QUESTION: REAL OR NOT DOES THE FATIMA SUN MIRACLE FIT CRITERIA FOR INTERVENTION OF A LOVING GOD?

The Blessed Virgin Mary allegedly appeared in Fatima, Portugal, in 1917 to three children, Lucia, Jacinta and Francisco. The visions culminated in an alleged solar miracle on October 13, the miracle of the sun. In this miracle, the sun allegedly changed colour and zigzagged around the sky and almost came down on a crowd of people. The miracle was supposedly seen by up to 70,000 people who had gathered to be with the children during their visions.
 
Lucia revealed that the Lady promised to do a great miracle that day. This promise was published in the papers and this drew huge crowds on the day of the expected miracle. Sceptics have concluded that this prediction preconditioned the people to see something. They were not going to go to the effort of going to the Cova and taking a day off work for nothing.

So that all will believe

Lucia wanted the Lady to do a big miracle so that everybody would believe.


The arrogance of her wanting the vision to back up her claims instead of concentrating on a gospel message is striking. Even Jesus said that the Lord your God must not be put to the test and especially when it is for a vision that one has the right to refuse to believe. Catholic teaching is that you MUST believe what God has revealed but since the death of the last apostle there are no new beliefs that are obligatory.

In July, the obliging Lady reportedly told that her she would perform the miracle she wanted in October “so that everyone will believe your story” (page 33, What Happened at Fatima?). 

The crowd would not be there unless they mostly wanted to support Lucia so it was no wonder out of compassion for her that they might lie that they saw a sign in the sky.
 
The Lady later appeared to the three children in Valinhos and discussed the miracle she would do in October. She told them that because of the scepticism of the unbelievers the miracle would be less dramatic and great. So she had changed her mind about doing an extremely striking super-miracle and set her Immaculate Heart on a less spectacular one. The less wonderful the miracle is the more reason people have to disbelieve it and yet she said she wanted the miracle done to make people believe. An all-knowing God does not change his mind or spout such stupidity for he knows all things and you only change your mind when you realise you have made a mistake. The Virgin at least partly broke her promise.
 
The Lady said that everybody would believe the story of the children upon seeing the miracle. But everyone did not believe when it happened. Many in the crowd saw nothing! Many of those that did did not see anything that couldn't be explained by excitement and imagination.
 
Many decided to wait until the Church decided what level of veracity and accuracy could be attributed to the Fatima events. The Virgin obviously did not want an ecclesiastical investigation! The real Virgin Mary would have. Not everybody even seen the miracle of the sun though the Lady promised they would all see it.
Lucia reflects badly on the miracle
 
The centrepiece of it all was Lucia who warned the miracle was coming and told the people to look at the sun.

Startlingly, Lucia herself said she did not see any miracle of the sun! The excuse is that she was looking at Mary but that is nonsense for Mary supposedly shone rays on the sun and then vanished. So Lucia must have looked at the sun. The story of Mary zapping the sun only appeared after the miracle of the sun story came out.

Lucia's manipulative tendencies are well noted. I'd guess for once she was telling the truth that there was no miracle of the sun. You cannot argue that Lucia had real visions of Mary and was wrong to say there was no sign of a sun miracle. It would make no sense.
 
And anyway her lies did not stop with the miracle of the sun. An aurora borealis took place over Europe in January 1938 and lasted from 8.45 pm to 1.15 am the next morning. Lucia proclaimed that the Virgin had predicted the coming of this "unknown light" and said it signalled the start of a world war. From eyewitness accounts the light looked reddish and gave the impression that fire had broken out. In some places, the lights were a beautiful display.
 
There was nothing magical abut the aurora borealis. And it was not the first light in the sky and not the last. It suited Lucia to treat it as important as World War II broke out soon after.
 
Nobody asks why the timing is still a bit odd. Why could God not have sent it a few days or the day before the War?
 
The cause was actually "a large sunspot" - (Nature, January 22, 1938, p.156).
 
Read Nature, January 29, 1938, p.192. February 5, 1938, p.232-235. Nature, April 16, 1938, p.686-7.
 
The prophecy of the light contains errors. Mary said that "If people do not cease offending God, a worse [war] will break out during the reign of Pius XI. When you see a night illumined by an unknown light, know that this is the great sign given to you by God that He is about to punish the world for its crimes, by means of war, famine and persecutions of the Church and of the Holy Father." The person who makes out that a war that killed many innocent people and children is a punishment is the lowest of the low. And the persecutions of the pope did not happen. The aurora was not an unknown light. It was natural.
 
There is no evidence that the prophecy was written before the event. It was not mentioned even until 1940.

The Bible God forbids us to listen to prophets - people who say they have messages from God - if there is any error in them. Lucia only revealed in 1941 that she was told by Mary in 1914 that there would be another world war - she did this after World War 2 had started. This is only how a fraud would behave. It is against the Bible to believe in the prophecy about the miracle of the sun and therefore in the miracle of the sun itself.

There has never been a proven prophecy where somebody was named like the pope was that came true.

Lucia shouts to look at the sun
 
In October, a crowd of allegedly 70,000 had gathered. At the end of the visions, the Lady who had identified herself as the Lady of the Rosary, let the children see Jesus and Joseph and herself in the sun. Lucia shouted for the crowd to look at the sun.

Lucia said, "Opening Her hands, Our Lady made them reflect on the sun, and as She ascended, the reflection of Her own light continued to be projected on the sun itself. That is the reason why I cried out to the people to look at the sun. My aim was not to call their attention to the sun, because I was not even aware of their presence. I was moved to do so under the guidance of an inner impulse."
 
Some say that there is no way of proving that Lucia shouted that the crowd must look at the sun before anything happened. Only a few at the front would have heard her. They might not have seen what maybe Lucia and some of the rest were seeing in the sky. Even if they did their own imagination and memory would colour their perception of what they thought they were seeing. And you know the way it is with eyewitness reports at occasions like that. Emotions are high and the pressure to see something is higher.

Some would misremember her saying to look at the sky before anything happened. But in all probability she did tell them to look at the sun. She had the stage set when she told them to put their brollies down. They knew then that was their cue to see something or to interpret what was not odd up in the sky as odd or odder.
Read this bit carefully: Lúcia shouted to people to look at the sun, although she confirmed later that this was simply because figures were appearing there, not because she was seeing the miracle. However, many people present reported that they saw the sun spinning. Surely then we have the trusted witness against the unreliable public? The contradiction is too much. Most or everybody reporting seeing Mary's face in a white veil in the sun would be more convincing.

Fatima fits the false wonders in the sky Jesus warned about. 

The message reflects badly on the miracle
 
The solar miracle is dubious because it happened for the sake of the message of Fatima. And the message in one word is reparation, reparation for the sins and unbelievers of the world. This is a message of evil and perversion. If Jesus paid for our sins then there is no need for reparation and he cannot ask for it for it is a sacrifice for us because there are plenty of sacrifices we could be making. The Devil would not do such a miracle nor would a God so the miracle can only be false.

The evidence against it is strongest.
 
If it was a miracle, then it was a miraculous illusion. It was a divine magic trick. It is an indignity to God to suggest that he does such things. A real God does real miracles. If the solar miracle of Fatima happened it was not the Solar Miracle of Fatima but a Miracle Solar Illusion. God deceived the witnesses by making them think that he had done something to the sun. If the super miracle happened then it warns us not to take miracles seriously as signs and revelations from God about what religion is true. The standard Catholic view is that God does real miracles but Satan does illusionary ones. Enough said!

The Catholic Church says divine miracles have mostly good fruits. Fatima started the spinning sun trend in religious fanaticism and it has carried on – especially in Medjugorje – and has left many blind or with bad sight due to damage done by gazing at the sun. Another bad fruit is that the sun miracle is reported at false apparition sites and has left many convinced of the truth of silly apparitions. Plus some who thought at the time of Fatima that the sun was going to fall on top of them were evidently nearly driven to insanity and there could have been a stampede in which people had died. The normal instinct when you see anything like that is to run away. There was no stampede which is evidence that there was no sun seen falling down to earth though some said there was. Or did they suspect or see signs that what they thought they saw was somehow an illusion? The Christian religion says we must love God totally and our neighbour as ourselves meaning that it is best for all people to serve God alone and to do it by helping others and ourselves not for our sake but for his. This is so unnatural that few do it and so what is the point in Mary’s miracle for its attraction was the display of power and its strangeness. People like to feel that there is a God of power to look after them which is what they want to run after miracles for. But that is quite contrary to the Christian religion which wants them to run after God and nothing else.

Catholic doctrine is that as Jesus warned that Satan is expert at the miracle tricks a miracle from him by God's providence will do harm in some way. At the vision of the sun, the people stood by and let the following happen. "Groups take it in turns to sing the praises of the Virgin, while a terrified hare runs through the crowd and is hardly noticed except by a half a dozen or so of small boys, who catch and beat it to death with sticks" - see O Seculo, October 15; De Marchi, p. 130-131.

When most people wreak havoc over religion though they do not know if it is right or wrong why trust them when they cry, “Miracle”?

Let us finish with an important line in Mc Clure’s wonderful book, The Evidence for Visions of the Virgin Mary, “There are surprisingly few convincing accounts of the solar event at Fatima” (page 80). Yet this miracle is the reason for believing in Fatima and it is a weak one.
 
It seems 10,000 people saw the Miracle of the Sun at Heroldsbach, Germany in 1949 which was a place graced by alleged apparitions. The Church, through the bishop of the diocese and the Holy Office, condemned the apparitions for heretical teaching. By implication, the Miracle of the Sun associated with the visions was condemned too. One witness declared that the sun "grew lighter and lighter and more dazzling. The sun seemed to become more blinding and bigger and to be coming nearer us. I felt blinded. I had the overwhelming impression of something quite abnormal and also felt that something awful was going to happen at any minute. I was terrified ... Then the sun began to turn very quickly on its own axis and the rotations were so clearly visible that it seemed as if a motor was turning the sun's disc at a regular speed. During this process it took on the most wonderful colours."
 
The Miracle of the Sun does not mean that Mary really appeared at Fatima.

PARALLELS

The fussing done about the sun miracle is a mystery considering that the occultist Vintras prophesied that visions would take place at Tilly-Sur-Seulles in Calvados France and when the prophecy was fulfilled in 1896 many people had aerial visions of Mary and there were miracles in which bizarre contortions of the bodies of visionaries took place. Contortions like that are generally regarded as from Satan no matter how orthodox the doctrine they seem to defend is for they are so pointless and showy. The miracle of the sun was frequently reported at Bayside New York which was not only the focus of apparitions without credibility for years but which were condemned by the Church and which made mincemeat of the authority of the pope. When people imagine the miracle happening when there is no miracle or when the miracle is heretical and therefore from Satan there is no point in taking any implication of such miracles seriously. In other words, you don’t consider becoming a Catholic if you see the sun spinning and turning different colours. It wouldn’t do any harm to consider seeing a therapist or a psychiatrist or your optician.
 
FINALLY
 
The greatest miracle of all time, the solar miracle of Fatima is far from impressive once you get behind all the hype and propaganda of the Church. The thought that it was mass delusion is too extreme and unnecessary. It can be considered if other things associated with mass delusion can be substantiated such as most of the crowd feeling faint, having headaches and/or feeling sick. But it is enough for something to happen to suggest something not necessarily that out of the ordinary but different enough to engage most of the people enough. Nobody became a missionary for the miracle - that says a lot. One clue is how the photos show some cloud cover and a little of that is enough to be able to see the sun through the clouds.

The Church investigated the apparitions of Fatima but it never ever investigated the solar miracle. It never looked for depositions about it. Why did so few write down what they experienced? Why should we take it seriously when we have no depositions? The wonder had to happen for what else could a crowd of thousands expect but the sun to move about? Plus they had a hint when Lucia roared at them to put down the umbrellas. The solar miracle is best seen as similar to dubious miracles of the sun at other places for the amount of testimony and the quality is the same - poor and confusing.