By JOHN BURKE
(Editor’s Note: John Burke, a journalist in England, has followed Fatima’s centenary events since his mid-May visit there.)
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The shrine at Fatima begins its pastoral year with Advent, so the centennial celebrations of the six Marian events in 1917 can now be reviewed.
What will remain for Catholics the greatest hundredth anniversary of this century has not made as much impact worldwide as it should have, partly because some churchmen also focused on interdenominational commemorations of Luther’s revolt 500 years ago. Yet the apocalyptic message of Fatima is being passed on to another generation.
That is thanks largely to the visits of various prelates to the Portuguese shrine; the Marian consecration of various dioceses; and the peregrination of the Pilgrim Virgin’s statues through many more.
The centenary also led the Church on February 13, 2017 to name Fatima visionary Sr. Lucia dos Santos a “servant of God,” as the first major step toward her canonization. Any progress since February is not yet known, however.
The first ambivalent factor was that whereas Pope Francis duly marked the centenary of the first apparition on May 13, finally canonizing the two seers who died young, his visit was briefer than the seven visits of four Predecessors. Also curious was that whereas Pope Francis did allude briefly to Hell in a sermon without fully explaining our Lady’s warnings, this was clarified during an unpublicized Mass late the previous night.
It was celebrated by Pietro Cardinal Parolin, the Vatican’s secretary of state, whose sermon followed Marian orthodoxy. He may have said the Mass either inside the neo-classical Basilica of the Rosary of 1954 or else in its ugly, ultra-modern counterpart at the opposite end of the esplanade.
I have also learnt, since attending the May anniversary, that ex-President Eanes of Portugal, whom I had met at Fatima in 1982, was discreetly present along with President Horacio Cartes of Paraguay. In my report for The Wanderer, I noted the absence of Portuguese politicians, but it seems that one or two did defy censure by the socialists and communists who dominate Parliament.
June
There were eight cardinals at the pontifical Mass, and a further cardinal presided over the pilgrimage to mark our Lady’s second appearance on June 13. He was Angelo Bagnasco, archbishop of Genoa, who also heads the pan-European assembly of national episcopal conferences (CCEE).
Later that month, Bechara Cardinal Boutros al-Rahi, the Maronite Patriarch in Antioch, yet again consecrated to our Lady not only his native Lebanon but the whole Levant and Middle East. He brought 9,000 Maronites, including bishops and priests, from as far afield as the Gulf States and North America to Fatima where he concelebrated Mass with Antioch’s patriarch for the Syriac Rite, Ignace Joseph III Younan, a Syrian by birth.
This was among the larger of the May-October pilgrimages that showed an increased foreign interest in Fatima. From 1,745 last year that total leapt to 4,986, whereas Portuguese groups rose only from 1,092 to 1,191. For example, July saw the first official pilgrimage of Russian Catholics, a total of 90 from several former Soviet states that included Turkmenistan.
July
Mass was said by Paolo Pezzi, the archbishop of Moscow, to mark the very date one hundred years earlier when our Lady had called for Russia to be dedicated to her Immaculate Heart. This was noted by Bishop Clemens Nickel of Saratov, Russia, in his homily during the vigil Mass of May 12 said by Bishop Athanasius Schneider from Kazakhstan. Also there were two other bishops, Joseph Werth, SJ, of Novosibirsk and Kirill Klimovich of Irkutsk, along with Archbishop Tomash Peta of Astana.
The head of Ukraine’s Greek-Catholic Church, Patriarch Sviatoslav Shevchuk, had visited Fatima the previous October to entrust his beleaguered land to Mary. The shrine’s spokeswoman, Carmo Rodeia, said that five countries of Eastern Europe were strongly represented during 2017, but she could not give me specific numbers for Ukrainians, let alone all pilgrims.
Research suggests that the total did not much exceed last year’s five and a quarter million — far short of the seven million during the ninetieth anniversary, let alone the nine million who included Benedict XVI in 2010. Even so, the greatest growth was in South Koreans, with Chinese attendance also noteworthy, although Spain, Poland, and Italy generally produce the most foreign pilgrims.
August
The principal Mass in mid-August was said by Dom Salvatore Fisichella, president of the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of the New Evangelization. He had come with Pope Francis in May, but returned to lead a pilgrimage dedicated to refugees and immigrants.
Yet there was little evidence this year of the Portuguese-speaking Brazilians, not even the Tridentine clergy of Campos, possibly because the national shrine of Aparecida was celebrating its tri-centenary.
August 19, however, saw a Mass in the old Latin Rite for what was probably the largest of organized groups. More than 10,000 traditionalists — many of them from North America — marked the historical fact that, the fourth time, our Lady was seen belatedly by the seers who had been briefly kidnapped.
Three Scottish bishops had recently led members of the World Apostolate of Fatima, following the April visit of England’s primate, Vincent Cardinal Nichols. Late in August, the primate of All-Ireland, Archbishop Eamon Martin of Armagh, said Masses in Fatima’s parish church and the separate Chapel of Apparitions for 150 accompanying pilgrims who endured a temperature of 84 degrees and risked fatal forest fires nearby.
September
The following month, Archbishop Leo Cushley, the primate of Scotland, did much the same, but in the chapel itself he consecrated his Diocese of Edinburgh & St. Andrews to our Lady. The exact centenary of the fifth Marian apparition saw the presence of Mauro Cardinal Piacenza, head of the Vatican tribunal known as the Apostolic Penitentiary, who preached against the unprecedented “cultural destruction of the family.”
Piacenza is also international head of Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) which brought 1,000 pilgrims from 17 countries, including Canada. These included religious specialists doing relief work in countries such as Cuba and Niger. Churchmen among them included John Cardinal Ribat from Papua New Guinea and two other archbishops, Mieczyslaw Mokrzycki of Lvov in Ukraine and John Forrosuelo Du, a Filipino from Palo, as well as a Venezuelan bishop, Raul Biord Castillo of La Guaira.
ACN had dedicated itself to our Lady during its first pilgrimage to the shrine 50 years ago whereas the country second only to Russia in size sought her maternal protection in Ottawa on September 26, the Feast of the Canadian Martyrs.
October
Bishop Samuel Aquila entrusted his Archdiocese of Denver on October 13, and the same month saw yet another consecration to our Lady by Archbishop Ubaldo Santana of Maracaibo. I recall the Venezuelan pilgrims of mid-May, with a banner begging for Marian protection.
No cardinal at the Vatican seems to have attended the centenary of our Lady’s solar miracle, but Pope Francis felt obliged to send a short message in Spanish. His key injunction was “Never quit the rosary” — and actually 10,000 had been purchased at Fatima even before May.
The final ceremony was attended by 36 bishops and 1,070 priests, although a good half are likely to have been Portuguese as during the pontifical Mass of May when I had put the esplanade’s throng at a million. That this was an overestimate is further suggested by the shrine’s statement that “tens of thousands” were at the closing Mass said by Bishop Antonio Marto from the local Diocese of Leiria.
Marto qualified the provisional prophecy of our Lady despite acknowledging current dangers worldwide. He stated that Fatima “offers us a prophetic message of hope and not an intimidating secret of fear,” calling it a promise of peace rather than destruction.
So that was the last time in 2017 that, by tradition, the bells rang out and pilgrims, waving white handkerchiefs, sang “Ave, Ave” while Our Lady of Fatima’s statue was borne down from the basilica’s steps to the Chapel of the Apparitions.
November
Even that was not the final event of the centennial year, although during my first visit in November 1966 few pilgrims were braving a temperature down to 55 degrees.
This month saw groups from the Scranton and Cheyenne Dioceses, while Raymond Cardinal Burke, the Wisconsinite, led another of several late pilgrimages by way of Lourdes and other shrines.
Masses were said in the old Rite by accompanying priests from the Institute of Christ the King.
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