Today’s feast of Our Lady of Fatima calls to mind Ernest Hemingway’s spiritual transformation during World War I as recounted in Hemingway’s Faith.
Ironically, Hemingway was on the same wavelength spiritually as newly elected Pope Leo XIV, Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost of Chicago.That both were Midwesterners transformed in Italy is of no little interest.
On July 8, 1918, Hemingway was gravely wounded in Northern Italy when Austrian mortar shells were lobbed across the Piave River, hitting the forward listening post where he was delivering cigarettes and chocolates — leaving him with 227 pieces of shrapnel lodged in his legs like “little devils driving nails into the raw,” he wrote a month later.
He was a Red Cross ambulance driver who had sought adventure in Italy and wanted to be where the action was. He got more than he bargained for.
As he lay bleeding, he prayed “with almost tribal faith” for the intercession of “Our Lady and various saints,” that he might be saved, he wrote years later.
So he was.
Father Bianchi Guiseppi, who had befriended him in the officers’ mess hall, anointed him with the sacrament of extreme unction and gave him Holy Viaticum after which Hemingway considered himself a Catholic, Charles Scribner III told me as I began this journey 14 years ago to try and understand what made Hemingway tick.
One thing is certain. His heart beat with the heart of Mary.
When Chris Matthews recently challenged me to defend my thesis, he was much taken with Hemingway’s focus on Mary’s apparitions, reading what George Herter, known for Bull Cook and Authentic Historical Recipes and Practices, told the late H.R. Stoneback, foremost scholar of Hemingway’s Catholicism:
“Hemingway was a strong Catholic. His religion came mainly from the apparitions of the Virgin Mary. He told me several times that if there was no Bible, was no manmade Church laws, the apparitions proved beyond any doubt that the Catholic Church was the true church.”
Don Guiseppi — a double for the priest in A Farewell to Arms — had, no doubt, spoken with Hemingway about the Fatima apparitions that had occurred not a year earlier in nearby Portugal. It had all made a deep impression on the young ambulance driver from the Midwest. So much so that “Hemingway,” Herter wrote in earlier correspondence to Stoneback, “could not understand why the Catholic Church did not publicize (the apparitions) … I have heard him mention all of these (Lourdes, Fatima, etc.) and others at one time or another.”
Pope St. John Paul II certainly had a great reverence for Our Lady of Fatima — on full display when he brought the bullet that nearly killed him on the Feast of Our Lady of Fatima, in 1981, and placed it in her bejeweled crown, exactly one year later on her feast day.
Now with the election of Pope Leo XIV, the apparitions will surely be front and center.
“Mary walks with us,” the new pope said, echoing Hemingway’s feelings, who told Herter, he considered Mary the “listening post” on earth for Jesus and God the Father.
Such a poignant way for Hemingway, injured at that forward listening post, to describe Mary.
Truly, she is walking with us, listening, and poised to help, if asked.
Pope Leo XIV ended his first public address in St. Peter’s Square by showing how to ask as he led the crowd of tens of thousands with a recitation of the Ave Maria. He continued teaching by example with his first visit outside of Rome, on Saturday, May 10, to the Shrine of Our Lady of Good Counsel, founded by a 15th-century Augustinian nun, in the small town of Genazzano, 19 miles southeast of Rome. Later that day he visited another Marian shrine, the Basilica of St. Mary Major, where Pope Francis is buried.
As Pope Leo XIII, the new pope’s namesake, wrote in his papal encyclical on the Feast of Mary’s birthday five years before Hemingway was born: “The recourse we have to Mary in prayer follows upon the office she continuously fills by the side of the throne of God as Mediatrix of Divine grace; being by worthiness and by merit most acceptable to Him, and, therefore, surpassing in power all the angels and saints in Heaven.”
From her heavenly post, as Hemingway imagined, and Pope Leo XIV reminds us, she has work to do here on earth as she “walks with us,” and listens.
