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
To watch a video of the meditation, please click below:
To listen to an audio recording of today’s meditation, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.13.25_Our_Lady_on_Mission_1.mp3
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 t...
