Mary revealed “a sea of fire”

This week marks the 100th anniversary of the most controversial apparition of Our Lady in Fatima, Portugal. What she did that day inspired many to convert but provoked others to reject the faith out of hand. It made some people a little nutty and won the begrudging respect of others.

July 13th was the day Our Lady scared the daylights out of three shepherd children by showing them hell and sternly warning them about a second global war and a new age of martyrdom. But the surprising — and surprisingly harsh — July 13, 1917 apparition changed the faith of the Church in our time.

… In July, instead of just exhorting the children to say the Rosary and pointing them to heaven, she showed them a terrible sight. “We saw as it were a sea of fire,” Lucia wrote. “Plunged in this fire were demons and souls in human form… amid shrieks and groans of pain and despair, which horrified us and made us tremble with fear.”

To give Our Lady of Fatima credit, the vision of hell only happened after a year of preparation, including visits by an angel and much reassurance about heaven. But the vision so badly rattled Jacinta, especially, that it seemed to change her personality utterly.

The only thing that would make this vision okay, and not an example of emotional abuse, is if hell were a real place and we were in eminent danger of ending up there if we don’t do something drastic… The meaning of all of this was not lost on the three shepherd children. They learned that it was absolutely urgent that they console Jesus, convert sinners and commit to Mary…

Every pope from Pius XII to Francis has said “the sin of the century is the loss of the sense of sin.”

The refusal to repent — the belief that sin doesn’t really matter — is at the heart of the major moral disasters of our time, from abortion to human trafficking, from the pornography epidemic to the urban violent crime rate. Those who see no wrong do terrible things.

Our Lady of Fatima’s vision of hell is an absolutely necessary corrective to the presumptuous expectation that we are all going to heaven no matter what. It is true that God wants to forgive everybody. But one thing stops him: We don’t repent.

Tom Hoopes

Aleteia