Msgr. Roger J. Landry
National Blue Army Shrine, Ashbury, NJ
108th Anniversary Celebration of the Sixth Apparition of Our Lady of Fatima
October 13, 2025
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The following outline guided the meditation:
- Introduction
- Today under rain that is evocative of the downpours that occurred in the Cova d’Iria 108 years ago, we joyfully celebrate the anniversary of the “exclamation point” of the Fatima apparitions: the “Miracle of the Sun” that took place on October 13, 2017. This Miracle involved a clear prediction, a solar phenomenon, and a scientifically inexplicable general dessication, all three of which combine in a compelling way to help skeptics gain confidence in Our Lady’s appearances and believers gain motivation to act on the message Our Lady came to Fatima to impart.
- Let’s begin with the prediction. During the third apparition of Our Lady in July, ten year-old Lucia, prompted by the advice she had received from others, said to the woman from heaven, “I would like to ask who you are and whether you will do a miracle so that everyone will know for certain that you have appeared to us.” The woman replied, “In October, I will tell you who I am and what I want. I will then perform a miracle so that all may believe.” When Lucia related to others that response, suspense quickly began to build. In August, the Lady reiterated, “In the last month I will perform a miracle so that all may believe,” and in September, she said again, “In October I will perform a miracle so that all may believe.” By the time October 13 arrived, a vast throng of about 70,000 had assembled around the Cova d’Iria in Fatima as the children arrived to pray the Rosary. Those crowd included secularists, anticlerical forces, journalists and skeptics, all of whom wanted to be eyewitnesses, when no miracle took place, of what they termed an ongoing “fraud.” It had been raining incessantly since the previous night, the fields were soaked and muddy, and despite umbrellas, the people were drenched.
- When the children arrived, slightly before 1 pm, the woman appeared, seen again only by the shepherd children. She said she wanted a chapel built, asked them to continue to pray the Rosary every day, revealed herself as “the Lady of the Rosary,” divulged that World War I would soon end, and called on everyone to amend their lives and ask God’s forgiveness. Then she rose toward the east and turned the palms of her hands toward the dark clouds that were obscuring the sun. Immediately the sun broke through the clouds and appeared to be an opaque grey disk that turned to silver. “Look at the sun!,” Lucia shouted, and people found to their surprise that they could peer directly at the intense sun without being blinded. Over the course of the next ten minutes, the sun whirled madly, “danced” like a giant circle of fire, careened toward earth and zig-zagged back to its normal position. People shrieked, wept and dropped to their knees in the mud and water. The colors of everything — the air and ground, trees, faces, and clothes — changed yellow, blue, amethyst, red and white. Soon the cry “miracle!” started being heard everywhere.
- Some assert that it was a Mass hallucination. Atheist Richard Dawkins, in his book The God Delusion, admits, “It is not easy to explain how seventy thousand people could share the same hallucination,” but then he went on nevertheless to propound that they all had to be hallucinating collectively because it would be “even harder to accept that it really happened without the rest of the world, outside Fatima, seeing it too — and not just seeing it, but feeling it as the catastrophic destruction of the solar system.” But it’s not scientific or even reasonable to dismiss out of hand the data to which about 70,000 collectively attest and to pretend as if they were all simply deceived.
- Here’s why the third part of the miracle, the one of dessication, is important. Many of the eyewitnesses described the intense heat of the sun as it careened toward earth. After the sun had returned to its place, they recognized that their soaked clothing and the drenched ground were all completely dry as if it had never rained. That physical reality doesn’t happen by mass hallucination or a spiritual vision. Engineers and physicists say that an extraordinary of amount of energy would have been necessary to dry up that much water so fast. Regardless of our incapacity to explain the data, it’s impossible to dispute it. 70,000 people, however, clearly saw — and felt — something, and the earth itself transitioned within minutes from saturated to dehydrated. All of this has led both faithful and skeptics present to conclude that the pre-announced miracle had in fact occurred and has moved so many others since, including the hierarchy of the Church, to find their testimony credible. And if that part of the children’s testimony proved true, then it certainly lends far greater believability to everything else that the children say that “the Lady of the Rosary” told them. It likewise should lead to a much greater commitment on our part to act on what Our Lady was permitted to come from heaven to earth to announce.
- Our Lady appeared in Fatima as the Mother who received us at the foot of the Cross, with a message for us and for all her other children. She was coming not fundamentally to impart information, but formation, to lead us, as she led the shepherd children, to her Son. She came as a missionary from heaven, calling the pastorinhos and all of us to conversion, to consecration, to action because, as she said, the salvation of souls was at stake. Mary is the Queen of Apostles, the one St. John Paul II called the Star of Evangelization, and we see her fulfilling this role in Fatima. Her Son’s first words in his public ministry were “repent and believe in the Gospel,” and she came to Fatima to announce, “Penance! Penance! Penance!,” to ask the shepherd children, and through them all of us, to pray and make sacrifices for the conversion of sinners, and then to live our faith through entering into Mary’s own faith through entrusting ourselves to her immaculate heart. That’s what I want to talk about today: Mary’s work as a missionary, reminding us of the stakes of the Church’s mission and summoning us, at 7, 9 and 10, Jacinta, Francisco and Lucia, or at whatever age we presently are, to take seriously the missionary dimension of our baptism.
- Joy to be here
- My name is Monsignor Roger Landry. I’m National Director of the Pontifical Mission Societies in the United States, tasked by the Church in helping to promote missionary spirituality and identity among American Catholics and to involve us through prayer and sacrifices to share in the mission Christ has entrusted us all, to go and announce the Gospel to every creature, to call people to repent and believe, to proclaim “repentance for the forgiveness of sins to all nations, beginning in Jerusalem,” to herald his kingdom and bring the gift of the salvation he won for us to all those who do not know it yet, or haven’t embraced it yet, or who, having once believed, have turned away. It’s ultimately to help American Catholics learn from our Lady’s example in Fatima how to participate in her Son’s mission out of love for him and out of love for all those he entrusted to Mary on the Cross.
- It’s a great joy for me to be with you today here at the Blue Army Shrine, where for the last 47 years the World Apostolate of Fatima has helped the United States and the world ponder what Our Lady said and did in Fatima and resolve to live and spread the way she interpreted with urgency the living out of our faith in her Son today. I have always had a great devotion to Our Lady of Fatima. When I was a seminarian, I lived in Portugal for a summer learning Portuguese and almost every Saturday I would take the bus from Lisbon to Fatima to pray. I became great friends with a Portuguese family who likewise loved to go to Fatima on the 13th of each of month from May to October and so I accompanied them during that summer on those visits in which hundreds of thousands would come. After my ordination as a priest of the Diocese of Fall River, Massachusetts, I was assigned to a Portuguese parish where everyone had an intense devotion to Our Lady of Fatima and so I sought to feed that devotion and was much nourished by it. On the first anniversary of my priestly ordination, the future Pope Benedict XVI, at the behest of St. John Paul II, published his brilliant commentary on the message of Fatima, especially the third part of the message, and I began to teach that lesson, in Portuguese and English, throughout southeastern Massachusetts and beyond. I likewise had the joy, when I was working for the Permanent Observer Mission of the Holy See to the United Nations in New York, to host a huge event there — with a standing room only crowd in a room that fit 560 delegates — in the presence of the Pilgrim Statue of Our Lady, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Fatima apparitions and Mary’s call for peace. So to be here with you to celebrate our Lady, to thank God and her for her work, to invoke her intercession, and to strive to live in response to her message like Saints Jacinta and Francisco and Venerable Lucia is an enormous joy for me.
- Mary as Missionary
- I want to speak about Mary as missionary. She was the first to receive Jesus’ mission within her life, and we know from Sacred Scripture how she could not keep Jesus her Son to herself. She was the first evangelized and the first evangelizer. As soon as the Archangel Gabriel departed from her in Nazareth, she, with great faith, departed, too, in haste, to Ein Karim, to care for her elderly cousin St. Elizabeth who was pregnant with St. John the Baptist in her old age. Jesus was only a few days old in her womb as she made the 70 mile journey down to Jericho and up to and through Jerusalem and down into the hill country of Judea. She was forming Jesus according to his humanity to be the itinerant preacher he would become before he even had the tiniest of feet. In the Mystery of the Visitation, she shows us the essence of a Christian missionary disciple, simply bringing Jesus to others so that he, who came into the world so that his joy might be in us and our joy made complete, might make others, like John the Baptist in the womb, leap for joy.
- We similarly see Mary forming the whole Church for mission in the Room after Jesus’ ascension. Jesus had told the apostles and disciples to wait for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit and so they wisely huddled around Mary in the Cenacle praying for the Holy Spirit to come and doubtless asking her, who was overshadowed by the Holy Spirit at Jesus’ virginal conception and never ran away from the Holy Spirit who was the spouse of her soul, how to be docile and cooperate with the Holy Spirit no matter what he asks. During those ten days of intense prayer, she would doubtless telling them many stories of Jesus’ infancy and three decades of hidden life that were eventually included when the Gospels were written down, so that they, with tongues fire, blown across the globe by the Spirit’s strong driving wind, might be able to base their lives too on the cornerstone who was her Son. She was forming them to be apostles, leading them to say a wholehearted fiat to her Son’s summons just like she had. For this reason, she is aptly called the Queen of Apostles and the mother of the Church’s mission, who perpetually intercedes for us to collaborate with the Holy Spirit in giving joint witness to Christ in the midst of the world.
- But Mary’s role in the Church’s mission did not cease upon her Assumption into heaven body and soul. There she ceaseless prays for the Church, for the successors of the apostles, and for all the baptized, called by our baptism and strengthened by our confirmation to be missionaries, sharing the treasure of our faith with others, helping them by our own witness and words to repent and believe, to accept Christ’s gift of salvation and seek to announce it to others, to enter Jesus’ kingdom and try to bring the whole world to receive the same heavenly inheritance.
- But she doesn’t just pray. As we know from history, she acts. She acted in Guadalupe in 1531. She acted in Lourdes in 1858. She acted in Fatima in 1917. And she’s acted in many other approved apparitions throughout the centuries. When she comes, as the Church teaches, she doesn’t bring anything truly new. As in every private revelation, what she gives us is the actualization of the Gospel, she reminds us of what is contained in the public revelation of the Church — Scripture and Tradition — and seeks to prod us to live it with new focus and fervor. That’s what she did in Fatima 108 years ago.
- The message and the response
- When St. John Paul II visited Fatima in 1982, on the first anniversary of Mehmet Ali Agca’s assassination attempt, he remarked that Our Lady’s words in the Cova da Iria can be summarized by Jesus’ words at the beginning of his public ministry: “Repent and believe in the gospel.”
- “These are the first words,” the Pope said, “that the Messiah addressed to humanity. The message of Fatima is, in its basic nucleus, a call to conversion and repentance, as in the Gospel. … The call to repentance is a motherly one, and at the same time it is strong and decisive.”
- John Paul II said she needed to give this call because we know “how many people and societies—how many Christians—have gone in the opposite direction to the one indicated in the message of Fatima. Sin has thus made itself firmly at home in the world, and denial of God has become widespread in the ideologies, ideas and plans of human beings. But for this very reason the Gospel call to repentance and conversion, uttered in the Mother’s message, remains ever relevant. It is still more relevant than it was [in 1917]. It is still more urgent.”
- Mary’s message wasn’t that “others” needed to convert, but we all did. And she summoned us to be our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers, true Good Samaritans, to those wounded by sin and the spiritual necrosis to which it leads. She wanted to involve us, once deeply converted, in the conversion of others.
- In her first apparition, on May 13, she asked Lucia, Francisco and Jacinta, “Do you wish to offer yourselves to God, to endure all the suffering that He may please to send you, as an act of reparation for the sins by which he is offended and to ask for the conversion of sinners?” Today, here, right now, she could be well asking us the same question.
- On July 13 that year, she repeated her appeal, telling the pastorinhos, “Sacrifice yourselves for sinners, and say often this prayer, especially during any sacrifice: ‘O my Jesus, I offer this for love of you, for the conversion of poor sinners, and in reparation for all the sins committed against the Immaculate Heart of Mary.’”
- Then she showed them a vision of Hell, a clear reminder of the stakes involved in whether sinners, whether we, convert and begin to choose God. It was, as Lucia recalled, a “great sea of fire” in which “were demons and souls in human form,” emitting “shrieks and groans of pain and despair,” which Lucia said “horrified us and made us tremble with fear.” It was so frightening that had Our Lady not promised to take them to heaven, Lucia said, they “would have died of fear and terror.”
- “You have seen Hell,” our Lady commented, “where the souls of poor sinners go. To save future souls, God wishes to establish in the world the devotion to my Immaculate Heart. If people do what I tell you, many souls will be saved.”
- That’s the essence of Mary’s mission in Fatima. Her Son Jesus had come into the world in her womb in order to save the human race, so that sinners might not perish but have eternal life. But there were many more on the broad road that leads to perdition than the narrow road that leads to life. And so Mary asked the shepherd children out of love to do reparation, to do the penance, for those who were in need of conversion. And then she asked them, and through them us, to consecrated ourselves to her Immaculate Heart. We will have a chance to talk more about Mary’s heart during the homily at Mass, but consecration to Mary’s heart is entrustment to a heart that is pure, a heart that says “let it be done to me according to your word,” a heart that treasures God’s word within. It’s the opposite of the heart we’re warned about in Psalm 95, “If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.” To consecrate ourselves to Mary’s heart is not just to entrust ourselves to Mary’s intercession but to enter into the essence of Christian discipleship as Mary lived it. Mary indicates that doing so is a matter of life and death, of heaven and hell.
- The Blessed Mother also showed the shepherd kids in the July apparition another vision — the famous “third secret of Fatima” — in which Our Lady pointed toward an Angel with a flaming sword who cried out in a loud voice, “Penance! Penance! Penance!,” a summons that beyond the symbolism needs little interpretation.
- She also taught them a prayer known to many of us that we should say with ever greater fervor during this month of October. “When you recite the Rosary,” she said, “say at the end of each decade: ‘Oh My Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell, and lead all souls to Heaven, especially those in most need of Your Mercy.’” Mary taught us this prayer through the shepherd children not for our edification but because she’s concerned as a knowing mother about our and others’ eternal destiny.
- In August, Mary repeated the summons with a holy candor that’s impossible to sugar coat: “Pray, pray a lot and offer sacrifices for the sinners. You know that many souls go the hell because there is none who pray for them.”
- In her last appearance in October, she repeated her appeal for people to recite the Rosary “every day” and emphasized, “It is necessary that they ask pardon for their sins” and “don’t offend our God and Lord.”
- Just like St. John Paul interpreted the Fatima message in the key of repentance and faith, so did his successor.
- Writing in 2000, the future Pope Benedict underlined, “Our Lady’s call to conversion and penance, issued at the start of the twentieth century, remains timely and urgent today.” Her “insistent invitation” to penance, he said, “is nothing but the manifestation of her maternal concern for the fate of the human family, in need of conversion and forgiveness.”
- The key words of what Mary revealed, he said, were prayer and sacrifice “to save souls” and the “threefold cry ‘Penance, Penance, Penance!’” These, he said, are a repetition of the call to repentance and faith that began Jesus’ public ministry and began our Lent. To understand Fatima and our own day, he said, “means to accept the urgency of penance, of conversion, of faith.”
- In response to Mary’s appeal, Lucia, Francisco and Jacinta prayed with fervor, fasted heroically, and offered themselves and their sufferings as alms for the conversion of others. What will we do?
- It’s always moved me to ponder why Mary appeared to children ages 7, 9 and 10. Obviously part of that answer is mysterious, but it’s likely because most of her older children — then and still now — routinely ignore this summons of her Son that she recapitulates. It’s very inspiring how Francisco, Jacinta and Lucia immediately acted on this summons. They prayed the Rosary for sinners. The recited between the mysteries of the Rosary the “O my Jesus” prayer Mary herself taught them. From the beginning of the apparitions, Francisco began to pray almost constantly to “console Jesus for the sins of the world.” One night, when his father discovered him sobbing in his room, Francisco gave the reason: “I was thinking of Jesus who is so sad because of the sins that are committed against him.” Jacinta was so convinced by the vision of the reality of Hell of the importance of saving sinners from it that she began to pour herself into prayer and practice various corporal mortifications. “Pray, pray much and make sacrifices for sinners,” Mary had told her. “Many souls go to hell because they have no one to pray and make sacrifices for them.” Jacinta responded, as did her brother, by prostrating themselves in prayer for hours, kneeling with their heads humbly bowed to the ground. They made all types of physical sacrifices, wearing tight cords around their waist, scourging themselves with stinging nettles, abstaining from water on hot days and other penitential practices. When both caught the terrible 1918 flu that took the lives of tens of thousands, they offered all of their sufferings for the conversion and salvation of sinners. Having been told by Our Lady that she would take him to heaven soon, Francisco declined hospital treatment, bearing enormous pain with a smile and without complaint. Our Lady appeared to Jacinta and asked if she wanted to stay on earth a little longer to convert more sinners. She said yes. So the little girl allowed herself to be dragged from clinic to clinic, to have two of her ribs removed without anesthesia, valiantly sacrificing herself as a victim for the conversion of sinners and for the Holy Father, whom she knew from the third vision would suffer much. When Saint John Paul II beatified them in Fatima in 2000, he lifted them up as an example to the whole world of what Christ-like and Marian love for the salvation of others looks like. He stressed that their lives demonstrate that children can be heroically virtuous and reach “the heights of perfection” at a very young age, and if they can, so can all of us. Echoing the words of our Lady, the Pope reminded all children of God, however young, “Our Lady needs you all to console Jesus, who is sad because of the bad things done to him; he needs your prayers and your sacrifices for sinners.” This isn’t a new message. This is the Gospel. And our Lady was calling us to live it!
- But it’s not enough for us, like the pastorinhos, to fast, to pray, to do various mortifications for the conversion of sinners. Those are super important and doubtless please God very much. But we are called, like the World Apostolate of Fatima has sought to carry out since the 1950s, to spread Mary’s reiterated call of her Son to conversion and consecration, to penance and holiness. We are called to a global mission. We’re called to live out fully the meaning of our baptism and Christian life, to love others as Christ has loved us, and to give our life so that they might not perish but have eternal life.
- World Mission Sunday
- This upcoming Sunday is World Mission Sunday. It’s the day annually that the whole Church prays to the Harvest Master for missionaries, the laborers for his harvest, when we pray for the fruit of that harvest, and for all of us to recognize that we are those harvesters. I’ve always found very powerful the call of the first apostles. After Jesus had told the disciples to pray to the Lord of the Harvest for laborers, Jesus prayed all night. And in the morning, he came down and called from among those who were praying to the Harvest Master, the twelve apostles by name. There’s a very important lesson contained here. When we pray to the Harvest Master, we’re praying ultimately for ourselves, so that we will respond to the Harvest Master’s call, roll up our sleeves and get to work.
- Our Lady is someone who has been praying for her Son’s harvest from the first time he asked his Church to do so. She has recognized that she is indeed meant to be a laborer and from heaven she labors still. And she’s imploring us, like she did the three Portuguese kids 108 years ago, to commit ourselves to working hard, each day of our life, for this end. To convert and believe. To pray and sacrifice. And then to preach by word and witness and strengthen the efforts of all those in the Church’s mission who are trying to bring her Son’s salvation to the ends of the earth.
- This morning Pope Leo did something truly unprecedented. He became the first Pope to record a video message for World Mission Sunday, something that can be played before every Mass everywhere in the world, in which he asked all Catholics to “help me help missionaries across the globe.” He called us to pray and to sacrifice for the missions. The young shepherd children prayed and made physical sacrifices. We’re called to pray, mortify and make financial sacrifices, so that the Church, made in the image of Mary, cooperating with her prayers and following her lead, can be the sacrament of salvation, bringing others to embrace the redemption won at such a great price by her Son. Mary is the model of the Church’s maternal love for everyone for whom her Son gave his life.
- John Paul II wrote about Mary’s role in our mission today: “Today, as never before, the Church has the opportunity of bringing the Gospel, by witness and word, to all people and nations. … Like the apostles after Christ’s Ascension, the Church must gather in the Upper Room ‘together with Mary, the Mother of Jesus,’ in order to pray for the Spirit and to gain strength and courage to carry out the missionary mandate. We too, like the apostles, need to be transformed and guided by the Spirit. … The whole Church is invited to live more intensely the mystery of Christ by gratefully cooperating in the work of salvation. The Church does this together with Mary and following the example of Mary, the Church’s Mother and model: Mary is the model of that maternal love which should inspire all who cooperate in the Church’s apostolic mission for the rebirth of humanity” (Redemptoris Missio 92).
- The apparitions of Our Lady in Fatima are an extension of Mary’s maternal love that are meant to inspire us just as much as the first apostles, just as much as Saints Jacinta and Francisco and Venerable Lucia, to cooperate with the Holy Spirit in the Church’s mission of salvation today. In Our Lady of Fatima’s school, the Church learns to consecrate itself to the mission of her Son. Continuing her work in the Upper Room, she helps the Church prepare new generations of apostles. She continues that work, today, here.
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