By DONAL ANTHONY FOLEY
This month sees the 99th anniversary of the Miracle of the Sun at Fatima, which took place on October 13, 1917, and this article will look at the “scientific” approach of people such as Richard Dawkins, to this extraordinary manifestation of the supernatural.
The first thing to say about the miracle is that was announced three months in advance to three simple children, and was seen by at least 70,000 people, who reported that the sun danced in the sky, that the color of the whole landscape changed successively, and that the sun seemed to come down toward them, to the extent that many of the crowd thought it was the end of the world.
It was also seen at a distance by various people, thus effectively ruling out any notion of hallucination.
In his book, The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins deals with the miracle of sun at Fatima in connection with the topic of religious visions — he takes a dismissive attitude toward them, categorizing them as “hallucinations.”
Specifically regarding Fatima, he says: “On the face of it mass visions, such as the report that seventy thousand pilgrims at Fatima in Portugal in 1917 saw the sun ‘tear itself from the heavens and come crashing down upon the multitude,’ are harder to write off.
“It is not easy to explain how seventy thousand people could share the same hallucination. But it is even harder to accept that it really happened without the rest of the world, outside Fatima, seeing it too — and not just seeing it, but feeling it as the catastrophic destruction of the solar system, including acceleration forces sufficient to hurl everybody into space” (p. 116).
So what Dawkins does here is to ignore the evidence of the witnesses, and rather focus on the effect the miracle would have had on the rest of the solar system and thus dismisses it that way.
But this is to ignore the omnipotence of God who is quite capable of dealing with any side effects from a miracle, as was the case in Old Testament times, when there was another “miracle of sun” involving Joshua, who commanded the sun and moon to stand still in the sky so that the Israelites could defeat their enemies (Joshua 10:13).
And we also have the incident in the Book of Isaiah, when God made the shadow cast by the sun on the stairway of Ahaz go back ten steps during the reign of Hezekiah (Isaiah 38:8).
In both of these incidents there were no reports of catastrophic side effects.
The problem is that people like Dawkins are trapped in an anti-miraculous mindset which it is very difficult, without divine grace, to escape from; this mindset refuses to acknowledge any possibility of the supernatural or the miraculous. So he automatically dismisses any evidence which does point in that direction.
But to do this is not to be acting scientifically, or rationally, since the proper investigation of reality should also include at least the acknowledgment that there may well be a realm beyond the material and the senses. And it also means taking all the evidence into account and not just dismissing the parts which we don’t like.
It’s also clear that Dawkins did not properly investigate the accounts of the miracle, since he speaks of people being “persuaded to stare at the sun, which can’t have done much for their eyesight.” (p. 117). The reality is that when the clouds covering the sun moved away, it had the appearance of a dull gray disk, and could easily be looked at.
In fact, all the evidence indicates that the miracle was not a hallucination. People many miles away from Fatima saw it, including people not expecting to do so. These individuals saw the miracle differently from the way it was seen at the Cova da Iria, but they definitely did see it.
The poet Alfonso Lopes Vieira who lived over 30 miles away from Fatima said:
“On that day, 13th October, 1917, without remembering the predictions of the children, I was enchanted by a remarkable spectacle in the sky of a kind I had never seen before.”
A young boy, Inacio Lourenco, who afterward became a priest, was a schoolchild of nine when he saw the miracle at a village about 12 miles from Fatima.
He described how the children and their teachers were attracted outside by a commotion in front of the school to see the miracle of the sun. He tells of how he could look at the sun, which looked like “a ball of snow revolving on itself,” before it suddenly came down in a zigzag toward the Earth.
As he says, “During those long moments of the solar prodigy objects around us turned all the colors of the rainbow. We saw ourselves blue, yellow, red, etc. All these strange phenomena increased the fear of the people. After about ten minutes the sun, now dull and pallid, returned to its place.
“When the people realized that the danger was now over there was an explosion of joy and everyone joined in thanksgiving and praise of our Lady.”
The miracle was also seen by sailors on a British ship off the coast of Portugal. I gave a presentation on Fatima at a college in England and was told by one of the lecturers that her grandfather saw the miracle from his ship and wrote about it to his wife — without obviously understanding what it meant or its significance. This letter has been preserved in the lecturer’s family.
There were also reports of the miracle even in the Portuguese secular press of the day; it was so huge, and had been seen by so many people, that it couldn’t just be ignored.
And finally, what seems to convincingly show that the miracle was not a hallucination is the fact that the people at the Cova felt the heat of the sun as it approached them, and their clothes and the ground — which had been soaked by torrential rain — were dry at the end of the miracle.
As regards what the miracle actually was, it does seem possible that it was a gigantic “apparition,” but one with real effects, such as the people feeling the heat of the sun as it approached them.
We find physical effects at apparitions such as Guadalupe and Rue du Bac, where in the case of the former, our Lady rearranged the flowers on Juan Diego’s Tilma with her own hands. With the latter, involving Sr. Catherine Labouré, she was able to put her hands on the Blessed Virgin’s lap during her first appearance to her.
These incidents show that there was a “material/sensory” aspect to some previous apparitions, and likewise at Fatima we seem to be dealing the same type of thing during the miracle of the sun.
Free Will
In conclusion, we can say that people such as Richard Dawkins have a similar attitude to Emile Zola, the late 19th-century atheistic French novelist, who was privileged to see two miracles at Lourdes but who said, “Were I to see all the sick at Lourdes cured, I would not believe in a miracle.”
So we have free will and can reject the miraculous even if it happens right before our eyes.
The fact is that the miracle of the sun at Fatima was the greatest miracle since the Resurrection, and its very greatness is a clear indication of the outstanding importance of the Fatima message for our times.
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(Donal Anthony Foley is the author of a number of books on Marian apparitions, and maintains a related website at www.theotokos.org.uk. He has also a written a time-travel/adventure book for young people — details can be found at: http://glaston-chronicles.co.uk/.)
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