Marian devotion
Avelino de Almeia, journalist at the O Seculo dialy — Public domain, vía Wikimedia Commons
The criterion of this page
Here is not the miracle of the sun: read the 1917 papers. And they read above all those of whom no had no interest in Fátima being true: the special envoy of the great Republican newspaper in Lisbon, and a witness who proposed to describe the phenomenon "without phrases to ensure the truth."
All the following texts are taken from the critical edition of the Shrine of Fatima (Critical Documentation of Fatima. Selection of documents, 1917-1930, 2013), with its document number and page.
And it is said from the beginning what the Church says: the approval of 1930 declared the visions credible and allowed the veneration. It's a private disclosure. No one is forced to believe the sun danced.
Avelino de Almeida, The Century, 15 October 1917
Who he was. Avelino de Almeida (1873-1932) was the special envoy of The Century, the great diary Republican in Lisbon, at that time the head of the Portuguese secular press. He didn't go to Fatima to believe.
El titularas the critical edition reproduces (Doc. 13, pp. 72-78):
The apparitions of the Virgin - What was the sign of heaven - Many thousands of people claim to have produced a miracle - War and peace
OREM, Octubre 13,’
What he saw himself, in its own text (p. 75):
The central passage (pp. 75-76):
And his professional honestywhich makes the testimony valuable (p. 76):
That is: the journalist distinguishes what he saw most of what some said. It does not homogenize the testimony. That, in source criticism, is worth gold.
The closure (p. 77):
Avelino de Almeidae»
La cifra que él da aquí (p. 75): "dispassionate calculations of cultured people and at all points outside of mystical influences computed in thirty or forty thousand creatures».
The same journalist, 15 days later: Portuguese Illustration29 October 1917
https://hemerotecadigital.cm-lisboa.pt/OBRAS/IlustracaoPort/1917/N610/N610_master/N610.pdf (HTTP 200, PDF de 5,5 MB). En la edición crítica es el doc. 21, pp. 113-116.Responding to an old fellow disciple who asked for "an unsuspected testimony," Avelino de Almeida writes (p. 116):
Miracle, as the people yelled; natural phenomenon, as the wise say? I don't care now about knowing, but just telling you what I saw... The rest is with science and the Church...»
La cifra que da aquí (p. 114): "to the point of joining the Moor of Fatima on 13 October, about 50,000 people according to the calculations of dispassionate individuals».
Eye with the figures
| Source | Date | Cipher |
|---|---|---|
| Avelino de Almeida, The Century | 15-X-1917 | 30.000-40.000 |
| Avelino de Almeida, Portuguese Illustration | 29-X-1917 | 50.000 |
| Leonor de Avelar e Silva Constantio, present (doc. 17, p. 96) | ~19-X-1917 | «cerca de 50 mil People " |
| Narrativa actual del Santuario | Today | «50.000 a 70.000» |
The honest thing to say is: the sources give between thirty and seventy thousand; contemporary witnesses who left written figures say 30.000-50.000. The figure of "70,000" circulating in the disclosure not in the 1917 documents We've read.
The technical testimony: Almeida Garrett (and an important correction)
The safe formula, therefore, is: "eyewitness, son of Professor Gonçalo Xavier of Almeida Garrett," not "Professor of Coimbra."
That said, it is the most valuable descriptive testimony that exists. * * Document 29 of the Selection, pp. 149-152, closed 18 December 1917.
Empieza declaring his method:
On the aspect of the disc:
On duration and sight:
On the movement and the fall:
Suddenly a cry is heard as a cry of anguish from all that people. The sun, conserving the speed of its rotation, is derived from the firmament and blood advances on the earth by threatening to crush us with the weight of its ignite and huge tooth. They're seconds of terrifying impression.»
And the control that he himself was made - this is what distinguishes a trained witness from an enthusiast:
And the express distinction with an eclipse, which he had seen in Viseu:
Close:
[...] I must make the statement that never before or after 13 October, I saw equal phenomena, solar or atmospheric.»
Other contemporary witnesses of the same critical selection
| Doc. | Date | Who? | Puh. | What does it say? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 12 | 13-X-1917 | P. Manuel Pereira da Silva, parish priest of Monte Redondo | 70-71 | "begins by turning on itself quickly as a wheel of fire, with some intermittent, for more than eight minutes» |
| 17 | ~19-X-1917 | Leonor de Avelar e Silva Constantio, present | 89-99 | "about 50,000 people"; and its conclusion: "All these arguments [...] make me put aside both the idea of exploitation and the idea of nervous suggestion, and even the idea of demonic intervention. We await the Church's resolution» |
| 19 | 25-X-1917 | Survey of the vicar of Port of Mós | 105-106 | "This one had lost signals, turning over, shakingat the same time a decrease in light and an increase in temperature are observed. " |
| 31 | 30-XII-1917 | P. Luís de Andrade e Silva | 154-156 | recognizes "something extraordinary," sin to ensure that it is a miracle |
| 32 | 30-XII-1917 | Luís A. V. M. de Vasconcelos, abogado de Vila Nova de Ourém | 156-163 | «Only if you cry, believe, believe, believe [...]. If I wasn't Catholic, then I would have become» |
| 20 | 26-X-1917 | O World / Federation of Free Thought | 111-112 | the immediate antilerical response, collected in the same critical edition |
| 28 y 37 | XII-1917 y IX-1918 | Gonçalo X. de Almeida GarrettProfessor of Coimbra (the father) | 146-148 y 183-185 | test an explanation meteorology: "not astronomical phenomena of the sun itself, but weather of the Earth's atmosphere over the solar image" |
And part of the clergy was skeptical in 1917
El century José Castro * * wrote to The Order (Lisbon, 15- XI-1917), and your letter is contained in the report of the canonical committee itself (DCF. Selection, doc. 120, p. 454):
Alternative explanations: who proposes them and where
They are documented because they exist and because a serious study has to know them. No se valoran aquí ni se refutan: says who holds what and where it is published.
| Author | Reference | State |
|---|---|---|
| Gonçalo X. de Almeida Garrett (1917, favourable a las apariciones) | Letter to Father Formigão, XII-1917: "Weather phenomena of the Earth's atmosphere on the solar image" | DCF. Selection, doc. 28, pp. 146-148 — verified in the official PDF |
| Joe Nickell | Looking for a Miracle: Weeping Icons, Relics, Stigmata, Visions & Healing Cures, Buffalo (NY), Prometheus Books, 1993, sección «»Miracles» at Fatima», pp. 176-181 | page in the book index |
| Benjamin Radford | "Fatima Miracle Claims All Wet", Skeptical Inquiry, vol. 43, n.º 3, mayo/junio 2019 — https://skepticalinquirer.org/2019/05/fatima-miracle-claims-all-wet/ | HTTP 200 |
| Auguste Meessen | «Apparitions and Miracles of the Sun», en Actas do Forum International «Science, Religion and Conscience» (Oporto, 23-25 oct. 2003), Cons-Sciences 2, 2005, pp. 199-222 — https://www.meessen.net/AMeessen/Apparitions_and_Miracles_of_the_Sun.pdf | HTTP 200 |
| Steuart Campbell | «The Miracle of the Sun at Fátima», Journal of Meteorology (UK), vol. 14, n.º 142, pp. 333-338 | ⚠️ NO VERIFICADO: Meessen dates back to 1988; other sources in October 1989 |
And it deserves to be noted that Meessen, which proposes a physiological explanation, formulates the ecclesial status of the apparitions more precisely than many devotional texts:
— Meessen, op. cit., apartado «The Problem». Own translation.
What the Bishop argued in 1930
In the pastoral letter that declared the visions worthy of credit, Mr José Alves Correia da Silva used this reasoning about the solar phenomenon (read in the facsimile of Voice da Fatima of 13 October 1930, p. 2.
That argument - that the sun did not move astronomically and yet they saw it miles away - is exactly the knot of the matter, and it is the one that continues to be discussed a hundred years later. Here it is exposed; it does not fall.
Sources of this page
- Critical Documentation of Fatima. Selection of documents (1917-1930), Santuário de Fátima, 2013 — PDF oficial, ficha F001:
https://www.fatima.pt/files/upload/fontes/F001_DCF_selecao.pdf(HTTP 200). Documentos 12, 13, 17, 19, 20, 21, 28, 29, 31, 32, 37, 120. - Portuguese Illustration, II serie, n.º 610, 29 de octubre de 1917 — facsímil, Hemeroteca Municipal de Lisboa:
https://hemerotecadigital.cm-lisboa.pt/OBRAS/IlustracaoPort/1917/N610/N610_master/N610.pdf(HTTP 200). - Voice da Fatima, año VIII, n.º 97, Leiria, 13 de octubre de 1930 — facsímil oficial:
https://www.fatima.pt/files/upload/voz_da_fatima/VF0097_1930-10-13.pdf(HTTP 200).
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