Andrew Apostoli - Fatima for Today

FATIMA FOR TODAY

Father Andrew Apostoli, C.F.R.

Foreword by Raymond Cardinal Burke

IGNATIUS PRESS SAN FRANCISCO

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations (except those within citations) have been taken from the Revised Standard Version of the Holy Bible, Second Catholic Edition, 2006. The Revised Standard Version of the Holy Bible: the Old Testament, 1952, 2006; the Apocrypha, 1957, 2006; the New Testament, 1946, 2006; the Catholic Edition of the Old Testament, incorporating the Apocrypha, 1966, 2006, the Catholic Edition of the New Testament, 1965, 2006 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. All rights reserved.

Cover art:

Pilgrims Participate in a Religious Procession at the Shrine of Our Lady of Fatima

Paulo Novias / epa / Corbis

Cover design by Roxanne Mei Lum

2010 Ignatius Press, San Francisco
All rights reserved
ISBN 978-1-58617-523-8
Library of Congress Control Number 2010927110
Printed in the United States of America

This book is lovingly dedicated
to
the Immaculate Heart of Mary,
Mother of God and our Mother,
and to
Pope John Paul II
who made the Consecration of Russia
and to
Pope Benedict XVI
who has told us to
learn, live and spread the message of Fatima!

CONTENTS

Appendices

FOREWORD

D uring his historic visit to the Shrine of Our Lady of Fatima on May 13, 2010, His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI spoke of the maternal instruction of the Blessed Virgin Mary to all mankind, which she communicated through her chosen messengers, Blessed Francisco Marto, Blessed Jacinta Marto, and the Servant of God Lucia dos Santos. Summarizing the content of the teaching conveyed through her six apparitions between May and October of 1917, which were prepared by the three apparitions of the Angel of Peace, His Holiness described Our Lady of Fatima as the Teacher who introduced the little seers to a deep knowledge of the Blessed Trinity and led them to savor God Himself as the most beautiful reality of human existence. His Holiness continued by quoting expressions of the most tender and profound love of God, which were inspired in the seers by the apparitions and message of Our Lady of Fatima and of the Angel of Peace.

Through her apparitions and message, the Mother of God, as she always does, led Francisco, Jacinta, and Lucia more surely and fully to our Lord Jesus Christ, God the Son Incarnate, and through him to God the Father and God the Holy Spirit, with whom he is one in being. In the words of Pope Benedict XVI, Our Lady helped them to open their hearts to universal love, that is, to the love of God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, who loves all men and desires only their eternal salvation.

The Blessed Virgin Mary came to visit mankind at Fatima at a time when many had grown forgetful of God and his all-loving plan for our salvation, and many had grown rebellious before the Law of God by which he orders all things for our good. Having alienated themselves from the universal love that comes to us from God alone, they fell prey to a destructive selfishness of heart, which was most dramatically and tragically manifested in the horror of the First World War. The great temptation in a world beset with the gravest of evils was to lose hope in divine love and thus to cease responding to divine love with pure and selfless love. Knowing the severity of the temptation that his children were suffering, God the Father sent to earth the Blessed Virgin Mary, the mother of his only-begotten Son, in fidelity to her mission as Mother of God, which she first accepted at the Annunciation and which she expressed so clearly at the Wedding Feast of Cana. When the wine stewards of the newly married couple at Cana found themselves in a most distressful situation, it was the Blessed Virgin who was immediately aware of their distress; who interceded with her Divine Son to save the newlyweds from embarrassment; and who, with total confidence, instructed the wine stewards: Do whatever he tells you.

In all our times of crisis, both personally and as a society, the Virgin Mother of God is always immediately aware of our distress and is always interceding on our behalf before the throne of God. She also faithfully counsels us, with deepest motherly love, to do what our Lord Jesus Christ tells us, to turn over our lives to him through prayer and penance. In the most critical moments of our earthly pilgrimage, God the Father has favored us with an extraordinary sign of the Virgin Marys maternal love, that is, with her visits to us by way of apparitions and messages. Regarding her appearances at Fatima, the Holy Father observed: At a time when the human family was ready to sacrifice all that was most sacred on the altar of the petty and selfish interests of nations, races, ideologies, groups and individuals, our Blessed Mother came from heaven, offering to implant in the hearts of all those who trust in her the Love of God burning in her own heart.

Through the third apparition of the Angel of Peace and the July apparition of our Lady, the little seers saw before their eyes both the indescribable beauty of the Mystery of Faiththe Body and Blood of Christ sacramentally offered and poured out for us, for our eternal salvationand the unspeakably ugly emptiness of hell, of a life lived without God and in rebellion against his pure and selfless love for us. The Angel of Peace, like the angels in the Holy Scriptures, was Gods messenger to prepare the children to receive the miraculous visits of the Mother of God, and to become her messengers to the world, most of all by the example of their lives, even to our day.

Prepared by the Angel of Peace, the little seers were enabled to place, to an heroic degree, their hearts, one with the Immaculate Heart of Mary, into the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus and thus to be purified of sin and inflamed with the pure and selfless love that flows without cease and without measure from the glorious pierced Heart of Jesus. In his Consecration of Humanity to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, in October of 1942, the Venerable Pope Pius XII expressed in a striking manner the mystery of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, drawing us to the glorious pierced Heart of Jesus in which mankind finds the victory over sin and death, and the triumph of divine love and eternal life:

Through the Consecration of Humanity to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, the Shepherd of the Universal Church, the Venerable Pope Pius XII, prayed that the maternal care of the Blessed Virgin Mary, most perfectly represented in her sinless Heart, might lead all men to the Heart of Jesus, the font of their eternal salvation.

Reflecting upon the human context, individual and societal, of the apparitions of the Mother of God at Fatima, it is not difficult to perceive the critical importance of our Ladys message for our own time, an importance strongly underlined for us by the Venerable Pope John Paul II and by his successor Pope Benedict XVI. We too live in a time when many are ready to sacrifice all, including the lives of innocent and defenseless unborn brothers and sisters; the lives of those who have the first title to our carethe aged, the critically ill and those suffering with special needs; and the great good of marriage and the family, the first cell of the life of society, on the altar of selfish individualism and tyrannical relativism. Many in our day have turned away from God and have rebelled against the most fundamental teachings of his life-giving Lawthe teaching regarding the inviolable dignity of innocent human life and the teaching on the integrity of the faithful, indissoluble and procreative union of one man and one woman in marriageand have thus found themselves profoundly unhappy and without hope, gazing into the terrifying emptiness of hell.