NVC: The deceptive myth of Redemptive Violence

What is a myth?
Myths are narratives that emerged in the early days of human civilization, and they help us to explain and respond to key issues that men have asked at all times, such as the origin of the world, human beings, God, meaning of life etc.

Myths are not historic because they do not refer to events that really happened. However, because they did not happen it does not mean that they are false. In fact, they are true in as much as they try to explain realities at a time when science did not exist. Take for example the myth of the god of time named Kronos, who after giving birth to children eats them up. Of course, this has never happened, it is not historical, but it is true; in fact, time is something that first we have it and then we consume it; each day when we get up in the morning we “give birth” to a new day, so to say; each night when the day is over it’s because we have consumed it.

 In this and other articles to follow, I use the word “Myth” in its anthropological denotation and not in the sense it has now in modern English meaning a delusion, a lie, or something untrue.

The domination system or structure of power
This is how the theologian Walter Wink calls a set of unjust economic relations that are politically oppressive, racially biased and patriarchal in as far as gender is concerned. All this within a society that divides people into social classes in order that relations between people become hierarchical and not egalitarian; and finally, it is also the use of violence to maintain and guard this status quo, which has been in force since the birth of Babylon in 3000 BC.

According to Wink, things do not happen by chance, attached to a domination system there must be a domination myth, a legend or narrative that tries to explain and justify the reason for the situation being as it is, and how we got here.

“Might is right” – The myth is called “Redemptive Violence” and it entrenches the belief that violence saves and justifies itself, and that war brings peace or as the Romans used to say, vis pacem para bellum, that is, if you want peace, prepare for war. This myth, or stories people tell to explain nature, history and customs, justifies that power is imperative to establish peace and harmony. Like we turn to God when all else fails, so we turn to violence to solve individual and social problems as the last resort, thus attributing to violence the function of a god. As a matter of fact, for Wink, this, and not Judaism, Christianity or Islam, is the prevailing, and the most ancient and dominant “religion” in the world since Babylon.

The myth of redemptive violence endows the domination system with a narrative that can be reproduced in an infinite number of ways, convincing all those involved, both the oppressors and the oppressed, that without this system of domination, or structure of power, the world as we know it would cease to exist. Therefore, only “legal violence”, more specifically that which is exercised by the domination system, can save us from self-destruction.

The game of cops and robbers or heroes and villains
Let’s look paradigmatically how this myth works: a powerful individual, system or group, has caused injury or distress to another particular individual or group. From inside the oppressed group, a hero or powerful group arises, who confronts by violent means, defeats and kills the oppressor, thus ending the reign of terror.

Subsequently, the victorious protagonist and hero creates a system in which the newly liberated people can live freely and in harmony for a period of time. However, because power corrupts, eventually the previously fair liberator, seduced by power, is himself turned into a dominant oppressor, a villain. And so, the cycle starts once again with the eventual emergence of another hero.

It is on the basis of this myth that some historians claim that history repeats itself. Let’s look for instance how this paradigm evolved in the last century in Russia.  The czarist Russia was so oppressive that for a while, sadly a too short while, people felt a relief with the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, which soon evolved into an even more oppressive regime under the domination of Stalin and those who followed him in the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat.

From an early age, children are indoctrinated into the domination system through the worship and admiration of heroes in cartoons and later in films. Against an invincible hero is an apparent equally invincible villain.

Children, youth, and even us adults, consciously identify ourselves with the hero, in order to have a good concept of ourselves; but unconsciously we also identify with the villain, to whom we project our repressed anger, our rebelliousness and lust, and we enjoy this wickedness of ours for three-quarters of the film, allowing ample time for indulging the violent side of the self, during which evil seems to be prevailing.

When the end eventually comes, and the good declares victory after much effort and suffering, it is as if our innermost selves were able to re-establish order over our own wickedness and base instincts. The villain’s punishment provides catharsis to reassert control over our own inner tendencies, repress them, and re-establish a sense of goodness without coming to any insight about their own inner evil.

This is why we like watching movies or perhaps we need them to keep our aggressiveness under control or at a manageable level. This sort of sublimation also happens in sports; it is always preferable that the rival groups or countries face each other in stadiums at the Olympic Games than in battlefields.

Films serve therefore as a catharsis or release because the punishment of the villain in the film corresponds to a self-punishment of our own evil tendencies. Salvation is found in the identification with the hero, maintaining in this way the use of violence and self-violence, justified and reinforced, and the continuation of the domination system.

By making violence pleasurable, fascinating, and entertaining, the Powers are able to delude people into compliance with a system that is cheating them of their very lives.  We have been educated for thousands of years to make violence enjoyable; all you need is to think there are bad guys and these bad guys need to suffer for what they have done, so it is enjoyable creating pain for these people; revenge is very enjoyable indeed. In a violent society nothing is more enjoyable than the revenge.

Similar to what used to take place in Roman arenas where gladiators fought each other to death or Christians were devoured by beasts, and to this day in bullfighting arenas, throughout history, violence has been not just a means to advocate justice and peace, but our culture has been making it an enjoyable and rewarding spectacle.

In short, the Myth of Redemptive Violence is the story of the victory of order over chaos by means of violence. Based on the fact that man is naturally violent, violence, or better said “legal violence”, justifies itself because it makes us believe there is no alternative way to obtain order and peace. 

The violence in education
“La letra con la sangre entra”
This is the Castilian proverb extolling violence against children as the best method of teaching. At the mercy of sadistic and unscrupulous teachers, children were beaten up in schools and colleges as well as in the bosom of the family. I will always remember a schoolmate of mine, who had lost his father, and because the elderly mother did not have the strength to beat him up and the beatings he received in the school were not sufficient, he would go systematically to the police station to be beaten up there every day.

The Babylonian myth of creation
The most ancient myth or sacred narrative of creation of the universe and human beings tells us that in the beginning there was Apsu, the father god, and Tiamat, the mother god, who gave birth to many children gods; but because the younger gods were extremely noisy when at play and disturbed Apsu in his sleep, he decided to kill them off; the younger gods, however, discovered the plan and in anticipation killed Apsu.

Tiamat pledged revenge for the death of her husband, filled with fear the rebel gods solicited the help of their cousin, Marduk. Coming to their rescue, Marduk captured and killed Tiamat; later he dismembered her body and scattered her blood; so from her dead body, according to the Babylonian myth, the World was created. In other words, creation was an act of violence and not of goodness as in the biblical myth of creation.

In such a world, for cosmic order to exist the violent suppression of the feminine is needed; this is mirrored in the social order by the subjection of women to men, and men to their rulers. In the beginning there was chaos, and violence was used to establish order. It is therefore justified to use violence because without it there would be no order. We can then conclude that the myth of the redemptive violence is about the victory of order over chaos by means of violence.

After the creation of the world, Marduk threw into prison the gods who sided with Tiamat; since these complained of the bad prison food, Marduk and his father, Ea (son of Apsu), killed one of the imprisoned gods and from his blood human beings were created to be servants of the gods.

Therefore, according to the Babylonian myth of creation, violence is natural, it is encoded in our genes. So, it was not mankind who created violence by an act of disobedience to God as the biblical myth has it; violence has always been a reality, and part of the cosmic and human nature. Humans are naturally incapable of peaceful coexistence; peace has to be imposed on from a higher order.

Therefore, the smartest and the most powerful present themselves before others as kings, Czars, emperors, princes, priests and masters, that is, as representatives of the goodness and justice of God with the mission to combat evil and punish evildoers. The “legal” violence of the leaders in the society opposes the “natural” violence in order to defeat evildoers and dissuade others from their evil tendencies thus facilitating social coexistence.

In this way women are advised not to have needs since they must sacrifice themselves for the good of the family; men are instigated to renounce their personal interests to serve the king to the point of giving up their lives in battles to protect and increase the king’s dominion. Similarly, children are instructed from very young that there is right and wrong, good and bad, and that to be good they must give up the use of their natural power outwardly, and use it inwardly against themselves to suppress and repress their evil tendencies and obey authority unconditionally.

The biblical myth of creation
Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. (…) And God said, ‘Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.’ And it was so. God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good. (…) God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day. (Genesis 1, 4, 12, 18, 21, 25).

The biblical myth of creation described in the book of Genesis is quite different from the Babylonian one. However, because it was developed during the time the Jewish people were living in exile and captivity in Babylon, there are similarities between them, but fundamentally it opposes the Babylonian myth. In the Bible, God is good and creation is an act of God’s goodness. The way God creates each of the various realities, he makes sure that what is created is good. In other words, God is good and creates a good creation.

Evil and violence are not part of the creation as God conceived it. Creation is an idyllic garden where the first human beings lived in harmony with each other, with nature and with God. Evil entered later as the result of misuse or abuse of freedom. The world and the realities that God created were good initially, but were later corrupted by the sin of Man.

In the Bible, after Adam and Eve stole from God the prerogative of good and evil, and placed themselves as the standard of all things, arbitrariness entered into the world and with it violence, which is exercised soon after in the second generation by Cain over his brother Abel. Violence never appears in the Bible as a naturally good reality, but always as an artificially evil one; it does not present itself as a natural fact that has to be assumed and accepted, but always as a problem to be solved.

It is clear that the biblical story of creation is not the myth that prevailed all over the world, from Babylon or Mesopotamia to Egypt, Greece, India, or China. Instead, the Babylonian myth is the most ancient and most current, and has no rival; there are very few that confront and challenge it. It is a type of civil religion that is transversal to all cultures, civilizations and religions, and the matrix that is used in most of the films and cartoons that are made, in order to educate the new generations of the necessity of violence to re-establish and maintain order.

Religion as legitimation of power
Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgement. Romans 13:1-2

The belief that authority comes from God and that whoever exercises it on earth does so in His name belongs to the ideology of the domination system. From this belief of idolizing authority is a short step that many kings and emperors took. Already in our time after the Spanish civil war, the dictator Francisco Franco, in order to justify the usurpation of power, declared himself ruler and even minted coins with his effigy and the words “Francisco Franco, Leader of Spain by the grace of God”.

Religion, instead of asserting its myth that man is not violent per se because he was created by God from an act of love, let itself be influenced by the Babylonian myth, thus becoming violent as in the case of the Jewish religion.

The whole sacrificial system is based on the belief that only with blood is one redeemed or rescued. The only difference between the Jews and the surrounding peoples, or the distant Mayans and Aztecs, is that they replaced human sacrifice with animal sacrifice. Christianity has somehow returned to human sacrifice by giving it a new meaning, this time to the sacrifice of one man once for all, valid for all times and places.

Christianity, the successor of Judaism, as the verse cited by Saint Paul suggests, followed in the footsteps of Judaism, blessing and adopting the myth of redemptive violence. It is certain that Jesus of Nazareth stands apart, and precisely because of this, he was not understood by his disciples and furthermore, his teachings were washed or watered down already in the apostolic generation by his own followers.

For Walter Wink, Christianity was perverted and made chaplain, or religious educator and moral guarantor of all that the State did. Caesaropapism is the ideology that ruled the Western world after the Roman Emperor Constantine made Christianity the state religion, despite Jesus being against the union of powers as we conclude from his warning to give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s. (Matthew 22:21)

The Crusades and the Inquisition are the most exponential cases where the interests of politics united and coincided with the interests of religion, merging into a single goal and strategy, one being justified by the other. In the Crusades, the Church, which declared them, mobilized armies to defend the holy places occupied by Muslims, hence the concept of the holy war, killing in the name of God which is the “non plus ultra” in the self-justification of violence.

The Inquisition, an instrument of the Church to purify and compel faithful to true faith and doctrine, was used more by the state than by the Church herself; the most blatant case was the conviction of Joan of Arc. Both in the Catholic and the Protestant world, witch-hunting was promoted by the state, with the approval of the Church, thus freeing themselves of individuals who threatened the system.

The Karpman or the Bermuda triangle
In short, the myth of redemptive violence is a fallacy that order can only be victorious over chaos by means of violence. As in this myth, violence presents itself as the only possible solution to chaos, barbarism and anarchy; since violence is not a problem but a fact, our world is neither perfect nor perfectible. The world is a theatrical stage of an eternal conflict on which there is a more or less lenient version of the law of the jungle, that is, the survival of the fittest.

Ultimately redemptive violence redeems nothing, neither the victim nor the villain, nor does it solve the problem or conflict that created it. The only thing that it does is to perpetuate itself in a kind of eternal vicious circle. Thus, we have a version of the Karpman triangle (persecutor – rescuer – victim equivalent to villain – victim – hero) and from this sort of Bermuda triangle no one escapes alive.

The Greek thinking is shaped by the myth of eternal return, and so is the Hegelian dialectics that consists of a thesis that is opposed or confronted by an antithesis resulting in a synthesis; with time the synthesis itself becomes a new thesis to which follows a new antithesis and so on ad infinitum. The Greek circular understanding of time also follows the same paradigm, the god of time called Kronos continuously gives birth to children and eats them.

If we do not change the paradigm, if we do not dismiss the Babylonian myth and adopt instead the biblical sacred story of creation, then there is no hope, the world is at a dead end, and so the self-destruction of humanity is the most likely outcome.

Opposed and very different to the Greek paradigm of eternal return is the Jewish thinking because it is rooted in the Hebrew epic of emerging from the slavery in Egypt, passing through the desert of purification and entering into the Promised Land of freedom. Time is not cyclical, but linear; in this view of time we never return to the starting point, unlike a mouse running on a wheel, we walk into a future that enables us to progress ad eternum.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

NVC - Worldview and Worldviews

NVC = Non Violent Communication

When we were babies and first began to talk, we could learn one or two languages without needing to learn the grammar, that is, the reason why we should speak this or that way. As we grew and became adults, to learn a language now, we need to learn the grammar, that is, the rules of the language, and to somehow obey them in order to speak properly.

Non-violent or compassionate communication is a new language, and to learn it in adulthood we need to learn its rules, its philosophy, its worldview or the thinking behind it. If we are going to learn a non-violent language, we need first to know in what way the language that we are using today is violent. Where did this violent language come from, and what was it based on?

Whatever it is, it has to do with the way we conceptualize the world and its history, the human nature, the reality that surrounds us and the very meaning of life. Worldview is the cornerstone or the foundation on which our thinking rests upon; it is composed of beliefs, myths and basic ideas that are mostly unconscious, and as such they are neither discussed nor questioned.

To turn our present violent language into the language of the Kingdom of God, we need to first change our thinking, and to do that we need to challenge and eventually change the worldview on which it is grounded.

The theologian Walter Wink, in his book The Powers that Be, says that worldviews are the skeletal structures of our thinking and describes the worldviews that are prevalent in the Western culture.

The Ancient Worldview
This worldview presents a heavenly world existing in parallel with its earthly counterpart; whatever happens in Heaven also happens on Earth, and vice-versa; this is indeed how it was in the Greek and Roman mythologies. Every material reality has a spiritual dimension and a divinity that represents it in heaven; hence, the god of war is Mars, the goddess of love is Venus, the god of the seas is Neptune and the chief or father of the gods is Jupiter, etc. In the ancient world, the Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Indians and the Chinese, in fact most people in the ancient world, shared this way of understanding reality.

The Spiritualist Worldview
This worldview appeared in the second century during the Christian era and is in direct conflict with the idea that creation is basically good. Greek dualism is imposed where Spirit is regarded as good while Matter is regarded as evil; the world is a prison of the Spirit, and the body is the prison of the Soul. It considers anything related to the body, like sex for instance, as evil; so, in order to conquer evil, the body needs to be mortified and denied so that the spiritual component can be imposed and affirmed. This world is a ‘vale of tears’, and death is seen as freeing the soul from the shackles of the body that makes it impure.

The Materialist Worldview
In opposition to spiritualism, the materialist worldview establishes that what is real is what can be known through the five senses, and everything else is pure superstition. In other words, there is no heaven, no God, not even a soul; human beings are nothing more than matter; the universe has no intrinsic meaning so it lacks essence and purpose. Ethics is non-existent, there are no good and no evil, what are considered right or wrong are arbitrary and conventional, and result from a social agreement for the survival and peaceful coexistence of citizens.

Walter Wink says that this is the dominant ethos of the post-modern world; it is the mental structure or motherboard that most universities, politics, the news media and the culture as a whole model and follow. This worldview has penetrated so deeply into the society and the modern way of thinking, that it even claims to be scientific or based on science, at a time when science, especially physics, has moved beyond mechanist materialism into a “reenchanted universe”.

People who live within this worldview see themselves accompanying science at every step, but in reality, they have been left behind by modern science. They still cling to the Newtonian physics where the world is like a clock that functions predictably with mathematical precision.

After Einstein, the mechanistic Newtonian physics gave way to quantum physics which is based on Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty and causality, replacing the predictability of the real world with the calculation of probabilities.

The Theological Worldview
This appeared from a spiritual reaction to the materialist worldview; it reaffirms the existence of a supernatural realm and thus seals itself off by declaring that its existence is purely a matter of faith; it cannot be accessed by the senses so its existence cannot be proven nor denied by science.

In this way of understanding reality, science and religion live with their backs to each other. This forces believers with a great sense of culture to live with a schizoid view; during the week they believe that man is the result of evolution of species, and on Sundays, they believe that man was created directly and explicitly by God; evolutionists during the week, creationists on the weekends.

The Integral Worldview
This worldview combines and overcomes at the same time the previous ones by placing the spirit at the heart of the matter. God is transcendent, that is, different, he is detached and beyond everyone and everything, but at the same time is at the heart of each and every person and thing. This mutual harmony between immanence and transcendence must not be confused with pantheism where it is affirmed that God is everything.

The integral worldview has to do with panentheism: everything is in God and God in everything. It is somehow the view that St. Francis of Assisi had of creatures as being manifestations of God because God is immanent in all of them.

Wink states that this is the worldview of quantum physics, liberation theology, feminist theology, and many religions of Native Americans, and also names psychologist Carl Jung and the paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin as proponents of this worldview.

With the way these worldviews are presented, it implies that there has been a process of evolution and that now most people on this planet are guided by the integral worldview, but it can also not be so; in fact, all worldviews are current and probably only few people are guided in their lives by just one type. Wink says that we all possess pieces of one or the other view of the reality, depending on the issue at hand.

According to Wink, understanding the worldviews that inspire, guide and govern our thinking is important so that human beings and their institutions can be freed from the powers that dominate them.

“Homo homini lupus” or “Beau sauvage”?
Homo homini lupus – For the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1679), Man in the natural state assumes that he is entitled to everything, and uses his power in an arbitrary way to preserve his own life. Since his selfish interest prevails, he cannot have security and peace because the survival of the fittest is always at play. Not being sociable by nature, the social coexistence forces the individual to give up his will in favor of a leader or government, the king or the state, that represents him, thus losing his freedom and even relinquishing violence.

Beau sauvage – For the French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712), Man is by nature good, sound and happy; the creation of private property leads to the distinction between rich and poor, slaves and free, thus promoting in this way the survival of the fittest. The man who tries to emerge out of inequality is corrupted by power and crushed by violence. He proposes a contract in which the general will is sovereign; since everyone loses equally therefore no one loses.

Which of these two theories best describes the true human nature? As humans come from an evolution of 5 million years of primates and mammals, it would be helpful to first arrive at a conclusion regarding the animals that preceded us in the history of the evolution of species: whether these animals are violent or non-violent by nature. We do not need to look too closely at the animal kingdom to conclude that as a general rule, animals are not violent gratuitously or by nature; they only behave violently when their needs are not met.

Since life only feeds on life, in the biological context of the food chain, every form of life is food for another form of life. For example, a gazelle feeds on grass, a lion comes along and eats the gazelle, the lion dies and is eaten by hyenas and vultures, and when they die they are eaten by worms and when the worms die they fertilize the soil and make the grass grow. A dead body is called a cadaver; curiously enough this same word in Portuguese is made up of the initial for ‘carne-dada-aos vermes’, translated as meat given to worms or Ca-da-ver.

If any of the aforementioned animals finds an alternative way of feeding itself, it will immediately stop being a predator, that is, it will no longer be ‘violent’. Let’s take our pets, cats and dogs, as examples, they were previously merciless predators, but today they live in perfect harmony in our homes.

Millions of years of evolution separate us from the primates, the animals closest to us. Created in the image and likeness of God the Father, Man is not a wolf to Man, but a brother; the world that God created has sufficient resources for the needs of everyone to be met without resorting to violence.

This leads us back to one of the fundamental assumptions of the non-violent communication: as with the rest of the living creatures, violence and conflicts among people occur when their needs are not met. NVC is, in this sense, a process that leads to the needs of everyone involved being met thus appeasing violence and resolving any conflict that might occur when needs are not met. The belief that man is by nature evil, selfish and violent is a myth and has served for centuries to justify violence of one person over another, and even of man on himself through the feelings of guilt and shame.

“Se vis pacem para bellum” – If you want peace, prepare for war. This has been the motto of the worldview of man as an individual and within a community. According to this motto, because it sees man as being violent by nature, peace cannot be achieved through peaceful means, but only through violent ones.

Society educates individuals to be violent with others and to repress their innate anger; for those who cannot do this, society exercises its coercive and punitive power over them. In this way, based on the false concept that humans are violent by nature, the structures of power and violence are perpetuated.

The worldview on which non-violent communication rests as the language of a New World, the Kingdom of God that Jesus came to bring into the world, is that God created all things good. The author of the book of Genesis shows us a God who rejoices in every created reality by saying, “And God saw that it was good.” (Genesis 1). If everything is good then how much more is man who is created in the image and likeness of God himself, the creator of everything (Genesis 1:26).

The Man of Tomorrow
In addition to Walter Wink and other theologians like Paul Tillich and Teilhard de Chardin, Rosenberg was also much influenced by his teacher Carl Rogers, the great master of non-directive, person-centred psychotherapy.

In an article written at the end of his life, Rogers described the mood of the man of tomorrow. His predictions have been proven to be correct and his ideas continue to be current and inspiring, and should help to determine which worldview ought to guide our thinking. Therefore, the men of tomorrow,

• will be open to the inner and outer world, new ways of being, of seeing new ideas and concepts.
• will be suspicious of science and technology aimed at controlling the world of nature and people.
• will be of new forms of communication, closeness and intimacy.
• have consideration for others and have a positive and benevolent regard; when they help out, they do it in a gentle and courteous way, non-moralistic and non-judgmental.
• with regard to ecology, will ally with the forces of nature, not at war for their conquest.
• will be hostile to the highly structured inflexible and bureaucratic institutions; with the understanding that institutions exist to serve the people and not the other way around.
• will be suspicious of external authorities that are morally autonomous, that is, trust in one’s own experiences and moral conscience to make value judgments that may go against laws that are considered unjust.
• will be spiritual people, that is, ones who seek to find meaning, design and reason for life that are bigger than the individual and even life itself.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

NVC - The Language of Peace

One of the NVC logos

I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly. (John 10:10)

“New Year, new life” – To do justice to this proverb, this year I am going to write about a way of living that I want to progressively adopt as I research and write about it. Frankly speaking, this is probably the main reason why I chose this theme for the 2018 blog.

I am researching and writing about this topic to convince myself that up until now, I have been living in a wrong way, so this year will be for me the novitiate in this alternative way of living. If by these writings others also come to the same conclusion, then so much the better. As Mahatma Gandhi said, “We must be the change we want to see in the world”.

The initials NVC stand for Non-Violent Communication. I first learned about this type of communication in a Bible course that I took in Jerusalem, and quickly realized the potential this theory has to transform the lives of individuals, and eventually the society and the world as a whole.

According to its founder, Marshall Rosenberg, NVC is not just a form of communication, nor does it refer only to non-violence. More than just a simple theory or technique, NVC is a whole new philosophy of life and a new way of communication that is based on a new worldview, that is, a whole new way of thinking, feeling and looking at life, and everything about it.

Marshall Rosenberg (1934-2015) was an American Jew who graduated from Clinical Psychology, but at the start of his career as a psychotherapist, he quickly realized that the analysis, psychoanalysis and diagnosis of anger and other psychological problems that people presented to him did not lead to the changes that he and his patients wanted and needed most. Rosenberg realized that the problem was more systemic than specific to this or that person, and for this reason the solution to the problems also needed to be systemic.

Non-violent communication strives to be an alternative way of communication, a brand new language to tackle individual and social violence, and create a new culture, a new world, the Kingdom of God on earth in Christian terms. Meanwhile, we are aware that the language we have been using since the beginning of civilization is violent, because we are violent, not by nature but by education. We are violent, because we grow up and are educated in a society whose social structures and institutions are based on a violent worldview and culture.

The success of using the NVC process in psychotherapy prompted Rosenberg to run NVC workshops thus reaching many more people. From then on, the founder of NVC traveled around the world to teach and get people to speak this new language, especially in areas of conflict. The success has been enormous. All who came in contact with NVC sooner or later realized that they had lived in error, and smiled hopefully at the possibility of living a fuller, more genuine and happier life.

How we are called to live
As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. (Colossians 3:12-13)

Rosenberg realizing that he was dealing with a global issue, a question arose in his mind: how are we really meant to live? Given that this question could not be answered in the field of psychology, he turned to religion. In all the religions he studied, he found the word compassion in them; so, he came to the conclusion that we are meant to live compassionately with ourselves and with others.

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, God’s compassion for his people is unconditional (Isaiah 54:10). For Jesus, it was natural to feel compassion for the people who crossed his path; it is why Jesus felt compassion for the multitudes who walked like sheep without a shepherd (Matthew 9:35-38) and the two blind men sitting on the fringe of the road of life, unable because of blindness to fully participate in it (Matthew 20:29-34).

The concepts and tools of the non-violent communication are designed to help us think, hear and speak in ways that arouse compassion and generosity inside of us and towards others. NVC helps us to interact in ways that lead us to feel more alive, genuine and in solidarity.

The way of thinking and the techniques necessary to live compassionately are very different from the ways that we have been taught over the centuries.

How we have lived
Without even noticing, far from communicating compassionately with ourselves and with others, we have been using a language that is offensive and violent: it injures, and causes and feeds conflicts. The language that most human beings use is a static language, based on the misuse and abuse of static verbs, like the verb to BE, used to judge, interpret, diagnose, classify and label people we meet. We have the bad habit of pointing out the faults of others, telling them what is wrong with them and giving them advice on how they should be.

Since ancient times, we humans have used a language that promotes internal and external conflict, the cold or open warfare, passive or explosive aggression and so we live in a world of exploiters and exploited, masters and slaves, dominant and dominated – neither one nor the other is happy; neither the promoters nor the sufferers of war live in peace; as the saying has it, “Those who go to war, give out and take in (violence)”.

We have been educated in structures of power in which some judge themselves superior to others, snatching for themselves the prerogative to label what is good or evil, right or wrong, just or unjust, adequate or inadequate. Those who submit and obey the rules imposed on them are called good, those unwilling to submit or rebel against the rules are called bad or evil. Justice in this world is retributive; the good, those who obey, are rewarded and the bad, those who disobey, are punished. NVC confronts and exposes this fallacy in the language and behaviour that underlies this worldview.

A language that evaluates and labels
The times when we can observe without giving an opinion, evaluation or judgment do not happen very often. Our culture abuses too much the usage of the verb to be, because we are addicted to labeling and framing everything we observe. Because one has killed a dog, now everyone calls him a dog-killer, and so on, we put labels on everything and everyone we see: so and so is selfish, lazy, vain, mean, a liar…

The use and abuse of the verb to be tie people to a static identity, and prevent them from growing, discovering and changing into their true self. As time goes on, our eyes cloud over with prejudices that blind us like cataracts to reality, until we end up only seeing what we want to see, and hearing what we want to hear.

A language that denies responsibility and the ability to choose
The use and abuse, with ourselves and with others, of expressions such as “I have to do this or that whether I like it or not” and “It is my duty to do such a thing…” remove our freedom, and make us slaves to duty and subject to something that is not of our choice.

The denial or abdication of our choice and decision-making capacity, has the immediate result of denying responsibility for acts we commit. As it is not really our choice, we do not answer or feel responsible for what we do.

In this frame of mind, millions of Jews were murdered in gas chambers during the Second World War as those who killed them defended themselves in court by saying that they were only following orders, thus desensitizing themselves to the atrocities that they had carried out. Today we use the same method when we say: they are orders from the boss, it is the rule or the constitution or company policy…

A coercive language that threatens with punishment
People who are forced to do things out of fear of being punished or out of shame or guilt, feel debased, as they realize that someone can punish them and make them suffer if they do not comply.

Those who are forced or coerced into performing certain tasks, even when they are well performed, as well as those who demanded them with threats of punishment, pay a very high price because violence can only generate violence; on the road of violence, compassionate giving and receiving can never be achieved.

A language that seduces with rewards
The same can be said when a task to be accomplished is motivated by a reward that we yearn and expect to receive. Also in this case, the motive is not compassion, nor the joy to contribute to the good of others. Doing something to receive reward does not come from the energy that aims to enrich our lives and that of others.

Whoever does something in order to get paid will stop doing it once the pay stops; whereas “whoever runs for the joy of running, does not tire”. Both the tasks motivated by rewards as well as the tasks motivated by punishment are violent; as neither are voluntary, that is, by free choice, they do not enrich the life of the one who orders them nor do they enrich the lives of those who execute them. On the contrary, they impoverish the lives of both because they establish human relations of inequality that are born out of violence thus generating more violence.

To live compassionately
Language is the interaction between words and concepts; intelligence is the interaction between neurons. Throughout the millions of years of human evolution, language and intelligence have evolved in parallel. It is unthinkable for intelligence to exist without language and language without intelligence; even so, it is not a chicken or egg question. A baby learns to talk and with this learning he is, at the same time, educated; education would not be possible without the use of language.

We could consider changing our lives first and only then learn a new language suited to this new way of living. However, since the baby is educated at the same time he learns how to talk, let us embrace conversion, that is, let us integrate this new worldview and new way to live, as we adopt and use, with ourselves and with others, this new language that is implicit in it.

Let us learn and use the language of non-violence and the rest will follow. This is what made Rosenberg drop out of private practice in psychotherapy and instead, take to the road running workshops from town to town teaching this new language, and everyone who learned it saw their problems resolved and experienced a “metanoia” – a change of mind – followed by a change of life, without the need of any psychotherapy based on analysis or psychoanalysis.

Underlying all human actions, there are needs that seek to be fulfilled; the understanding and recognition of these needs can lead to establishing a shared basis for connection, cooperation, and, ultimately and more globally, peace.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

Fatima: The theology of the message

Have a blessed Christmas and a wonderful year!

At the heart of the message of Fatima is the mystery of the Holy Trinity. Being the object of two Fatima prayers, one taught by the Angel and the other by Our Lady, we can very well say that the apparitions at Fatima open and close with this mystery.

Lucia, however, has said to the then Cardinal Ratzinger that the “practical” goal of all the apparitions was to increase in the people of God the theological virtues of Faith, Hope and Charity which was evident in the message starting from the first prayer taught by the Angel: My God, I believe, I adore, I hope and I love You! I ask pardon of You for those who do not believe, do not adore, do not hope and do not love You.

Contrary to the view of some theologians, in my understanding, Guadalupe, Lourdes and Fatima are theophanies and not “marianphanies”. When the little shepherds inquired where the Lady was from, she responded that she was from Heaven. Therefore it was Heaven that manifested itself through her and the message that she came to deliver was not hers, but from Heaven, that is, God’s.

Divine revelations have occurred at all times, in all sorts of places and through all sorts of people. The theophany of Fatima is a little more complex than other theophanies because it occurred at different places, through different people, and at different times. In fact, we can distinguish three different cycles in the apparitions at Fatima:

The Angelic Cycle:  the apparitions of the Angel in 1916
We leave out the angelic experience of Lucia and her friends in 1915 because it was inconsequential and lacked clarity. Despite of this, it did put Lucia in a state of watchfulness for the apparitions of the Angel that came the following year, when she was not with these friends but with her cousins, Francisco and Jacinta Marto. In line with the roles of angels in the Bible, this angel is a messenger, and just like Archangel Gabriel who announced to Mary that she had been chosen by God to be the mother of the Incarnate Word, he too announced to the children that they have been chosen:

“The Hearts of Jesus and of Mary are attentive to the voice of your supplications (…) have designs of mercy on you…”  In the case of Fatima, the Angel went beyond the role of messenger-only and prepared the children for the true apparitions to come, in other words, those of Our Lady. Something similar to the role of John the Baptist as the precursor of the Messiah, the Angel prepared the children for the impending encounter with the supernatural.

Perhaps this is why the encounters with the Angel were of different nature. The children described the three encounters with the Angel as strenuous; they felt drained of their energies as if they were outside of their bodies. In contrast, the encounters with the Lady left them radiant, comforted and full of energy.

There is one other detail that may raise doubts in some people regarding these apparitions. In the representations of angels that we see in sculptures, paintings, theaters and films, and of course, in the imagery of the little shepherds, angels always appear with wings. The Angel of Fatima, however, as the little shepherds described him, did not have wings. For whatever reason that was how the children described him. This fact may even add to the veracity of these apparitions or manifestations of the divine since messenger angels in the Bible do not have wings; those that have wings are the Seraphim and the Cherubim guarding the Ark of the Covenant.

The Marian Cycle:  the apparitions of Our Lady in 1917
The core message of Fatima is revealed in the Marian apparitions that took place from May to October 1917. Those of the Angel, like we have said earlier, served as a preparation for these apparitions, and those that followed helped to interpret them.

The doctrinal core reveals itself in the apparitions of the Virgin which is vast and complete and the reason why Fatima is considered the most doctrinal, most prophetic and also the most sociopolitical of all Marian apparitions, having inspired and influenced concrete social and political measures in the twentieth century.

The Heart of Mary Cycle:  the apparitions in Pontevedra (1925-1926) and Tuy (1929)
In these apparitions that took place years later and when Lucia was perhaps not yet accustomed to the loneliness she felt after the death of her cousins, the Lady blessed her with these apparitions, as she had appeared to Jacinta at her deathbed, to fulfill what she had promised Lucia, of never abandoning her, giving her strength, and helping her in the interpretation of the message.

These visions had the same effect on Lucia as the transfiguration of the Lord on the apostles, of assuring that she had taken the right course of action both in relation to the interpretation of the message as well as her life on earth and the reason why she had been left behind. These apparitions also served to remove doubts in Lucia and to clarify some aspects of the message, especially in regard to the devotion of the five first Saturdays.

The dimensions of the Fatima message
As the apparition with the greatest doctrinal amplitude in the opinion of many theologians, Fatima is like a “Summa Theologica” because it touches upon all the themes that are essential to our faith and gives clues to how to live them, both in the area of individual as well as liturgical spirituality, in a way that is very practical and pedagogical.

The Sacrificial Dimension – Understood as the Eucharistic sacrifice and offering of oneself in the context of the Eucharist and of life, that is, to make life eucharistic: “Do you want to offer yourself…” From the very first Marian apparition, and paraphrasing James and John who asked to sit one on the right and the other on the left of the Lord but first they needed to drink the cup that he drank (Mark10:36-45), thus the little shepherds asked to go to Heaven, but first the Lady asked them if they were willing to offer themselves for others.

Christ gave up his life for us, and as a Christian or a follower of Christ we also need to love others not only as we love ourselves as the commandment says, but more than that, as Jesus loves us, to the extent of giving up his life for us (John 13:34-35).

The Eschatological Dimension – This is the translation of the Gospel warning: “unless you repent, you will all perish as they did” (Luke 13:3).  It is about the misfortunes that hang over the world because of sin – and also about the conversion of sinners, and how we can participate in it; the prophetic and pedagogical vision of hell, as well as how to avoid eternal damnation.

The Missionary Dimension – Mission is transversal through the entire message of Fatima; all the practices that Our Lady asks in relation to prayers, sacrifices, the Rosary, the consecration, the first Saturdays, are aimed for the good of others, that is, the conversion and salvation of sinners and not for personal sanctification. The follower and devotee of the message of Fatima is converted by praying for the conversion of others. Everything is oriented towards others; it is, therefore, a truly “altruistic” and not an “egocentric” spirituality.

Unlike most Catholics in those days and also in ours who live obsessed with gaining Heaven and do good for the sole purpose of their own individual salvation, the little shepherds did nothing to save their own souls because the Lady had already said that she would take them up to Heaven.

It is as if they practiced the theology of Protestant reform, and now also Catholic’s, that Heaven is free for all because Christ has already paid in full the entrance ticket. With Heaven guaranteed to them, the little shepherds dedicated their lives in securing it also for others.

In this way, everything that the little shepherds did was missionary:  by ways of an “Apostolate of Prayer”, in which Francisco distinguished himself, as he was always seeking occasions and places to be alone with God, consoling Him, and by ways of an “Apostolate of Sacrifice”, in which Jacinta distinguished herself by being tireless in finding instances to do more and more self-sacrifices, because she wished that everyone could go to Heaven.

The Marian Dimension – The devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary and the Rosary as the contemplation with Mary on the mysteries of Christ. The manifestation of the Lady identifying herself as Our Lady of the Rosary.

The Ecclesial Dimension – Communion in solidarity with the whole Church, in prayer for peace in the world and for the conversion of sinners.

The Petrine Dimension – Fatima started with an appeal from the Holy Father and always involved the popes; and precisely the one who did not want to get himself involved with the Fatima message was the one who turned out to be its greatest proponent -- Pope John Paul II.

The Prophetic Dimension – Fatima represented for thousands of Christians the blue army of Mary - the evangelical activism, against the red army of Russia - the militant atheism. The militant atheism continues to exist even without the tutelage of Russia, in the Freemasons and certain groups of agnostics who always try to influence politics to go against the Church.

In this time as in all times, Fatima is a perennial exhortation for all Christians to become evangelists, always ready to stand up to anyone who demands an account of the hope that is in us (1Peter 3:15). Or as someone has said after the Second Vatican Council, an appeal to become Christians as members of a political party, and militants as members of the Church.

The Pedagogical-Religious Dimension – The learning of prayers and pious practices of devotion as ways to reparate, console and atone the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

To incarnate the Fatima message
This is accomplished by putting into practice what Mary had asked the little shepherds which they generously fulfilled as they embodied all the aspects of this message. It is up to us to do the same if we are lovers of Mary our mother and if like the little shepherds, we want to participate in the redemption of the world.

Stop offending Jesus – This is the first thing the little shepherds did:  to leave behind their own sinful ways of life by developing a more austere awareness that enabled them to judge each one of their own deeds and expose sins in their lives regardless how small they might be.

Pray the Rosary every day – Through the Rosary we are taken by the hands of Mary our mother, to contemplate on the mysteries of our Redemption, that is, the life of her Son. Since she knows him better than anyone else, she more than anyone can introduce us to her son, to his life and doctrine.

Offer sacrifices – By offering sacrifices we are putting into practice the reason why we participate in the Eucharist. At the end of a Latin Mass the priest dismisses the people by saying, “Ite missa est” which means at the same time two different things: first, that the Mass is over and second, that you are on a Mission, that is, once the Mass ends the Mission starts.

Part of this mission is to bring to life the Eucharistic dimension. We eat the body offered and drink the blood outpoured, so that we ourselves in our lives become the body offered and the blood outpoured. We participate in the Eucharist so that we become eucharistic as we make our lives a gift for the redemption of others. We do this when, like the little shepherds, we offer ourselves through self-sacrifices, and embrace the cross of Christ every day by denying ourselves and affirming others in our lives.

Devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary – Assiduous prayer places us before God who acts as a mirror that makes us see who we really are, hence a false image of ourselves leads us to have a false image of God. Prayer purifies these two images, of God and of ourselves; prayer to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, on the other hand, purifies our heart and makes it like hers. It is in our own interest this devotion since as the beatitude has it, only the pure of heart will see God.

Observance of the five first Saturdays – This is a beautiful observance to reinvigorate our faith and our Christian practices. It is like the spiritual exercises of Saint Ignatius or like the Cursillos. It gives a new start and awakens a dormant faith that has lost its saltiness which used to give meaning and taste to a life that now is no longer the light of the world.

Use of the scapular – This practice was once very popular, and has not yet lost its value. It is not that the scapular is a talisman that protects us by its own merit without our collaboration; this would be idolatry. The use of the scapular serves to remind us, hour by hour and minute by minute, that we are called to put on Christ as Saint Paul says in Ephesians (4:22-24).

Conclusion
We have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us. (2Corinthians 4:7)

At the end of this long digression and study of the events at Fatima, both its meaning and message, I realized the richness, the doctrinal depth, and the prophetic sociopolitical aspects of the message. Even I can hardly believe that such important message was placed in the hands of three children of such tender ages, completely uncultured, and in spite of their limitations, they did a very good job of living and delivering, and being the custodians of the message of Fatima, despite the unbelief of their own families and the Church, and the obstacles and threats from the administrative and political power.

I want to end this reflection the very same way I began it: The mystery hidden from the wise who are proud of their wisdom is revealed to the simple and accepted by the truly wise, that is, those who keep an open mind without prejudice and who recognize that they know only that they know nothing. (Matthew 11:25)

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

Fatima: "Pray the Rosary everyday"

Before Pope John Paul II introduced the Luminous Mysteries, the full Rosary consisted of 150 Hail Marys so that the laity could mimic the 150 psalms in the Bible that the clerics’ Liturgy of the Hours is based on. Furthermore, in Portugal it was not called the Rosary but “Third” since we prayed only one third (50 Hail Marys) of the full Rosary at a time.

The full Rosary was therefore made up of three thirds. It was prayed by meditating on the first third, the Joyful Mysteries, corresponding to the Birth and Infancy of Jesus, then the second third, the Sorrowful Mysteries, corresponding to his Passion and Death, and the last third, the Glorious Mysteries, corresponding to his Resurrection and Ascension into Heaven.

The Church was slow to realize that the Rosary was incomplete with only the mysteries of the incarnation birth, passion and death, and resurrection of the Lord. It was missing the mysteries of his public ministry in which Jesus of Nazareth by his preaching, attitudes, ways of living and acting models for us the new man, the one who is the way of truth and life for all human beings.

With the creation and integration of the Luminous Mysteries by Pope John Paul II in his 2002 apostolic letter Rosarium Virginis Mariae, the logic of the three thirds making up a complete Rosary didn’t make sense anymore. The full Rosary is now four “thirds” comprising of 50 Hail Marys each thus totaling 200 Hail Marys instead of the original 150. By including Jesus’ public life in the Luminous Mysteries, there are now four sets of mysteries to contemplate.

The structure of the Rosary
It is called the Rosary because the now 200 Hail Marys intertwined into groups of ten, forms a “Crown of Roses” which is offered to Mary, Mother of the Lord and our Mother.  The twenty mysteries which recall the events in the Lord’s life are divided into four series of 5 mysteries each. In each recitation of the Rosary, we pray only five mysteries of one of the following series:

In the Joyful Mysteries, we meditate the beginning of the redemption of humanity, from the annunciation to Mary and the incarnation of the Son of God in her womb until Jesus’ adolescence.

In the Luminous Mysteries, we meditate the most important moment of Jesus’ public ministry, from his inauguration at Baptism until the institution of the Eucharist as the memorial of his Passion. It is during these years that Jesus truly revealed himself to be the Light of the World (John 8:12), by his attitude before the most diverse situations he encountered in life, by the doctrines that he taught, and by his actions.

In the Sorrowful Mysteries, we meditate on the events of the passion and death of Jesus, from his agony in the Garden of Gethsemane to his last breath on the cross. When we say that Jesus died for our sins, we imply not only that he paid off our debt in full which we are incapable of paying, but also that the sins of those who intervened in his death are still being committed today, and always will till the end of time. For this we can conclude that Jesus was killed by the sins of all humanity.

In the Glorious Mysteries, we meditate on Jesus’ triumph over death by his Resurrection. Death has been conquered once for all just like the sin that caused it. After Jesus’ Resurrection, death is no longer the final destiny of mankind, but rather a passage to eternal life for those who choose him as the way, the truth and the life. Jesus’ life that began with a ‘Yes’ from Mary to God’s plan ends now with the glorification of the one who is for all a model of Christian life.

The Our Father – The Lord’s Prayer, which precedes each mystery, is much more than a simple prayer that the Lord taught us to recite occasionally. It summarizes the most important aspects of the Gospel; it is in this sense an entire pocket Gospel because it contains all we should know and do, the words to live by.

Since it is made up of several unrelated statements, it can be viewed as a “shopping list” that we make in order not to forget the important things that need to be done. As a list, it concerns with the protocol of our relationship with God, that is, how our prayer should be structured: how is God to be addressed, to be praised, and in what ways can we ask for our needs, in what order, and when. Therefore, more than a prayer, it is basically a practical guide on how to pray and live.

The Hail Mary – This prayer is divided into two parts. The first part is biblical and is made up of two greetings, one by the Angel Gabriel and the other by Mary’s cousin, Elizabeth. The second half has its origin in the faith of the Church, it is not known how or when or where it was first used. For this reason, the Hail Mary prayer represents the perfect union between the Bible as the Word of God and the Church as the community of believers.

In an upward movement, the first part which is descended from the Bible, is made up of 5 ladders that ascend to Jesus. In a downward movement, the second part is also made up of 5 ladders that descend to a human reality, our death.

This cannot be understood by our Protestant brothers and sisters, the advocates of the “sola fide sola scriptura solus Christus” because the Scripture, the Word of God described in the first part, is united in a harmonious way with the Tradition, that is, the history of the Christian faith throughout the ages embodied in the second. Jesus who is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, and the center of human history is the hinge that unites these two parts.

The Glory Be – It is an invocation of God as One and Triune. One single God in three different persons united in a triangle of love. It is the solution to the dialectic of Greek philosophy between the one and the multiple. This prayer also helps to remind us that made in the image and likeness of God we human beings are also one and triune: we do not exist nor subsist outside the family.

The origin and history of the rosary
As an instrument of prayer, the beads of the rosary have their origin in India, in the third century BC. In Christianity, it was the desert fathers in the third and fourth century who started using this counting instrument for prayers, especially for praying the Our Father.

Furthermore, in the antiquity, the Greeks and the Romans used to crown the statues of their gods with crowns of roses as a way to show their love and gratitude. Perhaps following this tradition the Christian women who were led to martyrdom were dressed to the hilt, wearing on their head a crown of roses, a symbol of their joy and surrender as they made their way to meet Christ the Bridegroom. After their martyrdom, other Christians collected these crowns and prayed, one prayer for each rose, for the souls of the martyrs.

At Fatima, Lucia and Jacinta liked to put flowers in their hair. On the days of the apparitions, the three shepherd children wore their Sunday best as if they were going to Mass; the two girls placed flowers in their hair, especially Jacinta who was photographed wearing a crown of roses on her head for the occasion of the apparitions.

The praying of the Rosary came out from the shadows of the monasteries as the psalter of the laity in the year 800. It was only in 1214, however, that the Church accepted the Rosary in its present form. Tradition says that it was given to the Church by Saint Dominic de Guzman who had in turn received it from the Virgin Mary as a powerful weapon against the enemies of the faith.

The Rosary gained great momentum after the naval battle of Lepanto where Christians defeated the Turks thus eliminating once and for all the danger of Islam subjugating Christianity in Europe. Just before the battle, Pope Pius V bid Christians to pray the Rosary to support the Christian fleet. After the unexpected victory, he instituted the feast day of Our Lady of Victory on the 7th of October, the day of the 1517 battle of Lepanto. This day was later changed to the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary.

Mary’s insistent call to pray the Rosary every day at most of her apparitions, especially those at Fatima, made this practice distinctively Catholic in contrast to the rest of Christendom, the Orthodox and the Protestants.

The way to pray the Rosary
Each day of the week we meditate on a different group of mysteries: on Mondays and Saturdays we meditate on the Joyful Mysteries, on Tuesdays and Fridays the Sorrowful Mysteries, on Wednesdays and Sundays the Glorious Mysteries, and finally Thursdays are reserved for the Luminous Mysteries.

There are several ways of praying the Rosary but for the most part people start praying by making the sign of the cross, followed by the Creed, then one Our Father, three Hail Marys and a Glory Be. After saying these introductory prayers, the first mystery is announced which may or may not be accompanied by a short meditation and then one Our Father and ten Hail Marys follow.

After the tenth Hail Mary in each decade is recited, the Glory Be is prayed followed by several pious small prayers depending on where the Rosary is recited and by whom, and ends with the prayer that Our Lady recommended at Fatima to be prayed after each mystery: “O my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell, lead all souls to Heaven, especially those most in need of Thy mercy. Amen”.

For a more complete ending, we add three Hail Marys for the intentions of the Holy Father so that we may be united to all Christendom, represented by him, and ends with the Hail Holy Queen preceded or not, according to the time available, by the Litany of Our Lady.

The importance of the Rosary
The Rosary is at the same time a Marian and a Christ-centered prayer because we repeatedly invoke Mary as Mother of God and our Mother, and ask her to join us in our prayers to the Father as we recite the Our Father and to the Holy Trinity as we pray the Glory Be, and to help us to contemplate the mysteries of the life of her Son, our elder brother and saviour, of whom she is also an integrant part.

At Fatima, as at many Marian apparitions, Mary never draws attention to herself, but rather she exclusively points to her Son. Her joy comes not when we praise her, but when we praise her Son. As the proverb says, “Whoever my son kisses, my lips sweeten”.

One does not love the son without loving the mother, therefore all the love directed to the son is indirectly directed to the mother. Every praise given to the mother is given to the son, as was the case of the woman who in the midst of the crowd, raised her voice and said to Jesus, ‘Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts that nursed you!’ (Luke 11:27)

The Rosary is not a prayer of thanksgiving, nor a prayer of petition, and not even a prayer of lamentation like some of the psalms found in the Bible. The Rosary is fundamentally a prayer of meditation and contemplation. In fact, we announce and enunciate each mystery by saying that in this mystery we contemplate…

It has been told that one day when someone confessed to Pope John XXIII his difficulty in praying the Rosary because he is often distracted by the mechanical and repetitive nature of the Hail Marys, to which the pope replied, ‘What is the purpose of the Rosary but to distract us?’

Being a contemplative prayer, the repetitive recitation of the Hail Marys in the Rosary acts like the mantras in the Buddhist spirituality; they engage the mind by preventing it from jumping from thought to thought, thus enabling the person to contemplate strictly on the mysteries of the Lord’s life. The goal, however, is not to put our attention on each Hail Mary and Our Father that we recite, but to occupy the mind with these prayers as with the mantras and thus surge us into the contemplation of the divine.

The Rosary and Fatima
At the apparitions in Fatima, Our Lady asked the little shepherds to pray the Rosary every day, not just at one or two apparitions, but at all the ones that took place in 1917, as well as those that happened in Tuy and Pontevedra to Sister Lucia alone. Why the Rosary, Lucia had asked Our Lady, because it is a prayer accessible to all, young and old, wise and ignorant alike.

Soon after the apparitions, praying the Rosary became an integral part of the evening prayer routine in a Catholic home. Before or after supper by the warmth of the fireplace the father or mother would lead the prayer, and no child would ask for a bedtime blessing from his parents before saying the Rosary, no matter how tired he was.

The family that prays together stays together. The television, however, like a Trojan horse came to disturb this candor and harmony in the homes and soon the Rosary was replaced by the soap operas. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why the divorce rate has increased so drastically.

The little shepherds who already prayed the Rosary before the apparitions, albeit hurriedly, began to pray it as Our Lady wanted. Especially Francisco, to whom the Lady said that he had to pray many Rosaries before he could make it to Heaven.

In effect, the Rosary identified Francisco in his earthly life because there were days when he prayed ten Rosaries a day, and it also identified his bones when his body was exhumed. Among the many corpses that were buried in the same common grave, Mr. Marto, Francisco’s father, identified the bones of his son because clinging to them was the rosary still intact that Francisco used to pray.

Penance and prayer is what Mary asked of us and others at Fatima. The Rosary catapults us into the contemplation of the Mystery of God, above all the Incarnate Word. Therefore, meditating or not, distracted or not, those who profoundly love the Rosary and cannot go one day without praying it are “ipso facto” truly people of prayer.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

Fatima: Prayer as a way of being a Missionary

Prayer and penance are the spirituality and the heart of the message of Fatima. The main objective of prayer and penance that the Blessed Virgin Mary asked of the little shepherds at Fatima was not to achieve their personal perfection. Our Lady did not exhort the three children to pray and to make sacrifices for their own sanctification.

The spirituality of Fatima is, therefore, not an egocentric spirituality, that is, a set of spiritual practices where the objective is to benefit and perfect the one who practices them; for this reason, it is not comparable to the asceticism of the monks which has sanctification, mysticism and beatific vision as the final goal.  

Quite the opposite, both the prayer and penance that Mary asked of the shepherd children had a concrete and specific goal: the conversion of “the poor sinners” and the reparation to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary. It is, therefore, an altruistic spirituality.

It is true that through these practices the little shepherds became sanctified, but the practices were not done by the children with the intention to sanctify themselves but to contribute to the spiritual welfare of others. In other words, it was not to save themselves that they did what they did, but rather to save others. In this sense, both their personal prayer and penance are their contribution to the universal mission of salvation.

Even when the children decided not to sin anymore the fundamental reason that led them to do so was not to become saints, a thought that never entered into their minds. It was their great love for God that propelled them to do all that they could not to offend Our Lord further. In other words, even in their avoidance of sin, their objective is altruistic.

Prayer of intercession
Then Abraham came near and said, “Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked? Suppose there are fifty righteous within the city; will you then sweep away the place and not forgive it for the fifty righteous who are in it?” (…) “If I find at Sodom fifty righteous in the city, I will forgive the whole place for their sake”. (Genesis 18:23-26)

Whenever Moses held up his hand, Israel prevailed; and whenever he lowered his hand, Amalek prevailed. (Exodus 17:11)

The two great patriarchs of our faith, Abraham and Moses, experienced the value and the efficacy of intercessory prayer to God for the sake of their people. Later the task of asking God for the well-being of the people was assigned to the priests who were descendants of Aaron. The medieval Christian society was divided into classes, and each class was given a specific task: the nobles defended the clergy and the people, the clergy interceded for the nobles and the people, and the people provided material support for the clergy and the nobles.

Nowadays prayer is not an exclusive task of a particular class of people. Instead, we are all called to pray. Prayer is a means for us to express not only our love for God but also for our neighbours when we pray for them. Prayer can be our answer to God when He asks us where is our brother (Genesis 4:9). Unlike Cain, we ought to see ourselves as guardians of our brother by caring for him, wanting what is good for him, and acting in his favour.  All these are realized not only through deeds but also through prayers as we intercede for him to the One who can do him the most good, more than we can ever do especially in areas beyond our reach.

The Our Father and the Hail Mary prayers, as well as most Christian prayers, never exclude others. Even when we pray them in the privacy of our rooms and in our hearts, others are always there with us because we address ourselves to God in the plural form as a community; and whatever we ask in these and other prayers, we do not ask for ourselves exclusively, but also for the entire community of believers.

Chapter 17 of Saint John's Gospel presents the so-called priestly prayer which happens to be the longest prayer in the entire Bible.  In the second and third part of this prayer, Jesus prays to the Father for his disciples and then for all the believers. The important point of this prayer is the unity among all faithful and it is in this oneness where we are all members of the Mystical Body of Christ that all intercessory prayers rest upon.

The communion of saints is very dear to Catholicism. It consists of solidarity that is established among all the baptized, whether they live in space and time, or beyond in purgatory or in the bosom of God. It is on the basis of this communion that the Portuguese people has a special devotion in praying and offering the Eucharistic sacrifice for the most abandoned souls in purgatory, those who have no one to intercede for them.

When I had already decided not to go and cut my hair today, I began to hear a voice inside of me urgently imploring me to go; the more I ignored it the more insistent the voice became until it turned into an obsession. I gave up then and went. As I entered the shop, the barber surprised me by saying that he was at that very moment praying to the Lord that I would come in today.

“… Prayer is the most effective supplement after traditional medicine, surpassing acupuncture, herbs, vitamins and other alternative remedies.” (Washington Post, March 24, 2006)

It is difficult to quantify the efficacy of prayers. At the apparitions in Fatima, Lucia presented many intentions to Our Lady and she responded that some would be answered while others not. Faced with this reality, we can only say with certainty that it is easier for our requests to be answered if we formulate them than if we don't. However, whether our petitions are answered or not, it is God’s will that is fulfilled not ours; a will which we are called to accept unconditionally, because God is our Father and no one knows better than Him what we really need and what is more beneficial for our salvation.

Matthew 5:44 – Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you – Even enemies cease to be one when we have the courage to pray for them as the Gospels ask us to do. It is in fact something mysterious that we can all experience; the moment we succeed in praying for those who want us harm, our hatred for them ceases.

Francisco and Jacinta the reparators of humanity
In the summer of 1916 while they were playing in Lucia’s backyard, near the well of Arneiro, an Angel appeared and said to them:

--What are you doing? Pray, pray much! The most holy Hearts of Jesus and Mary have designs of mercy on you. Offer prayers and sacrifices constantly to the Most High.

With the passage of time, Sister Lucia interpreted this interjection of the Angel not as a reprimand because they were at play, but as a call to something of supreme importance, that is, to prayer. This call to attention must still echo in our hearts because as Christians we get distracted with too many things; very much like Marta in the Gospel, we tend to waste time on less important things… instead of sitting, despite the frenzy of our days, at Our Lord's feet like Mary, the sister of Marta, and fixing our gaze on Him who is all in all.

The little shepherds answered faithfully to the wake-up call of the Angel and again one year later, to the exhortations of Our Lady to pray and offer sacrifices in their daily lives according to their capabilities as the Angel had suggested, for the conversion of sinners. They took upon themselves this task like a mission, and embodied it in accordance to their personality and character.

Jacinta being the emotional one, and without neglecting prayer especially to the Blessed Sacrament or the “Hidden Jesus”, was more drawn to offer sacrifices because she had great pity for sinners and the more she could save the better. Francisco being the most intuitive of the three, without neglecting sacrifice like his sister, was more inclined to prayer; he was especially sensitive to the sadness of Jesus and used to spend hours and hours alone in consoling Him.

Prayer and sacrifice is an inseparable binomial like theory and praxis. To pray without making sacrifices is comparable to that character in the Gospel who says “Lord, Lord”, but does nothing to embody the Word, that is, to put it into practice (Matthew 7:21).

On the other hand, sacrifices without prayer would not be Christian either; therefore, the Blessed Virgin Mary also taught the little shepherds a prayer to go with all the sacrifices that they make: “O my Jesus, it is for love of You, in reparation for the offenses committed against the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and for the conversion of poor sinners.”

Using a letter from the post office as an analogy to explain the relationship between sacrifice and prayer: sacrifice is what is written in the letter, prayer is the envelope where the address is written, in this case to God in Heaven.

Francisco the consoler of the Lord
One day Lucia asked Francisco:
--“Francisco, why don’t you tell me to pray with you, and Jacinta too?”
--“I prefer praying by myself,” he answered, “so that I can think and console Our Lord, Who is so sad!”
I asked him one day:
--“Francisco, which do you like better – to console Our Lord, or to convert sinners, so that no more souls will go to hell?”
--“I would rather console Our Lord. Didn’t you notice how sad Our Lady was that last month, when she said that people must not offend Our Lord any more, for He is already much offended? I would like to console Our Lord, and after that convert sinners so that they won’t offend Him anymore.”

Francisco recognized simultaneously the transcendence of God and the jubilation derived from His presence. He confessed: “What I loved the most was to see Our Lord in that light which Our Lady which put in our hearts. I love God so much!” Francisco felt himself “on fire in that light which is God (…)” and affirmed, “What is God? … We could never put it into words!”

It was in this union with God that made him perceive the pain that human offenses cause Jesus. Francisco empathized greatly with Him for “He is so sad” and, for this reason drew from him the touching response, “If I could console Him!” (Cf. Portuguese Episcopal Conference 2017)

Perhaps this will be the most contemplative part of the Fatima message. Francisco was in fact a contemplative, used to separate himself from his companions, and probably would have become a monk had he lived to adulthood. However, the contemplation that made him spend the entire morning day after day in the Church of Fatima praying in front of the Hidden Jesus while Lucia and Jacinta went to school was not to make himself feel good by being in God’s company, but solely to console Jesus who is sad from all the offenses of sinners.

Devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary
… I will take Jacinta and Francisco soon. But you are to stay here some time longer. Jesus wishes to make use of you to make me known and loved. He wants to establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart.” (I promise salvation to those who embrace it, and those souls will be loved by God like flowers placed by me to adorn His Throne).

The cold modern world of technology pays little attention to symbolism. In order to better understand what the Hearts of Jesus and Mary mean, it is helpful for us to enter into the world of poetry. We all know that the expression to wear one’s heart on one’s sleeve means being emotional about certain topic or situation. This is how the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary are presented – as a display of distress and concern for the situation of humanity, so the faithful can see and do something about it.

In the biblical sense and also in the message of Fatima, the heart is not only a pear-shaped muscle that pumps blood throughout the body, but it is also the symbol of the very innermost part of man where thoughts, affections and will all come together.

The Sacred Heart of Jesus – The image of Jesus with his heart in his chest, and sometimes in his hand, is a graphic representation to make it very clear how much Jesus loved the people of his time to the point of suffering and giving his life for them, his friends and all humanity. Devotion to this image has inspired Christianity since the apparitions to Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque between 1673 and 1675. These visions are not out of the historical and biblical context if we think that it was really the soldier who pierced Jesus and opened his chest to show us his heart.

The Immaculate Heart of Mary – The image of Mary represented like that of Jesus with the heart in her chest means love, dedication and suffering for her son from conception till death on the cross. Crucified and before giving up his spirit, Jesus gave us his mother to be our mother, thus starting her passion for the brothers and sisters of her son, the whole humanity.

The Virgin Mary communicates to the shepherd children that her son wants to establish this devotion on earth, hence the reason why Lucia were to remain living while Jacinta and Francisco were soon to be taken up to Heaven. This image is also not out of historical and biblical context if we think of old Simeon’s prophecy that a sword will pierce Mary’s soul.

“You can only pay love with love” – The devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus like that to the Immaculate Heart of Mary and all other devotions and acts of love to God are not needed by God. It is us who need them, for the fact that it is only when we are open to the love of God that His love produces fruits in our lives.

But as long as we turn our backs on God, His love which never stops will not have any effect in our lives. On the other hand, it is not possible to be at the same time open to the love of God without loving Him, hence why this proverb makes perfect sense that God needs our love to love us. Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them. (John 14:23)

The Immaculate Heart of Mary is the mediator of all graces; it was this heart, immaculate for being conceived without sin, that agreed to God’s plan of conceiving His son for the salvation of humanity. By being the mediatrix of the primordial Grace that is Christ, and also in the smaller graces, Mary is always the mediatrix between Heaven and Earth.

For this reason Jacinta was fervently devoted to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, exhorting her cousin Lucia to propagate this devotion, for which reason she was to stay many years on earth:

“It will not be long now before I go to Heaven. You will remain here to make known that God wishes to establish in the world devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. When you are to say this, don’t go and hide. Tell everybody that God grants us graces through the Immaculate Heart of Mary; that people are to ask her for them; and that the Heart of Jesus wants the Immaculate Heart of Mary to be venerated at His side. Tell them also to pray to the Immaculate Heart of Mary for peace since God has entrusted it to her. If I could only put into the hearts of all, the fire that is burning within my own heart, and that makes me love the Hearts of Jesus and Mary so very much!”

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

Fatima: Personal Sacrifice as a way of being a Missionary

– Are you willing to offer yourselves to God and bear all the sufferings He wills to send you, as an act of reparation for the sins by which He is offended, and of supplication for the conversion of sinners?
– 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