Our Lady Of Fatima: The May Apparition
By FR. SEAN CONNOLLY
(Editor’s Note: This is the fourth in a series of articles on the one hundredth anniversary of Our Lady’s apparitions at Fatima. Fr. Connolly is a priest of the Archdiocese of New York.)
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1917 was a tumultuous year that would forever change the face of the world. The suicide of Christendom was taking place as the First World War was being waged throughout Europe, and Communist errors began to spread as the Bolshevik revolution took hold of Russia. Both of these events are at the root of the moral and social evils which characterize the present age.
To the tiny and unknown Fatima, located in a country where an anticlerical government of prominent Freemasons just came to power overthrowing the Catholic monarchy, came Heaven’s antidote to these evils which could still lead to the destruction of the world and the ruin of countless souls.
The Mother of God would appear to three children, Lucia (age ten), Francisco (age eight), and Jacinta (age seven) to deliver a message of peace and conversion by means of prayer, penance, and devotion to her Immaculate Heart.
During the previous year, the Angel of Peace came to the children three times to prepare them for the coming of our Lady. The angel’s message of prayer, reparation, penance, and devotion to the Blessed Sacrament was deeply impressed upon them.
In the spring of the next year, our Lady came at last for the first time on May 13, 1917. It was a Sunday, and Lucia, Francisco, and Jacinta had been to Mass at their little parish church and then were sent off by their parents to take the sheep to pasture in the grassy depression among the hills called the Cova da Iria. (1)
At midday they ate lunch, sped through the rosary, and began to play their games. While they were playing, out of the clear sky on this beautiful spring day came a sudden and brilliant flash of light which they thought was a sign of a brewing thunderstorm. Frightened and perplexed as the perfect weather belied this flash of lightening as a forerunner to a storm, they decided to return home with haste. (2)
As they did, they saw another flash — there was no sound of thunder, only the flash. They continued home but only made it a few more steps when they stopped short upon seeing before them atop a small holmoak tree a lady dressed in white.
As described by Lucia: “She was more brilliant than the sun, and radiated light more clear and intense than a crystal glass filled with sparkling water, when the rays of the burning sun shine through it.” (3)
Other details of our Lady’s appearance were later added by Lucia, as Fr. Andrew Apostoli, CFR, notes in his comprehensive work on the Fatima event: “She looked about seventeen years old. She wore a mantle and a tunic that seemed to be made of light. Around her neck was a cord with a little ball of light. There was a star toward the bottom of her tunic. In her hands were beads of a rosary which shone like stars, with the crucifix the most radiant of all.” (4)
Like the Angel of Peace, our Lady sought to dispel the children’s fears at this, their first meeting: “Do not be afraid. I will do you no harm.” All three children could see our Lady, but only Lucia and Jacinta could hear her. (5)
It was Lucia alone who spoke to her. “Where are you from?” she asked. The Blessed Mother replied simply, “I am from Heaven.” Lucia humbly asked another question: “What do you want of me?” In our Lady’s reply, the course of events for the Fatima event is set: “I come to ask you to come here for six consecutive months, on the thirteenth day, at this same hour. I will tell you later who I am and what I want. And I shall return here again a seventh time.”
Lucia then asked, with the endearing directness of a child, if she and her cousins would go to Heaven. Our Lady replied that they would but that Francisco would first need to say many rosaries.
The next batch of questions is of great significance for the answers of our Lady shed light on the reality of Purgatory which is a truth of our faith that is often neglected in contemporary times. There were two girls who used to come to Lucia’s house to learn sewing from her sisters who recently died. (6)
Lucia asked first, if Maria Neves was already in Heaven, who was about sixteen years old when she died. “Yes, she is” came the reply which was no doubt a relief to Lucia, who then asked about Amelia, who had been between the ages of eighteen and twenty. (7)
Our Lady’s answer ought to eradicate the presumption all too many have about the goodness of their souls in the eyes of God: “She will be in Purgatory until the end of the world.”
Fr. Apostoli details what we are to learn from this revelation:
“It was later learned that Amelia died in circumstances involving immoral behavior. To be in Purgatory, she must have been sincerely sorry for her sins when she died; however, she probably did not have sufficient time before her death to make satisfaction for all the temporal punishment due to these sins. The fate of Amelia is a powerful reminder to practice the virtues of a Christian life and to do penance now, while we have the chance, so that when we die we may go as quickly as possible to Heaven.” (8)
The Virgin Mary then asked a challenging question to the children which touches upon a central component of her general message given at Fatima: “Are you willing to offer yourselves to God and bear all the sufferings He wills to send to you, as an act of reparation for the sins by which He is offended, and of supplication for the conversion of sinners?” (9)
Lucia’s reply was brave and direct, “Yes, we are willing.” The children’s ready willingness to bear sufferings as an act of reparation for the sins which offend God and as a supplication to Him for the conversion of sinners, was rooted, we can surmise, in the teachings they had received from the angel who had appeared to them the prior year. (10)
After they consented to their role in Heaven’s plan of reparation and conversion, our Lady said to them: “Then you are going to have much to suffer, but the grace of God will be your comfort.” After she said this, our Lady opened her hands emanating a bright light that penetrated the souls of the young visionaries enabling them to see themselves in God. From this, an interior impulse was communicated to them and they fell on their knees and repeated these words in their hearts:
“O most Holy Trinity, I adore you! My God, my God, I love You in the most Blessed Sacrament.”
In her last words to them, the Blessed Virgin addressed the immense crisis that was enveloping the world at the time and made a request: “Pray the rosary every day to obtain peace for the world, and the end of the war.” With this, our Lady departed by rising into the sky towards the east.
The First Believer
Lucia rightly believed news of this great event would be doubted and misunderstood. At her behest, the three agreed to keep all they had witnessed a secret. But upon their return home, the joy of the event was too much for little Jacinta, and in her youthful enthusiasm she told her mother and father who closely questioned her.
Manuel Pedro Marto was a sensible man who was religious, but certainly no fanatic. He possessed a firm grip on reality. After questioning his daughter, he believed because Jacinta had never lied to him before and because her brother Francisco later corroborated her story. He became the first believer in the Fatima apparitions and said:
“From the beginning of the world our Lady has appeared many times and in various ways. If the world is wicked, it would be much more so but for many such happenings. The power of God is great. We don’t know what this is, but it will turn out to be something.” (11)
He was the only believer at first. The sufferings our Lady spoke of came quickly to the children as everyone else rejected their story with mockery and scorn. Lucia’s mother, Maria Rosa, was particularly upset and did all she could to have her daughter recant what she thought to be a blasphemous fraud.
When Lucia refused, she was brought to the parish priest, Fr. Manuel Ferreira, who, though he was not convinced that Lucia and her cousins were telling the truth, prudently advised for all to be patient and to see what would happen in the months ahead. He told Maria Rosa not to prevent her daughter from returning to the Cova on the thirteenth of the coming month. (12)
Word of the children’s claims began to spread. The children held serenely firm against the ridicule of family and friends alike. They offered up to Christ this suffering and nobly furthered it by going without lunch and even water each day they were out with the sheep. (13)
When two priests visited Fatima, they met with Lucia and asked her to pray for Pope Benedict XV who was suffering very much on account of the war. So, the children began to add three extra Hail Marys for the Pope to the rosary they recited daily for peace. These prayers and penances were requested by our Lady and were faithfully fulfilled by the children as they waited for the thirteenth of June when she would return.
Footnotes
1) Warren H. Carroll, 1917: Red Banners, White Mantle (Front Royal, Va.: Christendom Publications, 1981), p. 72.
2) John de Marchi, The True Story of Fatima: A Complete Account of the Fatima Apparitions (Constable, N.Y.: The Fatima Center, 2009), p. 13.
3) Lucia dos Santos quoted in Andrew Apostoli, Fatima for Today: The Urgent Marian Message of Hope (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2010), p. 44.
4) Ibid.
5) Ibid., pp. 44-45.
6) Ibid, pp. 45-46.
7) Ibid., p. 46.
8) Ibid.
9) Ibid, pp. 46-47.
10) Ibid, p. 47.
11) Carroll, p. 73.
12) Apostoli, p. 50.
13) Carroll, p. 73.