Message of Fatima

Heather Ramos, an eighth-grade student at St. Joseph School in Alice, was selected to crown the Blessed Virgin Mary on the Feast of Our Lady of Fatima. Father Chris Becerra celebrated a Feast Mass.

In a world where we see wars being played out on the evening news, threats of terrorism both foreign and domestic, and where the faithful are challenged and vilified by a secular society, the message of Fatima is still relevant today. Increasingly we live in a society that does not know God or that keeps him at arm’s length. 

Our Lady’s messages to the three shepherd children, Lucia de Jesus Santos, and her first cousins, Francisco and Jacinta Marto, are messages to bring us closer to God and help us understand our duty to pray for people to know and love God better.  

On May 13, the faithful around the world celebrates the beginning of Our Lady’s visitations to the three little shepherd children in Fatima, Portugal. These visitations took place on May 13, 1917, and continued until October of the same year. Our Lady has always worked to bring people closer to God. Therefore, it stands to reason that the messages of Fatima would ask us to put God first in our lives, make reparation for our sins, pray the rosary each day for peace in the world so that all will know and love God.

At this point in history, our world had been enduring World War I for three years and reeling from the loss of life. Although the end of the war was on the horizon, the global pandemic of 1919 would soon be spreading. The Russians who had begun a civil war would soon establish a communist nation. Our Lady’s appearance and the miracles that followed were God’s means of showing his love for the world, a world that had lost its way and needed to be turned from the path it was on.  

The visitation of Our Lady of Fatima exhorts us to return to God, to prayer, and to make reparation for the souls in purgatory. Our Lady of Fatima is still asking us to do those things. She is still pleading with us. She is still waiting for us to make things right with God so that our world will come back to the love of the Father. We need only to heed her message. In asking us to recite the rosary every day, Our Lady of Fatima also asked us to pray the following prayer after each decade of the rosary, “O My Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of Hell and lead all souls to Heaven, especially those who are in most need of Thy mercy.”

As we see the strife in the world around us and our own recent pandemic, let us turn to Our Lady of Fatima and heed her call to prayer. Let us not forget what happened over 100 years ago in a small village in Portugal but take up the power of the rosary and pray fervently.