Fatima for the Non-Religious

The Fatima story is too interesting to be left to the Catholic Church

The feast of Our Lady of Fatima is coming up on 13 May. Now is a good time to take the opportunity to look at the strange and enigmatic story of Fatima from a secular point of view.

It is a very, very interesting story - one of the most curious historical episodes of the twentieth century. A series of visions seen by a group of Portuguese peasant children became an international movement supported by several popes - one which looked to the Virgin Mary to lead a crusade against communism and for right-wing dictators. How did this happen?

Most people who encounter the Fatima story, whether they are Catholics or not, do so through the official narratives promoted by the Catholic Church. Few people look behind them. Matters are not helped by the fact that the original 1917 documentation on the apparitions has never been published in English (although it is available in a Portuguese edition).

I might as well say at the outset that I don’t know what ‘really happened’ at Fatima, and this article is not aimed at persuading you into believing in a particular explanation for the events. Instead, I want to look at the way that the story was told and how it developed.

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The Fatima story centres on three Portuguese peasant children, Lucia dos Santos (age 10) and her cousins Jacinta Marto (7) and Francisco Marto (8-9). On 13 May 1917, the children were tending their sheep in a field when they saw a vision of a beautiful young lady. She was short and dressed in white and gold, with a rosary in her hands and a skirt that went down to her knees. The sheep fled in fear. The lady said that she had come from Heaven, and she told the children that they should come back to the same place on the same day each month until October.

The children duly returned each month for the next six months, and they saw the lady on each occasion. (The August apparition was delayed until 19 August because the children were detained by the civil authorities.) From 13 June onwards, other people started to go to the apparition site with the children. Some of them apparently claimed that they could hear the lady themselves.

On the final date, 13 October, the children saw visions of Jesus, St Joseph and two forms of Mary: Our Lady of the Rosary and Our Lady of Sorrows. On this occasion, tens of thousands of people had assembled at the apparition site. But the crowds did not see what the children saw: they saw something else. They looked up at the sun and were confronted by what seemed to be miraculous phenomena. Some witnesses said that the sun turned into a silver disc. Others said that it shook, whirled and danced in the sky. Others again said that it changed colour to red, yellow and purple. Most spectacular of all was the claim that the sun appeared to leave its position in the sky and fall towards the earth. It remains a matter of debate whether these sights - the ‘Miracle of the Sun’, as they are known among Catholics - can be explained scientifically. It has been argued that they were produced by natural atmospheric conditions, or that they were the result of staring at the sun for too long. The ‘Miracle’ was not seen by some of the devout Catholics in the crowd; yet it was seen by some spectators who were anticlerical secularists. It was also reportedly seen by people who were miles away in other locations.

Over the course of the six apparitions, the lady said various things to the children. She told them to pray the rosary so that World War I would end. She taught them a prayer which asked Jesus to save them from Hell and to have mercy on the souls in Purgatory. She told them to learn to read. When she was asked to heal specific local people or to convert them to Catholicism, she said that she would grant the prayers in some cases but not in others. By August, people were bringing cash offerings to the apparition site. The lady said that half of the money should be spent on building a small chapel and half should be spent on making two small platforms (or should be placed on the platforms - the accounts are not clear) for use in celebrating the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary. The lady also told the children to put a white cape on the statue of Our Lady of the Rosary in the local church.

These can be regarded as naive statements that belong in the world of peasant Catholicism in which the children had grown up. According to the original 1917 accounts, nothing that the lady said related to politics or world affairs, save for the references to the War. As it happens, she was inconsistent on that subject. In May, she said that she would give no information about the War until October. But in July she held out the prospect of the War dying down, and in September she said that it would soon end. On 13 October, she said that it would end that very day. Clearly, it did not - as people immediately pointed out. What the lady said this regard is not entirely clear. She may have said that the War would end that day if people repented. This seems to offer a loophole. But not necessarily: it was also reported that she said that if people did not repent the world would end.

One other thing. In June, the lady told the children a secret. No-one attributed special significance to this at the time, but it became very important later.

Interestingly, the visions from 13 May to 13 October were not the only visions that the children reported seeing. Jacinta seems to have claimed that the lady had appeared to her at home before 13 May. Lucia said that a mysterious figure, wrapped in white and with no face visible, appeared several times to her in 1916 when she was with other local children. She told her mother about this, and her mother scolded her for lying. There was also apparently a ‘fourth seer’, a girl by the name of Carolina Carreira (10), who reported seeing a small angelic being in the local area on 28 July 1917. She did not seek publicity, and she was left out of the official accounts of Fatima.

There is one final aspect of the Fatima apparitions that is rarely talked about. Prior to the 13 May vision, notices appeared in several Portuguese newspapers predicting that something important would happen on 13 May. These notices appear to have been placed by two Spiritualist groups in Lisbon and Porto.  Neither of them had any known connection with anyone involved in the apparitions.

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A sceptic might be forgiven for thinking that Fatima was a clerical scam. Maybe the priests seized on a few impressionable kids with a propensity for telling stories about visions. Maybe the church establishment manipulated Lucia and her cousins for its own ends, during a time when the place of Catholicism in Portuguese society was under threat. Maybe the apparitions were a scheme for generating political capital - or actual capital. Portuguese secularists at the time suggested that they were some sort of money-making scam.

This is very unlikely. Visions have an established place in Catholicism; but they are a problem for the church. They involve individual Catholics - often women and children - having direct experiences of the divine without the mediation of the priesthood. The church is committed by its teachings to accepting that visions sometimes happen; but when they do so, they inescapably pose a challenge to its authority. Nor are clerics as credulous as some people might assume. It is not easy to get the church hierarchy to accept that Mary or Jesus has appeared to someone. Out of the thousands of alleged apparitions that have taken place in the course of Catholic history, only twelve have been officially approved by the church authorities. The church establishment initially treated the Fatima apparitions with some suspicion and told the clergy to stay away from them. It did not formally recognise Fatima as a genuine apparition until as late as 1930. Whatever Fatima was, it wasn’t a clerical stitch-up.

Clerics were nevertheless involved in investigating the apparitions from the outset, starting with the local parish priest, Fr Manuel Marques Ferreira. There was an element of scepticism in the investigations. The children were not treated with pious reverence. The priests picked up on anomalies in the accounts of the visions and asked awkward questions. One of them seems to have suspected that the children might have made up details based on the statues in the local church or based on stories of other Marian apparitions like Lourdes. Another priest could not get over the fact that the lady wore a knee-length skirt. This was such an offence to Catholic standards of modesty that he suspected that Satan had staged the apparitions to cause trouble.

If one is looking for a naturalistic explanation for Fatima, it is probably to be found in the mind of Lucia dos Santos. There is no nice way of saying this: Lucia was a religious fanatic and was probably mentally ill. She became a nun in adult life, and continued to see visions and hear voices. She also rewrote the entire Fatima narrative. She published seven books between 1935 and 2001, and these adult writings completely recast the story of the simple peasant visions of 1917 – the mysterious lady telling people to pray the rosary and predicting the end of the War – so that they turned into something quite different. This is sometimes referred to as the difference between ‘Fatima I’ and ‘Fatima II’ (the terminology comes from the Belgian Jesuit scholar Fr Edouard Dhanis, who was already probing the differences by 1944).

Fatima II is a deeply suspicious phenomenon. It is a mixture of graphic apocalyptic fears and half-baked ideas about international politics; and it contains demonstrable untruths and inconsistencies. It is vastly more likely that it was put together in the mind of Sister Lucia than that it came from Heaven via the Virgin Mary. Yet it was the problematic, distorted Fatima II - not the simple, unelaborated Fatima I - which went on to generate a worldwide movement among Catholics.

At the heart of Fatima II is the mysterious secret that the lady was said to have told the children in June 1917. Jacinta and Lucia said that the secret was something about the children themselves. Jacinta and Francisco said that it was bad news, while Lucia said that people would be mostly indifferent to it. One theory is that the original secret was a prediction of the coming deaths of Jacinta and Francisco, who were soon to be taken by the great influenza epidemic.

In later years, Lucia changed the story radically. She claimed that there was not one secret but three. None of them had anything to do with the children as such, although they could certainly be described as bad news.

The first secret was a vision of Hell. The details of this were stereotyped and medieval in character: Hell is a fiery inferno which contains demons and appears to be located underneath the earth.

The second secret involved a prophecy of World War II. If people did not cease offending God, a worse war would break out in the reign of the next pope (Pius XI). The coming of the war would be heralded by “a night illuminated by an unknown light”. This can be interpreted as the aurora borealis of January 1938. It is more of a problem for believers that Pius XI died in February 1939, although at a stretch it could be argued that World War II began with the Nazi invasion of Austria in March 1938.

The second secret also indicated that the pope should consecrate Russia to Mary’s Immaculate Heart. If this was done, communist Russia would be converted and there would be peace. If not, Russia would “spread her errors throughout the world”. (Several popes have attempted to perform this consecration, including Pope Francis, although there has been dispute among Fatima devotees over whether the conditions laid down by Mary have been satisfied.) The concept of Mary’s Immaculate Heart was never mentioned in 1917, let alone the political baggage that came with it.

The third secret remained unpublished for years. Unauthorised bootleg versions circulated among Vatican employees; but the church eventually released an official text in 2000. It is quite short. The pope and other religious figures climb up a mountain and pass through a half-ruined city littered with corpses. They are killed by soldiers when they reach the top of the mountain. Make of that what you will.

In any event, it is very likely that the lengthy and harrowing accounts of the secrets that Lucia wrote down in adulthood had little to do with whatever the mysterious lady had told her on 13 June 1917. By the time that she started publishing this material, she had learnt much more about world politics than she would have known at age 10; and her life as a nun in 1930s Spain had given her a ringside seat during the deadly battles between fascism and communism.

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The Fatima visions did not take place in a vacuum. In 1910, Portugal had overthrown its monarchy and replaced it with an anticlerical republican government. Visionary experiences in Catholicism are associated with conservative resistance to modernity, and in 1917 rural Portugal there was a lot of conservatism around and a lot of modernity to resist.

After the apparitions, the pendulum swung back towards the church. In 1926, the Portuguese army overthrew the secularist government and established a right-wing Catholic regime which lasted until 1974 (mostly under the dictator Salazar, who ruled from 1932 to 1968). The Fatima story was convenient for those who wanted to take the country back to a simpler and more religious time. The cultural and religious nationalism of the Salazar dictatorship came to be summed up in the phrase ‘Fátima, Fado e Fútbol’ - Fatima, Folksongs and Football.

Overseas right-wingers appealed to Fatima for legitimacy too. A condemnation of the “errors of Russia” coming directly from Heaven was a gift to Catholic anticommunists. We might mention here the Blue Army, an anticommunist organisation founded by an American priest after World War II (it still exists today under the name of the World Apostolate of Fatima). In some cases, anticommunism could shade into support for the rightist dictatorships of Portugal and Spain. As the Catholic historian Eamon Duffy wrote:

Notoriously, the Virgin of Fatima was emphatically presented as a Cold Warrior, her message a fear-laden denunciation of Communism.... I recall vividly as a boy in Ireland in the 1950s reading pious pamphlets in which the apparition at Fatima was explicitly associated with support for right-wing politics in the Iberian peninsula, a celestial endorsement of the regimes of Salazar and Franco.

Even popes were drawn into the movement. Pius XII claimed to have witnessed the Miracle of the Sun several times in the Vatican gardens in 1950. John Paul II claimed that he was saved by Our Lady of Fatima when he was shot by a would-be assassin on 13 May 1981; he had one of the bullets placed in the crown of Mary’s statue at Fatima.

Fatima is also a major cause among ultra-traditionalist Catholics who are opposed to what they see as the liberalising tendencies of recent popes. In these circles, there is a bizarre conspiracy theory that claims that the real Sister Lucia was murdered in the 1950s and replaced with a stooge who could be trusted to toe the Vatican line. Oddly enough, one conspiracist has obtained reports from experts which attest that photographs of the younger and older Sister Lucia are not of the same person. Another conspiracy theory maintains that the full third secret has still not been released to the public, as the text published by the Vatican does not correspond with what Lucia said about the secret in one of her books.

But it’s not just ultra-traditionalists. Fatima is a relatively mainstream cause in the Catholic world. It even has interreligious dimensions. Liberal Catholics have argued that it is no coincidence that Fatima was also the name of the Prophet Muhammad’s daughter. Our Lady of Fatima has gone from being a patron of the Salazar dictatorship to a symbol of transcendental unity.

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We have come a long way from that field in rural Portugal 107 years ago. The three children cannot possibly have imagined in their young minds how the events of that day would generate an international political-religious movement supported by popes, world leaders and millions of ordinary Catholics. This points to a lesson which is worth remembering. Supernatural experiences are in one sense wholly personal to the experiencer. But once they become public, no-one owns them. They can quite easily get out of control.