by Albert Jack
… the astonished eyes of these people, whose attitude takes us back to biblical times and who were white-faced with shock and with their heads uncovered, facing the blue sky. The sun has trembled, the sun has made sudden movements that were outside all cosmic laws—the sun has “danced,” according to the typical expression of the country people. Covered with dust on the running board of the bus from Torres Novas, an old man recites the Creed, from beginning to end. I ask who it is and they tell me it is Joao Maria Amado de Melo.
I see him later talking to those around him, who still have their hats on, begging them strongly to take them off in the presence of such an extraordinary demonstration of the existence of God. Identical scenes are repeated in other places and a woman shouts, bathed in tears and almost suffocated, “What a shame! There are still men who don't take off their hats in the presence of such a miracle.”
And next they ask each other if they have seen it or not. Most confess that they have seen the dancing of the sun but others, however, declare they have seen the smiling face of the Virgin herself. They swear that the sun spun about itself like a ring of fireworks and that it came down almost to the point of burning the Earth with its rays. Some say that they saw it change color. It was about three in the afternoon.
De Almeida claimed to have witnessed the whole event, but the photographer standing next to him, Judah Ruah, nephew of the famous shutterbug Joshua Benoliel, said he saw nothing at all. When asked why, he replied, “because nothing strange happened to the sun. But when I saw all those people kneeling I understood something to be happening and so I photographed them instead.”
Another journalist, from the Lisbon newspaper O Dia, reported:
The silver sun, enveloped in the same gauzy gray light, was seen to whirl and turn in the circle of broken clouds. The light turned a beautiful blue, as if it had come through the stained-glass windows of a cathedral, and spread itself over the people who knelt with outstretched hands. People wept and prayed with uncovered heads in the presence of the miracle they had awaited. The seconds seemed like hours, so vivid were they.
An eminent eye surgeon, Dr. Domingos Pinto Coelho, recorded that “the sun, in one moment was surrounded with scarlet flame and at another aureoled in yellow and deep purple. It seemed to be in an exceedingly fast and whirling movement, at times appearing to be loosened from the sky and to be approaching the earth and strongly radiating heat.” There can be little doubt his eyes were not deceiving him (or they shouldn't have been at any rate). Another medical man, Dr. Almeida Garrett of Coimbra, wrote that “the sun, whirling wildly, seemed to loosen itself from the firmament and advance threateningly upon the earth as if to crush us with its huge and fiery weight. The sensation was terrible.” And another learned individual, Dr. Formigao, a professor at the seminary at Santorem, noted that “suddenly the rain stopped. The clouds were wrenched apart and the sun appeared in all its splendor. Then it began to revolve on its axis like the most magnificent fire wheel that we could imagine, taking all the colors of the rainbow and sending forth multicolored flashes of light, producing the most astounding effect.”
With an estimated one hundred thousand people present, the weight of witness evidence is overwhelming. This, coupled with the children's ability to predict the event to within a few hours, proved to many people that they truly had experienced a miracle. Even so, a careful examination of individual statements reveals many contradictions. In some the sun looked like a “ball of snow” and in others an opaque disc. Some reports state the sun was “dancing” and in others that it was zigzagging. Some witnesses believed it actually touched the earth's surface, while others failed to see it move at all. There have been statements claiming columns of fine blue smoke, and others describing how the very air seemed to change color. Everybody claims to have witnessed the miracle at the same time and simultaneously let out either a roar or loud gasp that echoed around the valley, but the timing of the reports varies from between midday and dusk.
The only connecting theme is that most people saw something happen at around the same time and on the same afternoon. But scientific records contain no reports from anywhere in the world of unusual astronomical or solar activity. This is strange, because even if there had been a natural reason for the phenomenon, such as a cloud of dust from the Sahara Desert or unusual atmospheric gases, as has been suggested, then astronomers would have recorded these. That is exactly what happened when stratospheric dust made the sun appear to be blue and red to the people of China in 1983, or when the blue moon was seen for two years after the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883.
It is hard to believe that so many well-educated and rational people could either make their story up or be fooled by what might amount to a vast con trick. But for those who claim some sort of collective hallucination at Fatima, there is the evidence of witness reports from as far away as thirty miles from people going about their normal business.
Some years later, in 1931, Lucia claimed Jesus himself had visited her in Rianxo, Galicia, to teach her two new prayers and he had given her a message for the pope. Soon afterward the Catholic Church added its considerable weight to the debate by announcing they were “approving the visions as worthy of belief.” So, with the official stamp of approval from the Vatican, the Blessed Virgin as she appeared at Cova da Iria became known throughout the world as Our Lady of Fatima. By then little Lucia de Jesus Rosa dos Santos had become Sister Lucia of Jesus, following her ordination as a Carmelite nun.
In 1942, as the Second World War was at its bloodiest, Sister Lucia finally decided to reveal the first of the secrets confided in her by the Virgin Mary all those years ago. The first was a terrifying vision of Hell, which she recorded in her third memoir, published toward the end of that year:
Our Lady showed us a great sea of fire which seemed to be beneath the earth. Plunged in this fire were demons and souls in human form, like transparent burning embers, all blackened or burnished bronze, floating about in the conflagration, now raised into the air by the flames that issued from within themselves together with great clouds of smoke, now falling back on every side like sparks in a huge fire, without weight or equilibrium, and all the time the shrieks and groans of pain and despair, which horrified us and made us tremble with fear. The demons could be distinguished by their terrifying and repulsive likeness to frightful and unknown animals, all black and transparent.
Fortunately, as she goes on, “This vision lasted but an instant. How can we ever be grateful enough to our kind heavenly Mother, who had already prepared us by promising, during the first Apparition, to take us to heaven? Otherwise, I think we would have died of fear and terror.”
The second secret included Mary's instructions on how to save souls from Hell and convert the world to Christianity:
You have seen hell where the souls of poor sinners go. To save them, God wishes to establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart. If what I say to you is done, many souls will be saved and there will be peace in the world. The war is going to end, but if people do not cease offending God, a worse one will break out during the Pontificate of Pius XI. When you see a night illumined by an unknown light, know that this is the great sign given to you by God that he is about to punish the world for its crimes by means of war, famine, and persecutions of the Church and of the Holy Father. To prevent this, I shall come to ask for the consecration of Russia to my Immaculate Heart and the Communion of Reparation on the First Saturdays. If my requests are heeded, Russia will be converted and there will be peace. If not, she will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church. The good will be martyred; the Holy Father will have much to suffer and various nations will be annihilated. In the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph. The Holy Father will consecrate Russia to me, and she shall be converted and a period of peace will be granted to the world.
All of you who find the timing and content of this revelation suspicious, what with it coming in the middle of a “worse” war an
d during Pope Pius's reign (even if it was Pius XII rather than XI by this time), will be struck down by the next bolt of lightning. But come on! This is a serious matter. The Catholic Church actually approved the visions as “worthy of belief,” and granted them genuine, bona fide miracle status, eleven years before revealing one of the three big “secrets” with its anti-Russian warning. Are they really expecting us to believe the Virgin Mary visited three young peasant children in Portugal in 1917 to warn the world about something as specific and politically biased as the threat from Russia in twenty-five years’ time?
For reasons best known to themselves, Vatican officials refused to release the third secret until the late 1990s, when Pope John Paul II finally unveiled Sister Lucia's (somewhat disjointed) account:
After the two parts which I have already explained, at the left of Our Lady and a little above, we saw an angel with a flaming sword in his left hand. Flashing, it gave out flames that looked as though they would set the world on fire; but they died out in contact with the splendor that Our Lady radiated toward him from her right hand: pointing to the earth with his right hand, the Angel cried out in a loud voice: “Penance, Penance, Penance!” And we saw in an immense light that is God: “something similar to how people appear in a mirror when they pass in front of it,” a Bishop dressed in White, “we had the impression that it was the Holy Father.” Other Bishops, Priests, men and women Religious [sic] going up a steep mountain, at the top of which there was a big Cross of rough-hewn trunks as of a cork-tree with the bark [sic]; reaching there the Holy Father passed through a big city half in ruins and half trembling with halting step, afflicted with pain and sorrow, he prayed for the souls of the corpses he met on his way; having reached the top of the mountain, on his knees at the foot of the big Cross he was killed by a group of soldiers who fire [sic] bullets and arrows at him, and in the same way there died, one after another, the other Bishops, Priests, men and women Religious, and various lay people of different ranks and positions. Beneath the two arms of the Cross there were two Angels each with a crystal aspersorium [a vessel for holding holy water] in his hand, in which they gathered up the blood of the Martyrs and with it sprinkled the souls that were making their way to God.
It is said that Pope John Paul II believed that the text refers to the attempt on his life in St. Peter's Square by Mehmet Ali Agca in 1981, while others have suggested it is a prediction of the end of the world. I, to be honest, can make neither head nor tail of it.
In 1946, Sister Lucia joined the Convent of the Carmelite Sisters at Coimbra, where she remained until her death on February 13, 2005, passing away shortly before her ninety-eighth birthday. During her lifetime she wrote six memoirs and two books. The day of her funeral, February 15, was declared a national day of mourning, even disrupting political campaigning for the Portuguese parliamentary elections a few days later. Before she died, Sister Lucia claimed to have seen her “pretty lady from Heaven” many times throughout her lifetime, although nobody else ever witnessed or corroborated her claims. I wish I could. In fact I only wish the Blessed Virgin would appear round here. We could do with a few heavenly visitations to pep things up a bit.
The events in Fatima during 1917 have never been fully explained and remain as mysterious today as they did in the beginning. Nobody knows what happened, although everybody agrees that something did. I find it hard to completely rule out the appearance of some sort of vision or natural phenomenon occurring near Fatima on those four separate occasions because that would suggest that around one hundred thousand people were either mentally ill, deluded, or simply lying. The sightings were, however, made in the midst of the Great War, when things looked particularly gloomy. Perhaps people so badly needed evidence of something spiritual, some proof of divine interest in them, that they were able to convince themselves that they had witnessed something rather more impressive than they actually had. After all, the famous incident of the Angels of Mons (the supposedly supernatural force of ghostly warriors that intervened to help protect British forces at the crucial moment in the battle of Mons), which had happened only a couple of years earlier, is commonly considered now to be a mixture of morale-boosting prop aganda and hallucinations on the part of sleep-deprived soldiers. And we have seen how it is possible to create an illusion on a huge scale, as evidenced by the way in which magician David Copperfield made the Statue of Liberty appear to vanish before the eyes of millions of people, and yet we know it didn't really go anywhere.
So that leaves us with one final question. Even without the assistance of “magic,” is such mass deception otherwise possible— convincing a vast group of people to believe in the same lie at roughly the same time? Anybody would have to hesitate before saying yes. But then you think of Tony Blair's second and third election victories and you realize that of course it's possible; in fact it's surprisingly easy. Or to quote Abraham Lincoln, it's perfectly feasible to “fool all of the people some of the time.”
Did Louis-Charles, heir to the French throne,
really survive or was someone just pretending?
After the French royal family had been cut down to size—by the guillotine-wielding revolution aries in 1793—a story about Louis-Charles, eldest son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette and heir to the throne, quickly spread throughout Europe.
According to the official version of events, the eight-year-old had been separated from his parents and elder sister at the Temple prison in Paris and had been incarcerated on his own in an attempt to prevent loyalists from rescuing the boy and reestablishing the monarchy. To make the point that he was now just one of the people, his captors called him “Louis Capet”—after his ancestor Hugh Capet, founder of the royal dynasty, but also as a deliberate insult, as royalty tend not to use surnames—and set him to work as a cobbler's assistant. The former dauphin was also forced to sing revolutionary songs, drink alcohol, and curse his mother and father. He remained in prison for two years, dying of tuberculosis in 1795.
But when his death was announced, a story circulated the courts of Europe that soldiers loyal to the king had substituted a dying peasant boy for the royal lad and he had been spirited away to safety and to await his coming of age and a suitable moment to retake the throne. It was suggested that the dauphin might have been smuggled out in a bathtub: a guard claimed that one of the men carrying a tub of water from the dauphin's room stumbled and the cry of a young boy could clearly be heard.
The doctor who performed the autopsy on the dead boy removed his heart, as was common at the time when a member of the royal family had died, and pickled it in alcohol—presumably to keep the royal livers company on the shelf. Ten years later, one of his students stole the jar and kept it hidden until his own death, when his wife sent it to the archbishop of Paris.
In 1814—shortly before Napoleon, escaping from exile in 1815, was thoroughly routed by the Duke of Wellington (not relevant at all to the story, but I like to remind people anyway)— the Bourbon monarchy was restored in the person of Louis XVIII, brother of Louis-Charles, or Louis XVII as he would have been. At the time, hundreds of claimants to the throne, all professing to be the “lost dauphin,” arrived in Paris from all over Europe, some from as far away as Canada, South Africa, and the Seychelles.
Of these only one seemed plausible to many royalists, a German clockmaker by the name of Charles-Guillaume Naundorff, who had mysteriously appeared in Berlin during 1810, seemingly from nowhere. His claim was sup ported by proof that his age matched the birth date of the real dauphin, but very little else could be established as he had no birth certificate and no proof of who his parents were. Some claimed him to be the son of Marie Antoinette and her lover Axel de Fersen, while others dismissed him as an impostor, and he never managed to establish a true claim to the French throne. Nonetheless, his death certificate, issued in Holland, named him as Louis-Charles of Bourbon, Duke of Normandy, the correct form of address known only in royal circles. His tomb in Holland bears the inscription: “Here lies Louis XVII,
Charles Louis, Duke of Normandy, King of France and of Navarre.” Subsequent forensic and DNA testing of his remains have proved inconclusive, however.
The pickled heart many believe to be that of Louis XVII passed through several hands between 1830 and 1975, when it was finally laid to rest in the royal crypt in the Saint Denis Basilica, close to the remains of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Even then, there was a challenge to its authenticity by one of the descendants of Naundorff, his great-great-grandson Charles Louis Edmond de Bourbon, who fought to assert his claim to the title of prince. To this day nobody has satisfactorily confirmed whether Naundorff was in fact a prince or a prat, or if there is much difference anyway.
