THE CHURCH KEEPS BACK THE TRUTH ABOUT THE FATIMA WONDERS OF 1917
The Virgin Mary allegedly appeared in the middle of six consecutive months to three young children, Jacinta born 1910, Lucia born 1907 and Francisco born 1908 in Fatima Portugal in 1917. The Virgin supposedly made people have a vision of the sun spinning at the end of the appearances.
The book we are referring to for now is Celestial Secrets. I absolutely loved this book. I couldn’t put it down. It argues that in relation to the apparitions of Mary to three children at Fatima in 1917 that the entity was not Mary at all but the Church made sure people would think it was. It explores evidence from the original accounts that the phenomena had too much in common with reports of visions of alien messengers and spaceships to be genuinely Catholic.
I have always suspected that the Catholic Church, despite it's antagonism towards miracles, will hijack some of them when they are popular enough and when it gives Church image and coffers a boost. The Church fears miracles and apparitions due to its belief that God has established the Church to teach us and the Church is infallible. It says miracles and apparitions only draw attention to aspects of what the Church already teaches. The Church says we are not obligated to believe in them of they are not part of the faith. The Church says that God has stopped revealing new truth since the last apostle of Jesus died and the Church with his guidance tells us what God’s teaching is. It fears apparitions and miracles because they can tend to make the witnesses or apparition your teachers in preference to the Church. This has happened at Medjugorje where messages from Mary are given out without any effort being made to provide them to legitimate Church authorities to check them for orthodoxy first. The visions of Medjugorje are the real magisterium for devotees of the apparition.
The Church claims that apparitions and miracles verify that she is the true Church and are signs from God to that effect. Yet it doesn’t investigate any miracles that don’t fit Catholic orthodoxy such as milk-drinking Hindu idols. It doesn’t even investigate most miracle and apparitions reported by Catholics. A religion that does that is plainly lying when it says that miracles authenticate the claims it makes. Besides the Church says we are obligated to believe in the miracles of Jesus in the Bible and even today the Church rejects more impressive miracles at Lourdes as not genuine. It expects us to take the word of the gospels for it that Jesus did miracles and ignore many modern miracle testimonies some of which are supported by doctors.
In the book we read that the Church took charge of the evidence and testimony in relation to the alleged apparitions of the Virgin Mary at Fatima and controlled Lucia the only surviving main witness to make sure anything that was said was what the Church wanted to be said (Foreword ii).
The book is based on the original records which the Church kept locked up for six decades (Introduction iv). Two authors of the book Ferndades and d’Armada spent 25 years researching diary entries and letters and other sources of information at the time of the apparitions to get at the true story.
Mary appeared at Fatima to the three children Lucia and Jacinta and Francisco in 1917 starting on May 13th.
The fact that there had been several apparitions reported of Mary over the centuries in the region of Fatima (page 38) lends support to the thought that the three witnesses of Fatima might have been influenced by them to wrongly interpret what they saw.
Jacinta told the parish priest in July 1917 during the apparitions, that the lady she saw wore a knee-length skirt and that when the lady left she raised her toes up with the heels pointing down and the body already disappeared. This is so bizarre that it beggars belief. It is no wonder Celestial Secrets surmises that the experiences are identical with the contactees who claimed to have encounters with aliens. The entity was not the Virgin Mary who wouldn’t behave so strangely.
Francisco said that the Virgin didn’t move her lips as she spoke and didn’t move as if she were some kind of doll (page 96). Lucia had a light within that made her understand the Virgin (page 97). With such a bizarre method of communication, it would be easy for Lucia to imagine communications from her Catholic conscious. Did she think the vision was putting thoughts in her head?
The vision made buzzing noises (page 249).
Canon Formagao had severe problems with the Virgin wearing a knee length skirt which even prostitutes of the time didn’t have the audacity to wear (page 151-153). This made him suspect that the vision was of the Devil but he deduced that it must have been really Mary for apparitions are authenticated not by the testimony of witnesses but by their popularity among pious people.
The earliest evidence about the 1917 apparitions is that the entity interpreted as Mary never said she was of the family of God or Christ or mentioned Jesus or God. Lucia and Jacinta says she wanted a chapel built but they were not sure if she said she was the lady of the rosary or if she meant she wanted a chapel for the lady of the rosary. Though lady of the rosary is a title of the Virgin Mary an entity carrying a rosary might call itself the lady of the rosary in another way: just the lady with the rosary.
Pro-Fatima booklet, What Happened at Fatima? tells us that the vision said to Lucia that she must say the rosary every day in honour of Our Lady of the Rosary in order to obtain peace for the world and the end of the war “for only she can help you” (page 32). The booklet expresses puzzlement at the entity talking as if she is not Our Lady or Mary. Also, the “for only she can help you” implies that God won’t help unless Mary is invoked. This contradicts the Bible doctrine that Jesus Christ intercedes for sinners. This being was not the Mary of Christianity. We must not forget that Roman Catholicism is not a true form of Christianity.
It is certainly doubtful that the vision was really of Mary.
APPENDIX FROM FATIMA FOR AGNOSTICS
The Third Memory of Lucia
The introduction informs us that this Memory was concluded on 31 August 1941. Like those before it, it was written in obedience to an order from the Bishop of Leiria. Lúcia wrote it in Tui, just across the northern border in Galicia. The topic that is suggested to her is again Jacinta. They want more details. Perhaps they are thinking about her canonization. And Lúcia gives them. She resorts to her memory. It seems that the farther away the facts, the more she remembers the details. And if she can’t remember them, she invents them in her delusions,
The Third Memory is perhaps the most famous of all because it talks about the “Secret”, which has been accepted by the Church as a historical fact, even though only one person, 24 years after the events, has this secret. Here we have Lúcia’s personal vision of Hell, borrowed almost word for word from two nineteenth century religious “classics” for believers in visionaries, the visions of Melanie at La Salete in France and Missão Abreviada by Padre Manoel do Couto, Portugal’s answer to the French visions. I will talk more about these influences later.
The first of the secrets was a peek at the suffering reserved for those who “offend Our Lord.” There were rumors of these secrets even during year of the first apparitions. The seers could not say when and in which circumstances the Secret had been communicated to them. Lúcia told Canon Formigão: “I think it was the second time (June), while Jacinta answered: “I think it was in July”. For something so important they were not even sure when it occurred. In fact, there is a strong possibility that someone in Lúcia’s family helped her create the Secret. In the Ourém parish priest’s report a witness says: “A woman who said she was Lúcia’s aunt helped her sometimes in the answers and made some considerations about “a secret” that they had and which they would not reveal to anyone even though they had made various seductive promises and they had even threatened to throw them down a well or burn them if they did not reveal it.” The priest noted that the woman was Lúcia’s great aunt, connected to the famliy by many family ties and the godmother of several of her relatives. (Documentação Crítica, 235; cited by Espírito Santo)
A Vision of Hell
Our Lady showed us a great sea of fire that seemed to be below the earth. Plunged into this fire, I could see demons and souls, as if they were transparent and black or brown embers, in human form, who floated in the fire, carried by the flames that came out of them together with clouds of smoke, falling on all sides, similar to the falling of sparks in great fires, without weight or balance, among shouts and groaning of pain and despair; this horrified me and made me tremble with fear. The demons stood out with their hideous and horrible shapes of frightening and unknown animals, but they were transparent and black. This view was for only an instant, and thanks to our good Mother of Heaven, who before had warned us with the promise to take us to Heaven. If she hadn’t done so, I think we would have died of fright.
Then we raised our eyes to Our Lady, who told us with kindness and sadness:
“You saw Hell, where the souls of the poor sinners go; to save them God wants to establish in the world the devotion to My Immaculate Heart. If you do what I tell you, many souls will be saved and they will have peace. The war will soon be over. But if they don’t stop offending God, in the reign of Pius XI another worse war will begin (this was written in 1941, when the Second World War had already begun; in other words, after the facts) When you see the night lit up by an unknown light (Lúcia is referring to the aurora boreal, registered by astronomers, on the night of 25 to 26 of January 1938, which Lúcia took as the “signal from heaven” that would announce the beginning of the Second World War.) know that it is the great signal that God is giving you that he is going to punish the world for its crimes of war, hunger, and persecutions of the Church and the Holy Father. In order to stop it, I will come to ask for the consecration of Russia to My Immaculate Heart and a communion to address the wrongs committed to be celebrated on the first Saturday of every month. If they grant my requests, Russia will be converted and they will have peace; if not, its (Russia’s) errors will spread throughout the world, promoting wars and persecutions of the Church; the good will be martyred, the Holy Father will have much to suffer, several nations will be annihilated, but finally my Immaculate Heart will triumph. The Holy Father will consecrate Russia to me which will convert, and the world will be granted some time of peace.
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
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