Filipino Families of Skokie

“brighter than the sun, shedding rays of light clearer and stronger than a crystal ball filled with the most sparkling water and pierced by the burning rays of the sun. “ – Lucia Santos

 May 13 is the anniversary of the first appearance of the Blessed Virgin Mary to the three children, Lúcia Santos, Jacinta and Francisco Marto in Fatima, Portugal in 1917. On the 13th of October of the same year, the last  of the promised appearances of Our Lady, the crowd grew to an estimated 70,000 people. The devotion to our lady of Fatima grew rapidly. And today, during the festivals, the largest  crowd estimate on the 13th of May and 13th of October each year, a million people gather to pray and attend the procession.

Clearly, the message of Fatima is heeded by so many, but sadly, in so many ways. Some of these  are even found in our email messages about the need for preparing blessed candles for the three days of darkness, as part of the third message of Our Lady of Fatima to Lucia. Let us try to examine ourselves on our devotion to the Lady of Rosary. A National Catholic Reporter (NCR Today) presented to us the two different sides, many of us is unaware of, of heeding the call of our Lady of the Rosary of Fatima.  Here’s what John Allen Jr., wrote  in his article ” A Tale of Two Fatimas” after his interview with Carlos Evaristo, a person who runs several foundations in Fatima – including  the Blue Army – and publishes widely on the subject:

In a sense, there have always been two Fatimas in the popular Catholic imagination.

One is a gentle devotion focused on Mary’s appearances to three illiterate shepherd children, an icon of God’s special favor for the simple ones of the earth.Then there’s the other Fatima, a darker and harder-edged subculture focused on speculation about the errors of Russia, nuclear annihilation, and the great apostasies of the Catholic church after the Second Vatican Council (1962-65).

That second Fatima, according to one expert, has often obscured and perverted the first. According to Carlos Evaristo, some feverish devotees become so engrossed by the second Fatima that they almost have to be “deprogrammed.”

Evaristo knows something about the hawkish Fatima subculture, having once been a protégé of Canadian Fr. Nicholas Gruner, the famed “Fatima priest” who publishes the Fatima Crusader and who for decades has promoted a hard-line reading of the Fatima revelations – insisting, among other things, that the version of the “Third Secret” of Fatima published by the Vatican in 2000 is incomplete, omitting details about the end of the world and a condemnation of modernizing currents in the church.

In 1992, however, Evaristo broke with Gruner after publishing an interview with Sr. Lúcia Santos, the only one of the three visionaries of Fatima to have survived the influenza epidemic of 1918. In Two Hours with Sr. Lucy, Evaristo quoted Sr. Lúcia to the effect that:

• John Paul’s 1984 consecration of the world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary satisfied the conditions laid down in the Fatima revelations;
• The “conversion” of Russia referred to in Fatima does not necessarily mean explicit conversion to the Catholic faith;
• The “third secret” of Fatima did not have to be revealed in the 1960s, meaning that the Vatican had not been guilty of a decades-long cover-up.

Each point was anathema to Gruner and like-minded Fatima devotees, who questioned the authenticity of the interview and speculated about Evaristo’s motives for publishing it. (All this unfolded in the wake of a 1992 symposium Gruner sponsored in Fatima as a rival to an official program put on the shrine, both of which attracted 60 bishops from around the world. Evaristo says that because of his split with Gruner, he ended up with thousands of dollars in debt for the event that Gruner refused to pay.)

Today, Evaristo, who grew up in Canada, sees Gruner as an example of an exegetical free-for-all that’s long percolated in the Fatima underground.

“What happened with the Fatima message is that Sr. Lucy related it but never interpreted it,” Evaristo said. “That left space for all sorts of strange theories.”

Make no mistake – Evaristo is a true believer. For example, he accepts at face value Sr. Lúcia’s claim that John Paul’s 1984 consecration prevented a nuclear war that was set to happen in 1985. Had Pius XI adequately carried out the consecration, he believes, World War II would have been prevented.

Yet Evaristo is insistent that the core elements of the Fatima message – penance, conversion, the Immaculate Heart of Mary and the promise of salvation for performing a series of “First Saturday” devotions – don’t need to be “sexed up” with end-time fervor.

“The message of Fatima is already so majestic that it doesn’t need science fiction,” Evaristo said. “It doesn’t need hocus-pocus.”

Evaristo says that much of the speculation promoted by Fatima devotees amounts to a kind of “brainwashing” premised largely on fear.

“It was a perfect spirituality for the Cold War,” he said. “Unfortunately, a lot of people still live in the Cold War.”

On May 12, on his visit to the Chapel of Apparitions, in Fatima, Pope Benedict XVI pray and gave Our Lady a Golden Rose “as a homage of gratitude from the Pope for the marvels that the Almighty has worked through you in the hearts of so many who come as pilgrims to this your maternal home.”

Article sources: NCR Today, catholic.net, wikipedia.org, Zenit.org

Photo sources: thecalltofatima.wordpress.com, santuario-fatima.org