Warnings From The Sun
On this day many years ago, tens of thousands of people gathered together to witness a miracle. They didn’t know ahead of time that it would be a miracle. There were many people there who thought, perhaps cynically, that nothing at all would happen and that three small children would be proven to be liars and charlatans for the stories they had been telling of a mysterious lady who appeared to them, warning them of terrible events in the future. Finally, here was the day on which people would know for certain. Were their accounts real? Or were they merely the results of hysteria and childish imagination, perhaps even a deliberate attempt to make themselves look important?
It was October 13, 1917. Five score and seven years ago today. It was a little town in Portugal called Fatima. And the three children turned out to be telling the truth. At 1 :30 on a rainy afternoon, the sun broke through the clouds and the soaked crowds, tens of thousands in number, stood in the muddy field and witnessed the greatest supernatural spectacle the world had seen since the crucifixion. For the sun appeared in a form different to what we are accustomed. The crowds suddenly realized they could look directly into the sun without discomfort as it lit up the sky with strange colors and began to spin in the heavens. The father of two of the children, Ti Marto, described it thus: “We looked easily at the sun, which for some reason did not blind us. It cast its rays in many directions and painted everything in different colors—the trees, the people, the air and the ground.” And then it stopped spinning and something happened that would terrify the awestruck crowds, causing many sinners and even atheists to call out to God for mercy. The sun appeared to detach itself from the heavens and hurtle down towards the multitude. “It was a terrible moment,” recalled Ti Marto. A nine-year-old boy called Ignácio Lorenço, who would later become a priest, explained the event as best he could: “I feel incapable of describing what I saw. I looked fixedly at the sun, which seemed pale and did not hurt my eyes. Looking like a ball of snow, revolving on itself, it suddenly seemed to come down in a zig-zag, menacing the earth. Terrified, I ran and hid myself among the people, who were weeping and expecting the end of the world at any moment.”
Prayers of penance and cries for God’s mercy were on the lips of the thousands of people who thought they were about to die. This is what happens when we are in imminent danger of death. But the purpose of this Miracle of the Sun was not just to scare us. It was a warning—a warning of what would happen to the earth if we do not change our ways and turn away from our sins and back to our all-powerful and just Creator. The entire story of Fatima, not just this miracle, is one long warning to pray and seek God’s mercy. God sent us a message, one which now lingers in a drawer at the Vatican, which the false popes of Vatican II have not dared to show us. Our Lady asked that this Third Secret of Fatima be revealed by 1960, but it was not. And in New Orleans in the summer of 1972, as the U.S. Supreme Court was in the process of legalizing the murder of our children in their Roe v. Wade decision, the statue of Our Lady of Fatima expressed her sadness and God’s anger at the sins of the world. The statue wept. Since then, things have become far worse. We have been warned.