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Introduction

Fatima: A Message for the World

I can remember when I first heard about the apparitions at Fatima. I was in Father Robert J. Fox’s living room. After writing several books and doing all he could to increase devotion to Our Lady of Fatima, Father Fox was known throughout the world as the “Fatima Priest.”

I wondered at the time, “Why Fatima?” With all the countless devotions in the Church, why should a nearly one-hundred-year-old apparition to three shepherd children in Portugal have any special importance? Over time I came to realize the answer: Fatima is not just a place; it is a message and a call.

The message of Fatima is universal — a message for you and for me that reflects all the teachings of the Catholic Church. It is at once simple enough for children to understand and deep enough to baffle theologians. It is not simply directed to pilgrims or for those seeking Mary’s intervention in specific areas of their lives. In fact, we don’t have to go to Fatima to live out the Fatima message. The message of Fatima can become a part of our daily spiritual lives wherever we are. Simply put, the message of Fatima is that Mary, the Mother of Jesus Christ, is living, real, and present in our lives, interceding for us.

The call of Fatima is an invitation to embrace what Mary offers both the Church and the world. What does Mary want for us? A personal relationship with her Son, Jesus Christ. Mary always leads us to Jesus.

A century after the first apparition of Our Lady to Lucia, Francisco, and Jacinta in Fatima, Portugal, the message and the call live on. That is because what flows from Fatima is more than a Marian devotion: it is all at once centered on the Holy Trinity, focused on Christ, strengthening to the Church, and oriented toward prayerful union with God. The message of Fatima is not only for one time and place: it is just as urgent and relevant today as it was a century ago. Father Luciano Guerra, former rector of the Fatima shrine, writes:

In the light of the face of Mary, which here [at the Fatima Shrine in Portugal] perhaps becomes more attractive, in the motherly warmth of her Immaculate Heart, in the simplicity of the children who had the grace of seeing and hearing her, certainly, also through individual and public manifestations of filial piety, which take place wherever Our Lady of Fatima is venerated, we are forced to hope that this grace, until today full of divine surprises, constitutes still today an abundant source of energy for the renovation of the Church, now that we have entered the third millennium.… The message irradiating from Fatima has the power of strengthening the faith, of purifying the hearts of the pilgrims and of getting them closer to God and their fellow men.¹

Whenever the Blessed Virgin appeared at Fatima, she had a gold ball at her waist. People came to understand that this ball represented the world and signified that the message of Fatima was for the whole world. If we put ourselves in the place of Lucia, Francisco, and Jacinta, we too, can do what Our Lady asks of us. Through the Fatima message, we can be shaped into what God desires for us, just as the humble shepherd children were.

We don’t have to be especially “holy” or educated. The apparitions at Fatima prove that God chooses the simplest people to carry out his greatest works. Sister Lucia stated in later writings, “The Lord shows that the work is his and not that of weak instruments which he has chosen; for God it is enough that these instruments allow themselves to be molded and transformed and moved by the grace at work within them, engraving in their pure hearts and innocent hearts the reflections of his presence, the touches of His grace and the impulses of His love.” God still wants to speak to us through Fatima. If we open ourselves up to him, a transformation of grace will take place.

The three most recent popes have recognized the urgency of the messages of Our Lady at Fatima for our world today. Pope Saint John Paul II developed a spiritual bond with Sister Lucia, one of the three little shepherds of the Fatima apparitions. He even donated the cornerstone, taken from Saint Peter’s tomb beneath the Vatican, for the new Fatima church, which was dedicated on the ninetieth anniversary of the apparitions. This gift of the Holy Father was a sign of his deep conviction that he owed his life to Our Lady of Fatima, whom he credited for saving him from an assassination attempt on May 13, 1981. Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI entrusted his pontificate to the Virgin Mary at Fatima. Pope Francis has done the same.

The message of Fatima has unfolded over time, further confirming that it has lasting significance for us today. In his assessment of the Little Shepherds, the late Father Luis Kondor, S.V.D., former postulator for the canonizations of now Saints Francisco and Jacinta, noted: “The full content of the Fatima message and its mission was not given all at once at the time of the apparitions in 1917, but in the course of the various preliminary private and public interrogations of the visionaries.” In fact, Lucia — the only one of the three seers to survive into adulthood — only wrote about the apparitions and the various messages of Our Lady when told to do so, many years after the apparitions occurred.

Father Kondor continued:

It is true that, immediately after the first apparition on May 13, 1917, articles, interrogations of the visionaries … publications, periodicals, booklets and books began to make their appearance, and that all of these are now of great historical importance. Nevertheless, a great many writers wrote nothing because they lacked the necessary ecclesiastical authorization, which was not granted until October 13, 1930. This was the date on which D. José Alves Correia da Silva published Fatima’s so-called “Magna Carta” in which he declared the apparitions worthy of credence and authorized the cult of Our Lady in the Cova da Iria. This authorization was of great importance for the literature concerning Fatima, beginning in fact with the writings of Sister Lucia, which we can classify as “source documents,” since the other two visionaries had died before they learned how to write. One can state, to begin with, that Sister Lucia never wrote anything of her own volition. She wrote only when she was ordered to do so. Sister Lucia destroyed the first document concerning the Five First Saturdays of the month which she had written on December 10, 1925, shortly after she had received the vision described in it. The description we now have is, therefore, a second edition, sent to her spiritual director, Father Aparicio, S.J., on December 17, 1927. In it, Sister Lucia explains how she had received authorization from heaven to share the part of the Fatima “secret” relating to the devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary and the conditions required in order to respond to the call of the Five First Saturdays.²

Lucia produced this first document, long and very important, in obedience to D. José Alves Correia da Silva, bishop of the Diocese of Leiria. He had asked her to provide a spiritual portrait of Jacinta. In what is now known as Sister Lucia’s first memoir, the apparitions provide no more than a framework. She finished the thirty-nine pages on Christmas Day, 1935.

Father Kondor writes further:

The second document is a communication to Father Goncalves, S.J., who at the time was Sister Lucia’s spiritual director. In it she describes the vision she received on June 13, 1929, when Our Lady asked the Pope, in union with all the Bishops of the world, to consecrate Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, in order to attain the conversion of that country and peace for the world and peace within the hearts of man. There are also many letters, records of interrogations and reports.”³

This second memoir was also written at the request of the Bishop of Leiria. Lucia’s intention was to “reveal the story of Fatima just as it is.” The seventy-six-page document was begun on November 7, 1937, and completed on November 21.

A third memoir of fifteen pages was written between the end of July and August 31, 1941. It reveals the first two parts of the Secret imparted by Our Lady on July 13, 1917: the vision of hell and God’s desire for devotion to Mary’s Immaculate Heart. Finally, a fourth memoir, again written at the request of Sister Lucia’s superiors, was begun on October 7 and completed on December 8, 1941. This is how Sister Lucia’s principal testimony came to be written.

Quite another matter, however, was the very slow way in which these writings were made known to the general public. As a result, the events of Fatima remained shrouded in secrecy and silence. Bishop D. José Alves Correia da Silva, however, instructed Sister Lucia to write down the best-kept third part of the “secret” in January 1944, when she was seriously ill and it was feared she might die. Responding to the bishop’s request, Sister Lucia leaned against the mattress in her monastic cell, and wrote down four pages that documented the last part of the vision received by the three little shepherds on July 13, 1917.

This last part of Lucia’s writings could well be entitled “The Great Martyrdom of the Church in the Twentieth Century.” The document contains a prophetic description of an attempt against the life of Pope John Paul II which ultimately occurred on May 13, 1981, in Saint Peter’s Square in Rome. This third part of the secret would not be revealed until the beatification of Francisco and Jacinta, on May 13, 2000. With its publication, the whole of Our Lady’s message has been made known. There is nothing further to be revealed, as Sister Lucia herself declared shortly before she died.

When Sister Lucia was asked how she viewed the message over time, she stated:

If the message was chosen by men, it would have been the first to be rejected. Think of it: for such a message, a rural hillside, a stony place, devoid of natural beauty, with no means of transport, without shelter of any kind to protect people from the hot sun in the summer or the torrential rain and storms in the winter. No one would go there! Often what men reject is what God chooses, because his is the power, the wisdom, the grace and energy that is at work in souls, moving them and carrying them as he wishes.⁴

While she was still living, many people longed for a face-to-face interview with Sister Lucia. Such meetings were almost never granted. In order to visit her at the cloistered Carmel in Coimbra where she lived, one needed a permit issued by the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The prohibition against receiving visitors had been imposed on her to protect her life of prayer as a contemplative Carmelite nun. While Sister Lucia made use of every possible means for making the Blessed Virgin “better known and loved,” she always abided by this order, despite the many people who wanted to see her. She did, however, receive thousands of letters over the eighty-eight years between the time of the apparitions and her death. When she discussed this with Pope Paul VI during his visit in 1967, he suggested she write a long letter in response, which became the book “Calls” from the Message of Fatima (Apelos da Mensagem de Fatima). “Calls” was published on December 13, 2000, on the authority of Pope John Paul II and endorsed by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

In “Calls,” Sister Lucia tells us that the first call that God addresses to us through Fatima is a call to faith:

Faith is the basis of the entire spiritual life. It is by faith that we believe in the existence of God, in his power, his wisdom, his mercy, his work of redemption, his pardon and his fatherly love. It is by faith that we believe in God’s Church, founded by Jesus Christ, and in the doctrine the Church transmits to us and by which we shall be saved. It is by the light of faith that we see Christ in others, loving, serving and helping them when they are in need of our assistance. And it is also our faith that assures us that God is present within us, that his eyes are always upon us.⁵

While Catholics are not required to believe in the extraordinary events that occurred at Fatima, those who do have found their faith renewed.

Fatima Today

Before the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to the children at Fatima, they were visited by an angel. Sister Lucia would later recall:

God began the preparation of the instruments that He had chosen when they, utterly carefree, were praying and playing, by causing to pass before their eyes, gently and slowly, what seemed to be white as snow in the shape of a human being. The purpose was to draw our attention to it.

And in fact, even to this day I don’t know. But the events that followed make me believe that it must have been our Guardian angel who, without showing himself clearly, was preparing us for the accomplishment of God’s plan.⁶

This first appearance of the Angel occurred in 1915. With no verbal message for the children, it made the children aware of the supernatural. God was preparing them for the incredible events that were about to unfold. This, too, has relevance for us today. God often allows us to be touched in a special way in order to help us to become more aware of his presence and how he is working in our lives.

Over the course of his visits, the Angel taught the children to pray in union with Christ present in the Eucharist. “The message of the Angel in the ‘Loca do Cabeco,’ as well as the way the shepherd children received him, is a pressing invitation for us today. It calls us to remember that adoration and consecration to the Most Holy Trinity are the end goal of our Christian life.”⁷

Prayer is at the very heart of the message of Fatima because it is at the heart of growing in a personal relationship with God. From the first apparitions of the Angel, the children were asked to pray. When Our Lady appeared for six consecutive months in 1917, she asked the children to pray the Rosary every day for peace. Those of us living in the twenty-first century can take this request to heart. The peace Our Lady asks us to pray for is not only peace between nations, but peace within our hearts and homes. Now, more than ever, we need prayer.

The message of Fatima is a message of hope for all of us as we prepare for the coming triumph of Our Lady’s Immaculate Heart. It is a message that can be applied to our everyday lives of faith. As we look deeper into the meaning of these visits from the Angel of Peace and Our Lady, we will discover that Fatima is not just a nice, entertaining story. It is a message that can transform our spiritual lives if we are open to it. Fatima’s message of prayer, penance, and sacrifice changed the lives of three shepherd children one hundred years ago. That very same message can strengthen us for our own spiritual journeys.