Sun miracle

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The sun miracle is an apparition that was observed by at least 30,000 people on October 13, 1917 in the Cova da Iria near Fátima in Portugal and is partially classified as a miracle . Those present had gathered to witness the last visit of Mary announced to Jacinta and Francisco Marto and Lúcia dos Santos .

Happening

According to many testimonies, the clouds should have broken up after a downpour and the sun appeared as an opaque, rotating disc in the sky. It was reported that it was considerably less bright than usual and threw colored lights on the landscape, people and clouds and shadows. The sun then leaned to one side and moved in a zigzag course towards the earth, which shocked some of those present so much that they thought the end of the world was imminent. Eyewitnesses reported that the rain-soaked floor and their clothes became dry in about ten minutes that the event took place.

Estimates of the number of eyewitnesses range from 30,000 to 40,000 people by Avelino de Almeida , who wrote for the Portuguese newspaper O Século ; and up to 100,000 people, estimated by Joseph Garrett , a science professor at Coimbra University , both of whom were present that day.

The miracle was attributed by the faithful to Nossa Senhora de Fátima ("Our Lady of Fátima"), an apparition of the Virgin Mary to three young shepherd children in 1917, which - as the three children predicted - on July 13, 1917. August and September 13th took place. The children reported that the woman had promised them that she would reveal her identity to them at noon on October 13 in the Cova da Iria and work a miracle "so that everyone can believe."

On that day the three shepherd children are said to have seen a panorama of visions about Jesus of Nazareth , the Virgin Mary and St. Joseph while blessing the crowd . According to their own statements, they did not observe the sun miracle itself.

Descriptions

The most frequently quoted descriptions of the events reported at Fátima come from texts by John De Marchi , an Italian Catholic priest and researcher. De Marchi spent seven years in Fátima, from 1943 to 1950, where he conducted origins research and interviews with main characters of unlimited length. In The Immaculate Heart , published in 1952, De Marchi reports that “Her status (those in attendance on October 13th) included believers and unbelievers, pious old ladies and mocking young men. Hundreds of these mixed groups have given formal testimony. Reports vary; Impressions are confused in smaller details, but to our knowledge none has directly denied the visible miracle of the sun. ”Kevin McClure contradicts this and states that he has never seen such a collection of contradicting accounts of a case in any research that he has seen in the previous ten Years ago.

Copy of a page from Ilustração Portuguesa dated October 29, 1917. The crowd contemplates the miracle of the sun during the Fatima apparition

Some of the testimony follows below. They are taken from John De Marchi's various books on the matter.

  • Avelino de Almeida:

"Before the eyes of the astonished crowd, the sight of which was biblical, standing there without a hat, eagerly searching the sky, the sun trembled, making sudden incredible movements beyond all cosmic laws - the sun 'danced' in unison in the typical expression of the people."

Avelino de Almeida wrote for O Século , Portugal's most widespread and influential newspaper, which was pro-government and anti-clerical at the time. Almeida's previous articles mocked the previously reported Fátima cases.
  • Domingos Pinto Coelho:

“The sun, in one moment surrounded by a scarlet flame, in another shimmering in yellow and deep purple, seemed to be in an extraordinarily quick and swirling motion, sometimes it seemed to be detached from the sky and approaching the earth, intense heat radiating. "

Domingos Pinto Coelho wrote for the Ordem newspaper .

“The silver sun, enveloped in the same fleece-like gray light, was seen swirling and revolving in a circle of broken clouds […] The light turned a beautiful blue, as if it had come through the stained glass windows of a cathedral, and spread over it the people who kneeled with outstretched hands […] people wept and prayed bareheaded in the presence of a miracle that they had expected. The seconds seemed like hours, they were so graphic. "

  • Almeida Garrett:

“The solar disk did not remain immobile. This was not the sparkle of a celestial body, for it was whirling around itself in a wild vortex when suddenly a noise was heard from everyone. The sun seemed to loosen itself from the firmament in a whirling movement and to move threateningly towards the earth, as if it wanted to crush us with its enormous fiery weight. The sensation during those moments was terrible. "

Almeida Garrett was Professor of Science at Coimbra University.
  • Professor Formigão:

“Like lightning from the blue, the clouds were torn aside and the sun appeared at the zenith in all its glory. It began to spin on its axis, like the greatest wheel of fire imaginable, taking on all the colors of the rainbow and emitting multicolored flashes of light, producing the most amazing effect. This sublime and incomparable spectacle, repeated three different times, lasted about ten minutes. The immense crowd, overwhelmed by the evidence of such a tremendous miracle, threw themselves on their knees. "

Formigão was a professor at the Santarém Seminary and a priest .
  • Reverend Joaquim Lourenco:

“I feel unable to describe what I saw. I kept looking at the sun, which was shining pale and did not hurt my eyes. Looking like a snowball spinning around, it suddenly seemed to come down in a zigzag, threatening the earth. Frightened, I ran and hid among the people who were crying and who expected the end of the world at any moment. "

Reverend Joaquim Lourenco described his youthful experience in Alburitel , eighteen kilometers from Fátima.

“On that day, October 13, 1917, without remembering the children's predictions, I was bewitched by a remarkable spectacle in the sky of a kind that I had never seen before. I saw it from this porch. "

Afonso Lopes Vieira was a Portuguese poet .

Evaluation of the event

Visionaries claimed that in the context of the apparitions of Mary in July, August and September 1917, known today as “Our Lady of Fátima”, Our Lady had promised that a miracle would take place on October 13, 1917 “so that everyone could believe [ t] en ”. Pio Scatizzi SJ describes the events of Fátima and concludes:

“The [...] solar phenomena were not observed in any observatory. Impossible that the news should escape so many astronomers, and of course the rest of the hemisphere's inhabitants [...]; it is unquestionably an astronomically or meteorologically occurring phenomenon. [...] Either all observers in Fátima were collectively deceived and erred in their testimony or we have to accept a supernatural intervention. "

Stewart Campbell postulated in the Journal of Meteorology in 1989 that a cloud of stratospheric dust changed the appearance of the sun on October 13, making it look yellow, blue, and purple and appear to be spinning. In support of his hypothesis, Campbell points out that a blue and red sun was reported in China in 1983.

Joe Nickell argues that the position of the phenomenon - as described by the various witnesses - was in the wrong azimuth and elevation to have been the sun. He suggests that the causecould have beena side sun . Another explanation suggested by Nickell is a temporary retinal distortion caused by staring into intense light and / or by the effect of shooting eyes to avoid completely fixed gazing. He concludes that "there was likely a combination of factors, including optical and meteorological phenomena."

Paul Simons states in an article published in The Times that some of the optical effects at Fátima may have been caused by clouds of dust from the Sahara .

Kevin McClure claims that the crowd at the Cova da Iria might have expected to see signs in the sun because similar phenomena had been reported in the weeks leading up to the miracle. Based on this, he believes the crowd saw what they wanted to see.

Leo Madigan believes that eyewitness accounts of a miracle were subjectively accurate but inconsistent, suggesting that astonishment, fear, glorification, and imagination must have shaped perception and accounts. Madigan compares the experiences with prayer and accordingly sees the experiences as spiritual and therefore subjective as well as individual.

Author Lisa Schwebel claims that the event was a supernatural , extrasensory phenomenon. She notes that the solar phenomenon reported at Fátima is not unique, as there have been some reports of meetings of believers with similarly high expectations during which unusual light phenomena appeared in the sky.

It has been argued that the Fatima phenomenon and many UFO sightings share a common cause.

Protestant commentators generally do not assume the phenomenon to be miraculous; some assume a supernatural process but attribute it to Satan instead of God.

Many years after the events in question, Stanley L. Jaki , a Benedictine priest and author of a number of books on the compatibility of science and Catholicism, proposed a theory about the supposed miracle. Jaki believes the event was meteorological, but a miracle nonetheless, since the event occurred at the precisely predicted time.

recognition

The event was recognized as a miracle on October 13, 1930 by the Roman Catholic Church . On October 13, 1951, the papal legate and Cardinal Federico Tedeschini declared to the crowd gathered in Fátima that on October 30, October 31, November 1 and November 8, 1950 Pope Pius XII. even seen the miracle of the sun from the Vatican Gardens .

See also

literature

  • John De Marchi: The True Story of Fátima. Catechetical Guild Entertainment Society, St. Paul, Minnesota 1952.
  • John De Marchi: The Immaculate Heart. Farrar, Straus and Young, New York 1952.
  • John De Marchi: Fatima - From the beginning. , 2nd edition, Ravengate Press, 1980, ISBN 0-911218-16-5 .
  • John M. Haffert: The sun miracle of Fatima - meeting with witnesses. Frankfurt am Main 2008.
  • Kevin McClure: Evidence: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary. Knaur Verlag, Munich 1987, ISBN 3-426-03780-7 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Unless otherwise stated, information and quotations are based on the two books by John De Marchi named under “Literature”. The English Wikipedia article contains an abundance of footnotes on this, which are referred to and which are not reproduced here individually.
  2. ↑ Irene Seligo: The sun miracle of Fatima. In: time. November 30, 1950, online at Zeit.de, accessed on January 11, 2017.
  3. ↑ Kevin McClure: The Evidence for Visions of the Virgin Mary. Aquarian Press, 1983, ISBN 0-85030-351-6 .
  4. ↑ De Marchi 1952, p. 282.
  5. ^ Fátima's dusty veil. In: New Humanist. Vol. 104, No. 2, August 1989;
    The Miracle of the Sun at Fátima. In: Journal of Meteorology. UK, Vol. 14, No. 142, October 1989.
  6. ^ Joe Nickell: The Real Secrets of Fatima. In: Skeptical Inquirer. No. 33.6, November / December 2009, online at csicop.org, accessed on January 11, 2017.
  7. ^ Joe Nickell: Looking for a Miracle: Weeping Icons, Relics, Stigmata, Visions and Healing Cures. Prometheus, 1993, ISBN 0-87975-840-6 .
  8. ^ Paul Simons: Weather Secrets of Miracle at Fátima. In: The Times. February 17, 2005.
  9. ↑ McClure, 1983.
  10. ^ Leo Madigan: The Children of Fátima. Our Sunday Visitor Inc., 2003, ISBN 1-931709-57-2 .
  11. ^ Lisa J. Schwebel: Apparitions, Healings, and Weeping Madonnas: Christianity and the Paranormal. Paulist Press, 2003, ISBN 0-8091-4223-6 .
  12. ^ D. Scott Rogo: Miracles. Doubleday, 1982, ISBN 0-385-27202-2 .
  13. ↑ JD Johnson: Signs of the Saucers: A Revealing Study of the Flying Saucer - UFO Phenomenon's Role in the Final Spiritual Crisis Between Christ and Satan and the Coming New World Order. TEACH Services Inc., 1996, ISBN 1-57258-133-6 .
  14. ^ Stanley L. Jaki: God and the Sun at Fátima. Real View Books, 1999.
  15. ^ Joseph Pelletier: The Sun Danced at Fátima. Doubleday, New York 1983, pp. 147-151.