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20. The Sun Acclaims Our Lady of Fatima
THE
MORNING did not dawn. There was not a glimpse of the sun. The rain that
had been pelting down all night continued through the morning. It held
the chill of a northwest wind. Yet, from the widest reaches of Portugal,
people were on their way to the Cova da Iria. Some had been on the road
for days, for they walked; whole families of them; who had their
provisions packed in knapsacks flung over the shoulders of the men, if not
in panniers fastened to the backs of donkeys. Most of the pilgrims from
afar rode, in wagons, in rigs, on bicycle, on horse or burro. The
wealthier drove motor cars. At best, the going presented the threat of
never getting there. For the red clay of the mountain roads had by now
become river beds of mud.
The managing editor of Lisbon's largest
newspaper had been keeping an eye on this massive invasion of a remote
recess in the Serra da Aire. Infidel though he was and proud of it,
Avelino de Ameida at least reported the facts as best his prejudice would
allow. "Thousands are traveling to a wild expanse of country near Ourem
to see and hear the Virgin Mary," his dispatch to O Seculo read on
the date, October 13, 1917.
Here he partly erred in his attempt to
understand the driving motive of the more devout pilgrims. They did not
expect to see and hear the Virgin Mary: but that the three favored seers
would see her and two of them hear her, and that she would honor her word
to perform a miracle for all to see, they did believe. Such intuitive
faith on the part of the majority explains the vast turnout in weather
that would have discouraged a lesser conviction.
Jacinta arrived at the Cova, mounted on the
shoulders of a rollicksome giant who had lifted her there for fear the
child might be crushed in the mob.
"Clear a way for the children who saw Our
Lady," he called out, for Francisco and Lucia walked behind him with
Francisco's father. A path was cleared, in that dense crowd of 70,000, to
the holm. The little evergreen had been stripped of its higher branches
on former occasions by souvenir seekers, but was now draped and overspread
with flowers to make it a worthier pedestal. The rain, as noon
approached, had not stopped. But it had abated. It fell in a drizzle on
a mixed sea of umbrellas and unprotected heads.
Suddenly there came a command from Lucia, "Put
down your umbrellas!" The word passed from mouth to mouth through the
crowd. The umbrellas, starting with those nearest the holm, went shut.
Lucia doesn't remember having said that,
despite testimony to the contrary, for the girl had begun her ecstasy.
She did not realize, nor did Francisco and Jacinta, that they were
kneeling in slush and that raindrops ran off their chins as they kept
their faces lifted to a splendor unknown to the others.
"Have them build a chapel here in my honor,"
Lucia was being told what she had herself suggested a month ago. "I am
the Lady of the Rosary."
Lady of the Rosary, the Virgin Mary, Help of
Christians, Queen of Saints, by whatever synonym—who but the Mother of
God? The identification came as no surprise. It had been felt all along,
from the first apparition in May. What other woman of heaven, or angel,
could have recommended the rosary to such unfailing effect as to make the
touch of its beads a satisfaction to the fingers, the praying of its
decades a joy to the heart, a comfort to the mind? The seers unfailingly
experienced all that in saying their daily rosary while meditating on its
mysteries, once they had been so beatifically instructed.
The radiance from the Lady with her bright
rosary beads and cross contrasted unforgettably with the sorrow in her
voice and on her face as she spoke her final words: "Men must stop
offending our Lord and ask pardon for their sins, for he is already too
much offended."
This final mandate to the world from Our Lady
of Fatima, which would haunt the memory of the seers, summarizes her
message. All her requests for prayer and penance aimed at that. The
crying necessity to have for our Lord and God and Savior a love that does
not offend Him, spells out the whole idea. Why must it be supposed that
Lucia, who had not been going to school, was suddenly asked to go and
learn to read and write? The idea needed a publicity agent, an educated
hand to record her Memoirs.
Our Lady of Fatima, whose final pronouncement
brought from Lucia and Jacinta a cry of compassion for their offended God
and had Francisco wondering what she had said with such a mournful look,
had not done with her little seers. Nor had she forgotten that the
immense crowd had come out to witness a miracle. Saying nothing more, she
unfolded her hands as usual, turning the palms upward so that their
streams of light touched the very zenith of the firmament. At that moment
the rain stopped as the clouds parted to show forth the sun. The children
didn't see it, for the reason they had not felt the rain. In their
ecstasy they were only aware that the Lady of their vision no longer stood
over the small tree, but had ascended with her own radiance to disappear
in the sky—and to reappear in a different role.
An unmistakable tableau of the Holy Family
formed on the sky, directly overhead. The Blessed Mother, wearing a white
garment with a blue mantle, stood alongside St. Joseph who held on his
left arm the Christ Child. The Infant in a bright-red gown must have
looked adorably attractive to the three little seers down below. His
foster father made the sign of the cross over the world three times,
following which the Christ did the same.
The angel, it will be recalled, in teaching the
seers certain prayers would say them not once but thrice. Like the
adoring angel, Joseph by his triple gesture was paying honor to the
Trinity of co-equal Persons in the divine Unity. The little Incarnate God
he held, in doing likewise, gave poignancy to the action: the Child was
acknowledging his own inseparable association with his Eternal Father and
their Holy Spirit. Joseph and Mary watched the action and the Child,
adoringly.
The tableau faded out and another, seen only by
Lucia, took its place. The suffering Jesus and his grief-stricken mother,
as they must have looked when they met on the way to Calvary, stood clear
in the sky. The picture was obviously there to recall their co-active
endurance of the long and bitter hours of the Passion. But the afflicted
Mother of Good Friday did not long remain so represented. A third tableau
for Lucia alone portrayed her now, to quote the seer, "I don't know how to
describe it, but I think as Our Lady of Mount Carmel." Triumphantly
enthroned, Our Lady wore the crown of a queen and held on her lap the
divine Child and in one hand a scapular. If this third tableau suggests
the glorious, the second corresponds to the sorrowful and the first to the
joyful mysteries of the rosary.
But the crowd saw nothing of these tableaux in
the sky. They were meanwhile seeing wonders the children did not see. At
the instant the sun had broken through the clouds, the 70,000 who had
stood and damp in a drizzle of rain found their clothes immediately dry.
Then the sun put on a display that, in the report of the infidel editor,
"was unique, and incredible to one who had not been a witness to it."
The way the sun acted confounded Senhor Avelino
de Almeida of O Seculo. He had not come out to witness a miracle,
having in his editorials held the Fatima apparitions up to merciless
ridicule. The Freemason was there, at the Cova da Iria, on October 13,
1917, simply to describe the supposed bound-to-be disappointment of the
mob and to gloat over what in his judgment could not possibly happen: but
since it did happen before his eyes, the great miracle of the century, he
gave an honest account of it. His honesty, not unlike that of Dr. Alexis
Carrel, evoked a storm of resentment from his irreligious colleagues.
They were obviously not prepared for a frank acknowledgment of fact. They
wanted its suppression.
The fact had many more witnesses than the
enormous crowd at the Cova. Six and a quarter miles away an entire
village saw the miracle. Ignatius Lourenco Pereira, who testified under
oath, relates the particular that "schoolmistress rushed out of the school
into the street, followed by her pupils, to see the sight." Better than
that, the poet Alfonso Lopes Vieria beheld the miracle of the sun from a
distance of thirty-one miles. In detail he describes it. Both of which
verified reports kill outright the desperate assumption of mass
hypnosis.
What exactly occurred? The sun, after the mass
of clouds had split apart to race in all directions to the horizon and
disappear, had sole possession of the firmament. It paled from its normal
strength to a silvery disk. It could be stared at, with no need to shade
the eyes. It started to tremble, then to spin around madly, throwing off
bright rays of varicolored light over the sky, the Cova, the faces of the
spectators. They were dizzied from the wild dance of colors everywhere
they looked: red, pink, blue, purple, green, yellow, orange, and the
shades in between. Three times the whirling ceased; but after the third
time the unpredictable disk did not resume its colorful display.
More frenzied still, it did something else. It
gave off a shudder and hurtled in crazy zigzags toward the earth. People
who during the rotations had been exclaiming "A miracle! Look at the
miracle!" now fell to their knees in fright. They feared it was the end
of the world. Skeptics who were there to jeer did not jeer. One was
heard to call aloud, "O God, don't let me die in my sins." Then just in
time, right before it could crash on the earth, the silvery disk recovered
its poise and went spinning back to its normal place in the sky. It was
once again the familiar sun: a ball of fire too strong to be gazed at
without a hand to the eye.
The crowd breathed a sigh of relief. No cries
of blasphemy, no guffaws of ridicule, were heard. Its editor telephone in
to O Seculo his report under the headlines: "Amazing Phenomenon!
How the Sun Danced At Fatima at Midday!" He who had come out to expose
the "Fatima Fraud" did not dispute the demonstration that vindicated Our
Lady of the Rosary, for he saw it. He admitted, while ingeniously
avoiding the unusable word miracle, that the action of the sun had
made good her promise to the three young shepherds.
A miracle of tremendous proportions, what
else? No natural explanation avails. The observatories at Lisbon and in
the world at large recorded no solar disturbance that day. Or say, with
the finical, that the sun did nothing irregular, but that the Almighty so
worked upon the visory sense of the multitude as to make them think it
did—but what does that prove? It certainly does not lessen the sanction.
With spectators from miles around, as well as the 70,000 at the Cova, that
would in itself be a miracle.
The word offends the pontiffs of dialectic
materialism who declare from their university chairs that nature cannot be
disturbed in her inexorable laws by the least supervention. How do they
know? They cannot know. They assume it. Therefore, they conclude, all
evidence to the contrary must be ruled out of consideration. A more
unscientific attitude, which refuses to investigate the evidence, is hard
to imagine. It dare not so much as entertain, as a possible alternative,
the thesis that nature has a Creator and that he who made her laws out of
nothing ought to be able to suspend or supercede them if and when and how
he sees fit.
Those who reject supernatural intervention in
human affairs will, as with miracles, disallow apparitions. But they
merely assert their impossibility; they do not prove it. They cannot
prove it. They can only fall back upon their own negative experience to
convince them that, since no angel or saint or the queen of both has ever
appeared to them, neither could a heavenly visitant—even Jesus
Himself—have appeared to such redoubtable visionaries as St. Gregory
Thaumaturgus, St. Gertrude, St. Margaret Mary, St. Frances of Rome, St.
Francis of Assisi, St. Bernadette of Lourdes and, not to be omitted, the
uncanonized shepherds of the Cova da Iria. If that is not an ingrown
arrogance, what is?
The shepherds did see Our Lady of the Rosary.
What more could the sun have done to convince the incredulous? On second
thought, it could have done more. Did not Our Lady herself forewarn that
the October miracle would be less striking because of the administrator's
meddlesome infidelity? But it must still be rated, just as it was, the
miracle of the century.
It came of Almighty God who performed the
miracle through his mother to certify the story and message of Fatima. No
merely human power could have managed it. Not all the accumulated
resources of modern science could have so manipulated the massive star, of
a size 332,000 times that of the earth, and then given back to it its
normal stability. The phenomenon, admitted to have happened by the most
hostile of witnesses, received a flattering appraisal from an honest
agnostic. "The miracles of Catholicism," writes Somerset Maugham in his
Note Book, "are as well authenticated as those of the New
Testament."
The miracle on its own merits should make any
thinking skeptic reconsider his attitude of mistrust toward the
supernatural. It should humiliate into a change of heart and mind the
many sophisticates within the Church who dismiss the apparitions of Fatima
as unworthy of credence. It should: but will it?
A strange perversity closes the human mind to
the strongest evidence, when that mind so decides. The Christ of a
hundred miracles knew that even the most sensational of them would not
open such a mind. "Neither will they be convinced," he had Abraham say of
hardened infidels, "if some one should rise from the dead" (Lk. 16:31).
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