SORROWFUL MYSTERIES: The Shepherd Children of Fatima and the Fate of the Twentieth Century, by Stephen Harrigan
In 1917, the Virgin Mary visited three children in a field outside the village of Fatima, in central Portugal. For six months, Mary appeared regularly to the 10-year-old Lucia dos Santos and her younger cousins, Francisco and Jacinta Marto.
Dressed in white, she floated a few feet off the ground and spoke to the girls (Francisco could neither see nor hear Mary) about religion and politics, the Rosary, Russia and what it would take to end the First World War — spoiler: a lot of prayer. She also said that she would perform a public miracle in the field that October, “for all to see and believe.”
Or so the kids claimed. As Stephen Harrigan notes in “Sorrowful Mysteries,” his sober and engaging history-memoir about the supposed miracles at Fatima, these children were no strangers to visions. Just a year earlier, they’d reported a series of encounters with a transparent man who called himself the Angel of Peace.
Nor were such apparitions unusual for anxious young Catholics, as Harrigan attests from experience. He grew up Catholic in 1950s Texas, and he remembers convincing himself that a railroad spike he found on the playground must have been one of the nails that crucified Jesus. For him, as for Lucia, Francisco and Jacinta, Catholicism was “a feverish religion that helped to inflame a child’s already wild imaginings.”
Initially, the three children earned much mockery for their story, including from family members. (Lucia’s mother, certain she was lying, beat her with a broom.) By the October date Mary set for her miracle, however, some 60,000 people were curious enough to visit the field.
According to firsthand reports, something unusual did happen that day, though precisely what remains a matter of debate. Most people said it had something to do with the sun, which “looked like a plaque of dull silver,” or “spun like a fire wheel,” or dived toward earth like a meteor. This so-called solar prodigy was treated by many as validation of the children’s claims, and it wasn’t long before a cult of popular devotion to the Virgin of Fatima was born. (Never mind that no one else saw Mary in the field, or that she was evidently mistaken when she declared that World War I would end that same day.)
Harrigan suggests that the popularity of the Fatima cult was helped by a political battle between Catholic traditionalists and secular republicans that was raging in Portugal at the time. What earned the apparitions their worldwide fame, however — the reason he learned about them as a boy, and one of the reasons millions of people still visit Fatima each year — was a prophecy whose existence Lucia did not reveal until decades later, as a nun. (Her cousins died of the flu while they were still children.)
Although Mary had disclosed the prophecy in 1917, Lucia did not transcribe its contents until 1944. She sealed the account in an envelope with instructions that it not be opened until 1960, and gave it to her bishop, who eventually sent it along to the Vatican.
The mystery of the Fatima Letter, also known as the Third Part of the Secret, is the anguished heart of “Sorrowful Mysteries,” the hinge between Harrigan’s thoughtful (and appropriately skeptical) history of the alleged miracles and his own moving recollections about the terror he felt growing up in the double shadow of nuclear and theological apocalypse.
The letter’s contents seemed to the young Harrigan to be “the most important revelation that could ever occur in our lifetimes,” and that impression was only reinforced when a nun told him that the pope had “decided that what it said was so terrible that nobody could ever know, and put it right back in the envelope and sealed it up again.”
Except that wasn’t quite true. When Pope John XXIII did open the letter, in 1959, a few months ahead of schedule, he was apparently so unimpressed by its “abstruse locutions” that he sent it off to be buried in the Vatican archives. By then, however, it was too late to dispel the specter of a secret too horrible for public consumption.
Such was the letter’s grip on a certain kind of Catholic psychology that when the Vatican finally released its text in 2000 — a short and anticlimactic “mystical word stew,” as Harrigan describes it — conspiracists insisted that the church must have suppressed part of Mary’s prophecy.
Harrigan, who admits he never derived much spiritual or intellectual nourishment from his lapsed Catholicism, wonders near the end of “Sorrowful Mysteries” how “rational people” could accept the suggestion that a divine message meant to warn about a world-shattering catastrophe would be delivered by such convoluted means.
But, of course, he’s known since elementary school. As his own childhood fears about the Fatima Letter demonstrate, it’s precisely their evasions that give religious secrets the power to seize the imagination.
SORROWFUL MYSTERIES: The Shepherd Children of Fatima and the Fate of the Twentieth Century | By Stephen Harrigan | Knopf | 239 pp. | $28
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