—With the author’s permission, the following excerpts from Fatima: The Signs and Secrets (the newest best-seller on Fatima, available in glossy-cover paperback and Kindle), serve as the Introduction to this edition.
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How did the Fatima apparitions begin? Lucia dos Santos, the seventh and youngest child of Antonio and Maria Rosa dos Santos, was seven years old when she became shepherdess to the family’s flock. While together with three other neighboring shepherd children, Lucia and her friends thrice saw a mysterious figure in the air, like a statue made of snow. This figure is believed to be a presage of the angelic apparitions that Lucia would later behold with her younger cousins, Francisco and Jacinta Marto, both of whom are now beati (called “Blessed” by the Church). Lucia and her cousins would, in the spring and summer of 1916, receive three clear apparitions of the Angel, who literally identified himself as “the Angel of Peace” and “Angel Guardian, the Angel of Portugal.”
Our Lady’s first visit to a small hamlet called Fatima, Portugal took place when the sun was directly overhead (called solar noon) on Sunday, May 13, 1917. Appearing in an open field known as the Cova da Iria (the Cove of Irene), “a Lady dressed all in white” stood lightly atop a carrasqueira, a young holmoak sapling that stood about three feet high and bore glossy, green leaves. On that day, the Lady appeared to three young children−Lucia dos Santos (age 10) and her two younger cousins, Francisco and Jacinta Marto (ages 9 and 7, respectively), and she asked them to return each month through October, “on the 13th day, at this same hour” (solar noon). Promising to later give her name, she said only of herself, “I am of Heaven.”
Except for the children, there were noother people present in May…When the Virgin returned on Wednesday, June 13, 1917, the three children were waiting for her. So were at least 50 other people who came to see for themselves what was really happening in Fatima. June 13 was the Feast of St. Anthony of Padua, a very popular day among the Catholics of Portugal. Lucia’s mother had hoped that the village festival in honor of St. Anthony would halt Lucia from going to the Cova, while the parents of Francisco and Jacinta allowed the little ones to decide where they would go that day.
• It was at this June apparition that onlookers first saw a little cloud over the holmoak tree. Maria Carreira, one of those who saw the mysterious vapor only as the Apparition ended, said “we saw nothing but a slight cloud, just a few inches away from the foliage, rising slowly toward the east.” At another time, she said that “it was a little cloud…which went up gently in the direction of the east, until it finally disappeared completely.” It seems that Lucia and her cousins did not see this cloud resting on the holmoak tree because, in after years, Lucia would say, “The people spoke of a cloud but I saw none. Our Lady’s feet rested lightly on the top of the leaves.”
• “During the vision,” stated another witness, “the branches of the tree were bent down all around” as if someone was stepping upon the branches. Yet another witness remarked that “when Lucia announced that Our Lady was leaving in the direction of the east, all the branches of the tree picked up and leaned in the same direction, as if Our Lady, as she left, had let her dress rest upon the boughs.”
• When the cloud was no longer in sight, others also noticed that the little holmoak tree’s shoots, which had formerly been standing upright, were bent and inclined toward the east.
• Moments earlier, during the Apparition, some of the fifty onlookers discerned an unintelligible murmur, “like the sound of a very faint voice, but we could not understand what it was saying; it was like the buzzing of a bee.” Heard only between Lucia’s words to the invisible Lady, the mysterious sound appeared to be the Lady’s responses to the child.