Hajja Salesjana November December 2017

33 man, transparent, coming toward them.  The children could say nothing, but only looked on as the man came closer. The young man was the angel of peace, and during the three times he met with the children, once more in the summer and again in the fall of 1916, he taught them deeper reverence and specific prayers to pray for Portugal and the world.  We can look back over the events and see this time of the angelic apparitions as a time of tutelage for the children, preparing them for what was to follow. It was almost eight months after the last apparition of the angel, on May 13, 1917, feast of Our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament, when Mary first appeared to the children. They were pasturing their sheep in the Cova da Iria, or Cove of Irene, a hilly hollow owned by Lucia’s father, which was where, with one exception, that Mary would appear to the children on the six occasions in 1917 and to Lucia alone in 1920. There was a strange light following what the children described as “lightening in a clear sky.”  They were preparing to leave, thinking a storm was coming, when they saw a lady dressed in white.  She was shining brighter than the sun, with clear and intense light coming off of her in rays, “just like a crystal goblet full of pure water when the fiery sun passes through it.”  Lucia, Francisco, and Jacinta stopped, so near to the apparition that they were in the light surrounding the lady. Lucia was the spokesman for the children, perhaps by virtue of her engaging personality and insatiable curiosity.  She said that she felt no fear, only gladness and confident joy.  The lady asked them to return on the thirteenth of each month for six months, and after a brief conversation, in which the lady charged them with praying the rosary every day to bring peace to the world, she left. In May, 1917, World War I was in full throttle in Europe, ushering in a new kind of savagery in warfare.  In Moscow, Lenin was preparing the revolution that would topple the Russian social order and eventually include nearly half the people on earth.  In those circumstances, a visit from Mary bore the antidote to the evil of the planet.  The rosary is a weapon in our prayer lives.  Our Lady of Fatima asked simple shepherd children to end the war through their prayers. Though the children were filled with excitement, Lucia cautioned them to keep the visit a secret. Jacinta, though, simply could not.  In her seven-year- old world, this was too much to keep quiet, and she told her family.  Her mother didn’t think much of it, her siblings teased her, but her father accepted it as true immediately, seeing the honesty of children and the simple workings of God.  When Lucia’s mother heard the tale, though, she was furious with her daughter for inventing such a blasphemy, and used threats to no avail, trying to get her daughter to admit the fiction of the story.  She took Lucia before the parish priest and only grew more and more upset with her daughter. There was no dissuading Lucia, nor either of the other children.  They went on June 13, and on each of the following months, just as the lady had requested.  A parish festival, the biggest of the year, did not distract them in June, and an arrest in August didn’t either. In each of her apparitions, Mary reminds the children to pray the rosary daily.  She came to the children after the angel; she appeared only after they had been prepared and taught.