considerations regarding the apparitions at fatima

 

The apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Fatima in 1917 are of interest and retain a certain credibility because during the final apparition in October of that year, a crowd of many thousands of people claimed to have seen a manifestation of what they thought was the power of God.

During the other five apparitions whatever was going on was only claimed to have been seen by three children, Lucia (10), Francisco (8) and Jacinta (7).

Francisco died in 1919 and Jacinta died in 1920. Lucia lived to the age of 97, passing away in 2005.

The story of Fatima is in many ways quite splendid.

There is a call to repentence, There is a warning of great wars if we do not cease to do evil. There are innocent chlldren at the centre of momentous events. There is an atheistic newspaper claiming: "The sun danced at Fatima." There are secrets to be revealed at later dates.

The basic prophetic warning seems tremendously theologically sound to me. I do not necessarily think that it is precisely correct to say that God sends wars to punish mankind. My limited understanding is that he has warned us that when we do wrong, we allow evil to have power over us, and the evils we invite into our lives or societies, bring about wars and other malign events on the earth.

Issues arise with Fatima when one looks closer.

Lucia during her long life as a cloistered nun made other visionary claims which might offer a pretext to challenge her credibility.

The two younger children in some accounts are said to have seen the apparitions but that the boy did not hear any words in the visions and the girl may or may not have heard words.

The implication for a sceptic or just a critical thinker, is that Lucia may have been a ringleader orchestrating the claims.

The credibility of Fatima is also challenged at times when parts of the story emerge which are not revealed clearly in some accounts.

Thus we have Lucia seeing a vision of an angel as a translucent statue like figure in the sky on three occasions in 1915, fully two years before the main apparitions. She was accompanied during the 1915 incidents by various local children whose names are not always readily available in the various accounts. Most accounts do not mention the 1915 incidents.

In 1916 a year before the main apparitions, Lucia, Francisco and Jacinta claim to have received visits from an angel who spoke to them, gave them guidance in prayer and allowed them to partake of the Catholic ceremony known as Communion.

The angel readied them for the main Fatima visions the following year by saying: "Heaven has designs on you."

This might test credibility for some but no more so than the claimed apparitions of the Blessed Mother Mary which occur as we have noted in 1917. My issue is that when the Fatima story is recounted by its apologists, the details of the angelic preludes are not always included.

Inserted into the story later, they can seem to strike a discordant note.

Fatima has lacked a great documentarian such as the apparitions at Lourdes found in the ovelisation by Jewish poet Franz Wurfel as well as in the copious historiographical critiques of Father Rene Laurentin.

It's not too late for the Fatima story to be told clearly and resonantly.

We should bear in mind that Wurfel only showed up ninety years after the Lourdes apparitions. Laurentin wrote decades after Wirfel. For people like me who think Fatima is rendered somewhat questionable by apparent lacunas in the available accounts, it is perhaps wise to remind ourselves that God gets things done in his own time frame and with his own chosen people and with his own providential intent.

As for the most dramatic prophecies of Fatima.

They are amazing.

But Lucia appears to have only begun revealing them in the 1940s many years after they purportedly were given to her by Saint Mary.

Lucia claimed at that stage that if mankind did not repent, Russia would spread her errors through the world,

The prophecy about Russia is still impressive even if it did only incontrovertibly emerge in 1944.

At that time, Communist Russia had yet to export its dictatorships to China, North Korea, Burmah, Laos, Vietnam, most of Africa, all of Eastern Europe, Cuba, Egypt, Iraq, Syria, and many Arab countries, and of course central America.

Lucia's prediction of World War Two is less impressive than the Russia prediction because it appears to have been made available to selected Catholic Church figures only after World War Two has begun.

Part of the prophecy at Fatima urges the Catholic Church to consecrate Russia to the immaculate heart of Mary and asserts that if this is done, Russia will convert and a period of peace will be given to the world.

Such a demand can seem like pure divisive hokum to non believers and even in the Catholic Church the general attitude is quite adequately summed up by the phrase: "Handle with care."

This element of the Fatima visions has been occasionally discordant for the Catholic Chruch leading to adversely aligned groupings, factions really, endlessly claiming the consecration hasn't been done, or has been done but nor properly, or that some arcane wording must be used or it cannot be deemed to have been done no matter how often or how many Popes have claimed to have done it.

This sort of factioneering and scrupulous obsessing about exact wordings of rituals and prophecies and supposed demands from heaven that it all be done in a particular way or else, is one of the reasons the Catholic Church seeks to conduct herself with austere restraint and preternatural calm when presented with claims by apocalyptic visionaries.

But the factioneering in no way demonstrates that the Fatima visions are false.

We might expect such divide and conquer nonsense to be fostered by evil and its servants in response to any genuine intervention by God in human history.

And some of those I deem factioneers may be on the side of the angels.

It calls for wisdom.

And discernment.

Personally I do find the prophecies about Russia convincing and I believe I have lived through the moment when the prophecies were precisely fulfilled some years subsquent to a moderately discreet consecration of Russia to the immaculate heart of Mary by Pope John Paul the Second in 1984.

I thought I was watching nothing less than divine intervention in human history in 1991 when the Russians attempted to democratise, their own country and began telling the truth about the sheer vileness of the communism they had propagated throughout the world; at one and the same time they overnight ceased their sponsorship of  the command control communist dictatorships which they had installed in Cuba, Nicaragua, Ethiopia, Somalia, Zimbabwe, Angola, Mozambique, China, Burmah, Vietnam, North Korea, and Laos; they ended their domination of Eastern European coutnries like Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania and others, and they withdrew utterly from their decades long attempts to foster communst revolution in Western Europe through the IRA in Ireland an Britain, the Red Brigades in Italy, the Basque separatist group Eta in Spain, the Baadar Meinhof gang in Germany and many more of similar ilk.

What Russia did in ending her propagation of communism worldwide overnight was an astonishing event and unparalelled in human history.

Yes.

I regard it is a precise fulfillment of the prophecy of Fatima.

But I never stood with those who claimed that if a particular wording or particular invocation mandated at Fatima is used, then God must bring about peace on earth.

The use of the word "must" in relation to God is fraught with the possibility of error.

To believe that God must do something runs the risk of misinterpreting our relationship with God, effectively making him our subject.

The issue for me is that we were not worthy of the graces given in Russia in 1991.

Perhaps the grace of the conversion of Russia is being withdrawn as we speak because we have shown ourselves to be unworthyt of it.

Consecrations to the immaculate heart of Mary were indeed done.

Severally I'm told.

But did we become better people as our prayers were answered and Russia transformed before our eyes?

We did not.

We continued to murder the unborn. We allowed unscrupulous medical fetishists to devise a transgender advocating ideology and to impose it on vulenerable children and adults. We allowed drug dealing and all its attendant evils to flourish. We treated each other like dirt. Our societies became more violent. Gangs took over our towns and cities.

An older prophecy than Fatima, one found in the Book of Revelation, notes that people will see tremendous signs of the coming of the end of the age but they still will not give up "their fornications, their sacrifices to satan, their murders and their thefts."

That's four predictions from two thousand years ago coming true in our own time.

I think we may have been given the sign of Fatima in the apparitions of 1917 as a genuine gift to humanity from heaven. I think we were given the fulfillment of the prophecy of Fatima in Russia's attempts to democratise in 1991.

I suggest that on the whole at the societal level and many of us as individuals, have not been wothy of the graces given.

In such circumstances the evils we continue to do will allow further evils to attack us through war, famine, pestilence and societal collapse

Yet another consecration of Russia to the immaculate heart of Mary was carried out this year, 2022 by the present occupant of the seat of Saint Peter.

I would suggest that this one was more about Pope Francis seeking to pose as Pope for what he perceives as factions within the church concerned about his legitimacy than about any fulfillment of the Prophecies or requests attributed by Lucia Dos Santos to the Blessed Mother Mary at Fatima when heaven touched earth over six tumultuous months in 1917,