Some extracts from What Happened at Fatima:

1. THE STIRRING OF THE WINGS

Some time in 1915 three girls and a boy, aged around 8, were watching their sheep in a rocky olive grove in the hills bordering the western shores of Europe. They ate the lunch they had brought in their shoulder bags then, urged by the natural leader among them, Lucia, they knelt to pray the Rosary.

They had scarcely begun when they saw a figure poised in the air above the trees. It was simply suspended there facing them, though it had no face that the children could see. It looked like a statue made of snow with the rays of the sun playing around it and giving it an patina of transparency.

The children were alarmed, but mesmerised. They continued with their prayer but with their eyes transfixed on the motionless figure above them which dazzled them with its light.

As they finished their Rosary the figure vanished.

Lucia dos Santos told no one of this strange sighting but her companions couldn’t help but let it all tumble out once they were indoors with their families. In no time word of the children’s strange claim had travelled round Aljustrel, the small, peasant village where they lived. Before long Lucia’s mother was questioning her daughter.

“They are saying you saw something up on Cabeço. What was it? What did you see up there?”

Lucia was perturbed as she herself didn’t know what she had seen. It wasn’t as if the figure had had a face with eyes and a nose and a mouth, or even arms or feet, that could be described. Or perhaps it had had these things, but they couldn’t be seen because of the light. In her confusion she said, “It looked like a person wrapped up in a sheet.”

Her mother, at this point maybe more amused than her show of irritation betrayed, pronounced the claim to be “childish nonsense” and dismissed it.

A week or so later Lucia with two other children, local boys, was again grazing her flocks in Cabeço and the same white figure, almost transparent in the rays of the sun, appeared hovering above some other trees. The boys saw the vision first and called Lucia’s attention to it. As with her previous companions, the boys could not help but tell of it.

And then again, a third time, when Lucia was with her cousin João Marto, the mysterious form (unseen by João) presided over her prayer, a presence distant yet benign, solemn yet compelling, inexplicable yet accepted without question by the innocent girl shepherd.

Lucia, in her family the youngest of seven children and till this time always the darling, accustomed to the kisses and carresses of her sisters, was suddenly pained to find herself the butt of their jokes. “Are you seeing someone wrapped in a sheet?” they would ask her as she prayed after her First, and subsequent, Communions. “Are these statues of snow skipping around behind your eyes?”

That rural community, Aljustrel in the parish of Fátima, could not possibly have known it, but heaven was schooling one of its children, Lucia dos Santos, preparing her for a role it had selected her to play in the most public manifestation of Divine Mercy in our world since Christ walked among us.

2.THE UNFOLDING OF THE WINGS

Some time later, in 1916, when Lucia’s favourite cousins, Francisco and Jacinta Marto, had permission to shepherd their family flocks, Lucia chose to graze her thirty sheep with theirs on land belonging to branches of their respective families.

One morning when the three children and their sheep were on the hill called Cabeço a light rain caused them to seek shelter beneath some overhanging rocks. Even when the rain stopped they remained in the comfort of the rocky recess where they ate their lunch and began to say their Rosary. Lucia later recalled that they had got into the habit sometimes of saying only the words Hail Mary! or Our Father! on each bead, so anxious were they to get to the game they called “pebbles”. She wasn’t sure whether they employed this abbreviated form of the Rosary on this occasion, but soon they were at their game.

Then, without warning, a strong wind began to shake the trees. Since the light rain earlier the sun had been shining and there hadn’t even been a breeze. Startled they looked up and there, above the trees, just as Lucia had seen it before, was the effulgent figure like a statue made of snow.

Neither Francisco nor Jacinta had been with Lucia on the previous occasions when the strange shape had appeared so they were dumbfounded. The three remained absorbed in this light above the tree tops and, instead of disappearing as it had done before, it began to approach them, floating down from among the branches. As it drew nearer it became clear that it was not a being wrapped in a sheet but a very beautiful youth, about 14 or 15 years old, immaculately white and as transparent as crystal when the sun shines through it.

When his feet touched the ground and he was standing among them he said, Do not be afraid, just as angels had said to other shepherds near Bethlehem. I am the Angel of Peace. Pray with me, whereupon he knelt down, bowed until his forehead touched the ground, and said, My God, I believe, I adore, I hope and I love You! I ask pardon of You for those who do not believe, do not adore, do not hope, and do not love You. He taught the children to repeat the words three times. When he had risen from the ground, and before disappearing, he said to them, Pray thus. The Hearts of Jesus and Mary are attentive to the voice of your supplication.

This prayer, and the admonition of the angel, penetrated to the very core of their beings so that thereafter they spent much of their time in the pasture lands with their sheep, prostrate in adoration, repeating its salutation, homage and request over and over again.

Fortunately Lucia, having already suffered on account of the ready tongues of companions, strictly forbade her young cousins to speak to anyone of this encounter and they, despite their tender years, promised silence and maintained it.

It is right to admire their restraint yet there might be more subtle reasons for their silence than fear of Lucia and that is that their experience, like their intense prayer, though real, was unreal in their daily world. It could have been that on the level of the familiar they were inclined to forget, or at least compartmentalise it. They might have imagined, without specifically thinking it, that conversing with angels was not uncommon, but as nobody spoke about it, neither would they.

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 13th 1917

The 13th of June is the feast of St. Anthony, Portugal’s favourite son, and its patron. It is a time of festivity all over the land but if the adults of Aljustrel had thought the children would forget their claim to have promised to forego the celebrations on that date to return to the Cova da Iria, they were disappointed. The children evinced no interest in the activities associated with the saint. They grazed their sheep in the morning, penned them and then set out by different routes for the Cova. There they waited for their appointment beneath the shade of a great holm oak (the one that is still standing in the present-day Sanctuary) and reciting the Rosary with the 50 or so people from thereabouts who had joined them.

Promptly at midday they saw the flashes of approaching light. Then there was the Lady standing on the oak sapling, just as she had been a month before.

Lucia was the first to speak. She asked the same question she had asked in May. What do you want of me? Vossemecê again.

I wish you to come here on the 13th of next month, to pray the Rosary every day, and to learn to read. Later I will tell you what I want.

The first two of these injunctions had already been given in the first Apparition. To learn to read is a surprising but practical charge in as much as Lucia was to be Heaven’s instrument to communicate the Fatima message to the world.

Lucia asked for the cure of a sick person.

If he is converted he will be cured during the year.

Lucia’s next question, intriguingly, reveals something of the state of the children’s minds. The Lady had beguiled them; the God they saw themselves in when the rays from the Lady’s hands penetrated their hearts had beguiled them; heaven itself had beguiled them. The supernatural had kidnapped their every thought and affection. They had been promised heaven, had even been given a glimpse of it and now all else was insipid. They were hungry and there was no point in lingering outside the dining room when the food was already on the table.

I would like to ask you to take us to heaven.

This is not a spontaneous, “Please take us to heaven,” or an “I ask you to take us to heaven”. It is a planned question. The words have been carefully thought out, chosen, because everything depends on their reception. The children, one could almost wager, had spent a deal of time since the last Apparition formulating these words. They had no way of knowing, of course, that in their simplicity they had devised what could arguably be the most perfect of petitionary prayers - I would like to ask you to take us to heaven.

The Lady 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 those souls will be loved by God like flowers placed by me to adorn his throne.

The true beauty and magnificence of such a statement can only be apprehended here by deep meditation on the words, and only full appreciated when the promise itself is realised in heaven.

Am I to stay here alone? Not only is Lucia deprived of an early entry into the place where her heart is but she is to be separated from the two companions who have shared the divine experience. There could be no others, not if she searched every house in the world. In that sense she would be as alone as if she had been abandoned in a far galaxy. One is reminded of the trial of Joan of Arc when the belligerent Bishop Cauchon asked, “Did you see the Archangel and the attendant angels in the body, or in the spirit?” and Joan answered, “I saw them with the eyes of my body, just as I see you; and when they went away I cried because they did not take me with them.”

But the Lady answered, 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.

Comfort indeed, and endorsed immediately because, as in May, the Lady - I think we can say Our Lady now - opened her hands and communicated to the children the rays of the same intense light. Again they saw themselves immersed in God. “Jacinta and Francisco,” Lucia says, “seemed to be in that part of the light which rose towards heaven, and I in that which was poured out on the earth. 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.”

Because he couldn’t hear Our Lady’s words Francisco didn’t understand the significance of the Heart. He asked later, Why did Our Lady have a Heart in her hand, spreading out over the world that great light which is God? You were with Our Lady in the light which went down towards the earth, and Jacinta was with me in the light which rose towards heaven!

That is because you and Jacinta will soon go to heaven while I, with the Immaculate Heart of Mary, will remain for some time longer on earth. Note how there is no longer talk of Lucia being alone.

How many years longer will you stay here?

I don’t know. Quite a lot.

Was it Our Lady who said so?

Yes, and I saw it in the light that she shone into our hearts.

And Jacinta endorsed Lucia, It is just like that! That’s exactly how I saw it too!

Francisco said, These people are so happy just because you told them that Our Lady wants the Rosary said, and that you are to learn to read! How would they feel if they only knew what she showed to us in God, in her Immaculate Heart, in that great light! But this is a secret. It must not be spoken about. It is better that no one should know it.

From Chapter 15 commenting on Francisco after his death:

There is a tendency among devotees of Fatima to think of Jacinta as superior to Francisco, as if Francisco, although Jacinta’s elder brother, was spiritually a poor cousin who happened to be present when The Lady appeared to the girls, and has been borne along on the tide of the events ever since. “The Church is only beatifying Francisco,” some people seem to think, “because of Jacinta; she suffered longer and her body was incorrupt. By himself, Francisco would never be remembered.” It is as if the siblings were a double act with their agents squabbling over billing.

By himself Francisco would never have been remembered. No sweeter words could have been heard by the boy as he lay on his deathbed in the family cottage in Aljustrel, because the workings of grace had transformed his soul into a vessel such as centuries of contemplatives, of monks and nuns and a great army of lay folk, have striven and yearned and mortified themselves for - the bliss of being kidnapped by God.

The contemplative soul is not looking for a life of ease, for an on-going smorgasbord of spiritual delights. Nor is it looking for dark nights and great tempests of the soul, nor for a sweet disposition, friends, an aura of sanctity, martyrdom, canonisation. It is looking for its Creator to give itself to Him, a quest which would be futile and vainglorious except that the Creator wants it too, and runs the length of the universe to make Himself available. There He hovers under the guise of bread, offering love, a love so fearsome to the timid, flawed soul that it can only be caught in brief glimpses, yet so compelling that the soul is stunned to rapture.

Words like clever, entertaining, famous, haven’t got a entry in the contemplative’s lexicon. Fashion, excitement, novelty, are bizarre concepts. Love is the only word that identifies with The Word, the only word worth uttering and the only word worth listening to. To understand the motivation, the workings, the essence of contemplation, love is the word we must look up and ponder, but the only really satisfactory definition is in the loving.

Francisco, an illiterate peasant in ill-fitting trousers, who hadn’t reached adolescence and had never heard the word contemplative, met these criteria, through grace, and in doing so achieved that unique position his Creator had designed for him.

The more one studies Francisco the more clearly he comes into focus as a true contemplative. He couldn’t hear what the Lady said and expressed no desire to do so because for some reason she didn’t want him to. He didn’t fret about the reason; her will was enough and he abandoned himself to it. The insults, the disbelief, the misunderstanding of the neighbours no doubt affected him as much as they did Lucia and Jacinta but Lucia records no memorable comment from Francisco on the subject because, we might assume, he was too preoccupied in burning his humiliation as fuel to console the offended Jesus.

One lesson of Francisco’s life is his constant thinking of heaven, yearning for heaven, living, as it were, in heaven. If heaven is the goal, the boy seems to be saying, there is no point in wasting time dribbling the ball around centre field or cutting a smart figure before the spectators. The action takes place on the field of prayer, the rule book is found in the Mysteries of the Rosary. The Joyful Mysteries, home and village life, teach the tactics of humility. The Sorrowful Mysteries, the suffering, chosen and imposed, are the fight, but the Glorious are the object, the reason, the fulfilment of all. The goal justifies whatever takes place on the pitch; if your whole attention is focused there, everything else makes sense.

He never analyses. He senses love and in responding to this love he seems, in some extraordinary way, to disappear from view. His complete absence of worldly ambition, his own assumption that he is the least important of the seers, conforms with a mentality prescribed by St. Benedict for the formation of contemplatives.

Francisco´s lack of self interest together with his secret prayer life are of a piece with the prototypes of the Christian contemplative like Benedict Joseph Labre, Charles de Foucauld and Therésè Martin. The symptoms are the same. The thirst for solitude, the hours hidden camouflaged in prayer, the absorption in the Divine that goes unremarked by those around because of the veil of paradox, the veil that enables the contemplative to disappear into prayer, into the very wood of the cross, to contemplate the sun at midnight and to stake all on a Virgin with a child.

The symptoms are crystallised in the steps of humility as written down by Benedict for his monks:

when these steps have been mounted he acts now, not through fear of hell, but for the love of Christ, out of good habit and delight in virtue. All this Our Lord will work by the Holy Ghost in his servant.

Here we have the proof of the true contemplative, the touchstone of canonizable sanctity. Miracles and wonders aren’t often the province of the true contemplative. Should they be associated with him after his death this is but the joy God has of him, spilling over.

Leo Madigan/Fatima-Ophel Books - www.theotokos.org.uk/leomadigan