FOREWORD

May 13, 1917: Three children of the hamlet of Aljustrel, near Fatima in Portugal, tend their sheep at the Cova da Iria. Lucy, the eldest of the trio, is only ten years old, and her two cousins, Francisco and Jacinta, are nine and seven. It is hardly surprising that these cheerful and ingenuous children who were also very pious, would become the object of the predilection of the Queen of Heaven, who would appear to them six times in a row, from May 13 to October 13, to pass on to them Her Message.

What is more “natural” for us Catholics than these heavenly manifestations, to which we are so accustomed? They recall to our minds a long and marvellous history... That of St. Joan of Arc and her Voices, for the salvation of France. One century later, in the New World, there was the apparition to the poor Indian Juan Diego, the seer of Tepeyac to whom Our Lady of Guadalupe gave the signal favour of imprinting Her Miraculous Image on his tilma, which was made of rough cloth. Soon, under the reign of Louis XIV, the Sacred Heart will in turn manifest itself to a humble religious of Paray-le-Monial, St. Margaret Mary.

Finally, in the last century, an incomparable series of apparitions of the Most Holy Virgin makes this supernatural element quite familiar to us. And we recall with emotion the chosen souls, so simple and innocent, who had the privilege of being Her witnesses: St. Catherine Labouré, in the chapel of rue du Bac; Mélanie and Maximin, on the mountain of La Salette; the angelic Bernadette, at the grotto of Massabielle, Lourdes; and at Pontmain, during the starry night of January 17, 1871, almost all the children of the village.

The events of Fatima fit into this harmonious sequence of supernatural apparitions with which Heaven is accustomed to visiting the earth. Once again, God chose as His three messengers, three children who could neither read nor write, to remind the world of the desires of His Heart and to make known the requests of His Most Holy Mother.

And yet, for one who studies closely the events of Fatima, it appears clearly that this manifestation of the Virgin Mary, the most spectacular one that ever took place, occupies a unique and truly extraordinary place in the history of our time.

For here, as in the Gospel, it is by unprecedented miracles that God expresses His Will to be heard and obeyed. From the beginning of the world, nowhere had anyone seen the equal of these divine signs. This incomparable miracle, predicted three months in advance as the certain proof and divine guarantee of the apparitions and of the Message of Our Lady, took place on October 13, 1917, in broad daylight, before seventy thousand witnesses, who were both astonished and enraptured: the prodigious “dance of the sun”, an historical fact as undeniable as it is stupefying, and inexplicable from the standpoint of purely natural forces.

Fatima is equally extraordinary for the scope of its great Secret, which is also without precedent. Since July 13, 1917, this unique Secret, in three distinct parts, dominates our whole history. A prophetic herald of divine chastisements which threaten us, along with magnificent promises of salvation, on the one condition that the simple requests of Our Lady, so clear and precise, finally be fulfilled – this great Secret describes for us our whole past and explains the whole present drama the world is going through: for we have witnessed and are actually living through the time of errors, wars and persecutions stirred up by Soviet Russia, predicted in 1917 at a time when nobody could have imagined them.

With a clarity that is altogether divine, the Blessed Virgin Mary there reveals to us in the Secret everything necessary to our souls for their eternal salvation, to our nations for their temporal well-being, and finally everything necessary to the Church for its victory over the powers of hell, which have been unchained. For it is surely the Church and its present crisis that is the subject of the “third secret”, still kept hidden at the Vatican.

And the prophecy does not stop with these tragic events of the present. It announced that not far off is a happy conclusion, an era of peace, through the conversion of Russia and the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Thus, it is a marvellous and truly extraordinary message of hope.

In short, Fatima commands our attention, as it has commanded the attention of the Church unceasingly since 1917. It has commanded our attention right up to the day of the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II, which fell precisely on the anniversary of the apparitions, and which led the Holy Father to Fatima a year later, on May 13, 1982.

Faced with the event of Fatima, nobody could remain indifferent without giving proof of a strange levity of spirit, if not a blameworthy cowardice. No, it is clear that we must find out, with certitude, the truth. For if it is a question of true and supernatural apparitions, why not hear with docility this great Message of Our Lady and give it the attention it deserves? Thus, before all else Fatima imposes upon us the question of its veracity. And here, we must be insistent: its veracity stems neither from sentiment, nor from faith or even from devotion: but first of all from verifiable historical facts. This is the spirit in which we have undertaken and conducted this whole study.
 

«SCIENCE AND THE FACTS»

Our contemporaries are right. In this area, the facts must be studied with rigor and precision, without evading any difficulty, or dismissing any objection without an examination. With this end in view, and to respond to this legitimate expectation, our first volume includes a rigorous critical exposé.

When it concerns a supernatural event of such importance – and if the apparitions of Fatima are true in their entirety, they surely constitute the most important supernatural event of the century – it will not be in vain to carefully examine the various testimonies by which we come to know it, going over them with the “fine-tooth comb” of scientific criticism, to form a just idea of their worth. The best way to do this is to lay out in detail, with the greatest objectivity, all the arguments of those who have pretended to destroy its credibility.

On the subject of Fatima, this critical opposition was more violent than for any other of the great contemporary Marian apparitions. The major texts of the adversaries of Fatima, published in Dutch and in Italian, have never been translated. Only the negative conclusions of these authors, summed up in 1952 in an article intended for popular consumption, have been retained and propagated by certain theologians or publicists a priori hostile to the apparitions and Message of Fatima, while at Rome, as we shall see, they have continued to more or less directly influence the Popes themselves, from Pius XII to John Paul II. Thus it is useful, and even indispensable, to go back to the sources, to present the whole controversy with exactitude.

The advantage of this detailed criticism, which shows the worthlessness of all the arguments advanced against the reality of the miracles and the credibility of the witnesses, is to make the supernatural origin of the apparitions and Message of Fatima even more striking and unquestionable.

However this preliminary exposé, which is necessarily somewhat arduous, may disturb some readers, who wish to go to the historical part right away. In this case they may begin right at the second part, entitled “The Facts” [see publisher's note at the end of this foreword]. This will place them right at the beginning of the fascinating history of the events of Fatima, their historical context and the account of the apparitions, as well as the great solar miracle of October 13, 1917.

Let us add one more remark: perhaps some reader might object that, being favourably disposed a priori to the apparitions of Fatima, it is impossible for us to properly conduct an impartial critical investigation. How can we answer this suspicion?

First of all, it is unthinkable for us to go back on our original confidence in the apparitions and Message of Fatima, considering the repeated approvals of the Catholic hierarchy. We can say however that, since the decisions of the Church in this domain have no guarantee a priori of infallibility, our confidence would have quickly vanished had it encountered decisive criticisms. Originally the objections against Fatima had strongly impressed us. It was only the second time around, having weighed the objections against a broader body of evidence, that we saw how really feeble they were.

It was then that we understood the necessity of refuting the objections at the very beginning of our exposition, citing all our sources [see publisher's note at the end of this foreword]. The reader will be able to see for himself that we set forth the most cogent arguments of the adversaries of Fatima; then we cite the responses of its defenders, and finally we reproduce the documents themselves. Thus nothing is stopping those who would contest the validity of our conclusions from going back to our sources themselves, and showing – if they can! – where our own proofs are faulty. As for saying that we cannot be objective, since we are resolutely in favour of Fatima, that is a crude example of the fallacy of “begging the question”: it presupposes, without any reason, that an impartial study on Fatima cannot establish the supernatural character of what took place there. The truth is, that after a painstaking historical investigation, we firmly assert the authenticity of Fatima because this conclusion objectively imposes itself by solid and indisputable proofs.
 

THE SECRET AND THE CHURCH (1917-1942)

The apparitions of Fatima are also extraordinary, as we will show in Volume II, because of the sanctity of the little seers, which is so endearing. Francisco and Jacinta, who have been dead since 1919 and 1920, will undoubtedly be the first children who are not martyrs to receive the honors of the altar, to say nothing of Lucy, who is still living today in the Carmel of Coimbra, and has always showed herself perfectly worthy of her great mission.

Fatima is extraordinary also for the superabundant graces of the pilgrimages there, which in a few years effected the conversion of a whole people and its liberation from the atheistic Masonic domination, which persecuted the Church. The story is truly unique, and an example for our times as well.

But the full influence of Fatima is not limited simply to Portugal in the immediate post-war period. In 1925 and 1929, new apparitions which took place at Pontevedra and Tuy, in Spain, where Lucy was then a religious with the Dorothean Sisters, fulfilled the promises of the great Secret, and developed the prophetic message. Since this time, Sister Lucy through innumerable letters to her confessors, to various bishops and to the Popes, has continued to make known the desires of Heaven to the authorities of the Church.

In preparation for the fiftieth anniversary of the apparitions, (1917-1967), Bishop Venancio of Leiria decided to publish, at least in great part, these precious texts which until then were unknown to the public. In 1966 he commanded Father Alonso, a Spanish Claretian priest and renowned mariologist, to establish a critical edition. The result is a monumental work of fourteen volumes which, alas, has still not been published, and we shall see why. Fortunately, along with the great official critical study, whose publication was constantly postponed, this Fatima expert was able to make known the essential contents in numerous writings, until his untimely death on December 12, 1981. All his articles and pamphlets published from 1967 to 1981, written in Spanish and Portuguese, are an inexhaustible gold mine of first-hand information for us today. There were also two Portuguese experts, Father Martins dos Reis and Father A. M. Martins, who have published since 1973 numerous letters of Sister Lucy which until then had been unpublished.¹

Thus has the historical account of Fatima been enriched and renewed many times over since the labours of Father Barthas. It will be the aim of our second volume to make use of all these new documents, to place them in their historical context, and use them to better understand and explain the great Secret of Fatima. The second volume, The Secret and the Church, will trace the developments and repercussions of the Message of Fatima from 1917 to 1942.
 

THE THIRD SECRET (1942-1983)

Finally, the famous Secret – which should have been divulged in 1960 and still has not been – will be the subject of the entire third volume. There especially, we have many new facts to bring to light. Using the works of Father Alonso, which shed a great deal of light on the history of the last part of the Secret, we shall be able, almost with certitude, to state its true content. Indeed, today we have such a reliable body of evidence on this text that it is now possible, by a strictly logical demonstration, to dispel the thick, mysterious clouds which some have tried at any price to preserve around this Secret for the last twenty years...
 

*

But if Our Lady of Fatima speaks to the Church and to the world, let us not forget that She speaks, first of all, to each one of us. This is why we have not confined ourselves to a simple historical examination of facts. For what good is it to read the warnings of Heaven, if not to apply it to our own lives? Thus the historical and critical exposition, although indispensable, is not enough.

Just as we have sought to set forth The Whole Truth About Fatima, we have also sought to make known and loved the great Message of Our Lady, so rich, so attractive, more urgent than ever in view of the terrible dangers, both spiritual and temporal, that threaten us today. For this we have generally let Sister Lucy speak for herself: faithful to her mission of «making the Immaculate Heart of Mary known and loved», in innumerable writings she has not ceased for over fifty years to comment on, explain and illustrate the marvellous words of the Queen of Heaven, with which her own soul is completely penetrated.

We took her for our guide, so to speak, certain in this way of grasping the essential part of this great Secret, so salutary for our souls, for our nations, and for the Church. It is a secret rich in meaning, which introduces us into the very mystery of the Heart of the Virgin Mary: She is the Immaculate Mediatrix, the Mother of Mercy, Through the mediation of Her maternal Heart God wills today, in His incomparable love of predilection for Her and in His mercy towards us, to grant us every good thing: Heaven for our souls, peace for the world and the Church, and the conversion and return of all nations to Her bosom.

Certainly, these promises are unprecedented, but in the great tribulation to come they will help us preserve our faith, hope and charity to the very end.
 

Endnotes

(1) S. Martins dos Reis, Uma Vida ao serviço de Fatima, Apêndice documental de ineditos, p. 297-393 (1973). See also Antonio Maria Martins, S.J., Fatima, Documentos (Porto 1976), and Cartas da Irma Lucia, p. 98-117 (Porto, 1979).