Our Lady of Fatima

The world was shell-shocked. It was 1916, and the current war — the first mechanized war, the first world war — seemed potentially endless. New weapons carried seemingly mythic power for destruction and death. Armored tanks had made their debut in 1914. The following year, Germans released lethal poison gas on the battlefield for the first time. Another novelty, military airplanes were now dropping bombs and strafing infantrymen from above.

In the midst of this, in rural Portugal in 1916, three shepherd children reported three apparitions of an angel, followed in 1917 by six visions of the Virgin Mary. 

Their neighbors were skeptical. Even the children’s parents punished them severely. But the seers said in July that the Virgin would vindicate them on October 13, with a miracle that would be visible to all.

When the day arrived, tens of thousands of people gathered at the field where the children had claimed to meet the Virgin. It was raining; the sky was thick with clouds, and the ground was mud. And then, according to the testimony of those many witnesses, the clouds parted to reveal the sun, which “trembled” or “danced.” The phenomenon was seen from twenty-five miles away.

The miracle at Fatima had a profound impact on the popular imagination of Catholics worldwide. So did the message of Fatima, which was a simple call to prayer and penance.

But there were also “secrets” of Fatima, which the seers divulged to Church authorities, but were not immediately made public. In these, the words of the Virgin were sometimes apocalyptic. She made predictions shrouded in symbolic language that invited multiple interpretations. She spoke of current events — the World War and the Revolution in Russia. And she seemed to forecast a century of horrors.

The nature of these revelations inspired speculation, especially as later events seemed to fulfill the Virgin’s predictions. The two younger seers, Jacinta and Francisco, died in an epidemic the year after the events, just as the Virgin had said they would. The third, Lúcia, entered a Carmelite convent of the strictest observance, dying there at age ninety-seven. Since none of the children ever profited from their celebrity — or ever retracted a word of their claims — their lives and deaths seemed to confirm the authenticity of their visions.

In June of the year 2000 the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith made public the text of the third and last secret of Fatima. It was not cause for alarm, the Church insisted, but it was a call to conversion.