As Hollywood’s Golden Age was waning, Marilyn Monroe wowing, The Miracle of Our Lady of Fátima (1952) was made by Warner Bros.
Which was, itself, a miracle.
All the stars lined up for this film stocked with talented actors that tells the story of Our Lady of Fátima, who appeared to three shepherd children over six months, the 13th of each month, May to October, 1917.
Made in Portugal and enlivened by Max Steiner’s Oscar-nominated musical score, the film garnered a respectable $3 million in ticket sales (some $36 million today).
It opens with a scene from the October 5 Revolution overthrowing the centuries old Portuguese monarchy.
“As we have destroyed the power of the monarchy, so we will destroy the power of the church,” an official of the new First Portuguese Republic loudly proclaims.
We see priests and religious being booked, on their way to prison, some execution, even as all religious orders were expelled; their property confiscated; legislation banning the teaching of religion in schools and universities passed; and religious holidays canceled.
This anti-religious reign of terror finally ebbed in 1917, when churches were allowed to reopen. That is where the story begins.
The opening
It’s May 13, 1917. An ordinary Sunday in the humble mountain village of Fátima. We see Hugo da Silva, a fictional character at a bar consoling a hardworking farmer, António Abóbora dos Santos whose wife Maria Rosa, mother of Lúcia, is long-suffering given her church-skipping husband’s weakness for alcohol to drown his sorrows.
Soon Hugo is having friendly banter with three children outside — Lúcia and her cousins, Francisco and Jacinto — who are off to the Cova de Iria, owned by António, to say their shortened version of the rosary, yelling “Hail Mary” to the mountain — thrilling in the echo. An echo that is soon displaced by a clap of thunder followed by an apparition of a lady “from Heaven.”
Later Jacinto blurts out to Hugo what they saw. Knowing how religion is frowned upon, he says it will be their “secret.” Of course, word gets out and, as it does, people begin flocking to Fátima — a process authorities immediately try to shut down as the children suffer great duress. Even Father Ferreira is initially doubtful. But it’s real and God’s power will not be thwarted.
Over the course of her six apparitions, Our Lady envelops the children with her love, while asking them to pray the rosary for world peace; the end of World War I; sinners; and the conversion of Russia, convulsed by the Bolshevik Revolution shortly after her sixth and final apparition on October 13, 1917, when she unleashes the promised “the Miracle of the Sun.”
Besides these awe-inspiring events, Our Lady’s strategic choice of Fátima reveals prescient anticipation of coming world events, including rising sectarian tensions after the 1919 Paris Peace Conference redraws the world map given empires crushed in World War I’s wake.
The history is compelling. As the Muslim occupation of Portugal (711-1250) was winding down, a Moorish princess by the name of Fátima, daughter of the last Muslim chief, met and married a Christian knight, who loved her so deeply that he renamed their town Fátima. She is named after the favorite daughter of the prophet Muhammad, whose two sons by Ali, along with his descendants, Shiite Muslims of Persian origin, revere. Considered “the purest of women,” Muslims believe Fátima brings healing and compassion, and forgiveness and understanding, for individuals and nations alike.
Our Lady of Fátima gave the children three secrets, which the film does not reference — the last one regarding a “bishop clothed in white,” who “falls to the ground, apparently dead, under a burst of gunfire," which was later interpreted as the 1981 assassination attempt. (New York Times, May 14, 2000)
On the tenth anniversary of his near-assassination — May 13, 1991 — St. Pope John Paul II again returned to the Basilica of Our Lady of the Rosary of Fátima, built on the site of the Cova da Iria tree, to give thanks for his life as well as for Communism’s collapse, which, along with its cancerous spread, Our Lady of Fátima had predicted.
Surely a new golden age could offer new opportunities to shine a bright klieg light on faith powerfully shaping world events.
The light is particularly bright at the end of the 1952 film. At the new Basilica that “Our Lady of the Rosary” requested — giving her name and this instruction during her last apparition — a million people outside pay homage to Our Lady, waving white handkerchiefs, the traditional farewell to Mary.
Inside, Lúcia, a consecrated nun, prays before the tomb of her cousins — Hugo, long since converted, at her side.
In our present day, the cinematic possibilities abound.
