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18.
An Angel Anticipates Our Lady of Fatima
THE
ANGELS have received their beautiful name from a readiness to do God's
bidding in their historic transactions with man. It means in any language
messenger. They have earned it. They carry messages to earth with
an unerring fidelity to the Divine Will, which time and again has had them
introducing some great business of their Queen from Nazareth. An angel
certainly disposed Mary for her coming role of motherhood. An angel
awakened a sleeping novice to escort her to chapel and to an empty
sanctuary chair which soon held, at the angel's announcement, "the Blessed
Virgin." A third angel broached the subject of expiatory prayer and
sacrifice to three little shepherds in advance of the same glorious Mother
of God, Our Lady of Fatima.
When they do appear on earth, since we are
creatures of sense, the angels take on a human shape, adopt a human
voice. They assume a human body, not to turn up its nose at our natural
inferiority, but to show off the human form to greatest advantage. Not
one of their visionaries, who have recorded the experience, could achieve
a description to fit their transcendent charm. The prophet Daniel, Joan
of Arc, Peter Faber, Catherine Emmerick, Lucia dos Santos and the whole
litany of others found out at first sight: that an angel wearing a human
body glorifies it to be a beauty beyond words. The angel has an obvious
reason for thus humanizing his charm. It endears him to the seer, while
any message from the lips of so glamorous a presence compels attention.
The angels are therefore wont to shape their
visibility, when they assume it, to the dimensions of the human form in
full vigor, or adolescence, or even childhood. Frances of Rome on an
occasion found a visiting angel in her home who appealed to the mother in
her because he didn't look a day older than eight years—the age of her
little son when he died. Young Tobias felt the more at ease with Raphael
in that the angel wore the disguise of an equivalent adolescence. Pope
Gregory I, walking in procession along the Tiber, looked over to behold
atop Hadrian's tomb the figure of Michael the warrior, clad in armor,
standing resolute in his fresh and robust maturity, breathing of an
indomitable confidence, but now seen in the act of sheathing his sword.
An angel never assumes the feeble form of an old rheumatic for the reason
that such decrepitude, I suppose, would misrepresent his eternal
agelessness, energy, agility.
Whether or not his human form has the
additional wings, would seem to be arbitrary. St. Gemma Galgani, who
enjoyed visions of her guardian angel, refers to his quick pair of wings.
St. Catherine Labouré, on the contrary, found none on the little escort
who walked her to the chapel. Raphael could not have worn a pair, or
Tobias would not have taken him for an uncommonly handsome cousin; but
then the prophet Isaiah beheld a winged seraph, as likewise Francis of
Assisi; and Our Lady of Guadalupe, in doing an angel for her portrait,
thought enough of the idea to give him wings of a rich plumage. Yet
again, the boyish-looking angel who introduced the story of Fatima had
none. At least Lucia in her description mentions none.
This angel, on account of his role in what
Claudel has rightly called an explosion of the supernatural, merits a
grateful review of his three appearances. He will receive it. He serves
the Fatima story much as the angel in her picture served the purpose of
Our Lady of Guadalupe. The least our generation could do for him, a wise
few did. They erected a statue to his honor on the ground he sanctified.
The statue of the deserving angel stands on the
spot where he gave his little visionaries Holy Communion. The granite
figure holds in one hand a chalice, in the other a Host dripping Blood
into the chalice, while the stone lips are represented in the act of
saying what the angel had indeed said: "Take and drink the Body and Blood
of Jesus Christ, horribly insulted by ungrateful men. Make reparation for
their crimes and console your God." The invitation from the stone lips is
directed, to the statues of the three kneeling children about to receive.
The four-piece set, gracing the pastoral slope of Cabeco, memorializes an
event that brings out a feature of the Fatima story: reparatory devotion
to the Sacred Heart of Christ.
The feature, with its correlative reparation to
the Immaculate Heart of Mary, sets the essential tone of the Fatima
message. And the purpose of such reparation? To make amends for, and
even convert, the hardened sinner who does not care. The angel expressed
it all ever so touchingly the instant he appeared to the children this
third time, before he invited them to receive. Leaving the chalice and
the Host in mid-air, he knelt down before the adorable Sacrament, bowed
his head to the ground and prayed: "Most blessed Trinity, Father, Son and
Holy Spirit, I adore you profoundly and offer you the most precious Body,
Blood, Soul and Divinity of Jesus Christ, present in the tabernacles of
the world, in reparation for all the outrages, sacrileges and
indifferences with which he is offended. By the infinite merits of his
Sacred Heart and of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, I beg of you the
conversion of poor sinners."
The angel spoke the words with an ardor that
burned them into the memory of Lucia, and of Jacinta, so that after he had
said the prayer three times they could repeat it without effort.
Francisco could only see the angel without hearing him, and had to learn
the prayer from the girls. It became a favorite with the three, which
they would often recite on their knees in the pastures, with their
foreheads touching the ground. They felt a sweet compulsion to imitate
the angel.
During his third apparition the angel still
held them as rigidly in awe of him as during the first. The familiarity
they were later to feel toward the visions of Our Lady did not
characterize his. Their intensity of joy from his presence, to quote
Lucia, "overpowered" them. When the angel placed the Host on her tongue
and held the chalice to let Francisco and Jacinta drink of the Precious
Blood from it, they did not question him. They obeyed. They accepted the
distinction. Afterwards it dawned on them why: Lucia had already received
her first Holy Communion in St. Anthony's Church at Fatima and the younger
two had not.
The angel, in giving Lucia the Divine Host, was
showing deference to the child's custom of receiving the Sacrament under
the species of bread alone. That he offered her cousins the chalice must
not be interpreted a violation of, but rather an allowable departure from,
the liturgical practice of the time. That the angel brought the children
Holy Communion at all, when he was neither priest nor deacon, must again
be considered an act of obedience to God's adorable will. An angel of
heaven never goes against that.
The action beyond a doubt supports the doctrine
that Christ is wholly present in a consecrated Host or in any drop of the
Precious Blood. The angel, before administering the Holy Eucharist to
Lucia under one species and to her cousins under the other, made it clear
by his words that the three were receiving the same undivided Lord. He
invited his communicants to receive from him, equally, indiscriminately,
completely, their Incarnate God, knowing as well as Thomas Aquinas that
"when the Sacrament is divided, Christ remains entire in each particle."
The fact, moreover, that the Host in the angel's hand bled would indicate
its aliveness. It gave evidence of a mysterious coalition of Flesh and
Blood, the living Body of Christ.
Did the angel have the power to consecrate that
Host? Not unless God granted him the power for the emergency, as in Holy
Orders He confers it permanently upon the priest. The question presents
no difficulty to the Omnipotent. The Lord who transformed bread into his
adorable Self at the Last Supper could have done it as easily with bread
in the angel's hand.
As for that, if Providence so willed, the angel
could have taken the consecrated Host from some tabernacle. Its locked
door would not have prevented him. Whoever might require the key to open
it, he did not. Scripture offers some humorous reading on the
irresistible power of a spirit over matter, however solid. Herod made a
frustrated fool of himself by having had St. Peter locked securely into
jail. An angel broke in to get the apostle out. With ease they escaped
the prison grounds. They did not climb over the wall. They simply walked
straight to its iron gate, regardless of its being barred. They did not
have to touch it. There was no need to do that. "It opened to them of
its own accord, and they went out" (Acts 12:5-11).
The angel who brought Holy Communion to the
little shepherds of Fatima did so at his third and final apparition.
His first occurred on the same spot, two months
before, in the July of 1916. Lucia dos Santos, nine years of age at the
time, and her younger cousins, Francisco and Jacinta Marto, were grazing
their sheep on a slight hillside when a threat of rain set them scampering
up the slope to the shelter of an overhanging rock, known as the Cabeco
cave. They watched the rain, and were happy to notice their flocks
huddled together in groups under the trees. The downpour proved to be a
shower, and presently the late-morning sun was shining brilliantly. But
of a sudden a noisy breeze stirred the distant pines, while from above
them there approached a luminous figure, as white as snow, gliding more
swiftly than the eagle, clearing the tops of the nearby olive trees, and
coming to a stop at the entrance to the cave. The figure could now be
distinguished as a gorgeously beautiful youth of about fourteen, his
radiance brighter than "a crystal penetrated by rays of the sun,"
according to Lucia, as he stood facing her and her little cousins.
"Do not fear," he said in Portuguese. "I am
the Angel of Peace. Pray with me."
Whereupon he knelt down and, bending so low
that his forehead touched the ground, he prayed: "My God, I believe, I
adore, I hope and I love you! I beg pardon for those who do not believe,
nor adore, nor hope, nor love you!"
By the time the angel had finished his third
recital of the prayer in honor of the Holy Trinity, the girls knew it by
heart. The words coming from him, Lucia has reported, "could not be
forgotten. They seemed to engrave themselves exactly and indelibly upon
the memory." But neither Lucia nor Jacinto outdid Francisco in their
fidelity to the prayer, once he had learned it from them.
Their sheep would often see the three kneeling
on the grass, with heads bowed like the angel's, as they recited his act
of faith and reparation over and over and over. It was their joy to
imitate the angel, follow his instruction. And his last admonition,
before his radiance faded into the sunlight, included his first use of the
blessed Names that belong together in the Fatima story. He urged the
children to say and keep on saying the prayer to gratify the hearts of
Jesus and Mary, who would be listening. The two hearts, he would
henceforth always mention in the same breath.
The angel, at their first sight of him, had
made the children his avid pupils. His beauty enthralled them. And from
the reaction of Lucia and Jacinta to the words of the angel, Francisco
could tell that his diction matched his visible charm. Why the boy
throughout the three visions of the angel and the following six of Our
Lady remained deaf to them, no one to my knowledge has ever explained.
But the unhearing little visionary missed nothing of the heavenly message,
receiving it from the girls.
Reparation by means of prayer struck the
keynote of the angel's first lesson. In his second appearance, a few
weeks later, he included the need of penance along with prayer in his
exhortation. On account of the extreme heat of that summer day the young
shepherds had by noon urged their sheep homeward to the corral near
Lucia's cottage. The three were sitting idly by the well in the shade
when the air around them brightened. The angel had returned. He stood
before them, breaking the silence with a question.
"What are you doing? Pray! Pray hard! The
hearts of Jesus and Mary have merciful designs for you. Pray and
sacrifice constantly to the Most High."
"How must we sacrifice?" asked Lucia.
"Do penance in reparation for sinners, by whom
God is offended, and pray for their conversion. Thus draw peace upon your
country. I am its Guardian Angel." The children, whose country was then
at war, were deeply impressed. What the angel had barely intimated Our
Lady would afterwards clarify to a certitude: that war results from sin.
"Above all," continued the Angel of Peace,
"accept and endure with submission the suffering the Lord will send you."
Inferentially, in other words, the finest
mortification is not the kind we go our looking for. It is rather the
hardships already befallen us if only we adjust our mind to them and
embrace them as coming from Providence as a test of our love for him. Our
Lady would in due time recommend the practice of extra acts of penance,
aside from those which duty imposes. The angel stuck to the essential.
He was giving his young pupils their first lesson in asceticism. His
instruction to the girls, which of course had to be relayed to Francisco,
cut indelibly into their memory.
"The words of the angel," Lucia writes, "were
like a light which made us understand who and what God really is; how he
loves us and wishes to be loved. The value of sacrifice was for the first
time clear. Suddenly we knew of its appeal to God and its power to
convert sinners. From that moment we began offering to him all that
mortified us, all that was difficult or unpleasant, except then we did not
seek extra sacrifices and penances as we later learned to do."
The angel was clearly predisposing his young
visionaries for the greater apparitions of next year. He implanted in
their minds the idea of praying for sinners and suffering for them so as
to offer reparation in their stead to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the
Immaculate Heart of Mary. He introduced the theme which Our Lady would
develop in depth. The Angel of Peace merits his association with her for
the reason that the Angel of the Annunciation does. God sent him. He
belongs to the Fatima story. He enriches it.
It is not impossible that he, who named himself
the Angel of Peace, was in truth the Prince of Angels. The liturgy favors
the possibility. A hymn in use from the eighth century, which the Roman
Breviary assigns to Louds on the old feast of St. Michael, so
identifies him. "May Michael, the Angel of Peace," pleads the hymn,
"descend from heaven to attend us and, breathing serene peace, banish grim
war to hell."
The implication is clear. The angelic world,
created in harmony, remained so until Satan and his followers sinned
against that harmony to bring about war in heaven: a war the avenging
archangel promptly ended by hurling out of heaven the disturbers of its
peace (Rev. 12:7). May he do the same for sinful and strife-ridden
mankind on earth, the hymn implores. May he thrust the instigator of evil
finally and so effectually into hell that Satan will have lost his power
to lure additional souls to their ruin and to disrupt the tranquility of
order by stirring up rebellion against it, which is what sin is. The hymn
prays for that day of justice, which the prophet Daniel foretells, when
"Michael the great prince" will take action for the Most High to end
forever among men the struggle between good and evil (Dan. 12:1-2). The
earth will have been transformed to what St. Peter in his second epistle
calls "a new earth in which righteousness dwells" and the virtuous, rid of
strife at last, will enjoy an eternity of unassailable bliss.
Meanwhile, in proportion to the malice and
frequency of its sins will the human race suffer the resulting
dissentions. The logic of it is inexorable. Close out from the soul the
approaches of Infinite Love, which is what grievous sinning does, and you
allow in the subtle but powerful influence of Satan, the father of
hatred. "He who commits sin is of the devil," writes St. John in an
epistle that recounts the miseries of sin (I Jn. 3:8). The tranquility of
peace, in nation or individual, comes from the practice of a right order:
the observance of God's holy law. It is the violation of that, and
ultimately nothing else, which breeds wars between nations, anarchy within
nations, and a turmoil of spirit for the individual. Precisely, to remind
mankind anew of so historic and so personal a fact, God sent one of his
angels and his mother to the three little recipients of the message when
civilization had gone pagan and World War I was slaughtering human life in
a diabolic rage of hatred.
It was therefore appropriate of the angel to
introduce himself as the messenger of peace, whether he was actually
Michael or not. The possibility of his being none other still holds.
Despite his appearing under the guise of an unarmored youth not much older
than Lucia, he inspired a vehemence of awe which does suggest Michael. He
affected the children "so intensely," in the words of Lucia, "that we
could not speak even to one another. The next day our souls were still
wrapped in that atmosphere which disappeared only little by little." His
tremendous power of making them feel the presence of God around them and
in them by what he said and how he looked left their minds in a daze of
ecstasy and their immature bodies limp, drained of physical energy, for
hours on end. Coming out of one of his ecstasies long after the angel had
vanished, a bewildered Francisco remarked to his companions in the fields,
"I don't know what's wrong with me." The lad was finding it difficult to
walk, as were they.
Lucia and Jacinta had never heard any names
sound so beautiful as those of the Blessed Trinity and the combination of
Jesus and Mary on the lips of their heavenly visitant. It
inspired in them a great fervor. Francisco, denied the privilege of
hearing the angel, saw him pray: and that was sufficient to fill the boy's
heart with a similar yearning to do only what pleased the All-Holy. He
shared with his younger sister and older cousin the distinction of wanting
already in childhood to be a saint. The angel had such an effect on
them.
Six-year-old Jacinta, in the pasture with her
flock, would characteristically break out of her meditative silence into
song. It would be the refrain from some Portuguese hymn or other. Such
as:
O
angels, sing with me!
O angels, sing
forever.
I
can't give thanks as you can;
Angels, give
them for me,
Give them for me!
One time the child picked up a lamb to carry it on
her shoulder, with an arm crooked over it tenderly. When asked why, she
had the perfect answer: "Because Our Lord does it." The youngster was
remembering a picture she had seen of the Good Shepherd. But it was on
the feast of Corpus Christi, just weeks before Our Lady would first appear
to the children, that the youngest of them experienced one of the supreme
moments in her brief life. A flower girl in the procession out of St.
Anthony's Church into the village lane and back in and through the aisles
to the sanctuary, she liked being referred to as "one of the angels"
strewing her roses before the Blessed Sacrament.
She had the angels on her mind, wanting to
serve God like them. On heavily overcast evenings when the stars did not
appear, she would remark that "the angels won't be lighting their lamps
tonight." Again, finding Lucia one day in tears, she spoke out with a
maturity beyond her years: "Don't cry! We must bear the sacrifices God
sends us, as the angel said we should." And when the precocious mystic
lay dying because "the little Mother from heaven" had promised to take her
early, she confided to Lucia: "Sometimes, after everybody has left the
room I get out of bed and say the angel's prayers the way he taught us to
say them."
The same was true of Francisco. Almost to his
dying day, so long as he could speak at all, he would recite those
prayers. Late one afternoon little Jacinta was missing her brother for
quite some time. In her anxiety she beckoned to Lucia, and they walked
through the fields calling his name aloud. They obtained no response.
Their search finally ended at a mound of rocks, behind which Francisco was
kneeling with his face down. He admitted that he had been saying over and
over the reparatory prayer of the angel and just stayed there in
meditation, unheedful of their calls. The angel remained a lasting
influence. When in her turn the "Lady of all light" admonished the
children to pray and do penance in vicarious atonement for sinners, her
admonition fell on ears already attuned to it. The girls, and the boy
indirectly, were hearing nothing new. What the angel had impressed on
their minds simply took on a stronger meaning when Our Lady repeated it.
The prayer of the angel, in reparation for the
outrages committed against the Blessed Sacrament, touched the boy deeply.
Every time he went into Fatima, a village two miles from his home, he
would enter the church to be with "the hidden Jesus"—his usual term of
reference. Asked whether he would prefer to convert sinners or console
the neglected Christ at St. Anthony's, he said he would console his Lord
first and then hope to convert sinners—so they would not offend Him
anymore. "Console your God," the angel had advised while holding the
Blessed Sacrament in his hands. Francisco, learning the words from Lucia,
took them to heart.
Knowing from his later apparitions of the very
queen of heaven that he would soon be going there, Francisco talked his
parents out of sending him to school. What could be the use of learning,
he argued, when it wouldn't be needed in heaven? But he did walk along
with Lucia and Jacinta to the Fatima school regularly, and then parted
company with them to slip away into the church. We have it from the
memoirs of Lucia that he would still be kneeling there and looking
intently at the tabernacle when after school she would come for him. On
his early deathbed the little fellow in his happy resignation admitted one
regret: he couldn't visit the hidden Jesus now.
Lucia, the lone survivor of the three, a
cloistered Carmelite by the name of Sister M. Lucia of the Immaculate
Heart since 1948, previously spent better than twenty-five years as a
pupil and then a nun with the Sisters of St. Dorothy. Arriving among
them, she received the name she retained after her profession, Maria of
the Sorrows. It was during this period that she wrote, under obedience,
her four memoirs. In the fourth she does not forget to tell how, before
leaving home for the convent at the age of fourteen, she revisited alone
the scenes of the apparitions: those of the angel at the cave and at the
well, and those of Our Lady at the Cova da Iria and Valinhos. She wept.
So much had happened here, such visions of sheer ecstasy, that her
remembering eyes could not hold back the tears.
She knelt, perhaps for the last time, upon the
stone slab at the entrance to the Cabeco cave, where twice the angel had
knelt and often she and her comrades had knelt in imitation of him. She
recited again his prayers while maintaining his profound bow of
reverence. She remembered how the angel had always made them so feel the
presence of God as to leave them in a state of blissful exhaustion. It
was a sensation not easy to put into words, a feeling of somehow being out
of their bodies. But Lucia, in striving to express this sensation of
being lifted out of self, need not have apologized for her effort. St.
Teresa of Avila, telling of her reaction to the seraph who pierced her
heart, did no better. Nor did the apostle Paul, after a taste of heaven,
write of it with any greater accuracy.
"I know a man in Christ," writes St. Paul of
himself, "who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven—whether
in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows" (2 Cor. 12:2).
There you have the experience honestly stated. All such mystic experience
eludes the grasp of words. The apostle admits his inability to describe
what he must leave to the Omniscient to understand.
The angel knew his theology. It was his nature
to know the sacred truths. What angel does not? His two prayers,
supplemented by his admonitions, acclaimed the unit of God, the trinity of
Persons, in that adorable unity, the Holy Eucharist as truly Jesus Christ,
the reality of sin, the need of redemption, the whole economy of grace:
and, by associating together in the same phrase the merits of the
Immaculate Heart with the infinite merits of the Sacred Heart, the
theologian from heaven implicitly acknowledged Mary—by whatever term—reparatrix,
auxiliatrix, mediatrix, even coredemptrix. Pope
Benedict XV in his encyclical of May, 1917, openly avowed what the angel
had no less certainly implied. Bewailing the war then in progress as "the
suicide of Europe," he implores the embattled nations to have recourse to
their forgotten mother who did not forget them, the dispenser of all grace
who could bring harmony out of the strife, and would, if they would but
admit her sweet influence to their councils. The Holy Father forthwith
ordered into her litany the new insertion "Queen of Peace, pray for us."
She would have plenty to say for herself during
her forthcoming apparitions that same year to the little seers of Fatima.
To receive her portentous message, the angel had the children well
prepared. They could not be other than predisposed, who had been taught
to recite and often did recite through the winter of 1916-1917 such a
prayer as this: "Most blessed Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, I
adore you profoundly and offer you the most precious Body, Blood, Soul and
Divinity of Jesus Christ, present in the tabernacles of the world, in
reparation for all the outrages, sacrileges and indifferences with which
he is offended. By the infinite merits of his Sacred Heart and of the
Immaculate Heart of Mary, I beg of you the conversion of poor sinners."
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