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On the Feast of Our Lady of Fatima

Katherine Arcement, writing in the Washington Post two years ago today, which marked the centenary of the first Marian apparition in Fatima:

The Virgin Mary appeared to the children on May 13, 1917 as “a lady dressed in white, shining brighter than the sun, giving out rays of clear and intense light,” dos Santos wrote. She promised to come to the children on the 13th of each month.

Jacinta told her mother about it. While her siblings joked about the apparition, her alarmed mother hauled her in front of their parish priest to recant. She would not.

News of the visions spread by word of mouth, and the following month a small crowd waited with the children to witness the second apparition June 13. At the third sighting, on July 13, the children said the Virgin Mary revealed three secrets to them about the future.

Interest in what was happening in Fatima grew more intense.

On Aug. 13, the children were taken into custody by a state bureaucrat, who took them by car to Vila Nova de Ourem in hopes of getting them to recant their testimonies. Again, they would not.

Thousands of people began streaming to Cova da Iria, the site of the Virgin Mary apparitions. On Sept. 13, 30,000 people were present when dos Santos said the Virgin Mary told her, “In October I will perform a miracle so that all may believe.”

On that day, Oct. 13, 1917, the crowd of believers had swelled to 70,000.
About 2 p.m., some began to see what later became known in the Catholic Church as “the Miracle of the Sun.” The rains that had plagued the day ceased, and the sun emerged from behind clouds to spin and tremble for 10 minutes.

“Before the astonished eyes of the crowd, whose aspect was biblical as they stood bareheaded, eagerly searching the sky, the sun trembled, made sudden incredible movements outside all cosmic laws — the sun ‘danced’ according to the typical expression of the people,” reported O Seculo, a Lisbon newspaper.

The strange phenomena included odd colors.

“Looking at the sun, I noticed that everything was becoming darkened. I looked first at the nearest objects and then extended my glance further afield as far as the horizon. I saw everything had assumed an amethyst color. Objects around me, the sky and the atmosphere, were of the same color. Everything both near and far had changed, taking on the color of old yellow damask,” said José Maria de Almeida Garrett, a science professor from Coimbra, Portugal, who was at the scene.

Onlookers from as far as 25 miles away noted the strange phenomena in the sky.

Following this event, the crowd and grounds, which had been soaked by those heavy rains, were, suddenly, bone-dry.

Of course, purely naturalistic theories have been proffered for the Miracle of the Sun, like this one, which, depending on one’s point of view, might require more faith to believe than that an actual miracle had occurred. Theories like these assume extreme gullibility on the part of those in attendance, including the secular publications which reported on these phenomena.

It should also be noted that the children were also threatened with physical torture by authorities (being boiled in oil) in an attempt to get them to recant, which they did not.

At any rate, it should be noted that no Catholic is required to believe in any Marian apparition — even those, like Fatima, Lourdes, and Guadalupe, that have been approved by the Church as worthy of belief. Why? Because they fall under the category of private revelation, whereas Catholics are only bound to believe in public revelation. Despite the fact that there have been public aspects to the events at Lourdes (the existence of the spring and healings), Guadalupe (the miraculous tilma), and, of course, Fatima, the associated supernatural apparitions and revelations were made to certain individuals. (I happen to think that there is convincing evidence to believe in these apparitions, but I’m not troubled if friends remain, for now, unconvinced).

Speaking of centenaries, this coming Monday, May 18th, marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Pope St John Paul II, a towering figure of the 20th century who held that Our Lady of Fatima personally intervened to thwart the assassination attempt on his life made on this day in 1981. In fact, the Pontiff had the bullet, which came within millimetres of ending his life, placed within the crown of the statue of Our Lady of Fatima.

This frightening event was interpreted as the fulfillment of the “Third Secret” of Fatima which had been revealed to the children. The “First Secret” had to do with the end of WWI and the even greater destruction of WWII to follow; the “Second Secret” was a prophecy about the rise of Communism and the Soviet empire — an empire that John Paul II played a major role in dismantling.

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George Weigel: The Vandals Sack Rome…Again

George Weigel, writing in Catholic World Report on what amounts to a total demolition of the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and the Family in Rome:

There is a history here, and it’s worth revisiting in order to get the destruction underway into clearer focus.

Despite the global media addiction to the “liberal/conservative” trope for analyzing the Second Vatican Council and the debates following it, the really consequential division after the Council (which, as several conciliar theologians’ diaries attest, began to open up during the Council’s third and fourth periods) was between two groups of previously-allied reformist theologians, one group of which seemed determined to embrace intellectual modernity and its sundry skepticisms in full, while the other was committed to ballasting authentic Catholic reform by grounding theological development in the Church’s living tradition. This “War of the Conciliar Succession” (as I call it in my forthcoming book, The Irony of Modern Catholic History) was no mere donnybrook among intellectuals; it had real consequences in the life of the Catholic Church.

And:

Resistance to the magisterium of John Paul II (a magisterium that was influenced, of course, by then-Cardinal Ratzinger) was deep-seated and bitter among those self-styled progressives who imagined that they had won the War of the Conciliar Succession and yet suddenly found themselves, after the second conclave of 1978, on the outs in the great game of ecclesiastical politics – even though they continued to maintain an iron grip on most theological faculty appointments and on a lot of theological publishing. John Paul II’s response to this recalcitrance and intellectual pride was not to attack it head-on, purging progressivist faculty from the Roman universities. Rather, his strategy was to encourage newer and dynamically orthodox foundations like the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross (now, arguably, the most intellectually interesting of the Roman schools), and to create new institutes of higher learning in existing universities.

In both cases, the goal was to foster the genuine renewal of Catholic theology according to the mind of Vatican II – and not according to the minds of Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Karl Marx. Reversing Gresham, John Paul II was quietly confident that good coinage – good theology – would eventually drive out bad ethical coinage, for the latter was bankrupting human lives and leading people into confusion and misery.

The John Paul II Institute for Marriage and the Family was the linchpin in this effort to create vibrant alternatives to Catholic Lite scholarship, which had become increasingly bizarre when John Paul II came to the Chair of Peter. (In the United States, for example, the prestigious Catholic Theological Society of America commissioned a mid-1970s study of human sexuality that could not quite bring itself to condemn bestiality as intrinsically evil.) And over its first decades of work, the John Paul II Institute did exactly what its papal founder wanted it to do: it helped foster a renaissance in Catholic moral theology, recovering and developing the tradition of virtue ethics, exploring with care and compassion the often-tangled issues of living chaste love in various vocations, and creating a cadre of moral theologians around the world who wanted their intellectual work to help convert the late-modern and post-modern worlds, rather than pandering to late-modernity and post-modernity as they careened into decadence and incoherence.

The whole piece is well worth your time. Disturbing developments, to say the least. The speed at which all of this has taken place — especially the immediate dismissal of all senior faculty and cancellation of fundamental moral theology courses — is frightening, and must be a great shock to Weigel personally, who of course served as the main biographer of St John Paul II (Witness to Hope, The End and the Beginning). The establishment of the Institute, along with its satellite locations abroad, was one of the great accomplishments of the John Paul II papacy. I’m sure Weigel never imagined that, only 15 years after the Pope’s death, it would effectively cease to exist. Make no mistake: this isn’t a mere tweaking — it’s a teardown.

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My CTV News interview on the Pope is online

Screen Shot 2013-02-22 at 11.36.38 AMHi Everybody, just a note to let you know you can watch the interview I had tonight with Scott Laurie of CTV News about all things papal online here!

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The Theology of the Body in Genesis

Today’s First Reading at Mass was taken from Genesis. It features what Pope John Paul II would call the key to understanding what came to be known as the “Theology of the Body”, John Paul’s legendary catechesis on human sexuality and embodiment.

This key is the phrase, “The man and his wife were both naked, and felt no shame”. Why is this so crucial? To understand, we must revisit an earlier work of Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II, “Love and Responsibility”. The key thought in this book is that to love is the very opposite of what it means to use someone. Love is a total gift of oneself. This is exactly what Adam and Eve experienced before the Fall. The very pattern if their bodies demanded that they seek to be a self-gift to the beloved.

But after sin entered the world, lust entered the world. Adam and Eve instinctively cover themselves (prior to this, they had not even realized they were naked) with fig leaves (the original “Fruit of the Loom” underwear). Why? Christopher West, a well-known commentator on the TOB, puts it this way. Lust is sexual desire, devoid of the love of God. It is sexual desire (which is good and God-given in itself) misdirected. It is a desire which no longer seeks to give oneself completely to the beloved, but to take, to use the other as a mere object.

The cross of Christ is the very opposite of this. It is by contemplating the crucifix, and the supreme self-offering of the New Adam, Jesus, to his bride, the Church, that we understand what love truly is. And it is from the power of the cross that we derive, through the sacraments, the strength to imitate that love.

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Understanding the Creation Accounts in Genesis

Creation in GenesisPope John XXIII, before he was elected Pontiff, served as a diplomat. One evening, he was introduced at a function to a rather scantily clad woman.  “Here”, the future Pope said to her, “Why not take a bite from this apple?” The lady looked at him quizzically. He responded, “If you eat it, perhaps, like Eve, your eyes will be opened and you will realize you are naked!”

The Old Testament readings at Mass these days have been selected from Genesis. They deal with the origins of man and woman, nakedness and fig leaves, good and evil.  There are several things we as Catholics need to understand about this book, and one of them is this:

The first three chapters of Genesis deals with the creation of the world from a poetic perspective.

Now, before anyone asks, I want to get one thing straight: the Bible contains real history. The Gospels, for example – biographies of the life of Jesus, who truly lived and died and rose again on planet earth. The Acts of the Apostles – the history of the early Church. There are, of course, many historical books of the Old Testament as well.

A key to biblical interpretation is this: understand the genre that you are reading. You don’t read poetry (Like the Song of Solomon) as you would a historical narrative.  The problem with Genesis is that it is a hybrid of history and poetry (the first three chapters on Creation).

Catholics don’t run into the same sort of problems that some non-Catholic Christians do in dealing with creation from a scientific perspective (i.e. the young-earth theory, creation in six literal days, etc.). We see no conflict between faith and science. Some of the greatest scientists in the world were Catholics. A great number of craters on the moon, for example, are named for Jesuit scientist-priests who discovered them.

Science only describes how things work in God’s creation. But it can’t tell you the whys – the reason for our existence, and that of everything else. Genesis 1-3 does exactly that, using poetry. Genesis 1-3 is not a scientific document, or a documentary on how God created the universe and humanity. We know that it isn’t, for one simple reason (and there are more): the writer or writers of Genesis weren’t there, “in the beginning” to take notes!

But poetry can also communicate God’s truth, just as history can.

Christopher West, who has written so extensively on Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, has a great way of explaining this: He says that there’s a big difference between what an optometrist (a scientist) tells you when looking in your eyes, and what your lover tells you when doing the same thing – unless, of course, you’re in love with your optometrist! But what both are seeing is true – just from different perspectives.

The writer of Genesis was a lover who sees the deep truths of why God made the world – and us. It was so that we could be in relationship with him.

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