Dubious visions

Whenever the Mother of God has a message for Catholics, she bypasses the Vicar of Christ and appears instead to illiterate peasant children, as at Fatima.

Mary has hundreds of magnificent churches and ‘sanctuaries’ specifically dedicated to her. Yet on the rare occasion when she decides to make an appearance, she chooses the most wretched locations in the middle of nowhere: on an oak tree – long associated with Celtic paganism, at Fatima, on a heap of stones on a desolate hillside at Medjugorje, inside a hole in a rock at Lourdes...

At Fatima, believers allegedly witnessed the mirage known as ‘the miracle of the sun’. Even if many people claim to have witnessed an event contrary to our ordinary experience of nature, we should hesitate to believe them. An ophthalmologist observed: “If you stare at the sun long enough, you are going to see bizarre visual phenomena.”

The Mother of God allegedly told the children at Fatima: “Through the rosary, you can stop wars”. She would have had better results in stopping wars if she had addressed the world’s statesmen, rather than illiterate peasant children. Perhaps the reason why rosaries do not stop wars is because they go against the teachings of Jesus, who disapproved of the repetition of prayers, such as the repetition of 50 ‘Hail Mary’s’ in the rosary.

In a commentary regarding Fatima, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger observed: “A careful reading of the text of the socalled third secret of Fatima... will probably prove disappointing or surprising after all the speculation it has stirred. No great mystery is revealed, nor is the future unveiled.” He questioned whether the alleged visions were “”only projections of the inner world of children.” John Guillaumier St Julian’s