Fátima: what the sources say about the apparitions of 1917

Between 13 May and 13 October 1917, at the Cova da Iria, a dip in the ground two and a half kilometres from the parish church of Fátima, three children minding a flock said they saw a Lady. They lived at Aljustrel, a hamlet of the same parish: Lúcia de Jesus, ten, and her cousins Francisco Marto, nine, and Jacinta Marto, seven. The sanctuary of Fátima puts it carefully: according to the testimony of the three seers, they saw the Virgin Mary six times, at the Cova da Iria and at Valinhos.

Not all six meetings went as planned. On 13 August the administrator of the municipality of Vila Nova de Ourém took the three children away and kept them two days at his house, trying by threats to make them retract; the diocesan commission’s report, dated 13 April 1930, calls it an abduction and sees in it the first act of official persecution. The fourth apparition was therefore reported on 19 August, at Valinhos, according to the declaration of the parish priest of Fátima. And the crowd grew from month to month: some fifty people on 13 June, twenty thousand on 13 September, about seventy thousand on 13 October, by the figures in that same report.

On 16 October 1917 the parish priest of Fátima, Manuel Marques Ferreira, questioned Lúcia and wrote down what she said: the Lady had asked that a little chapel be made there to the Lady of the Rosary. Lúcia says herself that she hesitates over the exact words, between that phrasing and “make a little chapel here, I am the Lady of the Rosary”. It is from that record that the name of the Lady of the Rosary comes. The cult authorised in 1930 would be named Our Lady of Fátima.

The children were questioned without respite, by the parish priest from June 1917, by the priest Manuel Nunes Formigão, by passing visitors, and pressed even at home. According to the 1930 report, priests called Lúcia a liar and her own mother struck her with a broom handle. The parish priest, for his part, had to defend himself publicly, in a letter of 15 August 1917, against having been the administrator’s accomplice in taking the children away.

The great Lisbon daily O Século had sent its reporter Avelino de Almeida. His article of 15 October 1917 describes the driving rain, the umbrellas a child makes them close, the mud everyone kneels in, then the sky opening: the star, he writes, recalls a plate of dull silver, and one can look at its disc without the least effort. It does not burn, it does not blind. Then comes the word that stayed, which the journalist attributes to the peasants: the sun danced. For the crowd he takes up estimates from educated people with no mystical leaning: thirty or forty thousand.

The same article says the witnesses did not tell the same story. Most, writes Almeida, saw the trembling and the dance of the sun; others declared they had seen the smiling face of the Virgin, swore the sun had spun on itself like a firework wheel, or that it had changed colour. On the evening of the 13th itself, the parish priest of Monte Redondo wrote to a colleague that the sun had begun to turn like a wheel of fire, for more than eight minutes.

A lawyer from Vila Nova de Ourém, Luís António Vieira de Magalhães e Vasconcelos, set down his testimony on 30 December 1917. He had come out of curiosity, telling his acquaintances the whole thing was a joke. He saw an intensely pink fringe surround the sun, cried out that he believed, and the tears came. On the crowd he is plain: whether they were thirty thousand or fifty thousand, nobody could say exactly.

Two weeks later Almeida published in the magazine Ilustração Portuguesa a letter in which he refuses to conclude: a miracle, as the people were shouting, or a natural phenomenon, as the learned say? He is not trying, for the moment, to find out, only to tell his correspondent what he saw; the rest is the business of Science and of the Church. The sanctuary’s critical edition transcribes both texts and publishes them side by side.

Thirteen years. In 1922 the bishop of Leiria, José Alves Correia da Silva, set up a commission to conduct the canonical inquiry. It reported on 13 April 1930. On 13 October 1930, to the day thirteen years after the last meeting, the bishop signed a pastoral letter whose operative part has two points: to declare worthy of belief the children’s visions at the Cova da Iria, from 13 May to 13 October 1917, and to authorise officially the cult of Our Lady of Fátima.

What that recognition means, the Holy See set out in 2000. Fátima is a private revelation: the file published by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith quotes Prospero Lambertini, the future Benedict XIV, in its own English: “An assent of Catholic faith is not due to revelations approved in this way; it is not even possible. These revelations seek rather an assent of human faith in keeping with the requirements of prudence, which puts them before us as probable and credible to piety.”

The two younger seers afterwards took their own path in the Church. Francisco died at Aljustrel on 4 April 1919, Jacinta in Lisbon on 20 February 1920, both after a pneumonia the sanctuary dates to the autumn of 1918. John Paul II beatified them at Fátima on 13 May 2000, and Francis canonised them in the same place on 13 May 2017, a hundred years to the day after the first reported apparition. In his homily the pope recalled that many eyes turned in the direction the children’s eyes followed, and did not see her. Lúcia had entered the Carmel of Coimbra on 25 March 1948; she died there on 13 February 2005.

There are not three secrets, but one secret in three parts, and it is Lúcia who tells it: on her account the Lady entrusted it to her in July 1917. The chronology published by the sanctuary dates the writings. Lúcia finished the Third Memoir on 31 August 1941, at the request of the bishop of Leiria, and set down the first two parts there for the first time. She wrote the manuscript of the third part on 3 January 1944.

What each part contains, the Vatican has published. The Congregation’s file gives the first two as Lúcia wrote them: a vision of hell, then the request for a devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, with a warning about a second war and about Russia. It also gives the text of the third: an angel with a flaming sword, “a Bishop dressed in White” climbing towards a great cross in the middle of a city half in ruins, and killed there.

The instruction written on the envelope is documented, and so is its reason. Lúcia had written that it was not to be opened before 1960. Received in 2000 by Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone, sent by John Paul II to examine the manuscript, she explained, in the Vatican’s English: “It was not Our Lady. I fixed the date because I had the intuition that before 1960 it would not be understood, but that only later would it be understood.” At the same interview, on 27 April, she confirmed the document’s authenticity.

The envelope travelled. Handed to the archives of the Holy Office on 4 April 1957, it was brought to John XXIII on 17 August 1959, who decided not to publish; Paul VI read it on 27 March 1965 and sent it back; John Paul II asked for it after the attempt on his life on 13 May 1981. Publication was announced on 13 May 2000 at Fátima by Cardinal Angelo Sodano, at the end of the beatification mass, and the text appeared with a theological commentary by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, which warns at the outset: “No great mystery is revealed; nor is the future unveiled.” Many accounts circulate about this secret; this paragraph contains only what is in the Vatican’s file.

The sources of Fátima fall into two layers, and the difference matters. That of 1917 first: the interrogations by the parish priest of Fátima and by the priest Manuel Nunes Formigão, the press articles, the witnesses’ letters, the documents of the diocesan inquiry. The sanctuary has edited them with the Centre for Religious History Studies of the Portuguese Catholic University, under the title Documentação Crítica de Fátima: five volumes, fifteen parts, published from 1992 to 2013, covering 1917 to 1930.

The second layer is later. Lúcia wrote her first written account of the apparitions on 5 January 1922, then four Memoirs between 25 December 1935 and 8 December 1941, at the bishop of Leiria’s request, and two more in 1989 and 1993, at the request of the rector of the sanctuary. The dialogues you read everywhere come from there: they are reported by her, eighteen years and more after the event.

The natural explanation was argued over from 1917, and by believers. The diocesan commission’s report quotes the reply of the astronomer Frederico Oom to an editor of O Século: if it had been a cosmic phenomenon, the astronomical and meteorological observatories would not have failed to record it, and that is precisely what is missing. The commission draws the opposite conclusion from the one you might expect: since the instruments recorded nothing, the phenomenon was not purely natural.

Gonçalo Xavier de Almeida Garrett, a doctor of mathematics teaching at Coimbra, wrote for his part to Formigão, on 3 December 1917, that the phenomena had lasted some eight to ten minutes and that he held them to be not astronomical but meteorological: an effect of the earth’s atmosphere on the image of the sun. He nonetheless judged them miraculous. Both positions sit in the same file, and no document reconciles them.

Fátima also has its academic work. The anthropologist Jeffrey S. Bennett devoted to it When the Sun Danced (University of Virginia Press, 2012), which his publisher presents as an inquiry into the beginnings of the cult of the Virgin of Fátima and its relation to the rise of authoritarian politics in Portugal.

At the very place where the children said they saw the Lady, a chapel was built between 28 April and 15 June 1919: the Capelinha das Aparições. It was dynamited in 1922 and rebuilt in 1923, and its present porch dates from John Paul II’s visit in May 1982. The statue of Our Lady of the Rosary it shelters is by José Ferreira Thedim, in Brazilian cedar, 1.04 metres high, given in 1920 and solemnly crowned on 13 May 1946.

The crown, given by the women of Portugal on 13 October 1942, weighs 1.2 kilograms and carries 313 pearls and 2,679 precious stones. In 1989 the bullet taken from John Paul II’s body after the attempt on his life on 13 May 1981, in Rome, was set into it. The detail comes from the sanctuary’s notice on the places of the apparitions.

Attendance is counted in millions. The sanctuary reports about 6.5 million pilgrims in 2025, against 6.2 million in 2024, 5,608 registered groups from 84 countries, and 429,930 visitors to the house of Francisco and Jacinta Marto, at Aljustrel. The three other places of 1917 can also be visited: Valinhos, the Loca do Cabeço and the village of Aljustrel.