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The Great Promise of the Immaculate Heart of Mary

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He who conquers and who keeps my works until the end, I will give him the morning star. (Rev. 2:26, 28)

May 10, 2017                                                                                                                                 The Memorial of Saint Damien Joseph de Veuster of Molokai

Time passed after the Miracle of the Sun and the world went through its revolutions.  Blessed Jacinta and Blessed Francisco were swept up in the Spanish flu epidemic in late 1918 and as Our Lady had told the children on June 13, 1917 both of them were soon gone to Heaven: Francisco in April, 1919 and Jacinta in February, 1920.  They were beatified by Pope Saint John Paul II in 2000 and will be canonized by Pope Francis this Saturday May 13, 2017 to mark the 100th anniversary of Our Lady’s first Apparition.

Lucia was now alone in the world.  But Our Lady did not leave her.  The young Lucia would become a religious sister in the early 1920s joining the Sisters of St. Dorothy.  After beginning her life in the convent at Pontevedra, Spain she recorded further Apparitions of Our Lord and Our Lady.  Remember that on July 13, 1917 Our Lady informed the children that she would be coming to ask for the Communion of Reparation and for the Consecration of Russia.  She was not asking for them that day, but she was informing the children, and Lucia most especially that she would be coming in the future to ask for these things.

I give here Lucia’s account of how this came about, in this post it will be specifically relating to the Immaculate Heart of Mary and the Communion of Reparation.  Sister Lucia chose to write this account largely in the third person i.e. she uses ‘she’ to refer to herself.  So here it is from Appendix I of Sister Lucia’s memoir, pp. 196-97 of Fatima in Lucia’s own words:

On December 17th, 1927, she went before the tabernacle to ask Jesus how she should comply with what had been asked of her, that is, to say if the origin of the devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary was included in the Secret that the most holy Virgin had confided to her.

Jesus made her hear very distinctly these words: “My daughter, write what they ask of you.  Write also all that the most holy Virgin revealed to you in the Apparition, in which she spoke of this devotion.  As for the remainder of the Secret, continue to keep silence.”

What was confided on this subject in 1917, is as follows:

She asked for them to be taken to heaven, and the most holy Virgin answered: “Yes.  I will take Jacinta and Francisco soon.  But you are to stay here some time longer.  Jesus wishes to make use of you to make me known and loved.  He wants to establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart.  I promise salvation to those who embrace it, and these souls will be loved God, like flowers placed by me to adorn His throne.”

“Am I to stay here all alone?” she asked, sadly.

“No, daughter.  I shall never forsake you.  My Immaculate Heart will be your refuge and the way that will lead you to God.”

On December 10th, 1925, the most holy Virgin appeared to her, and by her side, elevated on a luminous cloud, was a child.  The most holy Virgin rested her hand on her shoulder, and as she did so, she showed her a heart encircled by thorns, which she was holding in her other hand.  At the same time, the Child said:

“Have compassion on the Heart of your most holy Mother, covered with thorns, with which ungrateful men pierce it at every moment, and and there is no one to make an act of reparation to remove them.”

Then the most holy Virgin said:

“Look, my daughter, at my Heart, surrounded with thorns with which ungrateful men pierce me every moment by their blasphemies and ingratitude.  You at least try to console me and say that I promise to assist at the hour of death, with the graces necessary for salvation, all those who, on the first Saturday of five consecutive months, shall confess, receive Holy Communion, recite five decades of the Rosary, and keep me company for fifteen minutes while meditating on the fifteen mysteries of the Rosary, with the intention of making reparation to me.”

Herein lies the Great Promise of the greatest and most marvelous and most wondrous thing in all Creation: the Immaculate Heart of Mary.  This is the way that will lead you to God.  This is the dwelling place that God created for Himself and it is our refuge in this perilous time as we traverse these darkening and storm tossed seas.

Practice the First Saturday devotion to the extent you can.  It is a simple and easy thing that we can do to warm the Divine Heart of our Savior and to make reparation to the wounded Heart of his most holy Mother.

Some questions may arise on how to practice this devotion.  First, you do not have to make Confession on the First Saturday.  Jesus told Sister Lucia in a later Apparition on February 15th, 1926 that it was possible to confess eight days before or after the First Saturday, provided that one is not conscious of any mortal sin when they receive Him on the First Saturday and the first bishop of Fatima Dom Jose Correia da Silva confirmed this in 1940.

Second, the last bit about keeping the Blessed Mother company “for fifteen minutes while meditating on the fifteen mysteries of the Rosary” is open to interpretation as to how one might practice it.  First, this Apparition took place in 1925, almost eighty years before Pope Saint John Paul II made his recommendation about the new Luminous Mysteries so quite understandably the Blessed Virgin did not mention twenty, but fifteen.

But as to how to practice this aspect of the devotion Bishop da Silva stated in 1940 that “it is preferable to meditate on one mystery each month.”  And this makes sense.  My own personal practice is to select a portion of the Gospel or the Acts of the Apostles or some other part of Sacred Scripture that pertains to a different Mystery each month.

The promises of Our Lady are great indeed to those who faithfully practice this devotion.  Do it.

Impressions of the September 13 Apparition and a step through the minefield

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Then he opened their understanding, that they might understand the scriptures.  And he said to them:  Thus it is written, and thus it behooved Christ to suffer, and to rise again from the dead, the third day: And that penance and remission of sins should be preached in his name, unto all nations, beginning at Jerusalem (Luke 24: 45-47).

April 18, 2017                                                                                                                                     Tuesday in the Octave of Easter

We are forced to deal here with one of the most disastrous and likely most deliberate, in its origin at least, misstatements in the whole history of Fatima, but first a bit of background.  When Sister Lucia published her memoirs, a quarter of a century after the Apparitions, she revealed for the first time the extent of the penances and sacrifices that the children were practicing.

Apparently the movement in their heart to do penance started after the second Apparition of the Angel of Portugal in 1916 when he told them to “Make of everything you can a sacrifice, and offer it to God as an act of reparation for the sins by which He is offended, and in supplication for the conversion of sinners.”  This movement toward sacrifice and penance only accelerated, especially for Blessed Jacinta Marto, after Our Lady showed the children the vision of Hell on July 13, 1917, told them to sacrifice for sinners, and gave them the Fatima intention for which to offer their sacrifices: “O Jesus, it is for the love of You, for the conversion of sinners, and in reparation for the sins committed against the Immaculate Heart of Mary.”

During this time the children followed her commands and the inspirations given by the Holy Spirit to their hearts to do penance.  Often when they were shepherding their families’ sheep they would do without their lunch and either give it to whatever poor children they found or, if no impoverished families were at hand, they would give their lunch to the sheep.  They would deprive themselves of water to drink on those unfathomably hot summer afternoons of the Portuguese serra at a time when there was no air conditioning to retreat into.  They prayed constantly, Jacinta spending hours sometimes with her forehead pressed against the earth repeated the prayers of the Angel and the O my Jesus prayer the Blessed Virgin taught them that we now recite after each Mystery of the Rosary.  This six year old girl made of everything she could a supplication for the conversion of sinners, to save them from Hell.  Blessed Francisco Marto spent the days when other children were in school (since Our Lady had assured him that he wasn’t long for this world he felt no purpose in learning lessons to help him advance in it) before the Blessed Sacrament in the local church seeking to console Our Lord and Our Lady for the outrages committed against them.  Blessed Francisco was only nine when he was doing this, and Blessed Jacinta only six.  What were you doing when you were nine?  What was I doing when I was six?  What are any of us doing right now?

The tragic misstatement about Fatima originates with one of the penances the children were practicing.  They chanced upon the idea a few days after the August 19, 1917 Apparition of tying a rope around their waists as a penance.  Here is Lucia’s description from Volume II of her memoir repeated on page 78 of 1998’s Fatima in Lucia’s own words:

Some days later, as we were walking along the road with our sheep, I found a piece of rope that had fallen off a cart.  I picked it up and, just for fun, I tied it round my arm.  Before long, I noticed that the rope was hurting me.

“Look, this hurts!” I said to my cousins.  “We could tie it round our waists and offer this sacrifice to God.”

The poor children promptly fell in with my suggestion.  We then set about dividing it between the three of us, by placing it across a stone and striking it with the sharp edge of another one that served as a knife.  Either because of the thickness or roughness of the rope, or because we sometimes tied it too tightly, this instrument of penance often caused us terrible suffering.  Now and then, Jacinta could not keep back her tears, so great was the discomfort this caused her.  Whenever I urged her to remove it, she replied: “No!  I want to offer this sacrifice to Our Lord in reparation, and for the conversion of sinners.”

This was the genesis of Our Lady’s instruction to the  children on September 13, 1917 that God is pleased with  your sacrifices.  He does not want you to sleep with the rope on, but only to wear it during the daytime.

This statement of Our Lady is often mutilated by various persons who talk and write about Fatima into some form of the following lie: “Yes the children were doing terrific penances, but Our Lady came and told them to stop doing that.”  Quite obviously that is not what she said.  She said that God was pleased with the penances were offering, but that He wanted them to modify one of them slightly.  After all God made us, and He knows us infinitely better than we know ourselves.  He knows what we can handle and what what we cannot, what will draw us to Him and what will drive us away.

Yet you will hear this stupid misstatement that “Our Lady told the children to quit doing penances” in some form or another from people who seem to have devoted their lives to spreading the message of Fatima, who have written books about Fatima, who have made careers dealing with Fatima.  It has sadly become part of ‘what people say’ about Fatima.

Why is this important?  Because there has been a movement in the Church for a long time, starting in fact many lifetimes before the Second Vatican Council, to be done with penance.  It probably goes back in some way to Martin Luther in 1517 and all of his successors and their declarations that the way one lives his life has nothing to do with whether or not he will be saved or not.  So over the centuries this idea has crept into and consumed the Church.  Penance and mortification, both exterior and interior, slowly over time began to lose their importance.  Yet this is what it is to be a Christian: our screwed up will must be subdued and our fallen nature must be conquered.  Penance and mortification are how you do that.  And there is no other way.  To remove penance from the Christian life is in many ways like removing the soul from the body: all you have left is a decaying corpse.

There is also the matter of what penance on our part can do for others and for the world.  The Fatima revelations remind us of something that is made clear throughout Sacred Scripture: penance softens the anger of God and loosens the grip that devils have on souls in the world.  Consider the account of the exorcism that Our Lord performed when He came down from Mount Tabor with Peter, James, and John after the Transfiguration.  He encounters the rest of the Apostles who had been trying and failing to exorcise a demon from a young boy.  Notice here as well the intimate connection between prayer and fasting and belief and faith.  Here it is from the Gospel of Mark:

One of the crowd answered him, “Teacher, I brought my son to you, for he has a dumb spirit; and wherever it seizes him, it dashes him down; and he foams and grinds his teeth and becomes rigid; and I asked your disciples to cast it out, and they were not able.” And he answered them, “O faithless generation, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you? Bring him to me.” And they brought the boy to him; and when the spirit saw him, immediately it convulsed the boy, and he fell on the ground and rolled about, foaming at the mouth.  And Jesus * asked his father, “How long has he had this?” And he said, “From childhood.  And it has often cast him into the fire and into the water, to destroy him; but if you can do anything, have pity on us and help us.”  And Jesus said to him, “If you can! All things are possible to him who believes.”  Immediately the father of the child cried out and said, “I believe; help my unbelief!”  And when Jesus saw that a crowd came running together, he rebuked the unclean spirit, saying to it, “You dumb and deaf spirit, I command you, come out of him, and never enter him again.”  And after crying out and convulsing him terribly, it came out, and the boy was like a corpse; so that most of them said, “He is dead.”  But Jesus took him by the hand and lifted him up, and he arose.  And when he had entered the house, his disciples asked him privately, “Why could we not cast it out?”  And he said to them, “This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer and fasting. (Mark 9:17-29)”

This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer and fasting.  And what is the message of Fatima?  Prayer and fasting.  In this sense fasting, penance, sacrifice, they are three different words for the same thing.  If you wish to drive out the demons afflicting souls in our world then heed the message of Fatima.

This would seem to have been a primary reason for Our Lady’s appearance at the Cova da Iria four centuries after Father Martin Luther’s little outburst: to call people back to penance.  After all Our Lord Himself after his Resurrection stated that penance should be preached in his Name to all nations.  How many times do we read in the Apocalypse, the Book of Revelation, that the followers of the Beast (Antichrist) and his false prophet will in the last days of this world refuse to do penance, despite the plagues that afflict them, and instead blaspheme God?

The penances that these children did were a primary reason for the beatification of Francisco and Jacinta Marto in the year 2000 so why do these people continue to repeat the lie that “Our Lady told them to stop making these sacrifices?”  How can you call them ‘Blessed’ if you deny the reason for their beatification?  Some of it is just habit, some of it is just a herd mentality i.e. people feel safe (even though they are in mortal danger) when they just repeat what everybody else says despite the fact that they know better and some are just ignorant, whether that ignorance is willful or not is between them and God.

But there is another group who have another purpose.  They think that by spreading this lie they can undo a large part if not the whole message of Fatima.  They are not the ones who repeat this lie publicly, rather they whisper it in the ears of authors of books on the subject, they cause it to be written in footnotes or cause it to be repeated by people who are supposed to be authorities on the subject.  And trust me they are there.  They do exist.  Just ignore them and the fruits of their work and do penance.

So what is penance?  What sacrifices are we called to make?  Are we supposed to go out and buy a hairshirt or wrap a cilice around our thighs and wear it until we draw blood?  No.  If God wants you to do that you will know it and it won’t be because you read this post.  But that is a dangerous place to start doing penance because most often those things are purely self will and feed only your pride and hurry you down the road to spiritual disaster.  So what do we do?

Penance is primarily doing the will of God, especially when it contravenes your own will.  Penance is not sinning, especially when the devil makes sin look like a good and reasonable choice that will do no harm to anyone and may perhaps actually help somebody.  Penance is enduring and conquering with prayer and patience grievous temptations that afflict you to commit certain sins. Penance is being patient with the troublesome and helping them bear their burdens.  If you want to do real penance then try this: the next time you encounter someone whom you deem to be rude and inconsiderate and whom you think is in your way then be kind to them, smile at them, pray a Hail Mary for them, ask them if you can help them in any way and maybe, just maybe, try getting out of their way.  In other words learn to live and love the Works of Mercy.

Sometimes penance is just to live in this world that is so awash with sin and error that 99.9999999% of the human race perceives good to be evil and evil to be good and not to succumb to it.  To not say Ave (2 John 1:10) to those in positions of authority who preach all manner of heretical yet seductive stupidity from the pulpit and to keep the commandments of God and bear the testimony of Jesus Christ in a world that is constantly screaming in your ear at the top of its lungs that neither of them have ever existed, that it is all a delusional fantasy.

These things are penance too, and if you let Him the Holy Spirit will show you more and better ways of doing penance than anything I could come up with.  Pray the Rosary every day and do penance.  Make supplication in reparation for the outrages committed against the Holy Trinity and for the conversion of sinners.  Place your forehead against the earth and say:

O Most Holy Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, I adore You profoundly, and I offer You the most precious Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Jesus Christ, present in all the tabernacles of the world, in reparation for the outrages, sacrileges and indifference with which He Himself is offended.  And, through the infinite merits of His most Sacred Heart, and the Immaculate Heart of Mary, I beg of You the conversion of poor sinners.

Impressions of the June 13 Apparition

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And the temple of God was opened in heaven: and the ark of his testament was seen in his temple, and there were lightnings, and voices, and an earthquake, and great hail.  And a great sign appeared in heaven: A woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars.  And being with child, she cried travailing in birth, and was in pain to be delivered (Revelation 11:19-12:2).

February 23, 2017                                                                                                                               The Memorial of Saint Polycarp

1) The public nature of the event

This is important because it demonstrates the extraordinary nature of the events at Fatima.  There were three primary witnesses (Lucia, Jacinta, and Francisco) who could see the Blessed Virgin and all saw the same thing; two (Lucia and Jacinta) who could hear hear speak and both heard the same thing; and a single witness (Lucia) who both spoke to the Virgin and was answered by her.  But, as both Lucia’s own comments and William Thomas Walsh’s description of the lead up to the June 13, 1917 apparition reveals, there were also many other people present at the time of the Apparition.  Did they see or hear anything?  And if so what?

Here is William Thomas Walsh’s answer to that question from p. 67-68 of Our Lady of Fatima, starting with the voice of Maria Carreira describing what she heard while Lucia was speaking to Our Lady:

“Then we began to hear something like this, something like a very faint voice, but we could not understand what it was saying.  It was like the buzzing of a bee.”

Some of the bystanders noticed that the light of the sun seemed dimmer during the following minutes, though the sky was cloudless.  Others said that the top of the azinheira, covered with new growth, appeared to bend and curve just before Lucia spoke, as if under a weight.

That bit about the sound of a voice is the most convincing to me.  It is important to understand here that these things the children, and others, saw were not just images implanted in their mind or spirits, but an actual person.  The Blessed Virgin Mary has a body, as we know from the dogma of the Assumption.  It is a glorified body like that of her Divine Son and therefore it must have all the properties that the Gospels tell us that his Body had after his Resurrection i.e. the ability to appear and disappear from view, the ability to change shape, the ability to be in multiple locations at the same time and not to be deterred by material barriers such as walls, but also the ability to eat and drink and accomplish all of the tasks our bodies need to do though without them being necessary, as well as an infinite number of other properties that we were probably not told about.  In any case there was a real physical presence here and the testimony of these other witnesses bear this out.

All of this makes me unsure how the events of Fatima can be strictly classified as private revelation.  These clearly were not visions that only one person saw.  I’m not certain where to place Fatima on that continuum so I will leave it to the Church and the Holy Father to sort it all out.

2) A simple request

“I wish you to come here on the 13th of next month, to pray the Rosary every day, and to learn to read.”

To learn to read.  A simple request to most of us.  Anyone who is reading these words has obviously learned how to read.  But for a peasant girl from Aljustrel, Portugal in 1917 this may not have been entirely in character.  Very many people in the Portuguese countryside at that time were illiterate all their lives and it didn’t bother them a bit.  They had other duties to perform.  But Our Lady wanted Lucia to learn to read, and presumably to write.  So that is what Lucia did.

A century later we can perhaps better appreciate this request than the little girl from the Portuguese hill country did in 1917.  Lucia wrote the volume I have been quoting from.  She wrote to bishops and to popes.  God loves to work through instruments, particularly humble instruments.  And the written words of this humble peasant girl, relaying Our Lady’s message from heaven, have shaken the world.

One thinks of the many times these simple requests or inspirations from Heaven have altered the world.  One thinks in the first place of the request from Heaven to the Virgin of Nazareth nineteen centuries before she herself was to make this request of Lucia.  One thinks of the inspiration Saint Jerome had in the Syrian desert to learn Hebrew.  We still possess the monument, the Vulgate, that his affirmative reply to that inspiration left to the world.  One simple yes, one humble person, can change the world.

3) I will never forsake you

“Yes. I will take Jacinta and Francisco soon.  But you are to stay here some time longer.  Jesus wishes to make use of you to make me known and loved.  He wants to establish in the world to my Immaculate Heart.”

“Am I to stay here alone?” I asked, sadly.

“No, my daughter.  Are you suffering a great deal?  Don’t lose heart.  I will never forsake you.  My Immaculate Heart will be your refuge and the way that will lead you to God.”

This to me is the promise that cinches the deal.  I defy the skeptics to explain this prophecy: I will take Jacinta and Francisco soon.  But you are to stay here some time longer.  Francisco died in 1919 and Jacinta in 1920, both during the Spanish flu outbreak that attacked the world during and after the end of the First World War.  But what about Lucia?  Well, Lucia did die: on February 13, 2005 at the age of 97 years old.  But you are to stay here some time longer.  Heaven does enjoy these sort of pithy little understatements.

Don’t lose heart.  I will never forsake you.  My Immaculate Heart will be your refuge and the way that will lead you to God.  What a consolation that promise must have been during the long and strange course of Lucia’s life.  She was born anonymously in a time and place where a donkey was the most convenient form of transportation and a luxury that only rarely took the place of one’s own feet.  She died with her name known across the earth three days before YouTube made its first appearance on the internet.

Her suffering was acute on that day, June 13, 1917.  While Jacinta and Francisco’s parents reacted generally positively to the news of the first Apparition on May 13, but Lucia’s parents and sisters did not.  One of her mother’s most admirable qualities was an almost pathological determination to tell the truth, no matter what the cost, and her determined desire to implant this remarkable character trait on her children.  But she became convinced that Lucia was lying and making it all up.  She was determined to break her child of this lie and force her to admit publicly to the parish priest and anyone else who would listen that it was all made up nonsense.  In addition the Cova da Iria was their personal family property and all of the people visiting the spot and tearing it up since May 13, and even more in the months to come, had made it unusable to pasture the sheep.

So on the morning of June 13 her mother and sisters sent Lucia off with acid comments ridiculing her and she, being human, was not in the greatest mood when she arrived at the Cova da Iria at midday.  Jacinta encouraged her reminding her of the Lady’s promise that they would have much to suffer, but that it would be for the conversion of sinners.  In any case now, after all this misery, she was hearing that her two cousins, the only other people on earth who could possibly understand what she was going through, would soon be gone from this world.

But what a consolation from the lips of the Blessed Virgin herself: I will never forsake you!

4) The suffering of the Immaculate Heart of Mary

In front of the palm of Our Lady’s right hand was a heart encircled by thorns which pierced it.  We understood that this was the Immaculate Heart of Mary, outraged by the sins of humanity, and seeking reparation.

This particular image of the Immaculate Heart of Mary that the children saw is what made me choose those lines from the Apocalypse, the Book of Revelation, to begin this post.  I will repeat here the last verse of that passage i.e. what Saint John saw the woman clothed with sun going through:

And being with child, she cried travailing in birth, and was in pain to be delivered.

That description of the woman from the Apocalypse bears a striking similarity to the image of the Immaculate Heart.  They both describe a woman in torment.  In particular I would like to discuss the phrase was in pain to be delivered.  That phrase comes from the old Douay-Rheims translation of the Latin Vulgate.  It is not the best possible translation, though I will own that this is not the easiest phrase to translate into smooth English.  But the Latin word that Saint Jerome used in the Vulgate for the phrase ‘was in pain’ was cruciabatur.  One doesn’t need to be a linguist to guess at what the root of that word is.  It is in the passive imperfect, so a possible translation from the Latin is that she was being crucified to be delivered.

But what about the Greek?  It isn’t exactly ‘was being crucified,’ but it is also far more intense than ‘was in pain.’  The Greek word is βασανιζομένη is a passive present particle that can signify any one of the following: being questioned by torture, being tortured, being vexed with grievous pains, being tormented.  There is also another use of the word that I find fascinating.  It applies to testing metals by the touchstone.  The touchstone is an ancient method of testing the purity of gold and/or other precious metals.

Pure gold being tested.  A woman with child crying in torment to be delivered.  The Immaculate Heart of Mary, the new Eve, the Mother of the living, pierced with thorns and being outraged by the sins of humanity.  Meditate on that.  What does it tell you?

Pray the Rosary daily.  Make reparation for the sins committed against the Immaculate Heart of Mary.  Join the Rosary Confraternity.