We should not be surprised if God chooses to speak
to poor children because Jesus
showed a special love for the poor and for children.

The importance of Fatima
By John Young

In 1917 the Mother of God appeared to three children at Fatima, Portugal, and gave them a message of crucial importance for the Church and the whole human race. So we should be vitally interested in that message, and do our best to obey it. But many Catholics have no interest in Fatima.

They may say they have no obligation to accept private revelations, and indeed that investigation of the array of revelations allegedly occurring around the globe would take up all one’s time. However, Fatima is special, and in this article I want to review the reasons it should claim our attention and aid our spiritual lives.

Prudence is needed in regard to claims made by alleged visionaries, but it would be a mistake to overreact by ignoring all such claims. A basis for the credibility in principle of private revelations is found in Scripture, where God often communicated with individuals through angels. True, this forms part of his public revelation to the human race, but the fact that he acted in this way points to the possibility, or probability, of special divine communications throughout history. Further, Christianity is incarnational: it is about God becoming man and working as a village carpenter. We should not be surprised, then, if he chooses to speak concretely to a chosen individual or group at a particular place and time, and we should certainly not be surprised if the chosen ones are often children living in poverty, for Jesus showed a special love for the poor and for children.

The Fathers and Doctors and all orthodox theologians agree that private revelations occur, and the evidence for their occurrence is overwhelming. While the fact of such visitations is certain, caution is needed before accepting any particular claim, perhaps especially today, when such claims abound.

But Fatima is certainly from God. The apparitions were accompanied by phenomena such as the falling of rose petals from the sky, and the bending of the branches of the holm oak on which the visionaries saw Our Lady—eye-witness testimony puts the fact of such phenomena beyond doubt. The overwhelming sign, of course, was the “dancing of the sun”; a solar miracle seen by at least 70,000 people, some of them skeptics, and occurring at the very time the seers had predicted that a great miracle would occur.

The event was described even in the secular (and anti-Catholic) press, and it left the unbelieving intelligentsia stunned and incapable of offering any explanation. There could be no natural explanation.

Confidence in Fatima is confirmed by other considerations. Its message is in harmony with Catholic teaching. Predictions given there have come true. The Popes have given it their strong support. The beatification of Jacinta and Francisco puts their heroic sanctity beyond doubt—which excludes deceit on their part concerning the apparitions.

The stupendous character of the solar miracle surely indicates that God wants us to take the message of Fatima seriously. It is not just one among many possible messages from heaven: it is certainly from heaven, and the colossal sign in the sky can mean only that it is a message of singular importance for the human race.

Above all, Fatima is important because it emphasizes teachings that were to be eclipsed later. By looking at the message and contrasting it with today’s situation, we can see present errors and shortcomings with stark clarity. Let us examine this in a number of areas.

Angels and demons. It is often seen almost as bad manners to talk seriously about even the good angels—and decidedly bad taste to insist that evil angels exist. In “sophisticated” circles the angels are demythologized; they cease to be persons and become personifications. But at Fatima the apparitions of Our Lady were prepared for by apparitions of an angel. He told the children he was the guardian angel of Portugal. This suggests that each country has its special angel—a reminder to us of the importance of guardian angels. Later, in the vision of hell, the children saw representations of fallen angels. As Lucia describes them: “The demons could be distinguished by their terrifying and repellent likeness to frightful and unknown animals, black and transparent like burning coals.”1

The Real Presence. The angel appeared on a further occasion with a chalice in his hand and a host suspended above it, with drops of blood falling from the host into the chalice. He gave the host to Lucia and shared the blood from the chalice between Francisco and Jacinta. The truth of the Real Presence is here strongly attested—a truth obscured and at times denied today within the Church. The impact of this truth is clear in the lives of the three children, with their devotion to their “hidden Jesus” in the Blessed Sacrament.

The evil of offending God and the need for reparation. A dominant thought in the minds of the three seers as a result of the heavenly messages was the horror of sin as an offense against God’s infinite goodness. They expressed it by saying that God is very sad because of sin. This led to the desire to make reparation, a desire that became dominant in their lives from then on. Francisco particularly was attracted to this motive for doing penance. On one occasion, when Lucia spoke of her unhappiness because of the persecution against her that was beginning in her family and elsewhere, Francisco tried to encourage her by saying: “Didn’t Our Lady say that we would have much to suffer, to make reparation to Our Lord and to her own Immaculate Heart for all the sins by which they are offended? They are so sad! If we can console them with these sufferings, how happy we shall be!”2

Today the need for reparation is rarely mentioned. When penance or fasting are recommended, other reasons are given: they help us control our desires, they help wean us from the consumer society in which we are immersed, eating less can improve our health, and the money saved can be given to the poor. I’m not criticizing these reasons; but the motive of reparation should be prominent, and instead it is generally ignored. As Mary made very clear at Fatima, sin offends God and requires reparation.

Some years ago I mentioned in an article that God is offended by sin, and a Catholic reader wrote a letter to the editor strongly contesting my statement. Later that man became a theology lecturer in a Catholic seminary. Of course, the greatest evil of sin is precisely the fact that it offends the infinitely good God, but this truth is now so widely neglected that it sounds strange and unreal to some Catholics. As a consequence, the need for reparation is not seen.

Pope Paul VI stated the constant Catholic doctrine: “Sins must be expiated. This may be done on earth through the sorrows, miseries and trials of this life and, above all, through death. Otherwise the expiation must be made in the next life through fire and torments or purifying punishments.”3 Only too often now it seems to be assumed that forgiveness alone is required, and that when God forgives a sin he does not require expiation. This totally wrong notion was refuted in advance at Fatima with the sharpest clarity. Further, reparation should be made for sins against the Immaculate Heart of Mary, as the message of Fatima also stresses. Lucia relates that the Blessed Virgin appeared to her in 1925 with the Child Jesus, and Jesus said to Lucia: “Have compassion on the Heart of your most holy Mother, covered with thorns, with which ungrateful men pierce it at every moment, and there is no one to make an act of reparation to remove them.”4

Purgatory. In view of the above it is not surprising that Our Lady spoke of purgatory. This doctrine, too, is neglected now, as it inevitably must be if the necessity for expiation is not seen. But if that necessity is seen, together with some realization of the horror of sin as an offense against God, we will pray fervently for the dead, including those who seemed to lead holy lives.

Hell. All who know anything of Fatima know about the vision of hell shown to the children. The horror of what they saw was from then on a strong motive for the heroic sacrifices they made—they wanted to save sinners from that awful end. Jacinta in particular took this motive to heart. There is no indication in Our Lady’s words, as reported by Lucia, that few souls are lost. Rather, the impression is that many are lost. Yet now we find numerous Catholics, including theologians, seeing eternal damnation as little more than a theoretical possibility. In this they are opposing the general consensus of the great saints and theologians through the ages. This dismissive attitude to hell has become prevalent in recent decades, and was answered in advance by the Blessed Virgin at Fatima.

The Holy Father. The children felt drawn to praying for the Pope. Mary had told them there would be persecutions of the Church and the Holy Father, and that he would have much to suffer. Jacinta related a vision in which she saw the Holy Father in a very large house (as she described it), kneeling with his head buried in his hands, and he was weeping. Outside were people throwing stones, while others cursed the Pope.

In our days, papal authority is challenged by people who regard themselves as good Catholics. They find the Pope an embarrassment and his traditional authority an anachronism. On the so-called “right,” too, passionate hostility is shown by some to the Popes since Pius XII, the most radical viewing them as anti-popes. Others, less radical, are forever seeking errors in statements of John Paul II. But our Heavenly Mother had already indicated the regard we should have for the Holy Father and his office, and had foreshadowed the sufferings he would endure in the coming crisis, as well as his key role in relation to peace and the conversion of Russia.

Traditional devotions. The message of Fatima calls on us to adore Jesus really present in the Eucharist, to pray the rosary, to have devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary, to honor the angels, to pray for sinners, to do penance. But in the last three or four decades all these have been widely neglected and even actively discouraged. A great deal of the malaise weakening the Church today is due to the abandonment of traditional practices, for those practices were based on solid doctrine, which they reinforced and made alive in the mind and will and emotions. With their decline, belief and devotion have weakened too, very often leaving a vague emptiness, a sense of boredom, and consequently a search for novelty.

Some will be uncomfortable with what they would call an anthropomorphic stress in the Fatima message. For instance, the children spoke of sins making God and Our Lady sad, and wanted to console them for their sadness. But in reality sadness is absolutely impossible for God, who is always infinitely happy, regardless of what happens in the world. Nor can Jesus any longer suffer in his human nature, nor can Mary suffer now.

All that is so, but divine truths have always been presented with the use of imagery and expressions which are not meant in their literal material sense. Scripture furnishes numerous instances, as when God is said to be angry, or to regret what he has done, or when he is represented as a venerable man sitting on a throne. Imagery is especially apt, of course, when a message is being given to children. But adults too are helped by imaginative representations of spiritual things which, correctly understood, deepen our understanding and intensify our love.

Jacinta and Francisco as models. Jacinta was only seven when Our Lady first appeared to the children; Francisco was nine. They died when ten years old. In that short time they became saints. They are models for all in their charity, absorbed as they were in the love of God and Our Lady, a love shown in the charity they exercised through all the harassment and persecution they endured. They are models in their wholehearted abandonment to the divine will. They are models in their voluntary penances in reparation for sin and for the conversion of sinners. They are models in the supernatural contemplation which flooded their souls, manifesting itself in their intense prayer life and in a wisdom far beyond their years.

There are people who are consumed with interest in the third secret of Fatima, and become engrossed in detective work to divine its content. They scrutinize the context, they note the guarded remarks of Cardinal Ratzinger (who has read the secret5), they collect any gossip supposedly deriving from the few individuals who know the secret, they study other private revelations or alleged revelations to see if these throw light on the matter. One man even hijacked an airliner in an attempt to force the Pope to reveal the secret! It is natural enough for believers in the Fatima message to feel a desire to know that hidden part, relating as it evidently does to the present time. [Editor’s note: The third secret of Fatima was revealed in June 2000, after this article was submitted for publication.]

But there is a more fascinating revelation; namely the whole picture presented by Our Lady, seen in the light of the history of the world and the Church since 1917. Looking back, we can see how she warned the world of evils to come, and how to avoid them. She foretold the errors that would spread from Russia throughout the world and that the remedy was the consecration of Russia to her Immaculate Heart. More generally, key truths were emphasized in view of the doctrinal and moral chaos to come. We are immersed in that calamity now. And in Our Lady’s message we have the remedy.

Back to Homiletic & Pastoral Review Table of Contents August-September 2000

Back to Catholic Information Center Main Periodical Page