Fatima
15 June 1999 08:44
The following article is by Alice Thomas Ellis, a popular writer/journalist in the UK
The fact of Fatima sits uneasily in the world of today; signs, portents, wonders are regarded askance in a climate of creeping secularisation and scepticism. Many of the nominally Christian consider apparitions an affront not only to reason but to their beliefs and prejudices. An Anglican bishop observed recently that if we are to have unity between the Churches, then Catholics must cease to insist on either the perpetual virginity or the Assumption of Our Lady as well, I dare say, as a great many other doctrines.
He has little in common with thousands of pilgrims who come to the place where the three small visionaries, Lucia, Jacinta and Francisco, received messages from the Angel of Peace, the Mother of God entrusted them with the Secrets and the sun danced in the sky. As Francis Johnson noted in his book, Fatima: The Great Sign, “Fatima confirms the existence of angels and of demons that Modernists try to eliminate. Fatima confirms the mystery of the Eucharist which Modernists have stripped of all meaning. Fatima confirms the existence of Hell, which is simply denied today. Fatima requires prayer and penance, values to which people today feel themselves far superior and from which they consequently dispense themselves”.
Not that the children met with unqualified favour at the time. Lucia’s mother beat her for telling “outrageous lies”, while her sisters blamed her for attracting swarms of strangers to the house, and Jacinta’s mother smacked her, saying: “They all go to the Cova da Iria because of you,” and admittedly the visitors did trample on the growing vegetables, which must have been exasperating.
Then there was Arturo Santos, the civic administrator of the district, a man with a robust approach to child psychology, who was determined to stamp out religion in the region. Having failed to force the children to disclose the Secrets, he kidnapped them and announced that he was going to boil them in oil, saying to Francisco: “Your sister is already fried. The same thing awaits you if you do not tell the Secret.” Lucia was threatened with the same fate and when people asked her later (as people will) how she had felt, she responded that she had been sure he was going to kill her too but she had not been afraid, saying: “I gave myself to the Blessed Virgin.” She was 10 and her cousins nine and seven.
There are numberless accounts of the apparitions and the extraordinary events of October 13, 1917, witnessed by between 70,000 and 100,000 people, and endless speculation on the content and consequences of the Secrets, but the fidelity and courage of the three illiterate children is also in its little way as strange and moving and, in an age dismissive of miracles, compelling evidence of the effects of divine intervention. Father Martindale was particularly impressed by the accounts of the little boy, Francisco, who did not, unlike Lucia and Jacinta, hear the words spoken but spent hours before the tabernacle seeking “to console the hidden Jesus”. He would say: “I’ve been thinking of God. I’ve been thinking of all the sins which make Him so sad.” All the children had a terrifyingly explicit vision of Hell which strikes the modem mind as shocking (poor little souls), until we endeavour to shake ourselves free of hypocrisy and remember that together with the Disney-World sentimentality which we impose on our children, the little creatures are inevitably subjected to continual scenes of sin and violence on TV, small females of nine and 10 years are encouraged to emulate the Spice Girls and schools try to inculcate in them a knowledge of sexual technique and perversion.
Lucia, aged 91, still lives in the Carmelite convent in Coimbra and occasionally visits Fatima, which now in no way resembles the scene of her childhood. In the town which has sprung up are hotels, bars, cafes and shops selling not only souvenirs but everything from pretty frocks to saddles and bridles. It is impossible for the visitor to imagine what it was like 80-odd years before. This is disconcerting and.does not immediately encourage reverence or a prayerful attitude in the aforesaid visitor. Even nearing the basilica, one has to remind oneself of the purpose of the visit, for there lies an open, curiously baffling space where once the children tended their sheep.
But then come people approaching on their knees and one is reminded of the penances which the children inflicted on themselves giving away their meagre food and denying themselves water in the parched heat of summer: unchildlike behaviour. Something happened here which changed forever those three small mortals and affected the course of history. On the anniversary of the extraordinary events the great space fulfills its purpose. It is thronged with thousands of people, each carrying a shaded candle, as the statue of the Virgin is taken round in procession. When the time comes for Mass, a number of priests somehow ensure that all receive Communion and the sound of many voices reciting the Rosary is mightily reassuring in a time when the persevering Modernists try to persuade us that such practices are obsolete.
In 1975, the Bishop of Fatima spoke of that “zone of silence, which illuminates and transforms, that vital space, so to speak, of humanity restored in Christ, who was also a man of silence, in the desert, on the mountain and in the midst of the multitude… “Fatima is truly the symbol of the lone mountain, the contemplative wilderness, where every man should spend a while if he seriously wishes to avoid his own annihilation and to be fulfilled in the plenitude of his being”.
There are two things to do in Fatima: one is to join in wonder in the communal worship and the other is to go alone into the quiet countryside and there try to imagine the austere simplicity of the lives of the children and the effect it must have had on them when they saw, standing above the holm oak, the Woman clothed with the Sun.