Mary Speaks to Our Century
by Zsolt Aradi
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Our own twentieth century has been called the age of totalitarianism, the age of anxiety, the atomic age, and, of course, the age of materialism. Perhaps historians of the twenty-first century, evaluating our deeds, achievements and failures, will be able to give us a more lasting title for our age. We all feel, however, that the general uncertainty of the twentieth century is the only certainty, which surrounds our lives. We still believe in progress, but undoubtedly in a different and more mature way than we did fifty years ago. We are no longer so certain that progress alone can make us happy, and though we enjoy our material and technological achievements, we look forward to something unknown. Arthur Koestler has called this state of mind "the age of longing."
The apparitions of Our Lady in the twentieth century strike us as most extraordinary signs of reality, not only in the spiritual but in the material order. Her apparitions are not only visions and messages given to the chosen few concerning our spiritual welfare, but their connections with the material order are vividly close, and their meaning of importance to each of us. As we have already noted, those warnings relayed throughout the nineteenth century had profound significance for the destiny of mankind.
The first and the greatest of the twentieth-century apparitions of the Blessed Virgin occurred in Portugal and has many of the characteristics we have already encountered. The scene is the vicinity of the village of Aljustrel in the parish of Fatima. The participants in this grace of vision are three children; innocent, poor, unprepared and unlikely candidates to receive celestial messages and prophecies of worldwide importance. The time is 1917, during the bloodiest period of World War I. The message of Our Lady is most unusual: she speaks about an event, which has no bearing on Portugal. The children who receive the message are unaware of the horrors of the war, for Portugal is neutral. Furthermore, in 1917, though the use of telegraphic devices is of long standing, people living in those remote parts of Portugal do not feel the immediacy of the battles on the Western front nor grasp the significance of the collapse of Tsarist Russia and the sudden appearance of the red star on the beclouded sky of the world. Yet all these events are included in the "miracle of Fatima."
The Weeping Madonna of Syracuse
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