Fatima is a mass devotion built on the testimony of three illiterate children, one of whom lived another eighty-eight years and kept adding to it. Both halves of that sentence matter.
1917
Lucia dos Santos, aged ten, and her cousins Francisco and Jacinta Marto, aged nine and seven, reported six apparitions of a woman above a holm oak at the Cova da Iria, on the thirteenth of each month from 13 May to 13 October 1917.
The setting is easily forgotten. Portugal was governed by an aggressively anticlerical First Republic which had disestablished the church and expelled religious orders. The local administrator arrested the three children in August, held them, and by their account threatened them; they did not retract. The strongest evidence that something happened to these children is not the sun, it is that three young children under real pressure from hostile authority told a consistent story.
The sun
A crowd variously estimated in the tens of thousands assembled in the rain on 13 October 1917. Many present reported that the sun spun, changed colour, or appeared to plunge towards the earth. Several secular newspapers, including the anticlerical O Seculo, reported the crowd's reaction.
What can be said honestly:
- the crowd's experience is well attested, including by hostile witnesses, and is not in serious doubt
- the accounts are not consistent with one another as to what was seen, and some present reported seeing nothing unusual
- no astronomical observatory anywhere recorded any solar anomaly, and an event of the kind described would have been global
- proposed natural explanations include retinal effects from staring at the sun through thin cloud after heavy rain, and meteorological optics
So the honest formulation is that a very large number of people had a powerful shared visual experience, and that the sun did not move. Whether the first requires the second is the question, and the atlas does not answer it.
The bishop of Leiria declared the apparitions worthy of belief in 1930. That formula is worth understanding precisely: the Catholic Church does not require belief in any private revelation, including this one, and approval means only that the content contains nothing contrary to faith and that devotion is permitted.
The secrets
Lucia recorded three "secrets": not in 1917, but over decades, at the direction of her superiors, the third written in 1944.
- First, a vision of hell
- Second, a prediction of a worse war, and the request for the consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart
- Third, withheld. Its scheduled disclosure in 1960 did not happen, and its content became one of the most productive rumour mills of twentieth-century Catholicism, variously said to foretell apostasy at the top of the church, nuclear war, or the end of the world
The Holy See published the text in 2000, together with a commentary by the then Cardinal Ratzinger interpreting the vision, a bishop in white struck down before a cross on a hill of corpses, as referring to the sufferings of the church in the twentieth century and to the 1981 attempt on John Paul II's life.
A persistent body of opinion holds that the published text is incomplete and that an accompanying explanatory text by Lucia exists and was withheld. The Holy See denies it. There is no way to settle this from outside, and the dispute has produced a durable traditionalist subculture organised around it.
The children
Francisco died in 1919 and Jacinta in 1920, both in the influenza pandemic, both as children, both having said they had been told they would die young. They were canonised in 2017, the youngest non-martyrs ever canonised.
Lucia became a Carmelite nun, lived until 2005, and was the sole surviving witness for eighty-five years. That is a genuine methodological problem and should be stated: most of what is known about Fatima in detail, including the secrets, comes from memoirs she wrote decades after the events, at the request of superiors who already believed. It does not follow that she invented anything. It does follow that Fatima's documentary record is not the record of 1917.