The angels at Fatima before the coming of Mary in 1917

The silly apparitions of angels at Fatima before the coming of Mary in 1917.

The Virgin Mary allegedly appeared to three young children, Jacinta born 1910, Lucia born 1907 and Francisco born 1908 in Fatima Portugal in 1917. The visions of Mary were not the only ones that Lucia and other children supposedly saw. We will examine the first series of visions allegedly involving angels.
 
Lucia saw a shapeless ghost three times before she joined forces with Jacinta and Francisco. It was when she got close to them when she started having clear visions of an angel which was visible to them as well.
 
A book says that initially, the angelic apparitions took the form of a shapeless being wrapped up in sheets which Lucia and her other companions reported (page 7, What Happened at Fatima? Madigan). This suggests that the children could have seen a shape and imagined it was an angel and talked to them. The Virgin has a strange choice of witnesses for her apparitions doesn't she? Lucia saw the figure three times. This looks like some psychic force within her trying to have decent apparitions or it looks as if her imagination was haywire. The Church and society disbelieve anybody that says they see ghostly figures and take what they claim to see as evidence that the witness is unreliable but not in this case which is so unfair. If she had had these hallucinations she would have developed a desire and an interest to make it look like she was having decent and intelligent apparitions from Heaven. She had been ridiculed and mocked because of the shapeless being visions (page 8, What Happened at Fatima? Madigan) so did she decide to get her own back and rise above the scoffers? Surely she would have.  She decided to make her apparition stories better and she did.
 
The year previous to the visions of Mary, Lucia, Jacinta and Francisco met the Guardian Angel of Portugal. When guardian angels get their power and orders for God to protect it is plain that there is no need for them and God wastes time and energy making and appointing them. Catholics say God does no irrational miracles but a guardian angel is an unnecessary miracle. We are told that when the angel was appearing the children said nothing to anyone and no one noticed anything out of the ordinary with them (page 12, What Happened at Fatima? Madigan). Probably because since this tale was told by Lucia years after the event it was untrue!

Much later the angel appeared with the host and chalice of the Eucharist and worshipped them. The angel gave them communion saying:

Take and drink the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, horribly outraged by ungrateful men

 (Is this the Third Secret? page 8).

With this it is astonishing that the Church approved of Fatima at all. Private visions are not equal in value to the sacraments but point the way to them in Catholic theology. The visions are for directing you to the faith and the legitimate authority of the bishops who succeed the apostles and to their sacraments. A vision giving communion is going outside the system because it is only a vision and only the experts in the Church have the right to make a judgement if it was real or not and even then they say it is only their opinion. So considering the position that visions have in the Roman Catholic system it is unthinkable that you should even think about taking communion from a being that may be a hallucination.  Perhaps a natural or psychic hallucination or illusion.  Or the being might even be a demon. Satan would love to give communion that was not really communion for the Catholic Eucharist is supposed to be the supreme means of grace.
 
But here an angel gives these kids their first communion! This stands in stark opposition to the principle that the Church rules must be obeyed and that Jesus decreed that the Church can bind and loose rules and he will not interfere.
 
Communion in a vision must be equal to the communion on an altar. The angel stressed that it was real communion. The Church has recognised some people like St Catherine of Siena who reported similar miracles as being real saints. It believed in the miraculous communions. But it remains true that to hold that the communion you get in a vision should not be made equal to the communion you get from a priest if the Church rule that visions are not equal to the revelation of God given in the Bible and preserved by the Church's infallibility in tradition that has not been added to since the apostles is right. Any apparition that treats the communion as equal is a false apparition. Can we trust the apparitions of Mary when the children were prone to false visions? Of course not!

Since communion must be consecrated by a priest the angel must have stolen it from a Church! The church will say it is okay if God permits it for communion belongs to him but if I may approve an apparition snatching communion then what is to stop me doing it if I think I have God's permission? The visionaries get communion in a vision but they still don't know if it is material communion or if it is just an experience of receiving unreal or immaterial communion.
 
Father Martindale says that when Jacinta went to hospital in Lisbon Lucia stated that Jacinta had not made her first communion (page 13, What Happened at Fatima? by C.C. Martindale S.J, CTS). Does that refute the angel giving her communion? The Catholics say that experience was purely spiritual or visionary despite the fact that communion has been reported as being given for real at some apparitions such as Garabandal and that the angel made it clear the host given to the children was the body and blood of Jesus and the angel and worshipped the host first. There is no hint of symbolism and children would take it literally and if God knows that that is what he wanted them to do. So we must take it literally too. Lucia never explained the contradiction.

The angel told Jacinta who was only six at the time to make reparation for sinners. But she was only a child and it is believed that children cannot become capable of merit until at least seven years of age. That is why Catholics only accept children of seven or over for Holy Communion and confession.

An angel told the children to pray,

O Most Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, I offer you the most precious body and blood and soul and divinity of Jesus Christ present in all the tabernacles of the world in reparation for the outrages, sacrileges and indifference with which he himself is offended. And through the infinite merits of his most sacred heart and the immaculate heart of Mary I beg of you the conversion of poor sinners�.
 
This prayer would not have been taught to children for it contains material too advanced for children such as the body and blood and soul and divinity of Jesus being present in the Eucharist and the concepts of infinite merits or deservings. Lucia made the prayer up from existing prayers or much later.
 
Plus it is not the communion wafer which is kept in the worlds tabernacles that is considered a sacrifice in the Roman Church. The sacrifice happens when bread and then wine are consecrated at Mass. The problem with the prayer is the fact that Jesus risen and Jesus glorified is officially held to be in the tabernacles of the world and not the suffering and atoning Jesus as the prayer implies. This is a serious denial of Catholic doctrine and it proves that Fatima was a hoax for if the angel was a lie how could the Virgin have been real?
 
Plus Jesus seems to be spoken of as if he is not God the Son in the prayer. How could you offer Jesus to God the Son when Jesus is God the Son according to Catholic doctrine?
 
A note on page 99 of Lucia's memoirs, admits that theologians have problems with this prayer. One excuse is that it is not necessary to think the prayer is word for word what the angel gave. So Lucia probably made a mistake in the wording. Lucia stood by the prayer in spite of their criticisms. She said that it was right when she first give it. Then it should be taken as the definitive version. Plus the children had the job of learning each other the prayer so the angel would have made sure that they were able to get it right.
 
The other excuse is that the prayer was influenced by other popular prayers! If so then there was an element of imagination in Lucia's visions.

It is significant that the encounters with the angel were not mentioned until years after the event even though they are basically a call for repentance and reparation. Only a dishonest person would hide such a heavenly appeal even if it was repeated by the Virgin.

In Fatima Revealed and Discarded page 151 it is stated that the angel's appearances were talked about when they happened and that the anti-Fatima myth man, Fr Dhanis was wrong to say they were imagined long after they happened. A Canon Formigao was allegedly told about what the people had heard in 1917. No documents are given in support of this. Just hearsay.
 
A person who is reluctant to accuse Lucia of deception such as the author of that book would have to make such claims.
 
Canon Barthas who said the Canon said this to him claimed that the parents knew the children were in the habit of reciting what they said was the prayer of the angel but they didn't know who taught it to them. But the children at the time they saw Mary used to say the first few words of the Our Father and the Hail Mary to get the rosary over with quickly when they prayed together. This is hardly consistent with them having seen an angel. Why did nobody venerate the site of the angelic appearances? Why did the children not tell their parents? Did they lie when their devout parents asked them about the origin of the prayer? Probably not for they had no lie to tell for they saw no angel. The parents would have been interested in the prayer when the children said it so often and they would have asked.
 
And we are told the people knew about the angel and the parents were puzzled by the prayer. Does this not show that the people were not talking at all about the angel for the parents would have known from the angel story that they must have got the prayer from the angel? The children would have told them. Jacinta was the loose tongued one and certainly would have told. Later Jacinta according to Lucia told about the Virgin for she couldn't keep it in despite her promise not to tell. Jacinta was younger than Lucia so she would have been less mature and discreet about the angel than she was with the Virgin when she got a bit older. Barthas lied about Formigao.
 
The authorities would not have tolerated the angel story. They tried to stop the children speaking of the Virgin the following year and they would have been easier to silence the year before with the angel tale. The angels story only emerged after the story of Mary's alleged visions in 1917.

THE ANGELS - from Celestial Secrets
 
In the 1940s, Lucia claimed that angels appeared before the apparitions of Mary in 1917 to prepare for the visions of Mary. Some preparation, the angels never mentioned Mary!
 
Lucia one of the three visionaries at Fatima, never mentioned seeing angels when she wrote her account in 1922. In 1924 during the Church investigation she never mentioned it either and took an oath to testify that she saw nothing but Mary (page 46). Later she produced stories about apparitions of angels that were granted by God to prepare for the visions of Mary. Church approval for Fatima cannot be considered valid when she held stuff back.
 
Lucia was asked by Canon Formigao if she had seen a figure wrapped up in a white sheet. She admitted to hiding something when he asked her for she didn't want to talk about it (page 49). This would support the idea that she didn't know what she had seen. It raises problems for the identification of her visions. The Canon advised her to say nothing because it might compromise the story about the apparitions of the Virgin Mary (page 51). What an honest man!
 
Page 56 says that in 1941 Lucia reported a revelation from an angel in 1917.  Now this communication involved a complicated vocabulary full of theology that children of her age couldn't understand.  How suspicious is that?  Nobody corroborated her testimony. The prayers allegedly taught by the angel were copied from a book writing by Father Alvares de Moura. It is undeniable that Lucia was lying.

She said that the words of the angel were miraculously engraved on her mind so that she wouldn't forget (page 61). This statement is hard to reconcile with Catholic protocol and doctrine that sometimes people seeing visions and getting messages make mistakes in remembering and relaying.  As an apparition report is not considered infallible this may have happened in relation to Fatima. The Church is engaging in sophistry.  It sticks to the rules and discards them when it suits  The Church uses them when it needs to find a loophole to authenticate apparitions that make errors.
 
The angel gave Lucia a communion host and Francisco and Jacinta took from the chalice of blood (page 63). The book points out that even an angel cannot give children of that age communion. Church law is clear on the matter that children cannot receive communion until they see it is the body of Christ and are instructed and prepared. Children drinking blood is sick. The book says it was unlikely to be wine and less likely to be blood and reasons that Lucia was putting a Catholic interpretation on a non-Catholic event. They were thought to be drinking something an alien gave them as Francisco described the drink a strange and didn't know what it was (page 93).
 
Why didn't it give all three the host? Why just Lucia?
 
Some Catholics say the communion was not real but symbolic but the angel said it was the body and blood of Christ horribly outraged by evil men. There is no reason for the symbol interpretation. It seems the original story didn't have all this stuff and Lucia and others were seeing a white figure in a sheet and were embarrassed to talk about it.
 
BIBLE QUOTATIONS FROM:
The Amplified Bible
 
BOOKS CONSULTED
 
Alexandrina The Agony and the Glory, Francis Johnson, TAN, Illinois, 1979
Celestial Secrets, The Hidden History Of The Fatima Incident, Anomalist Books, San Antonio, New York, 2007
Encountering Mary, Sandra Zimdars-Swartz, Avon, New York, 1991
Fatima in Lucia's own words, Sr Lucia, Postulation Centre Fatima, 1976
Fatima Revealed and Discarded, Bro Michael of the Holy Trinity, Augustine, Devon, 1988
Is This The Third Secret? IF Colquhoun, 45 Nicholas Court, Swansea, 1995
Looking for a Miracle, Joe Nickell, Prometheus Books, New York, 1993
New Catholic Encyclopedia, The Catholic University of America and the McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc. Washington, District of Columbia, 1967
Os Mouros Fatimidas e as Aparicoes de Fatima  
Queen of Peace (Newspaper), Fall 1995, Pittsburgh Center for Peace
Reason and Belief, Bland Blanschard, London, George Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1974
The Book of Miracles, Stuart Gordon, Headline, London, 1996
The Evidence for Visions of the Virgin Mary, Kevin McClure, Aquarian Press, Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, 1985
The Rosary and the Crisis of Faith, Msgr. Joseph a. Cirrincione and Thomas A. Nelson, Tan, Illinois, 1986
The Third Secret of Fatima, Brother Michael of the Holy Trinity CRC, Tan, Illinois, 1991
The Thunder of Justice, Ted and Maureen Flynn, Maxcol Communications Inc. Sterling VA, 1993
What Happened at Fatima? Leo Madigan, Catholic Truth Society, London, 2000
 
THE WEB

An Agnostic Looks at Fatima,
http://www.portcult.com/index.fat.htm

Where is the Conversion of Russia? John Vennari
www.dailycatholic.org/issue/2002Mar/mar22fat.htm

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