49- DOES THE VIRGIN APPEAR?

Radioclip en texto sin audio grabado.

Jesus christ denies the miracle of fatima

Lucia Dos Santos and her cousins,

Francisco and Jacinta Marto,
the young shepherds

who said they saw the Virgin Mary at Fatima

!(center)https://radialistas.net/wp-content/uploads/media/uploads/fotos_series/otro-dios/49g.jpg(alt_text)!

RACHEL To lift up the spirits of our radio audience, perhaps a little disheartened by our last program, the mobile unit of Emisoras Latinas has decided to return to the peaceful city of Nazareth. And we’ll begin today’s interview with Jesus Christ with a good joke.

JESUS A joke?

RACHEL Yes. It’s about your mother.

JESUS Let’s hear it, Rachel.

RACHEL Well, it turns out that a priest arrives in heaven and sees a child crying. “Who is that?” he asks. “It’s the Child Jesus,” they tell him, and he asks, “And why is he crying so?” They explain to him “Because his mother Mary goes down to earth every day and leaves him alone; she doesn’t have time to take care of him.”

JESUS Either I’m still half asleep, … or I don’t quite get your joke.

RACHEL Well, the joke is that your mother is constantly appearing on earth. In recent years her apparitions have been multiplying all around the world. There’s really been an avalanche of them Lourdes, Fatima, Garabandal, Medjugorje, Cuapa, Ostina, Mandura, Arizona, the Mystical Rose – the list is endless.

JESUS Really?

RACHEL People claim that there are statues of Mary that weep tears, holy cards that bleed, silhouettes of Mary in trees and drains. Not long ago your mother even appeared in a piece of pizza.

JESUS And what does my mother do when she appears?

RACHEL She asks people to build her a church and to pray the rosary. One of the most renowned apparitions occurred in Fatima.

JESUS Tell me about it, because I haven’t heard anything about this.

RACHEL On May 13th, 1917, in Fatima, Portugal, three children were tending sheep when they saw a woman in the sky. She was tall, blond, dressed in white.

JESUS Then I don’t think it could have been my mother, because she was dark-complexioned, short, and always wore an earth-colored tunic. What language did this woman speak?

RACHEL Portuguese.

JESUS She was speaking Portuguese?

RACHEL A few months later the miracle of the sun occurred. It was a spectacle witnessed by 70 thousand people.

JESUS And what happened, Rachel? Tell me.

RACHEL At noon, after hours and hours of waiting, the three little shepherds saw your mother Mary pointing to the sun. Then the sun began to spin and spin around; it became blood red and hovered close over the crowd. People were screaming out of fright.

JESUS What a horrible thing.

RACHEL When the ball of fire was about to plummet upon the people, the miracle came to an end, and the sun returned to its normal place in the sky.

JESUS And why do you call such a frightening calamity a miracle?

RACHEL I don’t. It was your own representatives in the Vatican who officially recognized it as a miracle meant to warn people. What is your own opinion about this, Jesus, since you are her son and also the one represented by the Vatican?

JESUS God makes the sun to shine on the good and the bad. On the smart and the dumb.

RACHEL I don’t understand you.

JESUS There’s only one sun in the sky, right, Rachel? The sun that those people saw that day was the same sun for the whole world. If the sun had come out of its orbit, all God’s children would have noticed it. The miracle wasn’t that those people in Fatima saw it, but that most people in the world didn’t see anything.

RACHEL But what happened, then, in Fatima? So many people couldn’t have been hallucinating at the same time.

JESUS Perhaps it was something they ate? Or maybe they were just faint after so many hours of waiting?

RACHEL You don’t believe in the miracle of Fatima?

JESUS It reminds me of the stories my grandfather Joachim used to tell us at night to scare us.

RACHEL What about the other apparitions of your mother Mary?

JESUS My mother really doesn’t need churches or rosaries. My mother doesn’t play hide-and-seek. Forget that stuff, Rachel, and tell me some funnier jokes.

RACHEL Okay, but first we have to sign off from the program. We now take leave of our audience, which once more, it seems to me, must be wondering what we’ll be hearing next from this fellow Jesus. From Nazareth this is Rachel Perez, special correspondent for Emisoras Latinas.

MUSIC

ANNOUNCER Another God is Possible. Exclusive interviews with Jesus Christ in his second coming to Earth. A production of María and José Ignacio López Vigil, with the support of the Syd Forum and Christian Aid.

*More information about this polemical topic…*

An official belief
That Mary, the mother of Jesus, appears to persons on earth is a belief officially certified and actively disseminated by the Catholic Church. The very first apparition of Mary, according to official Catholic doctrine, seems to have involved the miracle of bilocation: Mary, while still alive, appeared in the year 39 to James, the apostle of Jesus, who according to tradition was at that time preaching the gospel in Zaragoza, Spain.
Since then there have been more than 500 apparitions recorded by the Catholic Church over 20 centuries, and the number keeps increasing.  In the last two decades of the 20th century the Vatican received reports of 1,500 apparitions in more than 30 countries around the world. Only about 20 of the apparitions have been officially approved by the Pope or the corresponding bishop, including the most famous and popular ones, such as Guadalupe in Mexico, Lourdes in France, and Fatima in Portugal.

White, blonde and European
Curiously, practically all the “apparition” images which appear on holy cards, in paintings or in sculptures portray Mary as white, blonde, and in general European-looking. She frequently is wearing a blue and white robe, colors she never wore during her life since poor rural women in her time always had dark-colored tunics. Blue was worn only by the rich women of Jerusalem, who were the only ones able to buy the very expensive clothes dyed in that color.
In all her terrestrial incursions, the Mary who “appears” is always also an avid promoter of the official doctrines and devotions of the Catholic Church. She rarely or never mentions the novel and unsettling teachings of her son. Mary asks people to pray the rosary, tells them to go find a priest or a bishop, asks them to build her a church, urges them to make sacrifices for the salvation of the world, warns them about hell. In contrast, her son in his time raised questions about repetitive prayers, confronted the priests, avoided the temple, rejected sacrifices and never preached about hell.

Fatima and its three secrets
The “apparitions” of Mary in Fatima in 1917, occurring in the middle of the First World War and the same year as the Russian revolution, have been the ones most publicized by the Catholic Church. Mary “appeared” six times, once a month from May to October 1917, and she was seen by three shepherd children who were 10, 9 and 7 years of age: Francisco and Jacinta were brother and sister, and Lucy was their cousin.
Mary is supposed to have confided three secrets to them. The first was aimed at reinforcing a Catholic dogma that inspires fear: the little shepherds saw hell itself. It was like a sea of fire, with demons and souls, crying out and groaning in desperation, said the visionaries afterwards. The second secret sought to reaffirm the political prejudice of the Catholic Church against communism. In that “apparition” Mary told them that if Russia were to be consecrated to the Heart of Mary, it would be converted and there would be peace; if not, it would spread its errors throughout the world, provoking wars and persecution of the Church. The devotees of Fatima claim that John Paul II’s consecration of Russia in 1984 was the reason why the Soviet Union finally collapsed, seven years later.
In the year 2000, after eight decades of speculation, the third secret was “revealed” by Lucy, then an old woman. When the obscure message written by Lucy was finally opened, the Vatican interpreted its contents as relating to the 1981 assault on Pope John Paul II, which left him gravely wounded but not dead. The “secret” was simply a pledge that the suffering church would always prevail.

The day that the sun danced
During the sixth and final “apparition” of Mary at Fatima, in October 1917, the “miracle of the sun” occurred, an event that had been announced three months before. According to reports of that time, 70 thousand persons in Cova de Iría and thousands more within a radius of 40 miles gathered on a morning with torrential rainstorms. Suddenly they saw the rain stop and the sun appear; after spinning around three times, the sun came dizzyingly close to the earth and then returned to its original position. This “marvel” lasted ten minutes.
The Church officially recognized this phenomenon as a “miracle”. On that same date the director of the astronomical observatory in Lisbon declared to the reporters of the newspaper O Sëculo: If it were a cosmic phenomenon, the astronomical observatories would have detected it with precision. That is exactly what is lacking: a clear indication of some disturbance in the system, no matter how small.
Practically the whole of the official history of what occurred in Fatima that day and during all the “apparitions” is drawn from the personal memories of Lucy. Both Francisco and Jacinta died very young, shortly after these events. Lucy entered the convent as a teenager and there learned to read and write. Twenty years after the Fatima events she was told by the bishop of Leiría, José Alves Correia da Silva, to put her whole story in writing. By the end of 1935 she had her first memoir prepared, and she wrote five more in later years. Her writings are the only source for knowing what actually happened of Fatima.

A new message: abortion
In her more recent “apparitions” Mary has begun to speak about abortion, a topic that is an obsession with the Catholic hierarchy. Catholic websites give reports of countless visionaries who have received celestial anti-abortion messages.
In 1985 some visionaries of Oliveto, Italy, reported visions of aborted babies. In 1988 visionary Mike Siate of Texas stated: On one occasion the Virgin came to us during the rosary, dressed all in white, like the snow. Then her beautiful white dress began to turn blood red. While we were kneeling in amazement, she explained to us that her dress became red because of the blood shed by her aborted children.
In 1985 the Korean visionary Julia Kim claimed that she had experienced terrible pains, including the pangs of childbirth, because of aborted infants. She said that the “apparition” she saw revealed to her that abortion and genetic experimentation are bringing judgment upon the world. In 1992 the U.S. visionary John Downs heard Mary say: My son, distribute my image so as to put an end to the sins of abortion. Satan is mounting opposition to this plan. My virginal womb is in pain because of the children ripped out of the womb of their mothers.
To Nancy Fawlers, of Georgia, USA, the “apparition” gave a more specific message: Human life, the immortal soul, begins at the moment of conception. The souls of the aborted babies go directly to heaven and sit on God’s throne. Pray for the mothers, ask that they experience repentance. Pray for those doctors so that they have a change of heart.
These and other similar messages have given rise to a new devotion in the United States, one that is spreading to Latin America: people are praying the “rosary of the unborn”. Each bead of this rosary is shaped like a tear and has a fetus inserted into it.

Guadalupe and Juan Diego
Outstanding among the “apparitions” of Mary is one that took place in Latin America. In 1519 the Virgin of Guadalupe “appeared” to the Indian Juan Diego. This Mary was indeed of dark complexion and had indigenous features.
The “apparition” was studied in depth in 1980 by Jody Brant Smith and Philip Serna Callaghan, members of one of the many teams of NASA. Brant Smith had previously also done studies of the Shroud of Turin. These two Catholic professionals took photographs of the image of the Virgin, which is stamped on a piece of cloth, supposedly the cloak worn by Juan Diego on the day of the “apparition”. Those who pay devotion to Guadalupe claim that the image is a “photo” of Mary that was imprinted on the cloth; more stupendous still, the pupil of Mary´s eye in that “photo” reveals in turn a “photo” of Juan Diego himself. Some people even hold that the image on the cloth maintains a constant bodily temperature, which has been measured by a thermometer. This would indicate that Mary herself remains alive within the cloth.
Everything related to this “apparition” has created much fanaticism in Mexico, even though it has never ceased to be a heated topic of debate. The critics not only question the apparitions, but also wonder whether the Indian, Juan Diego, ever existed. A serious controversy arose among church figures in 1996 and is described in two books published in 2002 by the Editorial Plaza & Janes: Juan Diego: The Eagle Who Speaks, by Cardinal Norberto Rivera, and The Search for Juan Diego, by the priest Manuel Olimón Nolasco.

Apparitionism in the Catholic Church
The Mexican historian Rodrigo Martínez Baracs makes a statement that is applicable not only to the Guadalupe “apparition”, but to all the others as well: The basic question has to do with the way the Catholic Church relates to truth, to science, to the sense of what is true and real that we all share as human beings, apart from our creeds or political allegiances. In pursuing a narrow and ill-founded apparitionism, the Catholic Church closes in on itself; in seeking to grow and strengthen itself, it ends up separating itself from the other religions of our distressed human community.
Catholic “apparitionism” receives constant reinforcement from many sectors. Behind each of the “apparitions” there are both ideological and financial interests. During his pontificate John Paul II actively supported the fraudulent “apparitions” of Medjugorje, in Herzegovina. As a result the place became “the financial nerve center of a multimillion dollar enterprise,” according to the investigations of British writer David Yallop in his book The Power and the Glory (Carroll & Graf, 2007). In 2007 the Vatican became a business partner in Mistral Air, which flies pilgrims from Rome to the Marian sanctuaries of Lourdes (France), Fatima (Portugal), Guadalupe (Mexico) and Czestochowa (Poland). The airplanes are painted with the papal colors, white and yellow, and are staffed by people who animate the pilgrims with prayers and hymns during the trip.