Our Lady of Fatima

Our Lady of Fatima, kept on 13 May, commemorates the apparitions reported in 1917 by three shepherd children, Lucia dos Santos and her cousins Francisco and Jacinta Marto, at Fatima in Portugal, over six months and drawing large crowds, culminating in the reported "miracle of the sun" witnessed by a crowd in October. The messages, centred on prayer, penance and the rosary, and on a call to consecrate Russia, gave the devotion a strongly twentieth-century and political cast.

The "three secrets of Fatima", written down by Lucia years later, became one of the most discussed items in modern Catholic piety: a vision of hell, a prophecy read against the rise of Soviet communism and a coming war, and a third part withheld until the Vatican published it in 2000, interpreting it in connection with the 1981 attempt on the life of John Paul II. The apparitions and their political reading have been contested inside and outside the church, and historians treat the development of the secrets and their disclosure as a case study in how a devotion is shaped over decades. The shrine is a major pilgrimage centre and the day a national observance in Portugal.

Contemporary reports of the October 1917 event later called the miracle of the sun are notably inconsistent with each other: some of the tens of thousands present described the sun visibly spinning, changing colour and appearing to plunge toward the earth, while other witnesses in the same crowd, including some reporters present specifically to investigate the promised sign, reported seeing nothing unusual at all, a documented divergence in eyewitness testimony that historians studying the event treat as significant in itself, whatever explanation is eventually preferred for what did or did not happen in the sky.

Sceptical explanations proposed by scientists and historians since include temporary retinal effects from a large crowd staring directly at the sun for an extended period, optical phenomena caused by thin cloud or atmospheric moisture, and a degree of mass suggestion among a crowd primed by weeks of publicity to expect a specific promised miracle at a specific time and place, while believers point to the sheer number of independent witnesses and the physical drying of ground that had been soaked by rain shortly beforehand as details a purely psychological explanation does not obviously account for; the church's own approval of the Fatima devotion has never required settling this specific empirical question, treating the broader apparitions and their message as the substance of the approved devotion rather than resting church approval on any particular physical account of the crowd's shared experience that day.