Greg Daly
While St John Paul II’s devotion to Fatima may be proverbial, and while Pope Francis’ visit to the shrine may be filling the headlines, it is always worth remembering that their devotion to Fatima is one shared by countless Catholics – and even, as described below, Muslims!
Some four million people visit the Portuguese shrine each year, with many thousands coming from Ireland alone, and the World Apostolate of Fatima is thought to have over 20 million members in over 100 countries around the world.
The apostolate was the brainchild of the American Fr Harold Colgan, who founded it in 1947 as a deliberate ‘Blue Army’ intended to counter the Soviet Union’s ‘Red Army’, given the threat of atheistic communism at the time and how at Fatima Mary had called for the conversion of sinners, devotion to herself under the title of her Immaculate Heart, and for people of Russia to be consecrated to her care.
Other groups devoted to Fatima include the Alliance of the Holy Family International and the Alliance of the Two Hearts, which together earlier this year brought to Ireland one of six statues of Our Lady of Fatima that Pope Francis had blessed.
The statues were taken around the world as focuses for prayers and reparations for peace and the sanctity of family life. Archbishop Eamon Martin welcomed the statue to Ireland, crowning it in St Malachy’s Church in Armagh, after which it was brought to a succession of dioceses around Ireland, with pilgrims praying before the statue and bringing roses and white handkerchiefs for blessing.
Unsurprisingly, then, last weekend saw Fatima processions around such Irish towns as Navan, Kilkenny, and Dundalk, as devotion to Our Lady was unabashedly taken to the streets.
Devotion
Such devotion is, of course, often much more low-key, sometimes to a point where Catholics don’t realise they are following the instructions of Our Lady of Fatima. Younger Catholics in particular often don’t realise that when saying the Rosary, they often do so in a variant requested during one of the Fatima apparitions.
“O my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell, lead all souls to Heaven, especially those most in need of Thy mercy,” we so often pray after praying the ‘Glory Be’ following each decade of the Rosary, often oblivious to how Our Lady requested of Lucia and Ss Jacinta and Francisco that they should do this.
The prayer struck some as controversial from the start – how could all souls be saved? – and as early as 1946 Sr Lucia felt a need to correct versions of the prayer that watered it down by changing it to call for “mercy on the souls in purgatory”.
Famously, however, the theologian Fr Hans Urs Von Balthasar, a great influence on Pope Benedict XVI, argued in Dare We Hope that ‘All Men Be Saved’? that hope and prayers for the salvation of all is permitted. Scripture, he maintained, displayed a tension on the subject, and it would be for God, and God alone, to resolve this tension.
Prayer
As Sr Lucia explained to the then Archbishop Bertone, faith, hope and charity are at the very heart of Fatima, and in considering this prayer we should keep in mind how the Catechism of the Catholic Church stresses how “God ‘desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth’; that is, God wills the salvation of everyone through the knowledge of the truth”.
In calling this one prayer ‘the Fatima prayer’, though, we perhaps run a risk of impoverishing our understanding of Fatima.
There were, after all, four other prayers taught to the children by Our Lady in 1917, with Sr Lucia saying that years later she was taught two further prayers.
In combination with the call for First Saturdays devotions to be dedicated as acts of reparation to the Immaculate Heart and the general promotion of the Rosary, it is clear that the devotional riches of Fatima are remarkably deep.
