The Significance of the Apparitions of Fatima—90 Years Later

Fatima and Peace

I count myself blessed to have been in Fatima the last two summers in conjunction with the Annual International Symposium on Marian Coredemption, sponsored by the Franciscans of the Immaculate. During both summers, I was there for the celebrations that occur during the 12th and 13th days of the months in which Our Lady actually appeared. Words cannot convey the blessing that it is—actually to be in Fatima—if you go open to the truth that Fatima is all about.

People who know I’ve been to Fatima always ask me if I saw a lot of persons get miraculously healed while I was there. While Fatima certainly can be a place where people receive physical healings, the primary healing that goes on at Fatima is spiritual healing. By this, I mean that Fatima is a place where many are given the grace of a deeper conversion of heart. The Immaculate Heart of Mary is tangibly present and active in Fatima. One can sense this. She is providing her children with the grace to be brought into deeper union with the Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ, her divine Son.

The significance of Fatima for our times is clearly the resounding truth contained in both the messages Our Lady, herself, gave at Fatima and the messages the Angel of Portugal gave to the children in preparation for their encounter with Our Lady. Both sets of messages are all about how we, living in a world that often seems very dark and distant from God because of the choices we are making that are contrary to God’s will, can move from darkness to light and from war to peace.

I’m sure many of you either listened to or heard news reports on the recent hearings on the war in Iraq, during which Gen. Petraeus was questioned by the U.S. Congress about the success of the so-called surge and asked about his predictions for the future. The general said that if we desire victory in Iraq, it will continue to cost us $300 million dollars a day, the deaths of 2 to 3 of our soldiers a day, and the wounding of another 15 (1). On the other hand, Our Lady of Fatima’s answer to us today is the same as it was in 1917. The way to victory is the way of prayer, fasting and penance—in short, leading lives of repentance and conversion from sin. All of the miracles and secrets of Fatima given to Lucia, Jacinta and Francisco underscore the reality of sin in our world and the havoc it is wreaking on us, both individually and corporately, as families and as nations.

At the shrine of Fatima, you experience people undergoing the conversion Our Lady is calling for all around you, in a very quiet but very solid kind of way. Even amidst all the vendors who are selling statues, rosaries and other kinds of memorabilia, there remains a prayerful atmosphere. Masses are offered all day long, in either the outdoor chapel of the apparitions or the sanctuary church itself. There is also a chapel where confessions are constantly heard in various languages. And, one of the most sacred places is the chapel of perpetual Eucharistic adoration, placed in Fatima at Pope John Paul II's request. It is administered by consecrated religious women who adore the Lord in the Blessed Sacrament in hourly shifts, with plenty of room for pilgrims to come and adore also, from early in the morning until late at night.

Additionally, every night, promptly at 9:30 p.m., during the spring, summer, and fall, there is an International Rosary prayed aloud at the outdoor chapel of apparitions. Each decade, or even each half-decade, is prayed in a different language. The Rosary is followed by a candlelight procession of all the pilgrims around Sanctuary Square, following the statue of Our Lady of Fatima, which is hoisted high on a large flower-covered platform. On Thursday nights, this procession is always a Eucharistic procession. Rather than Our Lady’s statue being carried, the Lord himself, exposed in the Blessed Sacrament, is processed around Sanctuary Square under a canopy, while all the pilgrims follow in a candlelight procession. Additionally, there is usually a guest choir from somewhere in the world leading you in the singing of hymns, both during the Rosary and the processions. It is the most wonderful way to end the day. Regardless of your age or your state in life or your office in the Church, academia or the world, all gathered for this nightly Rosary and procession are reduced to being children again—children following their Mother who desires only to conform them perfectly to her divine Son.

When this time of prayer ends each night and the crowd disperses, many stay and continue to pray silently in the outdoor chapel. Others go to the Eucharistic Adoration Chapel. And, still others undertake a silent walk of penitence on their knees around the shrine. It seems as if there is always someone walking on his or her knees at Fatima. Each time that I've been blessed to be in Fatima for this nightly prayer routine, I always have the sense that if the whole world would simply stop at the end of the day, pray either silently or aloud to Our Lady, and allow his or her soul to experience the humility of becoming completely dependent upon Our Lady to lead them to her Son, there would indeed be peace in the world. Our Lady has a way of helping you see yourself as you really are before her Son and showing you where you need to repent and surrender to his mercy, so his grace can transform you.

It’s been my experience that being disposed to receive the grace that Our Lady offers at Fatima always requires several things on our part—namely, silence, humility, detachment, and a willingness to sacrifice. And, the payoff for corresponding to Our Lady’s way of prayer, fasting, penance and repentance is indeed peace—a deeper inner peace—a peace that comes from realizing that God is God and you/we are not. It’s also a peace that comes from being more and more convinced that sin really is the worst thing in the world. Confessing it, repenting of it and being healed by the divine mercy of Jesus Christ in order to be brought into deeper union with the entire Blessed Trinity is the only thing that really matters. This alone is the road to peace for us, not only personally, but also corporately.

Speaking as an American, you can’t be attentive to the messages of Fatima and their call to conversion without knowing the reason we are at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, etc., etc, etc., is purely and simply the tragic disregard for and even the killing of human life in our country—through abortion, Euthanasia, artificial contraception, pornography, the misuse of the gift of human sexuality and the deterioration of the human family. The biggest threat to our national security and to what’s good about our American way of life is not terrorism or 2.6 kilograms of highly enriched uranium in the hands of Iran or Pakistan or federalizing our health care system or any other hot button political issue here at home. It’s immorality. Pure and simple. That’s what Our Mother is telling her children even today through the messages of Fatima. Our Lady confirms what the Old Testament constantly reveals, namely, that God allows both war and natural disasters to happen as chastisement for sin. I believe she is warning the world of 2007—as much as she warned the world of 1917. Funny how none of the news talk radio shows or talking heads on TV or Moveon.org or presidential debates want to talk about this reality.

Furthermore, you can’t look at the emphasis that both the Angel and Our Lady place on prayer and reverence before God in their messages to the children, or experience the prayer and worship going on at the Fatima shrine today, without being outraged at the blatant irreverence in our culture in the United States—including the way irreverence has even crept into our church lives. It’s gotten where it’s hard to distinguish beachwear from church wear or bedroom wear from classroom wear and office wear. The immodesty of dress and the vulgar language all around us seem all the worse when you've allowed the spirit and messages of Fatima to penetrate your mind and heart. You begin to understand how immodesty and vulgarity are deteriorating the very soul of our nation and the souls of those we work and live with everyday. And, you see how prideful and arrogant we have become as a people, and how distant we are from God—not because God has moved away from us, but because we have moved away from God. Sept. 11 and Katrina (2) seem like mere wake-up calls. You wonder if the main event can’t be too far away.

Fatima reminds us that God loves us so much that God will not allow us to lose our souls without trying to get our attention. While the way back to God announced at Fatima is as old as that announced in the Old and the New Testaments, the hope that Fatima offers is the promise that the Blessed Virgin Mary, who is the very Mother of God and our Mother in the order of grace, can and will magnify our little offerings of prayer, fasting and penance—and make them powerfully efficacious for our personal welfare and that of the whole world. Our Lady tells us at Fatima that if we listen to her and do as she asks, in the end, her Immaculate Heart will triumph. The messages, the apparitions themselves, the miracle of the sun that we commemorate in a special way today (October 13) and the miraculous intervention of Our Lady of Fatima on May 13, 1981, to keep Pope John Paul II from being killed by a would-be assassin, all confirm Our Lady’s role in redemption. As the prayer of the Angel given to the children in 1916 in preparation for meeting Our Lady states, "the conversion of poor sinners" is to be prayed for through the infinite merits of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

Fatima and Marian Coredemption

During Our Lady’s second apparition at Fatima, on June 13, 1917, she said to Lucia: "God wishes you to remain in the world for some time because he wants you to establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart, for the Heart of Jesus wants my Immaculate Heart to be venerated alongside his Heart (literally by his side). I promise salvation to those who embrace it, (i.e., this veneration of my Immaculate Heart) and their souls will be loved by God as the flowers placed by myself adorning his throne."

This revelation from heaven, which announces that Jesus Christ himself wants his Mother's Immaculate Heart to be venerated alongside his Sacred Heart, has a profound theological and Mariological significance, whose implications we have yet fully to realize. We are being told that the Blessed Virgin Mary is no mere intercessor in the communion of saints, no mere good example for us, and no mere perfect disciple, as many today are accustomed to speak about her. While none of these things are untrue about Our Lady, they are simply incomplete. They fail to comply with the most important truth about our Blessed Mother, namely, that the Blessed Virgin Mary is intimately and ontologically involved in mediating the grace of the world’s redemption.

Certainly it is this profound reality that is being pointed to when we call her Co-redemptrix, Mediatrix of All Grace, and Advocate for the People of God. While the Blessed Virgin is subordinate to Jesus Christ by way of her being a human being and Jesus' being a divine Person, God enfleshed, nevertheless, by divine fiat, the Blessed Virgin is completely caught up by the Blessed Trinity in the redemption of the entire created order. And while such condescension on the part of the Blessed Trinity may be hard for some to grasp or accept, the very nature and reality of the virginal Incarnation of God the Son from the very flesh of the Blessed Virgin Mary reveals their choice to do just that. God's becoming human so you and I might become divine, or rather divinized, happens only one way. It happens by virtue of Our Lady’s being the very real Virginal Mother of God the Son, with all that motherhood means—physiologically, emotionally, spiritually and ontologically. It was entirely from her flesh that the very sacred humanity of Jesus Christ, which conveys divine life to human souls, is conceived. And, because Jesus is no mere human person but a divine Person, this great mystery of the Incarnation of God the Son from the flesh of the Blessed Virgin Mary is forever an eternally present and even ongoing mystery and reality in God—available for our reverence, worship and adoration. As St. Louis de Montfort frequently says when writing about this great mystery, here, let every mind and heart keep silence and ponder so great a mystery.

G. Gibieuf, a member of the 17th-century Bérulle School of French Spirituality, the same school that formed St. Louis de Montfort, said in talking about the mystery of Our Lady’s divine maternity,

Whenever I ponder the events of Fatima, and especially Our Lady’s message that the Lord himself wants us to venerate his Mother’s Heart alongside his own Heart, I always have the sense that heaven is opening up for us through the events and messages of Fatima the deeper meaning of the prophecy of Simeon to Our Lady, recorded in Luke 2:35. Simeon tells Our Lady that her soul—here the Greek means literally her soul, or her person or her life, or perhaps all three in the case of Our Lady—would be pierced by a sword also. This means the very same sign of contradiction that Simeon prophesied would characterize her Son, namely the Cross, will likewise be the same contradiction that Mary's soul and entire being will be marked by as well.