Our Lady of Fatima

Inaugurated by Miracles - Part 1

0. Introduction

UPDATE: See also my reply to Scott Alexander. I further develop the arguments that are presented here and respond to a number of objections that are not addressed in this post.

This is the first installment in a series of articles surveying the evidence for Catholic miracles. My objective is to present the miracle case for Catholicism in a way that is rigorous enough to persuade those that are strongly predisposed towards skepticism. That means empirical data has to be inferred from primary sources and every skeptical explanation has to be excluded by multiple lines of evidence.

In this article, I focus on the evidence for Our Lady of Fatima. In the first section, I argue that skeptical explanations of the six apparitions that were reported by the seers are not tenable. In the second section, I argue that skeptical explanations of the Miracle of the Sun are not tenable either. In the third section, I conclude the best explanation is that Fatima was divine vindication of Catholicism. In the fourth section, I respond to the strongest objections to that conclusion.

1. Six Apparitions

An adequate theory of Fatima has to explain the six apparitions.

• (Preannounced schedule) Between May 13th and October 13th, 1917, Lucia dos Santos (age 10), Francisco Marto (age 9), and Jacinta Marto (age 7) reported six apparitions. After the first apparition on May 13th, Lucia reported the apparition told the children to return to the same location, the Cova da Iria, once a month for six consecutive months, on the thirteenth day of each month.¹ On August 13th, the children were detained by a local official, which prevented them from visiting the Cova that day.² On August 19th, the children reported a ‘make-up’ apparition at Valinhos, a field about a mile away from the Cova.³ The rest of the apparitions conformed to the schedule announced in May.⁴

• (Visual appearance) Following each of the apparitions, all of the children reported seeing a luminous figure. They described the figure as ‘a woman of extraordinary beauty’ that was ‘more brilliant than the sun.’ They reported that the figure was so bright that it was sometimes blinding.⁵ Even when questioned separately, the children agreed on many, various, and specific features of the figure’s attire, posture, gestures, and behavior: the figure invariably arrived from and departed towards the east, perched itself on top of a holm oak, wore a white dress with gold accents, wore a white cloak, held a white rosary in its hands, clasped its hands together above its waist when it was not speaking, and separated its hands to about shoulder-width apart when it was speaking.⁶

• (Interactive dialogue) Lucia reported seeing, hearing, and speaking to the figure; Jacinta reported seeing and hearing the apparition, but not speaking to it; and Francisco reported seeing the apparition, but neither hearing it nor speaking to it. The conversations, as relayed by Lucia, were always concise and orderly, without lengthy or irrelevant digressions. Over the course of the six apparitions, the semantic content was marked by a steady and purposeful development. It began with reassurance and a call to prayer, soon moved to insistent appeals for daily sacrifice and amendment of life, and culminated in prophecy and instruction. In later appearances, the apparition disclosed her identity, promised and confirmed a public miracle, and requested that a chapel be built.⁷

• (External corroboration) Crowds were present for the apparitions on June 13th (~50 people), July 13th (~5,000 people), September 13th (~20,000 people), and October 13th (~100,000 people).⁸ The crowds did not perceive the apparitions, but they did perceive the children’s behavior during the apparitions as well as physical anomalies that coincided with the apparitions. As for the children’s behavior, witnesses reported that, during the apparitions, Lucia spoke audibly in a question–answer cadence (‘as if speaking to someone’) and that she often diverted her gaze.⁹ That is consistent with her testimony that the apparition was so bright that it sometimes blinded her. As for physical anomalies, witnesses reported that, at the beginning of each apparition, a mysterious cloud of smoke rose from the holm oak.¹⁰ Witnesses also reported that, on August 13th, the day the children were not permitted to attend the Cova, the crowd began to panic after hearing the sound of two loud ‘detonations’ at the holm oak.¹¹

1.1 - Dishonesty?

It is historically certain that the children were sincere.

• (Credibility) If the children were lying, they planned and executed a grand conspiracy that required extraordinary acting, coordination, discipline, and social intelligence from each of them. The children were subjected to many and various interrogations—days after the apparitions and months after them, together and apart, by clergy, academics, lawyers, doctors, and hostile officials. Without fail, interrogators deemed their testimony consistent, coherent, and compelling.¹² By way of illustration, the following was Dr. Manuel Nunes Formigao’s assessment:¹³

From the children's responses, and even more from their attitude and way of proceeding in all the circumstances in which they have found themselves, it emerges, with a clarity that seems to exclude all doubt, their perfect and absolute sincerity…

The naturalness and frankness with which they express themselves, the simplicity and candor they display, the indifference and disinterest they show as to whether or not they are believed, Jacinta's extreme shyness, the apparent contradictions, easily explained, into which they fall and which absolutely exclude any combination between the children, are all indications that the children possess, to the highest degree, one of the indispensable requirements for a witness to be trustworthy: truthfulness…

• (Commitment) The children did not have strong incentives to lie, but they did have strong incentives to drop their story. Lucia’s own mother publicly humiliated her, beat her, and threatened that there would be dire consequences if she continued to attend the Cova on the appointed days. Clergy emphatically warned the children they would go to Hell if they were lying and didn’t recant. On August 13th, the administrator of Ourem had the children arrested, interrogated them separately, and threatened to kill them unless they complied with his demands. Jacinta and Francisco were terrified to the point of tears, yet refused to comply.¹⁴

• (Content) After the third apparition on July 13th, the children reported that the apparition promised to perform a miracle on October 13th.¹⁵ If they didn’t buy into their own narrative, why would they have stuck their necks out by committing to a bold, falsifiable prediction that was likely to expose their deceit? Equally striking is the subtlety and sophistication of the children’s accounts. Rather than being rambling, fanciful, or self-serving—as one would expect from childish invention—they were minimalistic, understated, and self-effacing.

• (Character) None of the children pursued wealth, fame, or personal advantage from their role in the apparitions. Francisco and Jacinta, who both died within three years of the events, embraced lives of prayer, sacrifice, and penance with a seriousness far beyond their years. Even in their final illnesses, they stood behind their story: both reaffirmed on their deathbeds that they had seen what they claimed they had seen at the Cova and Valinhos.¹⁶ Lucia, who lived until the age of 97, spent decades in seclusion as a Carmelite nun. Far from pursuing notoriety, she endured years of isolation, obediently submitting to her religious superiors.

1.2 - Fantasy?

1.2.1 - Lucia

Lucia’s behavior during the apparitions was sophisticated and perceptually grounded:

• (Speech) Witnesses observed that Lucia spoke aloud in a question–answer cadence during the apparitions, pausing as though listening before resuming her replies. Several of the witnesses were close enough to hear the specific petitions, questions, and responses that she vocalized. Their testimony was always in agreement with Lucia’s.¹⁷ That leaves no room for memory distortion: Lucia publicly enacted dialogue in real time and remembered it with fidelity.

• (Gaze) Witnesses observed that Lucia did not keep her eyes fixed on the figure continuously, but repeatedly diverted her gaze, as though it were difficult to maintain eye contact. When asked about this, she explained that it was because of the figure’s luminosity.¹⁸ Lucia’s spontaneous, involuntary reflexes confirm that her testimony about the apparition’s brightness was an accurate recollection of a notable feature of an entity that she perceived at a fixed location in real time.

Children sometimes confuse fantasy with reality. However, Lucia and her cousins were old enough that they would have been able to reliably discriminate between imagination and perception.¹⁹ Given the level of scrutiny to which they were subjected, it almost certainly would have become apparent if that was what was going on. Furthermore, source confusion is sporadic, not reliable and predictable. Psychotic breaks don’t conform to preannounced schedules, nor do they involve rich phenomenology and elaborate narratives that remain coherent between episodes.

1.2.2 - Jacinta and Francisco

Nor is it possible to dismiss Jacinta and Francisco’s testimony as memory conformity. That hypothesis implies that the two children sat through six apparitions in which they didn’t perceive a luminous figure, but then immediately became convinced they had seen a blindingly bright and ineffably beautiful woman. Memory conformity does not repeatedly and reliably prevent witnesses from recognizing a total disparity between their actual experiences and stories they are told immediately afterwards.²⁰

We know that Jacinta and Francisco did not harmonize their testimony with Lucia’s whenever their experiences diverged. Francisco admitted he never heard the apparition’s words. On one occasion, Jacinta admitted she couldn’t hear because the crowd was too loud that day.²¹ If their perceptions had been wholly unlike Lucia’s—if they saw nothing at all—they would have been willing to admit that. The fact that they never did, even when they had strong incentives to distance themselves from Lucia’s claims, indicates their testimony was based on genuine experiences.

If Jacinta and Francisco were confabulating, they assimilated a remarkable amount of information about the apparition’s apparel, posture, gestures, and movements. If their memories were pliable enough for that, their testimony would have drifted when the local official “tried all sorts of police tricks to make them contradict themselves, to force them to recant, and to extract from them the secret they claim the apparition has confided to them.” That didn’t happen: the local official was impressed by their resolve.²² Confabulators are amenable to suggestion—yet, again and again, the children demonstrated that they were unusually resistant to suggestion.

1.3 - Hallucination?

It is exceedingly unlikely that the children were hallucinating.

• (Context) None of the children were neuropathic, psychotic, or even schizotypal; they were found to be physically and mentally healthy. The apparitions took place in the middle of the day while the children were wide awake. The apparitions were not associated with fatigue, stress, confusion, or agitation; all three children presented as alert, calm, and docile. A hallucination as rich, coherent, and stable as any of the experiences they reported would be an extreme outlier among the hallucination-prone, not to mention the psychologically balanced.²³

• (Intersubjectivity) Hallucinations are private and idiosyncratic. Yet, after each apparition, all three of the children reported that they perceived the same figure at the same external locus. Their accounts cohered not only in broad outline, but also in fine detail. None of them ever intimated that their impressions were vaporous, eccentric, or turbulent. “We would have to assume a collective, simultaneous hallucination… From the point of view of psychiatry, such a simultaneous hallucination in these conditions is a pure chimera.”²⁴

• (Predictability) Hallucinations are erratic and involuntary. They don’t conform to preannounced schedules. Yet from the start, the children reported that the apparition told them to return to the Cova on the thirteenth day of each month, and that is exactly where and when their experiences happened. “Now, hallucinators do not make prophecies about what they will see and hear, especially not prophecies that come true: it has never been recorded that they announced how many hallucinatory crises they would experience.”²⁵

• (Dazzling) Lucia’s reported that the apparition occasionally blinded her.²⁶ That is indicative of dazzle glare—a physiological effect that is produced when intense light bleaches photoreceptors in the retina. Hallucinatory brightness, no matter how vivid, bypasses the retina entirely, so it doesn’t cause photostress. Illusory brightness, which does involve retinal input, leads to the constriction of pupils, but not visual incapacity. Dazzle glare presupposes retinal irradiance. If the apparition dazzled Lucia, then it couldn’t have been a visual hallucination.²⁷

2. Miracle of the Sun

An adequate theory of Fatima has to explain the Miracle of the Sun.

• (Specific prophecy) Beginning on July 13th, Lucia prophesied a vindicatory miracle at the Cova da Iria on October 13th, around midday.

• (Atmospheric event) At solar noon on October 13th, there was a spectacular, localized, and unprecedented atmospheric event at the Cova.

2.1 - Specific prophecy

Fr. Manuel Marques Ferreira’s notes from his interrogation of Lucia on July 14th record that she claimed that she asked the apparition to “perform a miracle so that all may believe” and the apparition replied “In three months, I will make everyone believe.”²⁸ Given the context, this was understood as a promise of a vindicatory miracle at the Cova on October 13th, around the same time as the other apparitions.

Dr. Formigao’s notes from his interrogation of Lucia on September 27th record that she claimed that “the apparition declared that on October 13th she will make all of the people believe that she really appears.” In his reflections on that interrogation, prepared before the events of October 13th, Dr. Formigao concluded:²⁹

Were the events of Fatima the work of God? It is too early to answer this question with certainty. The Church has not yet intervened by appointing a commission of inquiry. Once done, this commission's mission will be relatively easy to accomplish. On October 13th, either everything will fall apart as if by magic, or new, entirely conclusive evidence will come to confirm the existing evidence supporting the reality of the Virgin's apparitions.

Dr. Formigao’s notes from his interrogation of Lucia on October 11th record that he asked her “aren’t you afraid that people will hurt you if you don’t see anything extraordinary that day?” She replied “I’m not afraid at all.”³⁰

2.2 - Atmospheric event

2.2.1 - Spectacular

An enormous number of people—estimated between 30,000 and 100,000—were at the Cova during the Miracle of the Sun on October 13th. Among them were freethinkers, journalists, lawyers, scientists, and mathematicians. Virtually everyone that attended the event was amazed by the extraordinary phenomena that they saw.

• Avelino de Almeida worked for the anti-clerical newspaper O Seculo. After witnessing the spectacle at the Cova, he published a favorable account:³¹

[Lucia] affirms that the Lady has spoken to her once more, and the sky, still murky, suddenly begins to lighten overhead; the rain stops, and one senses that the sun will flood with light the landscape that the winter morning has made even sadder...

The miraculous manifestation, the announced visible sign, is about to occur, many pilgrims assure... And then one witnesses a unique and unbelievable spectacle for those who were not witnesses… the entire immense crowd turns toward the sun, which appears free of clouds, at its zenith. The star resembles a plate of dull silver, and one can gaze at its disc without the slightest effort. It does not burn, it does not blind. One would think an eclipse was taking place…

Before the dazzled eyes of the people—whose emotion takes us back to biblical times and who are fearfully pallid, their gaze fixated upon the blue sky as the sun pulsates with never-before-seen tremulous movements, defying all laws of gravity—the sun danced, according to the typical expression of the peasants…

It remains to be seen what competent people will say about the macabre dancing of the sun in Fatima today that caused Hosannas to explode from the hearts of the faithful and left a deep impression on them—not leaving indifferent, either, the free thinkers and others not moved by any particular religious impulse, who went to the now-famous heath.

• Jose Maria de Proenca de Almeida Garrett, a lawyer, used powerful binoculars to observe the Miracle of the Sun while standing at the outskirts of the Cova:³²

I arrived at noon. The rain that had been falling since morning, light and persistent, driven by a harsh wind, continued, irritating, threatening to melt everything. The low, heavy sky had a watery brownish hue, a harbinger of heavy and long-lasting rain. I remained on the road, sheltered by the car’s hood and slightly overlooking the place they said was the apparition, not daring to enter the muddy, sticky mud of the freshly plowed field…

Shortly after one o’clock, the children arrived at this place, to whom the Virgin (they assured) had set the place, day, and time of the apparition… At a certain point, this large, confused, and compact mass closed their umbrellas… which left me surprised and amazed because the rain, in a blinding continuation, was now drenching them. I was later told that these people, who ended up kneeling in the mud, had obeyed the voice of a child.

Where the children were, a thin, tenuous, bluish column of smoke rose straight up to perhaps two meters above their heads, only to vanish at that point. This phenomenon, clearly visible to the naked eye, lasted for a few seconds… The smoke suddenly dissipated, and after a while, the phenomenon repeated itself a second and a third time. All three times, and especially the last, the slender stems stood out clearly against the gray atmosphere. I turned my binoculars toward it. I could see nothing but the columns of smoke, but I was convinced they were produced by some unshaken censer in which incense was burning. Later, trustworthy people assured me that it was customary for the event to occur on the 13th of the previous five months and that on those days, like this one, nothing had ever been burned...

Continuing to gaze at the place of the apparition in serene and cold expectation and with a curiosity that was softening because time had passed long and slowly without anything activating my attention, I heard the bruhaha of thousands of voices and saw that crowd, spread out across the wide field that stretched out at my feet… turn their backs to the point where until then their desires and anxieties had converged and look at the sky on the opposite side. The sun had, moments before, broken through the dense cloud cover that had hidden it…

It couldn’t be confused with the sun seen through fog (which, by the way, didn’t exist at that time) because it wasn’t opaque, diffuse, or veiled… It is wonderful that, for a long time, one could gaze at the star… without pain in the eyes and without a dazzling effect on the retina that would blind one. This phenomenon, with two brief interruptions in which the fierce sun threw its most brilliant and refulgent rays, forcing people to look away, must have lasted about ten minutes.

This pearly disk had the vertigo of movement. It wasn’t the twinkling of a star in full bloom. It spun around itself at a dizzying speed. Suddenly, a clamor is heard, like a cry of anguish from all those people. The sun, maintaining the speed of its rotation, detaches itself from the sky and advances bloodily upon the earth, threatening to crush us with the weight of its fiery and immense millstone…

I looked at what was nearby and stretched my gaze out to the far horizon and saw everything the color of amethyst. Objects, the sky, and the atmospheric layer were the same color. A purple oak grove rising in front of me cast a heavy shadow over the land. Fearing I had suffered a retinal defect—an unlikely hypothesis because, given this condition, I shouldn’t see things in purple—I turned around, closed my eyelids, and held them with my hands to block out all the light… I opened my eyes and realized that, as before, the landscape and the air remained purple…

Continuing to look at the sun, I noticed that the environment had brightened. Soon after, I heard a peasant nearby say in an astonished voice: “This lady is yellow.” Indeed, everything had now changed, near and far, taking on the color of old yellow apricots. People looked sickly and jaundiced. I smiled, finding them downright ugly and unattractive. Laughter rang out. My hand was the same shade of yellow.

A few days later I tried to stare at the sun for a few brief moments. Withdrawing my gaze, I saw, after a few moments, irregular yellow spots on the shape. It wasn’t all a uniform color, as if a topaz had evaporated into thin air, but rather spots or specks that shifted with the movement of my gaze.

All these phenomena that I have mentioned and described, I observed calmly and serenely without any emotion or alarm. It is up to others to interpret them.

• Dr. Goncalo Xavier de Almeida Garrett, professor of natural science at the University of Coimbra, wrote a concise, analytical summary of his observations:³³

(1) The phenomena lasted about 8 to 10 minutes;

(2) The sun lost its dazzling brightness, taking on the appearance of the moon, and could be easily seen;

(3) The sun, on three occasions during this period of time, manifested a rotational movement around its periphery, emitting sparks of light from its edges, similar to what happened with the well-known fire-work wheels;

(4) This rotational movement of the sun’s edges, manifested three times and interrupted three times, was rapid and lasted about 8 to 10 minutes, more or less;

(5) Next, the sun took on a violet then orange color, spreading these colors over the Earth, finally regaining its brightness and splendor;

(6) These events occurred shortly after noon and near the zenith…

2.2.2 - Localized

Dalleur (2021) presents overwhelming evidence that the Miracle of the Sun involved the spontaneous formation of an observer-independent, directional light source (LSa) due south of the Cova, paired with a diffuse source above the Cova (LSb).³⁴

• (Ophthalmology) The crowd at the Cova fixated on LSa in patches of clear sky for extended periods without squinting, watering of the eyes, discomfort, or after-images. Staring at the midday Sun would have triggered protective reflexes after a few seconds. Comfortable viewing requires that LSa had luminance orders of magnitude lower than the midday Sun. That is consistent with the consensus of witnesses that LSa was pale, moonlike, and bathed the landscape in unusual colors. Moreover, if LSa were the midday Sun, there would have been substantial incidence of retinopathy and photophobia. Zero cases were ever reported.

• (Distant witnesses) Fr. Dalleur analyzed the testimony of distant witnesses that reported seeing anomalous phenomena in the direction of Fatima from various bearings, distances, and elevations. For some of these witnesses, the bearing to Fatima was radically different from the solar azimuth at the time of the event, such as due north in Minde, directly opposite the Sun. Plotting these bearings produces a geometric convergence over the Fatima sky sector, which is striking given the geographical distribution of the witnesses. This undesigned coincidence indicates LSa was a localized emitter in the vicinity of the Cova.

• (Photogrammetry) Fr. Dalleur analyzed certified photographs of the Cova that were taken during the Miracle of the Sun. By analyzing shadow cues, he inferred the elevation of the light source that the crowd was staring at. This placed LSa at an elevation of 25–32° above the horizon. Astronomical data indicates the Sun was at 42.7°elevation. The discrepancy between the elevation of LSa and that of the Sun is robust to extreme assumptions about camera parameters. That excludes the identification of LSa with the Sun. Moreover, Fr. Dalleur identified shadows that imply the presence of a diffuse, overhead LSb at a high elevation.

• (Rapid drying) Fr. Dalleur observed that a certified photograph, taken during the Miracle of the Sun, depicts wet-dry contrast patterns on a boy’s pants and that the wet regions correspond to areas that had recently been occluded by the boy’s jacket. These occluder-shaped patterns indicate that infrared radiation was delivered along straight lines from a compact source. That conclusion is reinforced by witness testimony, with many accounts describing a sensation of heat and garments drying extremely rapidly despite the cool, humid conditions immediately before the event. That suggests a high-energy, compact emitter.

2.2.3 - Unprecedented

In view of Fr. Dalleur’s reconstruction, the Miracle of the Sun couldn’t have been produced by reflection, refraction, or scattering of sunlight. Atmospheric optical phenomena are sun-tied, appearing at fixed angular offsets from the Sun; observer-dependent, shifting against the landscape as one moves; and photometrically weak, spreading light over arcs or diffuse patches too faint to cast shadows or deliver radiant heat.³⁵ The luminous disc that enchanted the crowd at the Cova didn’t have any of those features. It was terrestrially anchored, observer-independent, bright enough to cast shadows, and energetic enough to dry saturated clothing in minutes.

Nor could the event have been produced by the re-emission of sunlight. When clouds or aerosols reradiate absorbed solar energy, they emit it diffusely rather than concentrating it into a compact disc. Such radiation is intrinsically weak, limited by the modest equilibrium temperature of the cloud, and entirely incapable of projecting a sharply bounded luminous form. A warmed patch of cloud would have produced a uniform glow, which would not have printed occluder-shaped wet–dry contrasts on garments. And even assuming unrealistically efficient absorption, the meager solar flux available beneath heavy overcast falls orders of magnitude short of the hundreds of watts per square meter required to dry soaked clothing within minutes.³⁶

That leaves one possibility: the disc was self-luminous. However, it bore no resemblance to any self-luminous emitter that has ever spontaneously formed in Earth’s atmosphere: lightning lasts milliseconds; auroras form curtains a hundred kilometers up; St. Elmo’s fire attaches to conductors. None appear as compact discs, stable in one sky sector for nearly ten minutes, bright enough to cast sharp shadows, IR-rich enough to dry clothing, and yet comfortable to stare at. The lower atmosphere is not a favorable environment for such an emitter: coherent structures are unstable, power reservoirs are lacking, and the spectral profile has no analogues.³⁷

2.3 - Coincidence?

It is statistically impossible that the correspondence between the specific prophecy and the atmospheric event was coincidental.

• (Extraordinary sign) For the prophecy to be fulfilled, the event had to lend itself to being interpreted as a vindicatory miracle. The promise to “make everyone believe” implied there was going to be an unambiguous, awe-inspiring sign. The Miracle of the Sun fit the bill. Not only was it totally unprecedented, it gave the impression of a choreographed display. When it commenced, the rain abruptly ceased, the clouds parted, and an aperture formed. Then, a well-defined, compact disc appeared through that aperture. For ten minutes straight, the disc maintained its coherence while rotating at a high speed, ejecting firework wheels, bathing the landscape in alternating, saturated colors, and heating up the crowd.

• (Spatiotemporal precision) The event also had to occur at the location and time that were announced months in advance. It would not have been enough for an anomalous event to occur somewhere in Portugal in 1917; it needed to happen around the Cova, on October 13th, while a crowd gathered there could see it. The Miracle of the Sun satisfied those constraints with exacting precision. It involved a physically localized emitter forming in the vicinity of the Cova, due south relative to the crowd, at the exact time it was supposed to. The emitter behaved as though it were a ‘spotlight’ aimed directly at the Cova, and was accompanied by a ‘diffuser’ that formed above the Cova in synchrony, complementing it perfectly.

3. Implications

Fatima was divine vindication of Catholicism:

• (Agent) An immensely powerful agent orchestrated Fatima.

• (Message) The agent endorsed and promoted Catholicism.

• (Veracity) The agent was neither deceptive nor ignorant.

3.1 - Agent

The preceding discussion established that the children underwent extraordinary visions that had to have been induced by a coordinating cause that operated reliably but not rigidly: it adhered to a fixed monthly schedule, yet when circumstances forced the children to deviate, it adapted. The visions were richly structured and transcendentally beautiful. They involved back-and-forth conversations with semantic content that purposefully developed within and between episodes. That content included a commitment to perform a miracle that the cause then, by all appearances, followed through on. The miracle itself had fingerprints of design: it was made possible by the orderly arrangement of finely tuned, functionally interdependent components in a chaotic medium. All of that points to intentional activity.

To orchestrate Fatima, an agent would have to be immensely powerful.

• (Psychological manipulation) Orchestrating the six apparitions required controlling the perceptual experiences of three percipients without relying on stimuli perceptible to bystanders, and without unintended side-effects. To achieve this by natural means, an agent would have to find a way to transmit a large amount of information into the percipients’ nervous systems through an unknown, imperceptible channel, then hijack their perception by hacking their chaotic, individualized neural codes, all without disturbing ordinary functioning.

• (Atmospheric manipulation) The Miracle of the Sun required exercising control over the atmosphere to create a dramatic, large-scale spectacle exactly when and where it was promised. To achieve this by natural means, one would need to disperse storm clouds, spawn an anomalous light source, and then choreograph the source’s motion and optics in the turbulent lower atmosphere. Each of those feats would have required Star Trek-level science and technology, massive energetic inputs, and a number of collateral effects that were not observed.

3.2 - Message

During the apparition on July 13th, Lucia petitioned the apparition to “convert” several individuals to Catholicism. The apparition granted those requests, promising to convert them within a year. By acceding to those petitions, the apparition affirmed that the Catholic faith is the proper object of conversion. Immediately after, the apparition promised to perform a miracle that would “make everyone believe.”³⁸ From the outset, the Miracle of the Sun was framed as a vindication of Catholicism.

Further, the conversations between Lucia and the apparition were suffused with statements and commands that presupposed the truth and importance of devotions and doctrines that are distinctive of Catholicism.

• (Rosary) The apparition repeatedly and emphatically called for daily recitation of the Rosary. On October 13th, the figure identified herself as Our Lady of the Rosary.³⁹ The Rosary is distinctively Catholic in its origin, substance, and practice. It originated in the Latin Church and was codified by papal authority. It consists of the Apostles’ Creed, the Our Father, the Hail Mary, the Glory Be, and mysteries such as the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Our Lord, the Descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, and the Assumption and Coronation of Our Lady.

• (Secrets) The apparition entrusted three ‘secrets’ to Lucia. Although the secrets were not publicly disclosed until Lucia’s bishop ordered her to reveal them in 1941, they were understood to exist and to be significant at the time of the apparitions.⁴⁰ Assuming the motives of the agent that orchestrated the apparitions are intelligible, it is absurd to suppose they were indifferent to how, when, or whether the secrets they divulged to the children were disclosed.

  • The first secret was a terrifying vision of Hell. The second secret included a statement of purpose for the apparitions: “You have seen hell where the souls of poor sinners go. To save them, God wishes to establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart…”⁴¹ That presupposed the Immaculate Conception of Mary, which is a dogma that is distinctive of Catholicism. While both Catholics and Orthodox affirm Mary’s lifelong sinlessness, only the Catholic Church teaches that from the moment of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege, she was preserved from the stain of original sin.

  • The crux of the second secret was a conditional prophecy: unless the Pope consecrated Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, God would punish the world for its crimes by means of war, famine, and “persecutions of the Church and of the Holy Father.”⁴² That presupposed the orthodoxy and normative authority of the Pope, decades after Vatican I solemnly defined papal infallibility. If Eastern Orthodoxy were true, why would Mary appear to Catholics to demand the intervention of the “Holy Father” to effectuate the conversion of an Orthodox country that was about to apostatize en masse?

Unsurprisingly, the principal effects of Fatima were the conversion of skeptics to Catholicism, greater devotion to the Rosary and the Immaculate Heart among Catholics, and significant pressure on the Pope to consecrate Russia.

3.3 - Veracity

The most explanatory, least convoluted theory is that a supernatural agent orchestrated Fatima to vindicate Catholicism because Catholicism is true. It is ad hoc, intuitively unacceptable, and epistemically self-defeating to posit a deceptive or ignorant agent with the motive, means, and opportunity to orchestrate Fatima.

3.3.1 - Demon?

If you reflexively dismiss any miracle that conflicts with your interpretation of prior revelation as a demonic counterfeit, then it is irrational for you to appeal to miracles to prove the authenticity of the revelation that you accept. Why not believe that the miracles that accompanied the prior revelation were counterfeits? To preserve the epistemic possibility of objective revelation, you need a non-arbitrary, non-circular principle that distinguishes genuine miracles from counterfeit miracles. The alternative is blind faith that is impervious to evidence and impotent to persuade.

Our Lord instructed his followers to apply such a principle: “Watch out for false prophets… By their fruit you will recognize them… A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit.”⁴³ False prophets are proud, duplicitous, and ambitious. By all accounts, the Fatima seers were “humble, meek, and docile.”⁴⁴ They took no pleasure in recounting their experiences. They were unfailingly honest, even when that demanded heroic virtue. After the apparitions, they grew in piety and penitence. Francisco and Jacinta endured hardship patiently. Lucia withdrew from worldly affairs, only discussing the apparitions when her bishop ordered her to do so.

When the Pharisees accused Our Lord of exorcising demons by the power of demons, he replied “If Satan drives out Satan, he is divided against himself. How then can his kingdom stand?”⁴⁵ The same logic applies to the case at hand. If the primary goal of the counterfeit miracle was to deceive members of a non-Catholic sect, then the choice to perform it in Portugal in 1917 was nonsensical. Although more than 99% of Portuguese were nominally Catholic, the country was ruled by an anti-clerical regime that was subverting the Church. The proximate effect of the miracle was to convert lukewarm Catholics and freethinkers, not to lure away Muslims, Jews, Protestants, or Eastern Orthodox. The remote effect has been to counteract secularism.

4. Objections

4.1 - “The war ends today”

Objection: During an interrogation on October 19th, Lucia reported that the apparition said “The war ends today; wait here for the soldiers very soon.”⁴⁶ Portuguese troops didn’t start to return home from World War 1 until November 11th, 1918. That was more than a year after the apparition claimed the war would end.

Reply: First, it is worth noting that Lucia’s testimony on October 19th demonstrates that she was high in integrity and low in suggestibility. When Dr. Formigao exclaimed “But look, the war is still going on! The newspapers report that there has been fighting since the 13th. How can this be explained if Our Lady said the war would end on that day?,” Lucia replied “I don’t know. All I know is that I heard her say that the war would end on the 13th. I don’t know anything.” Dr. Formigao tried to extend her a lifeline: “Some people claim that they heard you say that Our Lady had declared that the war would soon end.” She turned it down: “I said exactly what Our Lady said.”⁴⁷

Second, there is overwhelming evidence that the apparition’s statement was a conditional prophecy that Lucia subsequently misremembered. When Lucia was questioned on October 13th, she reported the prophecy in a conditional form:⁴⁸

[Formigao] - And what did [the Lady] say?

[Lucia] - She said that if we repented, if we did not offend Our Lord—who was very offended—if we prayed the Rosary and asked for forgiveness for our sins, the war would end today and we would see our soldiers back very soon.

When Jacinta was questioned on October 19th, she reported that the apparition said “I come here to tell you not to offend Our Lord anymore, that He was very offended, that if the people reformed, the war would end…”⁴⁹ In 1922, Lucia wrote “I understood that Our Lady had said to me: ‘When I go back to Heaven, the war will end today.’ But my cousin Jacinta said that this is what she had said: ‘If the people amend their lives, the war will end today.’ This is why I can’t affirm how she pronounced these words.”⁵⁰

Dr. Formigao asked Lucia “Didn’t she say that the apparition would end as soon as she reached Heaven?” Lucia replied “I don’t remember whether she said that it would end as soon as she reached Heaven.”⁵¹ That implies that, although Lucia was confident Our Lady said ‘the war ends today,’ she couldn’t remember the immediate context of that statement. Dr. Carlos Mendes claimed that, immediately after the final apparition, while he was carrying her in his arms, Lucia shouted “Do penance! Do penance! Our Lady wants you to do penance! If you do penance, the war will end!”⁵²

4.2 - “I did not see it myself”

Objection: There were witnesses that were present at the Cova during the Miracle of the Sun that claimed they didn’t see anything extraordinary that day.

Reply: After two years of investigation, Gerard de Sede published Fatima: Investigation into a Fraud. It is by far the most comprehensive and well-researched scholarly work that advances a skeptical explanation of Fatima. He was desperate to find testimony that established that there were witnesses that “saw nothing at all.” In The Whole Truth About Fatima, after dismantling G. de Sede’s examples, Br. Michel de la Sainte Trinite points out that “It is astonishing that G. de Sede was unable to quote a single valid testimony of somebody who clearly affirmed that he saw nothing!”⁵³

However, in fairness, Br. Michel concedes “there is such a case – the only one, as far as we know.”⁵⁴ In a letter to a Swiss priest, Izabel Brandao de Melo wrote the following:

And the sun, which can be gazed at directly and seems like a metal disk without rays, begins to spin on itself and to rise and descend several times. This is what people next to me were saying, and what thousands affirm they saw. I did not see it myself; I was indeed able to gaze at the sun, and I was terribly agitated to hear the whole crowd shouting that they were seeing extraordinary signs in the sky. I believe that Our Lady did not find me worthy to see these phenomena, but in my soul I did not need them in order to believe in the apparition of the Blessed Virgin to the children. Two of my cousins, who were close to me, were beside themselves and declared that they saw exactly the sun as a piece of fireworks spinning dizzily. This lasted a few minutes, then again the clouds covered the sun.⁵⁵

Notice that the witness reported that “I was indeed able to gaze at the sun” and “I was terribly agitated.” As for the first point, it is significant that she confirmed that she was able to stare at the light source without discomfort. As for the second point, it is entirely possible that her “terrible agitation” was delirium. Emotional stress can precipitate inattentional blindness and memory distortion. There are documented examples of delirium among members of the crowd that day. A young woman “realized only one thing: she was going to die, the world was going to end. Right near her two people had fainted. The terrible anguish that gripped her had kept her from discerning all the rich diversity of the phenomenon.” Alfredo da Silva Santos testified that “My wife – we had been married only a short time – fainted, and I was too upset to attend to her. My brother-in-law, Joao Vassallo, supported her on his arm. I fell on my knees oblivious of everything and when I got up I don’t know what I said.”⁵⁶

If the Miracle of the Sun was objective, sampling from tens of thousands of witnesses, it is not surprising that there was an outlier or two. If it was entirely subjective, it is beyond surprising that there weren’t more! It is much easier for subjective factors to account for idiosyncratic testimony than it is for them to account for the consensus of a diverse crowd. Especially when that consensus is consistent with ophtamology, certified photographs, and distant witnesses that couldn’t share their emotions or expectations during the event. In fact, even under the assumption that all the reports of rotational and vertical motion, fire-work wheels, and alternating, saturated colors were mass psychosis, the two anomalous light sources would be left as remainder.

1. Documentação crítica de Fátima: seleção de documentos (1917–1930) (L. C. Cristino & A. T. da S. Silva Neto, Eds.). (1999). Fátima: Santuário de Fátima (hereafter DCF), Documento 1.

2. DCF, Doc. 6.

3. DCF, Doc. 4.

4. DCF, Doc. 120.

5. DCF, Doc. 10.

6. DCF, Doc. 36; Doc. 120.

7. Ibid.

8. DCF, Doc. 36.

9. DCF, Doc. 39; Doc. 80.

10. DCF, Doc. 70.

11. DCF, Doc. 39.

12. DCF, Doc. 120.

13. DCF, Doc. 10.

14. DCF, Doc. 120.

15. DCF, Doc. 3.

16. DCF, Doc. 44; Doc. 53.

17. This table puts Lucia’s contemporaneous account of the apparition on July 13th next to independent accounts by witnesses Jacinto de Almeida Lopes and Teresa de Jesus:

18. Dr. Formigao attended the fifth apparition. He returned to the Cova on September 27th “with the aim of completing the impressions gathered on September 13th.” During his interrogation of Lucia, he asked “Why do you often lower your eyes and stop looking at the Lady?” (DCF, Doc. 10). His question presupposed that he observed that behavior on the 13th.

19. Woolley, J. D., & Nissel, J. (2020). Development of the fantasy–reality distinction. In M. Taylor (Ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of the Imagination, Part IV – Novel Combinatorial Forms of the Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Weisberg, D. S. (2013). Distinguishing imagination from reality. In M. Taylor (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Development of Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press.

20. Stephen J. Ceci & Maggie Bruck (1993). Suggestibility of the Child Witness: A Historical Review and Synthesis. Psychological Bulletin, 113(3), 403–439.

21. DCF, Doc. 11.

22. DCF, Doc. 120.

23. Ibid.

The Whole Truth about Fatima (Frère Michel de la Sainte Trinité). (1989–1990). Buffalo, NY: Immaculate Heart Publications (hereafter WTAF), Vol. I.

Linscott, R. J., & van Os, J. (2000). Prevalence of hallucinations and their pathological associations in the general population. Psychological Medicine, 43(12), 2475–2484.

Teeple, R. C., Caplan, J. P., & Stern, T. A. (2009). Visual hallucinations: differential diagnosis and treatment. Primary Care Companion for the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 11(1), 26–32.

Toh, W. L., Thomas, N., Robertson, M., & Rossell, S. L. (2020). Characteristics of non-clinical hallucinations: A mixed-methods analysis of auditory, visual, tactile and olfactory hallucinations in a primary voice-hearing cohort. Psychiatry Research, 289, 112987.

Aynsworth, C., Waite, F., Sargeant, S., Humpston, C., & Dudley, R. (2024). Visual hallucinations in psychosis: What do people actually see? Psychology and Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice, 98, 58–73.

24. WTAF, Vol. I.

25. DCF, Doc. 120.

26. DCF, Doc. 10.

27. Mainster, M. A., & Turner, P. L. (2012). Glare’s causes, consequences, and clinical challenges after a century of ophthalmic study. American Journal of Ophthalmology, 153(4), 587–593.

Laeng, B., & Endestad, T. (2012). Bright illusions reduce the eye’s pupil. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 109(6), 2162–2167.

28. DCF, Doc. 3.

29. DCF, Doc. 10.

30. DCF, Doc. 11.

31. DCF, Doc. 13.

32. DCF, Dc. 29.

33. DCF, Doc. 28

34. Dalleur, P. (2021). Fatima pictures and testimonials: In-depth analysis. Scientia et Fides, 9(1), 9–45.

35. Lynch, David K., and William Livingston. 2001. Color and Light in Nature, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Stull, Roland. 2017. “Atmospheric Optics.” In Practical Meteorology, LibreTexts.

36. Bohren, C. F., & Clothiaux, E. E. (2006). Fundamentals of atmospheric radiation. Weinheim: Wiley-VCH.

37. Bittencourt, J. A. 2004. Fundamentals of Plasma Physics. New York: Springer.

Dwyer, Joseph R., and Martin A. Uman. 2014. The Physics of Lightning. Physics Reports 534(4): 147–241.

38. DCF, Doc. 3.

39. DCF, Doc. 9.

40. DCF, Doc. 10.

41. Lúcia de Jesus Rosa dos Santos. Memórias da Irmã Lúcia I–IV (hereafter Memoirs). 4th Memoir (Oct.–Dec. 1941). English trans. by Dominican Nuns of the Convent of St. Dominic, Fátima: Secretariado dos Pastorinhos, 1976, pp. 133–135.

42. Ibid.

43. Matthew 7:15–18, Holy Bible, New International Version.

44. DCF, Doc. 120.

45. Matthew 12:22–32, Holy Bible, New International Version.

46. DCF, Doc. 16.

47. Ibid.

48. P. Manuel Nunes Formigão (1927), As grandes maravilhas de Fátima.

49. Ibid.

50. DCF, Doc. 65.

51. DCF, Doc. 22.

52. WTAF, Vol. I.

53. Ibid.

54. Ibid.

55. Garibaldi, L. (2012). Fatima: Il racconto di una persecuzione. Milano: Sugarco Edizion.

56. WTAF, Vol. I. .