– (Murilo Araújo/)
1) LESSONS FROM BEYOND
In 1916, a year before the apparitions of the saint, the children Lúcia (10 years old), Francisco (9 years old) and Jacinta (7 years old) would have glimpsed a angel while herding sheep in the countryside of the city of Fatima, in Portugal. According to the alleged divine messenger, his visits were to teach them prayers of forgiveness and invocation of the Virgin Mary.
– (Murilo Araújo/)
2) APPOINTMENT SCHEDULED
On May 13, 1917, around noon, the children were praying in the pasture when they were surprised by a strong flash. About to flee, they saw floating above a small tree a saint «brighter than the sun». As they approached, the Virgin Mary would have told them that they should pray for the world and return to that place every 13th to receive three sacred prophecies.
– (Murilo Araújo/)
3) MEN OF LITTLE FAITH
The scheduled meetings in front of the tree ended up raising suspicions in the neighborhood. The then administrator of the region, Artur de Oliveira Santos, arrested the children on one of these occasions. Interrogated, they revealed the appearances of the saint, but nothing about her secrets. The news reverberated across the country and the case began to be monitored from a distance, but without interference.
4) THE SUN THAT DANCES
For October 13th, the trio predicted a miracle in the sun. According to the newspaper The century40 thousand pilgrims went to Fatima on that date, and they would have seen a luminous globe in the sky that turned on itself and moved in a zigzag pattern from east to west, for about ten minutes. Colored lights reflected on the landscape and on people, who also reported unexplained healings.
– (Murilo Araújo/)
5) DIARIES OF THE NOVICE
After the apparitions ended, in 1918 the brothers Francisco and Jacinta contracted the Spanish flu at the same time and died soon after. They became the youngest non-martyr saints in the history of the Catholic Church. Lucia, who was their cousin, became a nun. In the 1940s, she handed over to the Vatican’s secret archive four memoirs in which he related, in addition to the apparitions of the angel and the Virgin Mary, his supposed prophecies.
– (Murilo Araújo/)
6) COME TO ME THE RUSSIANS
The Church revealed the two parts of the secret shortly after delivery. Entitled respectively “The Vision of Hell” and “The Immaculate Heart of Mary”, they described the destruction of sinful souls and a supplication to Russia to convert to the Virgin Mary. Otherwise, the errors of that nation would bring wars to the world and persecutions of Christians.
– (Murilo Araújo/)
7) POPE IN DANGER
The third secret, “The attack on the pope”, was revealed only in 2000, at the request of John Paul II. Although it addressed the extermination of all Catholic clergy, the prophecy was treated by the Vatican only as a deliverance (salvation by divine interference) to the attack that the pope suffered in St. Peter’s Square, on May 13, 1981, the same day and month in which the first apparition would have occurred.
EXPLAINING THE TRUTH
The case emerged at a very delicate moment for the Church, Portugal and the world.
– In the year of the apparitions, Portugal was going through one of the greatest crises in its history. About 55,000 men had been sent to the 1st World War and the surviving population, mostly poor and without formal education, found comfort in the Catholic faith.
– According to newspapers at the time, Santos arrested the children for suspecting that they were being guided by the Church to incite a demonstration against the State. This is because, with the end of the monarchy in 1910 and the new laws of the Republic, the Church had lost several benefits.
– The second secret it may have been a Church reaction to the Russian Revolution in 1917. Communism was strongly opposed to the Catholic faith and the Vatican, which would lose power if this ideology advanced.
– Pope Benedict XVI, who was in charge of interpreting the third secretnever treated the subject as “apparitions” of Mary, but as “visions” of “symbolic language difficult to decipher”.
– Paranormal investigator Joe Nickell suggests that the sun miracle was a parhelion. This rare atmospheric phenomenon happens when sunlight penetrates clouds of ice crystals capable of spreading the rays, making “more suns” appear in the sky.
– In The Vatican Billions, British researcher Avro Manhattan claims that the Church invented apparitions of various “Our Ladies” to enrich itself. Only the Sanctuary Fatima would raise, on average, €8 million a year.
– The visions reinvigorated the image of the victimized Catholic Church, giving it “a strong eruption of the supernatural in a difficult moment”, according to Monsignor Carlos Azevedo, who headed the compilation of the volumes on Fatima.
– According to the writer and specialist in faith phenomena Manuel Arouca, who had access to the apocalyptic writings written by Sister Lúcia, the fatal attack against the pope will still occur. And in the Sanctuary of Fatimain Portugal.
SOURCES Books The Vatican Billionsby Avro Manhattan, and The Memoirs of Sister Lucia, by Lúcia de Jesus Santos; websites Sanctuary of Our Lady of Fatima It is vatican.va