Our Lady’s Teaching  On Prayer: The First of a Lenten Course on Prayer

Part 1: The Fatima Secret

We did not have a youth club in our parish so when I heard there was a thriving club in the next parish I went there like a shot. They seemed to have everything I wanted, billiards, table tennis, football, hiking, camping and they even put on plays at Christmas. Bill Haley and his comets had not yet brought rock ‘n’ roll into the country and the Beatles were over a dozen years away, so music wasn’t really on the agenda. But there was more than enough for us to enjoy.

A Vision of Our Lady

This was a youth club with a difference. because it was run by a young man in his twenties who said he had seen Our Lady of Fatima in a vision. She did not say anything nor did she leave a message for him as she had already said many things to the children in Portugal many years before. As far as he was concerned, her message was that we should all say the rosary, so nothing ever began at the youth club without the rosary. Leon Morris, for that was the youth leader’s name, later became a priest but he has since died. With hindsight I have no reason to doubt that he did have a brief vision of Our Lady of Fatima. One thing is for sure, he inspired me with the message of Fatima and made the rosary the daily prayer of choice for me for many years.

San Sebastián de Garabandal

But above all else he filled me with a longing for the fateful year of 1960 when a secret that came to be known as the 3^rd Fatima Secret would be opened  by the Pope in Rome and revealed to the world. When the time eventually came the secret was opened and read by the Pope and by many subsequent Popes, but it was never shared with people like me. However,  Our Lady would not be thwarted, even by Popes, so in 1961 she appeared to four little children in Spain at  a remote hamlet called  San Sebastián de Garabandal.

Eventually after well over  two thousand appearances, she told one of the girls called  Conchita what she told  St Lucy at Fatima,  and what was still a secret as far as the rest of the Church is concerned. The girls were so simple that they did not even know what the word perdition meant, and so when they said Our Lady foretold the time when many priests,  bishops and cardinals would be going to perdition and taking ‘many souls’ with them, they did not know what was meant, but the Bishop did, and so did subsequent Bishops.  It was no wonder they would not give their  approval for the visions and most particularly for the fateful message of what was to come, if nobody listened to Our Lady this time. The latest ecclesiastical position is that the visions and therefore  the messages given by Our Lady are not condemned by the Church, but the question about their authenticity is still awaiting approval as it has been for many years now. After much study and investigation it seems to me that the message of Our Lady of Fatima is that if we do not return to the full and proper practice of our faith soon, then there will be frightening consequences. It was the same message originally given at Medjugorje too, although what is happening there now seems to me deeply questionable. However, three very good and reliable friends of mine have been to Medjugorje, and they all had a similar experience. The last of them was a Jesuit priest from Farm Street in London.

Medjugorje

He was a hard-nosed canon lawyer who admitted he was forced against his will to lead the parish pilgrimage to  Medjugorje as a fellow priest became ill. He telephoned me to tell  me how he had, like my other friends seen the Sun dancing in the sky. He told me that he fell to his feet and wept as he had never wept since he was a child.  I heard of this phenomenon from a close Portuguese friend   of mine many years before. He told me how with over seventy thousand others, his father had watched this same phenomenon for about fifteen minutes at Fatima during the first world war.

However, what is the point of  all these appearances, the strange  phenomena that surround them, and the miracles associated with them. There is no doubt they more than anything else are responsible for wave after wave of pilgrimages that still set out for these destinations. But if people are only looking for dramatic spiritual phenomena to enthrall them  and the friends whom they later entertain with their  experiences, then they have missed the point. Conchita, the spokesperson for the other children who now lives with her family in New York, said and still says, that what is important is the message.

Our Lady’s Message

The message which is almost identical to those associated with all the appearances of Our Lady in modern times, is reduced to four essentials. They are; return to the faith that God has given you by practising repentance, sacrifice, prayer, and participation in the Eucharist. When one rainy afternoon in the little mountain village of Garabandal, Conchita delivered this message to a large crowd outside the parish church,  you could almost hear the yawn from the multitude. That is not what they wanted to hear; they wanted to hear about exotic prophecies, miracles and  mystical, phenomena.

Well I have good news for all our spiritual butterflies who are forever looking for the wonderous, the exotic, and for prophecies of dramatic future events. Both Our Lady of Fatima and Our Lady of  Garabandal  made it quite clear that if her message is not heeded then dramatic and world-shaking  events will happen to bring people to their senses. If they do not, then more  terrifying events will ensue to ‘chastise’ the heedless for their present state of spiritual bankruptcy, and the spiritual bankruptcy of the modern world, that has completely lost its way and found solace in unspeakable crimes and misdemeanours.

I doubt whether you will ever hear about them in the Fatima secret that is kept under lock and key somewhere in the Vatican well out of harm’s way. But knowing this, Our Lady  gave the final message of what will happen if we do not change our ways to the spokesperson of the little girls, Conchita,  who is still alive and  recently celebrated her seventy-fourth  birthday.

That the day of reckoning is very close is certain but only she will announce when. If you think this is all tommy rot then you have every right to your opinion, but I for one believe her, and so did St Padre Pio. That is why he left her a glove that covered his stigmatized hand,  the cloth that covered his face before his burial, and his own personal rosary, that she has to this day.

If you want to know what you should do, then do as Our Lady suggests, take out your rosary and start using it again daily. For those who have forgotten how, then the course that follows is to remind you how.