by
Damien F. Mackey
‘Continue to come
here every month. In October, I will tell you who I am and what I want, and I
will perform a miracle for all to see and believe’.
Our Lady of the Rosary at Fatima
Introduction
By now, the 100th anniversary of Fatima (1917-2017), all but a
few of the Fatima prophecies have been fulfilled. On July 13, 1917, Our Lady of
the Rosary had announced:
“The war will end soon …”. World War I ended the next year,
1918.
“but if people do not cease offending God, a worse one
will break out during the Pontificate of Pius XI”. World War II was “a worse” war.
Pope “Pius XI” was the
Pope who turned his back on Hitler
this Hitler being an Antichrist:
“When you
see a night illumined by an unknown light, know that this is the great sign
given you by God that He is about to punish the world for its crimes, by means
of war, famine, and persecutions of the Church and of the Holy Father”.
See my:
The Great Solar Miracle: Fatima October 13, 1917. Part
Three: The ‘Unknown Light’ of 1938
It caused panic,
as if “announcing the end of the world”:
In the streets there is panic. “Paris
is on fire!” In
several villages of the province firemen are mobilized...» «An immense blood-red
glow was
extending over the sky...»
The review then gives a great number of statements from its correspondents, both from France and from foreign countries. Here are some significant excerpts:
At the observatory of pic du Midi: «... The first impression was of a gigantic conflagration...»
At La Chapelle-Saint-Laud, in Maine-et-Loire, the teacher kept this description given by one of his students, aged ten: «Yesterday evening there was a great red cloud; it was like a sheet of blood, then the cloud grew larger, forming great red threads, which kept going up, and below that, white threads, like chalk lines.
In Oise, Mr. Henri Blain - at first believed that it was the grim reflection of a vast inferno... Many of the villagers, struck by the anomaly and intensity of the phenomenon, observed somewhat nervously from the window sills of their houses... These red glows were visible, then disappeared, and later on reappeared after a more or less lengthy period of time... These luminous manifestations sometimes went up very high in the sky, and in colour and luminosity they were absolutely comparable to the very vivid reflections of a violent, nearby inferno... The intensity of this extraordinary celestial spectacle, its splendid brightness, its enormous extent, its extreme rarity at this intensity especially in our regions, and even more so in this season of the year, seemed worthy to us of being pointed out to the Society immediately.
In Picardie: «At a quarter past five, noticed in the north-northwesterly direction a red glow which first attributed as being the result of a far-off inferno... Ten minutes later, the great purple spot was extending above our heads right up to Orion; other smaller and paler ones formed and disappeared in their turn. A few moments later, the blazing sky was being reflected in our faces; my wife, who was admiring the phenomenon at my side, appeared to me in a red reflection which seemed to me unreal. At a quarter to eight, the red glow reached its maximum intensity, almost the whole sky seemed to be on fire. A second drapery was quickly lit up, its luminosity was such that could tell the time on my watch. The spectacle was extraordinary. A brave peasant who had come near me to ask for news believed very seriously that it was announcing the end of the world!...
At the minor seminary of Caen, the students contemplated from their dorm a great red sheet, through which a few stars could be seen.
A witness from Vaucluse employs the same expression: «I was surprised to notice a great red sheet in the sky. For a moment it resembled a fire to me somewhere in the surrounding area, whose glowing light was reflected in the clouds… I observed that during the whole duration of the phenomenon the dogs in the village and surrounding area began barking and howling. They did not stop until about half past ten.
In North Africa this aurora borealis was so intense that an admiral whose ships were cruising near the coast ordered a destroyer to turn towards the left, towards the northwest, for he too believed that a fire was in the distance.
Another witness reports: This aurora was visible in almost all of Tunisia. It is a very rare phenomenon in our region since a similar one has not been recorded since 1891... In general it looked like a vast red or rose coloured glow, more or less streaked with white... The natives, who were very frightened, saw in it a warning of the divine wrath; the Europeans believed it was a huge, distant fire. The descriptions coming from various points in Tunisia always come back to the same expressions, which reveals that the phenomenon had an astonishing uniformity: «the sky turning red, a large reddish band which at first resembled a fire...», the «blazing sky», «a general blaze in the sky, the colour of a red brick, etc. The phenomenon was visible in all of North Africa.
In England: a witness spoke of moving pleats of a red velour coloured curtain. The curtain was drawn and filled the whole space. In Switzerland: a spring-like day had preceded the unprecedented, unforgettable phenomenon.»
The astronomical review gave some reports originating from Czechoslovakia and Romania:
Very frequent but brief conflagrations inflamed the sky right up to its zenith. It seemed that the fiery arch in the sky had come very low.
In Italy: A phenomenon extremely rare in our country.» It was visible at Pontevedra in Spain, In Portugal: Yesterday, for the first time in my life I observed a magnificent aurora borealis, a phenomenon very rare over here, which nobody can remember having seen for fifty years. At Lisbon and in all Portugal this phenomenon occasioned as much attention as surprise. Almost all the spectators believed that the sky was being lighted up by an enormous fire; and I myself believed the same thing at first. The apparition lasted almost two hours, from ten o’clock until midnight... Its colour was a more or less intense red.
In the United States, «this aurora was spectacular... Early in the evening my attention was drawn to the east by an enormous conflagration. Over a wide area the sky was alight with a red glow and I believed at first that a great fire was devouring Hampton Beach. The aurora was also observed in Canada.
The review then gives a great number of statements from its correspondents, both from France and from foreign countries. Here are some significant excerpts:
At the observatory of pic du Midi: «... The first impression was of a gigantic conflagration...»
At La Chapelle-Saint-Laud, in Maine-et-Loire, the teacher kept this description given by one of his students, aged ten: «Yesterday evening there was a great red cloud; it was like a sheet of blood, then the cloud grew larger, forming great red threads, which kept going up, and below that, white threads, like chalk lines.
In Oise, Mr. Henri Blain - at first believed that it was the grim reflection of a vast inferno... Many of the villagers, struck by the anomaly and intensity of the phenomenon, observed somewhat nervously from the window sills of their houses... These red glows were visible, then disappeared, and later on reappeared after a more or less lengthy period of time... These luminous manifestations sometimes went up very high in the sky, and in colour and luminosity they were absolutely comparable to the very vivid reflections of a violent, nearby inferno... The intensity of this extraordinary celestial spectacle, its splendid brightness, its enormous extent, its extreme rarity at this intensity especially in our regions, and even more so in this season of the year, seemed worthy to us of being pointed out to the Society immediately.
In Picardie: «At a quarter past five, noticed in the north-northwesterly direction a red glow which first attributed as being the result of a far-off inferno... Ten minutes later, the great purple spot was extending above our heads right up to Orion; other smaller and paler ones formed and disappeared in their turn. A few moments later, the blazing sky was being reflected in our faces; my wife, who was admiring the phenomenon at my side, appeared to me in a red reflection which seemed to me unreal. At a quarter to eight, the red glow reached its maximum intensity, almost the whole sky seemed to be on fire. A second drapery was quickly lit up, its luminosity was such that could tell the time on my watch. The spectacle was extraordinary. A brave peasant who had come near me to ask for news believed very seriously that it was announcing the end of the world!...
At the minor seminary of Caen, the students contemplated from their dorm a great red sheet, through which a few stars could be seen.
A witness from Vaucluse employs the same expression: «I was surprised to notice a great red sheet in the sky. For a moment it resembled a fire to me somewhere in the surrounding area, whose glowing light was reflected in the clouds… I observed that during the whole duration of the phenomenon the dogs in the village and surrounding area began barking and howling. They did not stop until about half past ten.
In North Africa this aurora borealis was so intense that an admiral whose ships were cruising near the coast ordered a destroyer to turn towards the left, towards the northwest, for he too believed that a fire was in the distance.
Another witness reports: This aurora was visible in almost all of Tunisia. It is a very rare phenomenon in our region since a similar one has not been recorded since 1891... In general it looked like a vast red or rose coloured glow, more or less streaked with white... The natives, who were very frightened, saw in it a warning of the divine wrath; the Europeans believed it was a huge, distant fire. The descriptions coming from various points in Tunisia always come back to the same expressions, which reveals that the phenomenon had an astonishing uniformity: «the sky turning red, a large reddish band which at first resembled a fire...», the «blazing sky», «a general blaze in the sky, the colour of a red brick, etc. The phenomenon was visible in all of North Africa.
In England: a witness spoke of moving pleats of a red velour coloured curtain. The curtain was drawn and filled the whole space. In Switzerland: a spring-like day had preceded the unprecedented, unforgettable phenomenon.»
The astronomical review gave some reports originating from Czechoslovakia and Romania:
Very frequent but brief conflagrations inflamed the sky right up to its zenith. It seemed that the fiery arch in the sky had come very low.
In Italy: A phenomenon extremely rare in our country.» It was visible at Pontevedra in Spain, In Portugal: Yesterday, for the first time in my life I observed a magnificent aurora borealis, a phenomenon very rare over here, which nobody can remember having seen for fifty years. At Lisbon and in all Portugal this phenomenon occasioned as much attention as surprise. Almost all the spectators believed that the sky was being lighted up by an enormous fire; and I myself believed the same thing at first. The apparition lasted almost two hours, from ten o’clock until midnight... Its colour was a more or less intense red.
In the United States, «this aurora was spectacular... Early in the evening my attention was drawn to the east by an enormous conflagration. Over a wide area the sky was alight with a red glow and I believed at first that a great fire was devouring Hampton Beach. The aurora was also observed in Canada.
The astronomer, Carl Stromer, reports that one of
his correspondents in Norway, at the station of Njuke Mountain (Tuddal),
signalled to him that he had heard noises «while the aurora was at its height
and the sky seemed to be an ocean of flames... The observer and his
assistant heard a curious sound coming from above them... which lasted about
ten minutes, rose to a maximum and then vanished, following the fluctuations of
the aurora’s intensity. This sound, which resembled the crackle of burning
grass, was perceived in the same region, in the Tuddal valley, by Mr.
Oysteim Reisjaa. Everything was perfectly calm on the mountain, and nothing
could explain the production of this noise, neither the wind, which was not
blowing, nor the telegraph lines, nor motors. Above the observatories, from all
sides, there was not a murmur in the forest.
January 26 issue of Le Petit Dauphinois
Grenoble, January 25. – An atmospheric phenomenon of exceptional intensity was noticed this evening between seven-thirty and ten-thirty on the entire range of the Alps. This phenomenon manifested itself by an immense luminous trail which seemed to come from the sun, to unfold, fan-shaped, right up to its zenith. The breadth of the spectacle observed was such that the blazing sky resembled the brilliance of dawn. The people were astonished at first, then admired this celestial manifestation, which is rarely seen in these latitudes; then, as the phenomenon prolonged itself, they grew disturbed. Some curious scenes – especially in our countryside – were witnessed as the horizon remained purple. A thousand controversies swirled around this strange vision, which was believed to be a vast fire in the mountains, or gigantic military manoeuvres with searchlights; it was even believed – and this was the almost unanimous and not the least interesting observation – that the sun was going to rise...
January 26 issue of Le Petit Dauphinois
Grenoble, January 25. – An atmospheric phenomenon of exceptional intensity was noticed this evening between seven-thirty and ten-thirty on the entire range of the Alps. This phenomenon manifested itself by an immense luminous trail which seemed to come from the sun, to unfold, fan-shaped, right up to its zenith. The breadth of the spectacle observed was such that the blazing sky resembled the brilliance of dawn. The people were astonished at first, then admired this celestial manifestation, which is rarely seen in these latitudes; then, as the phenomenon prolonged itself, they grew disturbed. Some curious scenes – especially in our countryside – were witnessed as the horizon remained purple. A thousand controversies swirled around this strange vision, which was believed to be a vast fire in the mountains, or gigantic military manoeuvres with searchlights; it was even believed – and this was the almost unanimous and not the least interesting observation – that the sun was going to rise...
“To
prevent this, I shall come to ask for the consecration of Russia to my
Immaculate Heart, and the Communion of reparation on the First Saturdays. If my
requests are heeded, Russia will be converted, and there will be peace; if not,
she will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions
of the Church. The good will be martyred; the Holy Father will have much to
suffer …”.
(Communion of Reparation)
“On December 10, 1925, the
Most Holy Virgin appeared to [Sister Lucia], and by Her side, elevated on a
luminous cloud, was the Child Jesus. The Most Holy Virgin rested Her hand on
her shoulder, and as She did so, She showed her a heart encircled by thorns,
which She was holding in Her other hand.
At the same time, the Child said: “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.”
Then the Most Holy Virgin said: “Look My
daughter, at My Heart, surrounded with thorns with which ungrateful men pierce
Me at every moment by their blasphemies and ingratitude. You at least try to
console Me and announce in My name that I promise to assist at the moment of
death, with all the graces necessary for salvation, all those who, on the first
Saturday of five consecutive months, shall confess, receive Holy Communion,
recite five decades of the Rosary, and keep Me company for fifteen minutes
while meditating on the fifteen mysteries of the Rosary, with the intention of
making reparation to Me.”
(Consecration of Russia)
|
June 13, 1929
|
Our Lady fulfills her promise, asking "for the consecration of
Russia to Her Immaculate Heart, promising its conversion through this means
and the hindering of the propagation of its errors."2
|
Sister
Lucy received the order for the Consecration of Russia in June 1929, in a time
in which Stalinist terror ruled over Russia. …. in August 1931, the secret
judgments of God were illuminated thus:
"Make My ministers
understand, given that they follow the example of the King of France in
delaying the execution of My command, they also will follow him into
misfortune. It is never too late to have recourse to Jesus and Mary."
Jesus is
making reference to the well-known case in the history of the devotion to the
Sacred Heart of Jesus, in which the "King of France" does not fulfill
the desires of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, transmitted through Saint Margaret
Mary Alacoque. And she is afraid that the same thing will happen with this
request of Heaven concerning the Consecration of Russia.
Sister
Lucia (1935): "The
Holy Father ... Pray much for the Holy Father. He will make it (the
consecration) but it will be late”.
And “late”
it was, the Consecration of Russia being only successfully achieved - after
various attempts by popes - on the 25th of March 1984, by Pope John
Paul II, more than half a century after it had been asked for (in 1929).
Meanwhile Russia
communism had long “spread her errors
throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church”.
It was only after the Consecration
had finally been achieved that the Soviet Union collapsed.
Today, we live in a world saturated with “errors” at
every single level.
Foolishly, Jesus Christ’s
has been rejected by most and has been substituted by
expediency and transitory power.
Hence, we cannot now
reasonably expect Heaven’s conditional: “If
my requests are heeded … there will be peace …”, to be what prevails, but
rather its: “If
not …”, leading to all manner of disasters.
The kinds of disasters, in fact,
that have rent this world of ours for decade upon decade.
Nor can we now
reasonably expect to avoid that yet unfulfilled and most terrifying prophecy: “If not … various nations will be annihilated
…”, the fulfillment of which is looking more and more imminent.
And the final outcome?
Heaven always wins: “ … in the end my Immaculate Heart shall triumph …
and some time of peace will be given to the world.”
‘No, father Abraham’, he said,
‘but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent’.
[Abraham] said to him,
‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced
even if someone rises from the dead’.
Luke
16:30-31
Introduction
Nor will “they … be convinced”, apparently, if
Heaven should “perform a miracle for all to see and believe” that, several
months in advance, was foretold to the very day:
13 July 1917
‘I want you to come here on the 13th of
next month, to continue to pray the Rosary every day in honour of Our Lady of
the Rosary, in order to obtain peace for the world and the end of the war,
because only she can help you’.
‘Continue to come here every
month. In October, I will tell you who I am and what I want, and I will perform
a miracle for all to see and believe’.
This was yet another of those Fatima predictions that was fulfilled - and
spectacularly so.
Fr. Dwight Longenecker has written about it as follows (https://cruxnow.com/commentary/2017/05/08/fatima-and-the-atheists/
Fatima and the Atheists
….
May 8, 2017
CRUX_CONTRIBUTOR
Fr. Dwight Longenecker says the Miracle of the Sun happened in Fatima on October 13, 1917. We have documentary, eyewitness, and photographic evidence that 70,000 people ‘saw’ the sun spin, felt it was yanked from the sky and that it plunged to earth. Everyone said they saw the same thing. Everyone was so frightened they screamed and ran for their lives. Clearly something happened, what was it? The answer given by believers is more rational than the answer given by atheists.
Commentary
Atheists
love to mock miracles, and the miracle of the sun at Fatima is one of their
favorite objects of derision.
The
high priest of the atheists, Richard Dawkins dismisses the miracle of the sun
as a mass hallucination.
He
writes in The God Delusion:
“On
the face of it, mass visions, such as the report that seventy thousand pilgrims
at Fatima in Portugal in 1917 saw the sun ‘tear itself from the heavens and
come crashing down upon the multitude,’ are harder to write off…It is not easy
to explain how seventy thousand people could share the same hallucination. But
it is even harder to accept that it really happened without the rest of the
world, outside Fatima, seeing it too — and not just seeing it, but feeling it
as the catastrophic destruction of the solar system, including acceleration
forces sufficient to hurl everybody into space. Obviously the sun did not dance
and plunge to the earth. We know the sun is billions of times bigger than the
earth. If the sun plunged to the earth there would be no earth. Clearly there
was no miracle of the sun at Fatima…”
Dawkins
is relying on the Scottish philosopher David Hume’s pithy test for a miracle.
Hume wrote, “No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the
testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than
the fact which it endeavors to establish.”
Hume’s
test applied to Fatima would be to observe that it is very improbable that
70,000 people could simultaneously be deluded, or simultaneously collude in a
mass lie. It is also very improbable that 70,000 people experienced the same
hallucination.
However,
all of those improbabilities are far more probable than the alternative: That
the Sun was suddenly yanked sideways in its orbit, spun around and crashed
to the Earth destroying the balance of the whole solar system with nobody
outside Fatima noticing.
This
is typical of the dull literalistic “reasoning” of the atheists. We who believe
in the miracle of the sun have also taken science classes. We do understand
that the sun is much bigger than the earth.
We
also know that if the sun were really spinning that everyone on earth should be
able to see it. We also know that if the sun plunged to earth we would all be
toast.
Yet
we believe in the miracle of the sun.
Scientists
are supposed to objectively and rationally examine the evidence. At Fatima we
have documentary, eyewitness, and photographic evidence that 70,000 people
‘saw’ the sun spin, felt it was yanked from the sky and that it plunged to
earth.
Everyone
said they saw the same thing. Everyone was so frightened they screamed and ran
for their lives. Clearly something happened, what was it?
Obviously
the sun didn’t literally fall to the earth. But 70,000 people saw it fall to
the earth. The miracle therefore occurred somewhere within the process of
perception.
We
see with our eyes, but what do we see? Whatever we see is transferred to the
brain and the brain interprets what we see. It is well known that if we do not
have the mental capacity to “see” certain things they are invisible to us.
Likewise
we may “see” certain things, and without the capacity or mental vocabulary to
process what we have seen they will remain a mystery to us, for we all process
what we see in terms of what we know.
Therefore
do we conclude that the miracle of the sun at Fatima was a miracle that
occurred within the minds of 70,000 witnesses.
Does
this mean “It was only in their mind?” Or that “They had merely imagined it”?
How did they all imagine the same thing? Was that the miracle? Did the event
manipulate their minds and powers of perception in some way? Was it therefore a
very unusual kind of mass hallucination?
No.
They really did see the sun spinning, being yanked from the sky and plunging to
earth, but the way they “saw” it was with some other capability than the usual
kind of ‘seeing.’ They “saw” something in the same way that the visionaries
“see” the Blessed Virgin who is not there in a normally physical way. Yet, the
visionaries report that the characters they “see” seem to be physical and
solid.
The
seeming reality of what they see means this was not an ordinary hallucination.
Furthermore, the miracle could not only have taken place within the perception
of the witnesses because the phenomena was witnessed elsewhere.
Marian
researcher Donal Foley records, that the poet Alfonso Lopes Vieira who lived
over 30 miles away from Fatima witnessed the phenomenon. He wrote, “On that
day, 13th October, 1917, without remembering the predictions of the children, I
was enchanted by a remarkable spectacle in the sky of a kind I had never seen
before.”
Foley
tells the story of a young boy, Inacio Lourenco, who was a schoolchild of nine
when he saw the miracle at a village about 12 miles from Fatima. He described
how the children and their teachers were attracted outside by a commotion in
front of the school to see the miracle of the sun. He tells of how he could
look at the sun, which looked like “a ball of snow revolving on itself,” before
it suddenly came down in a zigzag toward the Earth.
As
he says, “During those long moments of the solar prodigy objects around us
turned all the colors of the rainbow. We saw ourselves blue, yellow, red, etc.
All these strange phenomena increased the fear of the people. After about ten
minutes the sun, now dull and pallid, returned to its place. When the people
realized that the danger was now over there was an explosion of joy and
everyone joined in thanksgiving and praise of our Lady.”
The
miracle was also seen by sailors on a British ship off the coast of Portugal.
Foley recounts an experience in England. He gave a presentation on Fatima at a
college in England and was told by one of the teachers that her grandfather saw
the miracle from his ship and wrote about it to his wife — “without obviously
understanding what it meant or its significance.”
And
finally, what most convincingly shows that the miracle was not only in the
minds and perception of the witnesses is the fact that the crowd at Fatima felt
the heat of the sun as it approached them, and their clothes and the ground —
which had been soaked by torrential rain — were dry at the end of the miracle.
Believers
and atheists agree that the sun did not literally and physically crash to
earth. Some atheists will continue to propose a mass hallucination. Others are
honest enough to be mystified by the events at Fatima, and admit that it was
some sort of psychic phenomena for which we do not yet have an explanation.
Believers
will ask, “Why not accept the most obvious explanation: A power greater than
nature interrupted the natural order. The term for a power greater than nature
is God, and the term for such an interruption is ‘miracle’.”
[End of quote]
Also against the idea of
‘mass hallucination’ is that the Miracle of the Sun did not occur at the time expected,
at 12 noon when the apparitions had customarily occurred, but two hours later –
at midday solar time – since this was a miracle intended for the whole world,
that all might believe.
