Fatima

Village in Portugal associated with apparitions of the Virgin Mary and with correct predictions of a miraculous sign and the rise and fall of Soviet Communism.
On May 13, 1917, during World War I, a girl named Lucia dos Santos was walking in the Fatima neighborhood with two cousins. She was ten years old; the cousins were younger. She had a vision of a radiant lady identified (not at once) as the Virgin Mary. In a short conversation, the lady said she would appear again on the thirteenth day of each month. The apparition was duly repeated. In the summer, rumors of these events began to attract visitors. The Portuguese government was strongly anticlerical, and the district administrator tried to make Lucia recant, but she persisted in her story with support from her cousins, who partly shared the experiences.
Up to that point, according to Lucia, the lady had said very little beyond assurances of the children’s salvation and requests for prayer, especially prayer for peace. Skepticism was excusable. The story could easily be dismissed as a fantasy, even a deception, hatched by a child who had heard of the apparitions at Lourdes. Lucia’s family thought it unconvincing, and her elder sister, Maria, did not believe any of it. Matters came to a head in September when the lady promised to give a sign at noon on October 13. This promise was publicized, not least in the chief antireligious paper, O Seculo. The paper’s editor foresaw a fiasco and went to Fatima on the appointed day to witness it. About 70,000 people assembled, though the weather was dull and wet. Lucia’s family accompanied her to the scene of the apparitions, terrified of mob violence if nothing happened. She had not given the slightest hint of what the sign would be. No one was watching for anything in particular.
About midday, the rain stopped, the clouds parted, and Lucia—who was seeing more visions—suddenly exclaimed, “Look at the sun!” The voice of a child, outdoors in a huge crowd, could have been heard only by the nearest bystanders, and suggestion cannot account for what followed. The sun, visible through the gap in the clouds, appeared to lose brightness, emit colored rays of light, and revolve, then to move downward in a spiral and up again to its starting-point. The phenomenon lasted for several minutes and caused a panic. Photographs show people staring up at the sky—there is no doubt that they are looking at something.
Many eyewitness testimonies are on record. One of the most impressive came from the anticlerical editor, who, denied his fiasco, was honest enough to publish an account in O Seculo. He had seen the solar gyration, which he described as a “macabre dance.” It was seen not only on the spot but by people miles away, who had taken little notice of Fatima and were certainly not involved in a mass hallucination. The descriptions do not entirely tally, and it is possible to explain the sign—after a fashion—as an optical illusion due to freak atmospheric conditions and cloud movements. The believer may regard these as miraculously caused; the unbeliever may regard them as accidental. The point, however, is not so much that the thing happened as that it happened at the place predicted, on the day predicted, and roughly at the time predicted. No juvenile fantasy could have produced a forecast a month ahead or projected

a rare phenomenon into the sky at the right moment.
Fatima became a venue of pilgrimage, as it is still. Nevertheless, even for believers, the sun’s eccentricities raised a question. This was a sign, a powerful one, but what was it a sign of? What had Mary said to justify drawing attention to it with such a spectacular effect? Lucia had quoted little more than exhortations to spiritual amendment, such as might have been heard from many pulpits.
But, of course, there was one additional thing that Mary had uttered. This was the prediction itself, and its fulfillment pointed to a prophetic element in her message. At the time and for years afterward, nothing more about the future was mentioned. But in 1936–1937 and 1941–1942, Lucia, who had entered a convent, added to her first account

of the apparitions. She now remembered, or claimed to remember, that Mary had said more about things to come and pointed much further ahead than October 1917.
Lucia verbalized these revelations in phrases of conventional piety, making Mary speak, for instance, of her Immaculate Heart. But plain predictions came through. “If men do not cease from offending God, a new and worse war will begin in the pontificate of Pius XI.” It nearly did—not quite, unless the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939 counts as its prologue, but it did begin less than six months into the next pontificate, that of Pius XII. More interesting was a prophecy that “Russia will spread her errors through the world, arousing wars and persecutions.” During the period of the apparitions, in 1917, the Russian Revolution was moving toward the ascendancy of Lenin, the formation of the Soviet Union, and the spread of international Communism under Russian direction. Mary, however, foretold—according to Lucia—that if the Church undertook certain acts of devotion and consecration, Russia would be “converted,” and the spreading of Russian errors would cease.
These belated disclosures looked dubious. Even if Mary said something of the kind, could a child of ten, in rural Portugal, have absorbed such a message before the Bolshevik revolution and before Russia had even begun “spreading errors”? By the 1930s and 1940s, it was a different matter. The process had been under way for some time, and the Catholic Church was almost obsessed with it. In any event, the pope complied with Mary’s reputed wishes. Prayers for the conversion of Russia began to be recited at the end of masses, and other requested acts of consecration were performed.
The final prophecy is the surprising one. The downfall of the Soviet system in 1991 was not a conversion in the religious sense, such as Lucia would have envisaged, but the sudden collapse of Communism was enough of a conversion to count, and its end as an international movement meant that the spreading of Russia’s “errors” did actually cease. In the upshot, it hardly makes any difference how far Lucia’s later statements truly recalled what was said at the time. Whatever the origin of the Russian prophecy, she put it on record, and it was fulfilled. Moreover, she was a better prophet than almost anyone among the sophisticated and well-informed. Hardly any “rational” commentator among the numerous journalists and other experts foresaw the Soviet collapse. Futurology, an alleged science of forecasting, made a stir between about 1965 and 1975 and then gradually declined; Nicholas Rescher, discussing the reasons in his book Predicting the Future, fastened on the issue that Fatima raises. “The inability of American ‘intelligence’ specialists to forecast the downfall of Communism in the former USSR and its satellites was another major cause for disillusionment.” Under whatever inspiration, the young village seer outdid virtually all the experts.
Lucia sent a further message to Rome with a request that it should be kept secret until 1960. As that year approached, speculation abounded. The message was rumored to predict another world war. Pope John XXIII read it but decided against publishing it, as did his two successors. An ostensible text that appeared in a German paper in 1963, on “third world war” lines, was recognized to be spurious. Cardinal Ratzinger, who knew the real contents, indicated in 1996 that the message was not “apocalyptic.” An announcement was finally made in May 2000 during a visit to Fatima by Pope John Paul II. It was revealed that Lucia had a further vision of the persecution of Christians by “atheistic systems.” This reinforced the Russian prophecy, but with an additional feature, that she saw a white-clad bishop being shot and falling to the ground. The image was interpreted as having foreshadowed the attempted assassination of the pope in 1981.