Une Minute avec Marie
Faire connaître et aimer Marie
Our Lady appeared for the first time in Fatima, Portugal, on May 13, 1917, to three young children named Lucia (March 22, 1907-February 13, 2005), Francisco (June 11, 1908-April 4, 1919), and Jacinta (March 10, 1910-February 20, 1920).
On that day, around noon, the children first ate lunch then recited their rosary. Then they pushed the sheep a little higher on the hill and began to build, for fun, a small building with stones. Suddenly, a bright light, which the little shepherds, for lack of a more appropriate term, will call lightning, came to disturb their occupations. Lucia confided later that it was not a flash like lightning, but a dazzling, a kind of explosion of light that flashed in their eyes.
Leaving their stones there, all surprised, they raised their eyes to the sky, for they knew that there is no lightning without a storm. But on neither side could they see a sign of a coming storm.
- It's better to go back to the house, Lucia said to her cousins, because there is lightning and it could come from the storm.
They then began to descend the slope, pushing the sheep in the direction of the road. When they reached about halfway up the slope, they saw another flash of lightning and, after taking a few more steps, they saw above a small holm oak, "a lady, all dressed in white, brighter than the sun, radiating a light clearer and more intense than a crystal glass filled with crystalline water, traversed by the rays of the most ardent sun” as Lucia described it. They stopped, surprised by this apparition. They were so close that they were in the light that surrounded her, or rather that emanated from her, about a meter and a half away.
The marvelous Lady appeared to be at most eighteen years old. She was unlike any of the images of the Virgin or other saints that the children have seen. Her face, with its very pure and infinitely delicate lines, shone in a halo of sunlight; she smiled sweetly, but with a smile slightly veiled by a shadow of sadness. The eyes were black.
She held her hands joined at chest height. On the right hand hung a pretty rosary whose white beads, shining like precious stones, were connected by a gold chain.
The dress, snow-white, goes down to the feet. It is tightened around the neck by a golden cord whose ends fall down to the waist.
A white "cloak", with edges adorned with fine gold braid, covers the head, covers the entire width of the shoulders and falls as low as the dress.
The bare pink feet gently rest on a light cloud of ermine that touches the green branches of the shrub.
Our Lady said to them:
- Don't be afraid. I won't hurt you.
"Where does your Grace come from?" Lucia asked.
“I am from Heaven.
Lucie did not say 'Madame' ('Senhora') to the beautiful Lady, but 'Vossemecê', a term of respect that she used to address her parents.
"And what does your Grace want of me?"
- Will you offer yourselves to God to bear all the sufferings He will send you, as an act of reparation for the sins by which He is offended, and of supplication for the conversion of sinners?
“Yes, we want it.
“You will then have much to suffer, but the grace of God will be your comfort.
The Lady then opened her hands and this is what Lucia relates to in her memoirs:
It was while pronouncing these last words that she opened her hands for the first time and communicated to us, as if by a reflection which emanated from them, a light so intense that, penetrating our heart and to the depths of our soul , it made us see ourselves in God who was that light, more clearly than we see ourselves in the best of mirrors.
Then, by an interior impulse which was communicated to us, we fell on our knees and we interiorly repeated: “O, Most Holy Trinity, I adore you. My God, my God, I love You in the Most Blessed Sacrament.”
After a few moments, Our Lady added:
— Say the Rosary every day, in order to obtain peace for the world and an end to the war.
This last sentence is capital to fully understand the general meaning of the message of Fatima: Our Lady attests, from this first apparition, the relationship between the conversion she asks for and the end of the trials of humanity.