Fatima – understanding the apparitions - Part 2

Catholic Homilies by Fr Linus Clovis

Always we begin by invoking the Holy Spirit, so that He Himself might speak to us. So that He brings to our minds the light of understanding. Come Holy Spirit fill the hearts of the faithful… Our Lady seat of Wisdom… Well welcome to this second talk on Fatima and our times, in which I first of all intended to do give a description and a meaning to many of the individual details that occurred when Our Lady came to Fatima. But there are so many and some of them are so interesting, that I decided to focus on two or three aspects of this. As I mentioned the last time, Our Lady came to Fatima in 1917 on six successive months. There was a seventh month when she came, that was twice in August. The reason, the children had been kidnapped. Then she promised she would come a seventh time, which she did, but much later. In the apparitions, the children, in May, were looking after their sheep when Our Lady came. They had resolved to say nothing about it, but Jacinta couldn’t keep quite and told her parents and news began to spread. By June, there were fifty people at the Cova with the children. Then the following month, July, there were two to three thousand. In August five, six or even seven thousand. In September, more than nine thousand. On the 13th October, the crowd was estimated at more than seventy thousand people. We are talking about a public event a public miracle and because it is public, because there are so many witnesses, it’s the main reason why we take it so seriously. It is not a case of some holy or some not so holy person having a vision and saying they had a vision even though it’s true, but rather a public miracle and a public event where there were tens of thousands of witnesses, so this gives Fatima a place of credence of its own. There were many signs associated with the arrival and departure of Our Lady. Among the signs, the first was a flash of light, the children initially thought it was lightening. Then when the crowds started to gather there was a clap of thunder. Many people saw a globe light descend from the East. This is one of the details I would like to spend some time on later. Our Lady always came from the East and returned to the East. This was seen by many people, everybody agreed that just before the apparitions the atmosphere, the air cooled. This happened in summer when it was exceedingly hot just before noon… For Fr. Linus’ complete homily please listen to the Audio.