The Miracle and the Message. John C. Preiss

      Introduction

      Fatima: A Message for the World

      I can remember when I first heard about the apparitions at Fatima. I was in Father Robert J. Fox’s living room. After writing several books and doing all he could to increase devotion to Our Lady of Fatima, Father Fox was known throughout the world as the “Fatima Priest.”

      I wondered at the time, “Why Fatima?” With all the countless devotions in the Church, why should a nearly one-hundred-year-old apparition to three shepherd children in Portugal have any special importance? Over time I came to realize the answer: Fatima is not just a place; it is a message and a call.

      The message of Fatima is universal — a message for you and for me that reflects all the teachings of the Catholic Church. It is at once simple enough for children to understand and deep enough to baffle theologians. It is not simply directed to pilgrims or for those seeking Mary’s intervention in specific areas of their lives. In fact, we don’t have to go to Fatima to live out the Fatima message. The message of Fatima can become a part of our daily spiritual lives wherever we are. Simply put, the message of Fatima is that Mary, the Mother of Jesus Christ, is living, real, and present in our lives, interceding for us.

      The call of Fatima is an invitation to embrace what Mary offers both the Church and the world. What does Mary want for us? A personal relationship with her Son, Jesus Christ. Mary always leads us to Jesus.

      A century after the first apparition of Our Lady to Lucia, Francisco, and Jacinta in Fatima, Portugal, the message and the call live on. That is because what flows from Fatima is more than a Marian devotion: it is all at once centered on the Holy Trinity, focused on Christ, strengthening to the Church, and oriented toward prayerful union with God. The message of Fatima is not only for one time and place: it is just as urgent and relevant today as it was a century ago. Father Luciano Guerra, former rector of the Fatima shrine, writes:

      In the light of the face of Mary, which here [at the Fatima Shrine in Portugal] perhaps becomes more attractive, in the motherly warmth of her Immaculate Heart, in the simplicity of the children who had the grace of seeing and hearing her, certainly, also through individual and public manifestations of filial piety, which take place wherever Our Lady of Fatima is venerated, we are forced to hope that this grace, until today full of divine surprises, constitutes still today an abundant source of energy for the renovation of the Church, now that we have entered the third millennium.… The message irradiating from Fatima has the power of strengthening the faith, of purifying the hearts of the pilgrims and of getting them closer to God and their fellow men.¹

      Whenever the Blessed Virgin appeared at Fatima, she had a gold ball at her waist. People came to understand that this ball represented the world and signified that the message of Fatima was for the whole world. If we put ourselves in the place of Lucia, Francisco, and Jacinta, we too, can do what Our Lady asks of us. Through the Fatima message, we can be shaped into what God desires for us, just as the humble shepherd children were.

      We don’t have to be especially “holy” or educated. The apparitions at Fatima prove that God chooses the simplest people to carry out his greatest works. Sister Lucia stated in later writings, “The Lord shows that the work is his and not that of weak instruments which he has chosen; for God it is enough that these instruments allow themselves to be molded and transformed and moved by the grace at work within them, engraving in their pure hearts and innocent hearts the reflections of his presence, the touches of His grace and the impulses of His love.” God still wants to speak to us through Fatima. If we open ourselves up to him, a transformation of grace will take place.

      The three most recent popes have recognized the urgency of the messages of Our Lady at Fatima for our world today. Pope Saint John Paul II developed a spiritual bond with Sister Lucia, one of the three little shepherds of the Fatima apparitions. He even donated the cornerstone, taken from Saint Peter’s tomb beneath the Vatican, for the new Fatima church, which was dedicated on the ninetieth anniversary of the apparitions. This gift of the Holy Father was a sign of his deep conviction that he owed his life to Our Lady of Fatima, whom he credited for saving him from an assassination attempt on May 13, 1981. Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI entrusted his pontificate to the Virgin Mary at Fatima. Pope Francis has done the same.

      The message of Fatima has unfolded over time, further confirming that it has lasting significance for us today. In his assessment of the Little Shepherds, the late Father Luis Kondor, S.V.D., former postulator for the canonizations of now Saints Francisco and Jacinta, noted: “The full content of the Fatima message and its mission was not given all at once at the time of the apparitions in 1917, but in the course of the various preliminary private and public interrogations of the visionaries.” In fact, Lucia — the only one of the three seers to survive into adulthood — only wrote about the apparitions and the various messages of Our Lady when told to do so, many years after the apparitions occurred.

      Father Kondor continued:

      It is true that, immediately after the first apparition on May 13, 1917, articles, interrogations of the visionaries … publications, periodicals, booklets and books began to make their appearance, and that all of these are now of great historical importance. Nevertheless, a great many writers wrote nothing because they lacked the necessary ecclesiastical authorization, which was not granted until October 13, 1930. This was the date on which D. José Alves Correia da Silva published Fatima’s so-called “Magna Carta” in which he declared the apparitions worthy of credence and authorized the cult of Our Lady in the Cova da Iria. This authorization was of great importance for the literature concerning Fatima, beginning in fact with the writings of Sister Lucia, which we can classify as “source documents,” since the other two visionaries had died before they learned how to write. One can state, to begin with, that Sister Lucia never wrote anything of her own volition. She wrote only when she was ordered to do so. Sister Lucia destroyed the first document concerning the Five First Saturdays of the month which she had written on December 10, 1925, shortly after she had received the vision described in it. The description we now have is, therefore, a second edition, sent to her spiritual

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