Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.
On May 13, 1917, our Blessed Mother appeared to three shepherd children in the area of Fatima.
She and Our Lord seemed to have a predilection for shepherds and for children.
David was a shepherd and a child when God called him to become the King of Israel.
It was to shepherds that angels brought the message of Our Lord's birth, and St. Bernadette had herded her family's sheep before Our Lady appeared to her at Lourdes.
I suppose it's the sort of life that keeps one fairly innocent, not sinless, of course, but unspoiled by the more numerous temptations of city life.
These are the sort of children to whom Our Lady appeared, surrounded by light and standing on a holm oak.
The light was so bright that when the children saw the flashes of it as she approached, they thought it was lightning and began to hurry home to avoid being caught in a storm.
St. Matthew also speaks of lightning when he describes the angel who came down from heaven and rolled back the stone to show that the tomb of Our Lord was empty, for Christ had risen.
The evangelist writes, his appearance was like lightning and his clothing white as snow.
So what is this light that is so intense that it seems like lightning?
The angel who came to announce the birth of John the Baptist to Zachariah said, I am Gabriel.
I stand in the presence of God.
The light, I think, is a reflection of God from those who stand in his presence and behold him face to face.
Because it is a reflected light, it has characteristics not only of the source of light, but also of the person who reflects it.
When the children were in the presence of Our Lady, they felt immersed in the divine presence, as they had when the angel appeared to them the previous year.
But the effect was different.
Lucia writes, instead of that annihilation in the divine presence, which exhausted us even physically, it left us filled with peace and expansive joy.
Although the angel appeared in human form, he was not truly human, but a pure spirit.
Light of the divine presence reflected from him inspired awe and adoration, but with an inhuman or non-human, anyway, force that the children's mortal bodies could hardly bear.
The light reflected by Our Blessed Mother was instead maternal and warm.
Although through her the divine becomes human without ceasing to be divine, as it did in the Incarnation, but thanks to her God's dwelling is among us.
She is the Mediatrix suited to us.
Her spirit rejoicing in God her Savior radiates joy.
Sister Lucia says she was more brilliant than the sun and radiated a light more clear and intense than a crystal glass filled with sparkling water when the rays of the burning sun shined through it.
Since she was the eldest of the children, Lucia asked the Radiant Lady where she was from and she replied that she was from heaven.
She asked them to return on the thirteenth of the month for six successive months to see her again.
When Lucia heard that the Lady was from heaven, she asked if she and her two little companions would go to heaven.
They would, but Francisco must say many rosaries first, Our Lady said.
We might think that this means that Francisco was less virtuous than the girls or that his rosaries were not worth as much, but when we read Lucia's testimony about Francisco, we see that this was not the case.
When he heard that he was going to heaven, he was overjoyed.
Crossing his hands on his breast, he exclaimed, Oh, my dear Our Lady, I'll say as many rosaries as you want.
From then on, he made a habit of moving away from the girls as if he was going for a walk.
He was looking for opportunities to say extra rosaries on his own.
He made great progress in prayer and loved to spend long periods in silent prayer while the girls played or ate their lunch.
I think Our Lady and Francisco would have to say, or I think Our Lady said Francisco would have to say many rosaries as a way of getting him started on his vocation to contemplative prayer, in which he made remarkable progress in his brief life.
The rosary can actually be a contemplative prayer.
Saint Pio of Petrocino may be the most extraordinary example of this.
He said an unbelievable number of rosaries by day and by night.
Thanks to a mystical gift, he could even pray the rosary while he was doing other things without it taking away from his ability to do them well.
When an ordinary person multitasks, his attention is divided, and so he doesn't do any of the tasks as well as he would if he were concentrating on just one.
But Saint Pio had the mystical gift to do three or four things at once with full attention so he could say the rosary all the time.
We won't match his 40 or more complete rosaries, 15-decade rosaries every day, but Our Lady of Fatima urges us to pray the rosary.
You want to go to heaven?
Well, pray the rosary.
Do you want peace in the world?
Pray the rosary.
Do you want to grow in your prayer life, like Saint Francisco?
Pray the rosary.
To recite the rosary, Saint John Paul says, is nothing other than to contemplate with Mary the face of Christ, that face which is so luminous because it reflects the glory of God.
In Sister Lucia's opinion, the special injunction to Francisco is for all of us.
She writes, it is not that saying many rosaries as such is an indispensable condition for going to heaven, but that we must pray much.
As Saint Alphonsus Liguori said, those who pray are saved, and those who do not pray are not saved.
At least they should not expect to be saved without prayer, because although they may in fact be saved by someone else's prayers, but there is no way to be saved without grace, and since grace is a grace, not something we deserve, the only way to get it is to ask for it.
So what is essential is prayer, and as Sister Lucia says, the rosary is the most accessible form of prayer for most people.
She expands on this when she comes to what Our Lady said at the end of the First Apparition, pray the rosary every day in order to obtain peace for the world and the end of the war.
Why did Our Lady ask us to pray the rosary every day, rather than asking us to do something else?
And the seer answers, if God, through Our Lady, had asked us to go to Mass and receive Holy Communion every day, there would undoubtedly have been a great many people who would have said, and quite rightly, that it was not possible for them.
On the other hand, to pray the rosary is something everybody can do, rich and poor, wise and ignorant, great and small.
All people of good will can and must say the rosary every day.
If you aren't used to saying it, a recording may help you get started, or perhaps you could start gradually by saying just a few mysteries every day, until you work up to saying the whole rosary.
You can pray the rosary as you travel to work or to school.
You can pray the rosary if you are homebound.
You can pray it with your family or pray it alone.
You can pray it in the morning.
You can pray it in the evening.
You can pray it in bits throughout the day.
Getting back to Sister Lucia, she says, and I agree, that even those people who are not able to assist at Mass every day should not, for this reason, neglect to say their daily rosary.
She explains that the rosary can serve as a way of preparing for Mass or as an act of thanksgiving after it.
As it seems to her, there are very few truly contemplative souls who preserve and maintain within themselves a relationship of intimate familiarity with God, which prepares them for worthy reception of Christ in the Eucharist.
Consequently, most people who participated in that Mass need to do something as preparation, and the rosary is a way that's accessible to anyone.
In the rosary, we entrust our preparation to the Blessed Mother, on the one hand, and on the other, we meditate the mysteries of the life of Christ, which the Mass will make present in various degrees.
Besides the rosary, perhaps the other important aspect of the Apparition of May 13th is the question which Sister Lucia says is addressed to everyone.
Are you willing to offer yourselves to God and to bear all the sufferings He wills to send you as an act of reparation for the sins by which He is offended and of supplication for the conversion of sinners?
To those who say yes, Our Lady promises, then you are going to have much to suffer, but the grace of God will be your comfort.
Certainly, the rosary is a powerful means of maintaining that grace so as to be able to bear the cross that we have taken up to follow Christ on the way that leads to seeing God face to face.
Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.