World Apostolate of Fatima England and Wales
Russia and Portugal: Two Spiritual Symbols in the Message of Fatima
This summer I visited my nephew and his family, partly to help with childcare for their 5 year-old-son and 3 year-old-daughter. I quickly learnt that the school summer holidays can be something of a marathon for many parents! I visited just a few days after the partial solar eclipse seen in the skies over Britain on 12th August. My nephew’s son had obviously been wonder-struck by this experience and so most of the games he invented for us to play were all about the eclipse (or the ‘calypso’ as he called it!). For example, we set out all his toys on the carpet – a surreal selection of plastic dinosaurs, rubber snakes and cuddly toys – so that they were all facing the same direction, with me sat in the middle. Then the toys were all given imaginary protective glasses (I got the real ones) and my nephew’s son turned on his big torch shining into all of our eyes, before he moved an orange slowly across the beam thus creating his own ‘calypso’ in his living room. It was quite a sophisticated scientific experiment for a 5-year-old! I thought of this little boy’s awe and wonder, when I sat down to write this article. The extraordinary phenomenon of the solar eclipse had awakened in him a whole new imaginative universe, transporting him out of the everyday and the familiar. How much more so the 70,000 plus people who witnessed the Miracle of the Sun at Fatima on 13th October 1917! So powerful and life-changing was their shared experience, that many present that day immediately saw the need to record the testimonies of different eye-witnesses, so that their vivid accounts could convey to others something of what they had all witnessed. Over a century later, their words bring alive for us the miracle they experienced. Firstly, the words of one who already had faith in the truth of the 3 shepherd children’s stories of the apparitions of the beautiful Lady – Ti Marto, father of Jacinta and Francisco and often called “the first believer” of Fatima:
