A M IR ACLE AT FAT IM A *Review of God and the Sun at Fatima by Stanley L. Jaki. Real View Books, 1999.
Peter H odgson O n 13 M ay 1917 three young shepherd children, Lucia Santos (aged 10) and her two cousins Francisco M arto (8) and Jacinta M arto (7), saw a lady dressed in luminous white near a holm oak tree in the northernmost part of the Cova da Iria, a field near Aljustrel, a hamlet near the village of Fatima in Portugal. T he lady told them to recite the Rosary daily and to return on the 13th of the month for the next five months. O n the 13th of June about 70 people joined them, and on 13 July about two thousand. Each time the lady appeared at noon, accompanied by a sudden breeze, thunder and lightning and a small cloud over the holm oak. In July a luminous globe glided from east to west across the Cova towards the holm oak. O n this latter occasion Lucia begged the lady to produce a miracle so that people would believe her message. Alarmed by this outbreak of religiosity, a local official kidnapped the children on the 13 August, when the next appearance was expected and put them in the local jail. T his enraged the crowd of about 5000 who had gathered on that day, and they forced him to release the children. O n 19 August the lady appeared to the children in a nearby grazing area, and promised a miracle on 13 O ctober. O n 13 September about ten thousand people went to the Cova da Ira and saw a luminous globe move across the sky from east to west. In early O ctober there were intense expectations of a miracle on the 13th. A well-known journalist Avelino de Almeida wrote an article that was published on that day saying that the whole fiasco would soon be exposed when the predicted miracle did not occur. O n the 13th O ctober about 70,000 people made their way, mostly on foot but some in oxcarts and automobiles, to the Cova da Iria. During the morning there was torrential rain, turning the ground into a sea of mud. At noon the children arrived and the rain suddenly
stopped. Lucia told the crowd to look at the sun, and they saw that the clouds had parted to reveal the sun as a silvery grey disc that could be observed directly, like the moon, without damage to the eyes. T he sun began to rotate, throwing off shafts of coloured light like a Catherine wheel. T hree times it danced and zigzagged towards the earth. T he crowd was terrified, thinking that the end of the world had come, and they dropped to their knees a in the mud and prayed for mercy. T hen after about ten minutes the sun returned to its normal place and brightness. T he same phenomena was also seen by some people in nearby villages. What on earth are we to make of this story? T he Church authorities were wisely sceptical and forbade the priests to go near the Cova da Iria on that day. H owever they failed in their duty to establish the facts by making a systematic collection of eyewitness accounts, especially by enlisting the aid of experienced scientists. N evertheless there were many recorded accounts, including those immediately published in the national newspapers by journalists like Almeida who had come to the Cova da Iria to see what would happen. T hese accounts, taken together, are sufficient to establish beyond doubt what the people saw, although careful scientific questioning would probably have revealed more details. O nce the facts are established we can ask what really happened, and whether it was indeed a miracle. Could it have been a collective hallucination? T his seems very unlikely because no one expected the promised miracle to involve the sun, and there were thousands of witnesses, some very sceptical, including many in nearby villages. Did the sun really dance? T his possibility can be excluded because of the size of the sun and the laws of dynamics. God is indeed all-powerful, but He cannot contradict H imself. Any such motion of the sun would have been observed by astronomical observatories all over the world, and it was not. We thus conclude that the apparent motion of the sun was a local meteorological phenomenon. Could it have been a very rare but
nonetheless purely natural phenomenon? In certain circumstances it is known that very remarkable meteorological phenomena can occur due to the many different forms that can be taken by ice crystals. H owever what was seen at Fatima does not in the least resemble the known effects attributable to ice crystals. Perhaps some eddies in the atmosphere produced lenses of air of different refractive indices that could enlarge the sun's image. All this is extremely unlikely, but nevertheless it cannot be stared with certainty that we know enough about meteorology to exclude a natural explanation. T he Church has never declared the phenomenon to be miraculous, and will probably never do so. H owever,the additional fact that this very rare phenomenon took place at a time and place specified three months in advance certainly indicates that it was a miracle. What is even less well-known than the miracle itself is the key importance of Fatima for the history of Europe. Portugal at that time was controlled by an intensely anti-clerical Government that had confiscated Church property, closed Catholic schools, banned religious instruction and forced the patriarch of Lisbon to leave his see. Lenin had earmarked Portugal as the first State to fall under Communist control. W ith Portugal in Communist hands, Spain would surely follow, and then France and eventually the whole of Europe would become Communist. T his was a very real possibility in view of the strength of Communism in Spain and France. T he very day after the 13th O ctober, there were new elections, and the anti-clerical candidates lost in regions around Fatima. In a few months the people of Portugal turned against the anti-clerical regime, and it was ousted by a coup. If this had not happened, the whole history of Europe might well have been very different. T here is a vast literature on Fatima, but now the whole story has been told in great detail with scientific objectivity and full respect for the essential and established facts. For a short biography of Peter Hodgson , who died in 2008, see the previouspage.