Inspiring Christian Lives

Mary at Fatima, Portugal, 1917

Much of what follows is based on a television show by Archbishop Fulton Sheen, himself an inspiring Christian figure. He can be seen telling this and other stories on You Tube. Simply follow this link: The Fatima miracle

May 1917: Pope Benedict XV makes a direct appeal to Mary, the Virgin Mother of God to intercede for peace in the world.

October 13th 1917. Moscow. A Russian noble woman, Maria Alexandrovich is teaching about Christ to a group of small children in the Church of the Siberian Virgin. Suddenly, rough shouts and the clatter of hoofs as horsemen burst in, smash up the church and kill several children. She runs to Lenin, the leader of the revolutionaries and pleads with him: ‘Men have just burst into my Church, smashed it up and killed some of the children’. ‘I know’, he says. ‘I sent them’. One of the first brutal and bloody acts of the anti-religious communist revolution in Russia has just been committed.

October 13th 1917. Rome. Church bells are ringing to celebrate a joyful event. A bishop is being consecrated and joyful crowds have lined the streets to greet him. His name is Eugenio Pacelli. Sometime after this event he went down to Munich in Germany. The communist revolutionaries had a stranglehold on the city. The leaders of the revolutionaries, Karl Liebknecht and a woman, Rosa Luxemburg send out an order. ‘Kill 325 enemies of the revolution’. Pacelli’s name was on the blacklist. The communist commander, Sila, entered Pacelli’s residence and shot him in the chest. The bullet bounced off the cross he was wearing; he picked up the bullet and handed it back to the failed assassin.

October 13th 1917. Fatima. 70,000 people have gathered in a field outside a small Portuguese village expecting a revelation from Mary, the Mother of God. Three children are the source of this. They say that Mary had appeared to them on a number of occasions previously, first on 13th May, 1917. They tell others that she told them that ‘This world war will end in a little over a year. If the world returned to God, there would be peace and Russia would turn away from atheistic communism and towards Christ – if only they would pray and do penance’. The children tell the local authorities, including the parish priest. The grown ups don’t believe them and the children are bullied, mocked, ridiculed and threatened. But they stick to their story. The children say they asked Mary for a miracle to help the grown ups believe their story. They say that the bright white lady they have been seeing on every 13th of the month tells them to return on the 13th of October and she will reveal her requests and perform a miracle.

News spreads. It’s a wet, rainy day, October 13th in 1917.. 70,000 people go out to the field of Fatima to see the sign that Mary had promised to send to help them believe. The crowd is made up mostly of unbelievers and sceptics, including an anti-religious news reporter. They look up at the sky and nothing happens. Then, still looking up at the sky, the crowd notice the sun turning into what looked like a silver ball, shooting out sparks and spinning off its axis, changing everything into different colours of yellow, blue and white, shaking and trembling and moving downwards towards the people with incredible speed. The crowd falls to its knees and prays. Three times, the sun appears as if it is falling from the sky, then, it is restored back in its place. And all the time it had been raining, but the clothes of the crowd went from being soaking wet to bone dry in about 10 minutes. And the newspapers, including the many anti-religious ones, report the incident.

One of the children, Lucia grows up, and because of the questioning moves away and joins a convent. Much later she revealed other ‘secrets’ that the lady in white was supposed to have revealed to her. She says that, if you do not pray and do penance, a worse war will break out, that will include devastating famines and persecutions. She also said that ‘When you see a night illumined by an unknown light, know that this is the sign that all this is about to happen’. On the 25th January 1938 a strange light shone in the skies of northern Europe; it was described as a particularly brilliant display of the Aurora Borealis. Meanwhile, in Germany during that very month, Heinrich Himmler was busy enlarging the first concentration camp, Dachau. Within 18 months, aggressive moves by Nazi Germany in the annexation of Austria, and the invasion of Czechoslovakia and Poland would push the world into a war that would challenge Christians to witness to their beliefs.

Read about the life of John Paul II for a continuation of this remarkable story . . .