory
The Angel pointing to the earth with his right hand, cried out in a loud voice: ‘Penance, Penance, Penance!’ (Third part of the Secret)
These are the words of the Angel with the flaming sword. Our Lady shows the vision of hell to the little shepherds as a possibility in the afterlife and the hell the world had plunged into in the 20th century . The alternative, in order to avoid one or the other, is penance. Hell is avoided with purgatory both in this life as in the next; in fact, in the Catholic tradition, purgatory is between heaven and hell.
Christ atoned for our sins, so we no longer need to atone for them. But if God forgives and forgets, why then do we need purgatory? It is us who do not forgive nor forget, not what others or what we ourselves have done; purgatory is a requirement of our human nature. We see this in the Gospel in the episode of the conversion of Zacchaeus:
Zacchaeus stood there and said to the Lord, ‘Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much.’ (Luke 19:8) Jesus who had already forgiven Zacchaeus did not demand anything from him as a payment for this pardon; what Zacchaeus offered as an atonement came out of his own free will, and as a consequence of his conversion and of having obtained the pardon, and not as a requirement of it.
Mark 1:15 -- “Pænitemini et credite evangelio” Repent and believe in the Gospel – Penance and sacrifice are part of the conversion process, like the desert that mediates between the Egypt of Sin and the Promised Land of Grace. The more pure we walk through this life, the less purgatory we need in the next. Purgatory can be spent here and now. Whether it is done here or in the next life, the blessedness remains valid: Only the pure of heart will see God.
Regarding the nature of the purifying fire, Sister Lucia said years later that it is not any physical fire sustained by any fuel, but rather from the fire of divine love communicated by God to the souls. Hence that perfect act of love, like the example of a martyrdom, takes the person directly to heaven because he is immediately purified of all sins committed up to that point.
Jacinta the good shepherdess
One day on her way back, she walked along in the middle of the flock.
- “Jacinta, what are you doing there,” I asked her, “in the middle of the sheep?”
- “I want to do the same as Our Lord in that holy picture they gave me. He’s just like this, right in the middle of them all, and He’s holding one of them in His arms.”
Jacinta embodies the sacrificial aspect of the message of Fatima. She in her own fashion imitates Jesus the Good Shepherd who cares and seeks for the lost sheep and afterward carries it on his shoulders back to the sheepfold. Jacinta offered many sacrifices for sinners during the three years following the apparitions. And when, already bedridden and living her passion, Our Lady asked her if she still wanted to suffer more for the conversion of more sinners, she readily answered ‘yes’. Like Christ the Good Shepherd, she, the little shepherdess, also gave her life for the sheep of the Lord.
The vision of hell affected Jacinta so much that even when she was at play she would not stop questioning Lucia, And if people pray very much for sinners, won’t Our Lord get them out of there? And if they make sacrifices as well? Poor sinners! We have to pray and make many sacrifices for them!”
The expression, poor sinners, was coined in Fatima; whenever one speaks of sinners in the message of Fatima, the sinners are referred to as poor which has the same affectionate meaning as “poor things” that Jacinta often used to say.
Jacinta, the most sentimental of the three, is the one who best mirrors God’s mercy and loving solicitude for sinners that run throughout the two Testaments of the Bible: Have I any pleasure in the death of the wicked, says the Lord God, and not rather that they should turn from their ways and live? (Ezekiel 18:23).
In Jesus of Nazareth, the mercy of God becomes flesh in concrete actions. Unlike the Pharisees who criticized and fled from sinners fearing their contamination, Jesus sought their company, touched them, healed them, ate with them, and finally gave his life for them as an immolated victim being eaten in the Eucharist and on the cross with his body handed over and blood spilled.
The little shepherds, especially Jacinta in her short life and Lucia in her long life, understood and joined their sacrifices to the passion of Christ by echoing it, by giving them a meaning and a usefulness, to update or underline in the here and now the passion of Christ, the redemption of humanity.
Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC
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