Aura and Inversion in a Marian Pilgrimage: Fatima and her Statues
Citation: Morgan, David. 2009. “Aura and Inversion in a Marian Pilgrimage: Fatima and her Statues” in Anna-Karina Hermkens, Willy Jansen and Catrien Notermans eds. Moved by Mary: Pilgrimage in the Modern World. Farnham, UK, and Burlington, US: Ashgate Publishing, pp. 49-65. Republished in The Jugaad Project, 14 Jul. 2019, thejugaadproject.pub/home/aura-and-inversion-in-a-marian-pilgrimage-fatima-and-her-statues [date of access]
Figure 1: Our Lady of Fatima, Munster, Indiana. Image by author.
On Sunday evening, May 21, 2006, eight aged Knights of Columbus sat on either side of the central aisle in the front pews of St. Thomas More Church, Munster, Indiana. Dressed in dark tunics trimmed in red and bearing hats with airy, white plumes, they were the stolid honor guard of a statue of Our Lady of Fatima. The statue was crowned in a Mass that evening in the eighty-ninth year since Our Lady appeared to three children on May 13, 1917, in a pasture not far from the small village of Fatima, named after the daughter of Mohammed during the Moorish occupation of the Iberian Peninsula many centuries before. The military bearing and solemn company of the Knights bespoke deep devotion to the Mother of God, whose image they honored.
A guest speaker delivered a homily on the glory and love of Our Lady, who, he said, never spared in her intervening mercies, having repeatedly saved the American nation and the entire people of God from the angry disappointment of a deity whose patience was tried and whose wrathful sense of justice had been stretched nearly to the breaking point. Mortify your senses, he told them, mortify your senses. Fast, pray the Rosary, and our Blessed Mother will hear you. In his way, he repeated the admonitions of the Virgin herself as she appeared to the shepherd children over the course of six successive months in 1917: say the Rosary everyday, pray for peace, make reparations in the form of penitential sacrifices to appease God’s wrath at the offense caused by sin.
When the speaker had finished, the congregation was led by a priest in reciting the Rosary. The prayer combined with the presence of the statue served the penitential task of effecting reparation, repairing the damage done by human iniquity. The prayerful engagement with the image was part of a larger economy, a material economy of the sacred. Marian devotion may be described as an economy or system of interaction with the divine inasmuch as it operates according to a set of practices that regulate giving and receiving divine favor through the intermediary office of the Virgin. The economy is sacred by virtue of its traffic in divine blessing and material in its means of operation, pivoting on the statue of Our Lady, but also in a host of devices that render penance and devotion to her such as the Rosary and embodied forms of prayer and adoration. And the economy is penitential in nature because the devotion one pays to Our Lady commonly takes the form of suffering, whether it is sickness or the pain of kneeling for long minutes in prayer or the self-denial of fasting. Fatima called for such suffering as reparation for sin and she rewards it with divine favor. The efficacy of this material and penitential economy of the sacred is undoubted by Fatima’s devotees.
Rose Marie Malburg, devotee of Fatima and wife of the caretaker of the International Pilgrim Virgin Statue (Fig. 1), told me that the Rosary was a potent instrument that Our Lady of Fatima explicitly urged the faithful to use:
The Rosary is powerful. One Hail Mary is all that is necessary [to receive the blessing or achieve the end one seeks]. If said with faith, it’s going to happen. The wall came down [in Berlin] through prayer. The people did it. People say Ronald Reagan did it, but it was prayer. If people would only believe in the message. The Rosary is the greatest sacramental in the world, the most powerful weapon you can possess. [Malburg June 2006]
Praying the rosary in the presence of an image of Our Lady of Fatima operates for millions of Catholics in place of making a conventional pilgrimage to Portugal. Indeed, the greater number of people who venerate Fatima each year do so by beholding anyone of several statues, but especially the most traveled version (Figure 1). This essay seeks to understand how the visual piety associated with what is officially known as the ‘International Pilgrim Virgin Statue of Our Lady of Fatima’ functions within what might be aptly described as a countercultural economy of the sacred. Seeing the image that comes to the devout constructs a gaze that is a powerful religious act, even if the devotees do not look upon the official statue, but especially when they do since this one carries special blessing and exhibits eyes and a presence that are reported to be without parallel.
Pilgrimage and Imagery
There are many, perhaps countless statues of Fatima. The one I saw in Munster was not the Pilgrim Statue, but an image based on it and owned by the Blue Army of the Gary diocese. Created during the Cold War by two American Catholics, the Blue Army is an international voluntary association dedicated to promoting the message of Fatima (Haffert 1982). Eight days after the May Crowning I attended the procession of the diocesan statue (Figure 2) into the sanctuary of Our Lady of Mount Carmel Monastery in Munster, where she was the centerpiece of an all night vigil and another crowning. This is one of two statues that belong to the Diocese of Gary, Indiana. Most people probably do not notice the difference between the many and the one. As we shall see, the confusion is not a problem for the devout. The International Statue (Figure 1) is itself a copy of a statue created in 1946 by the Portuguese sculptor José Thedim, ‘based on the description of Sr. Lucia, one of the three young seers who saw Our Lady’. Sr. Lucia recommended to the Bishop of Leiria that a second version of the statue, created in 1947, be used as a ‘pilgrim statue,’ so the Bishop blessed it and named it the ‘International Pilgrim Virgin Statue of Our Lady of Fatima.’ Carl Malburg, the statue’s caretaker, transports it around the world in an itinerant ministry. If millions have made pilgrimage to the Shrine of Our Lady of Fatima in Portugal, built on the site of the apparition, Malburg’s work is to serve Our Lady by making her likeness a traveler or pilgrim to many millions more. In addition to being blessed by the Bishop in 1947, the International Statue was crowned by Pope Pius XII in 1951.
Statues and paintings of saints, especially Mary, have long been deployed in processions on feast days, in plagues, and in local festivals; they have led armies, explorers, and missionaries, traveling from one country or continent to another. The practice of taking images from shrines or altars to move through streets or the countryside dates from the early medieval days of European Christianity and pre-dates that religion in the Middle East. Images of Christian saints were honored on their feast days by being carried in procession. They were used to bless new sites; they were taken into battle or carried abroad to confront plagues. Images still issue from nineteenth-century sites of Marian apparitions as mementoes or souvenirs cherished by pilgrims to Lourdes and La Salette. Since Fatima, apparitions have continued. On August 15, 1950 a crowd of 100,000 gathered on a small farm in Wisconsin, in order to witness a Marian apparition. Hotels within fifty miles had been entirely booked with reservations by pilgrims (Kselman 1993:175, 188). Among the most recent and popular of Marian sites commanding large annual pilgrimage, even if the appearance has not been officially recognized by the Church, is Medjugorje.
Figure 2: Procession in Our Lady of Mount Carmel Monastery, Munster, Indiana. Image by author.
But the idea of making an image into a pilgrim is less common. In fact, there is sound economic reason not to do so. Local church officials and vendors were always keen to associate a cult image very closely with the place in which it disclosed its revelation and power to perform wonders since the revenues to parish, bishop, and community from wave upon wave of visiting pilgrims has been a powerful incentive. Indulgences officially endorsed sites since the late Middle Ages, placing images within an economy of the sacred.
How then do we account for a pilgrim statue, an itinerant image that comes to the people rather than the reverse, an image whose very reason for being is to travel the globe for the purpose of visiting the faithful? The international career of the Pilgrim Statue of Fatima may be unprecedented for the extent of its travel and the singularity of its mission. The Pilgrim Statue was conceived in 1946 as part of a global communication project. One of the most widely distributed tracts issued wherever the Statue visits states that because ‘most of the world’s people were not hearing about the Fatima message, it was decided to send a statue on a teaching mission’ (Anon 1998:2). It was consecrated for the express purpose of travel. Until the 1940s, as one scholar has pointed out, the cult of Fatima had been limited for the most part to Portugal (Zimdars-Swartz 1991: 190). But the growing attention from Rome joined the apocalyptic intonation of Fatima’s ‘secrets’ to attract broader interest, especially in the context of anti-Communism following the Second World War. Indeed, the second of Fatima’s three secrets was the Virgin’s announcement of the need to convert Russia. Fatima was understood not simply as a pilgrimage site, a local manifestation of the sacred, but as a global message in a world under siege from unbelief. Morphing Our Lady of Fatima into a pilgrim in the form of a statue departed from the traditional paradigm of pilgrimage in order to enhance the principal message of each of the three major and approved Marian apparitions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—La Salette, Lourdes, and Fatima: that life in industrialized mass culture is not devoid of the sacred, but in dire need of the grace of a new dispensation. Each of these shared a number of characteristics studied by Victor and Edith Turner in their important work, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture, and by others: a manifestation to poor, rural children. Rather than addressing herself to local veneration, as in pre-modern Marian apparitions, the Virgin of these instantiations delivers what the Turners aptly characterize as ‘a general call to all humankind to repent and be saved. ’(1) Such a general call cannot rely on the physical limits of a local shrine, particularly when the call is couched in the apocalyptic rhetoric of urgent conversion in the face of imminent world cataclysm. The traveling statue was deployed as an effort in mass-communication using a traditional medium.
Politics of the Marian Gaze
But the communication project of the International Pilgrim Statue was not simply the dissemination of a message in the form of information, though the stream of tracts and booklets has been abundant. The statue is an ambassador, an embodiment of the message as the effigy of Mary, which delivers far more than information. The image dispenses graces or favors. On May 13, 1951, Pius XII, an indefatigable opponent of Communism and a Marian devotee, said that ‘the Pilgrim statue goes forth traveling as though to claim her dominion,’ in what some claimed was an unprecedented abundance of gifts or charismas (Anon 1998:2). Bishop Fulton Sheen, the outspoken Catholic churchman in mid-century United States, devoted the last chapter of his 1948 book, Communism and the Conscience of the West, to Fatima. There he blamed the First World War on modernity itself, which he identified with the thought of Marx, Darwin, and J. S. Mill (Sheen 1948:201). The modern world failed to heed the Virgin of Lourdes in 1858, inclining instead toward the ‘pagan ideas’ of license (Mill), evolution (Darwin), and irreligion (Marx). Neglecting to respond to Our Lady of Fatima’s call had issued in World War II. And Sheen grimly warned his contemporaries that World War III would take place for the same reason (Sheen 1948:208).
Figure 3: The enthralling gaze of Our Lady of Fatima.
But how does a statue enflesh and ritualize a message? One way is by engaging viewers in an enthralling gaze that embodies the presence of the Virgin for the devout, appealing directly to the soul and thereby eclipsing the appeal of false gods such as political ideologies like Communism. The emotional grip of the gaze is also able to elicit dedication that dispels all rivals (Figure 3). Imploring the faithful to look into the eyes of the statue, a leaflet points out that it has shed tears on more than thirty occasions. The effect upon viewers has been so moving that ‘Many say it seems to be truly Our Lady Herself who has gone forth to remind Her children of the conditions which must be met before we can have the triumph that She has promised’ (Anon 1998:3). ‘Look into Her eyes,’ the tract goes on to instruct readers. ‘This is the message which the Pilgrim Virgin having traveled the world since 1947 as an anxious mother, brings to us. You look at the statue. There are no words. But there is an experience of Her presence…It is as though looking into the eyes of your mother’ (Anon 1998:10). Response to the image commonly intermingles the image with its celestial referent, speaking of the statue as bearing the presence of Mary herself. Some openly regard the image as more than an image.
Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira (1908-1995), Brazilian academic, journalist, anti-Communist politician, opponent of the Catholic left, and indefatigable promoter of devotion to Fatima, wrote of the Pilgrim Statue:
I do not know a countenance equal to this one. Moved by an inveterate habit of observing everything, I contemplate it so that I may later understand it. As I fix my eyes upon that countenance, I suddenly perceive that I am entering it.…
Enveloped in the ambience [the expression of the statue] creates, I feel invited to enter deep into her gaze. What a gaze! None other is so calm, frank, pure, or welcoming. In none other can one penetrate with such ease…
The more one penetrates this gaze, the more one is attracted toward an indescribable interior and sublime summit.…
In the depth of this gaze, I see arise precisely a peak where all perfections meet. It is a peak incomparably higher than the columns that support the firmament.…
One could spend his whole life within that gaze, without ever reaching the summit of that peak…
Within that gaze one does not walk, but flies. One is not a tourist but a pilgrim. [Oliveira]
Oliveira goes on to identify the peak as the sacred mountain to which the soul flies, the Virgin herself. Access to this infinite goal is through the gaze of the Pilgrim Statue of Fatima, a kind of three-dimensional icon that invites the viewer’s penetrating entrance, at least as Oliveira characterizes his relation to the image. Oliveria describes an intensely visual pilgrimage he made by looking at the statue. This suggests that the image goes to the faithful to facilitate an imagined pilgrimage.
When I commented to Carl Malburg that I was struck by the relationships that people form with religious images, he replied:
People come to rely on the peace images give them in their homes. There is a moral presence that goes with all images. And that word ‘moral’ has nothing to do with religion. I carry pictures of children in my wallet. They produce the feeling of presence. But with this image [the International Pilgrimage Statue, which was standing on the table beside us] there is more going on than science can explain. The moral presence that people feel is more than what natural science can explain. [Malburg, August 2006]
I asked what kind of responses viewers have had to the image and Rose Marie said that she heard a woman say ‘These eyes try to talk to you.’ Tears were a common response, they said. ‘Men cry, too,’ Carl added. ‘Seeing the statue brings back lost feelings of faith. They see a mother who truly cares. They have a feeling of someone who cares. Not a thing, a person. That’s why we take her around.’ His description closely recalled the leaflet quoted above, underscoring the likely role of such popular literature in shaping response. Wherever he takes the image, he and local assistants distribute hundreds and sometimes thousands of copies of the tract, Our Lady of Fatima: Our Mother Comes to Us. On a visit to several venues in the Philippines during January of 2007, 100,000 copies of the booklet were distributed (Malburg 2007). Whether prompted by such literature or not, to many devout viewers the image seems to transport the very presence of Mary. According to Carl, making the statue a pilgrim changes the intensity of the experience of parishioners in their local churches. Because the statue has visited them there, ‘People come to their own parish today thinking somehow that the prayer is more powerful’ (Malburg 2007).
The gaze of Mary may be, as Oliveira says, an invitation to be penetrated by the viewer, but it is also widely experienced as a penetrative, absorbing look, an imploring apprehension of the viewer, who feels called to respond. The gaze is a magnetic visual field formed within the international politics of anti-Communism and the Cold War. As we shall see, it is now being refitted to changed political circumstances. Mary’s mission continues.
The Image
Although the International Pilgrim Statue is actually the third of official images associated with the Shrine at Fatima (the earliest was created in 1920 and is now in the chapel built on the site where Mary appeared), Carl and Marie are fond of saying that when Sister Lucia saw ‘No. 2’ (so named because it was the second version carved by Thedim), she said it was the nearest to what she had seen as a child. ‘I like this one best,’ she observed. Carl explained that the unusual appeal of No. 2 was the result of the Bishop’s blessing: ‘When he blessed the statue in 1947, the Bishop of Fatima prayed “Wherever the statue goes, may Mary herself always accompany it.” We feel that God put a little more of her presence in that statue [than in others] as the fruit of that blessing.’ He reported that various wonders are performed by the statue and seen by some devotees: Our Lady smiles, her eyes move, she changes color, she turns her head, she cries, and she moves. Carl pointed out that ‘copies don’t have those miracles.’ On another occasion, Rose Marie pointed to the unique character of the statue’s eyes: ‘There’s something different about them’ compared to other statues of Fatima. ‘The face is unique,’ she added. ‘The sense of faith is restored in people by looking at the statue. Anybody who looks at the statue take something away with them’ (Malburg, June 2006). When I asked Carl what would happen to the statue if it were ever replaced by another, he answered that it would not be replaced, but would retire from traveling only when ‘the age of peace arrives,’ that is, the age that Fatima predicted would come to pass when the appropriate reparations had been made to assuage God’s anger. Clearly, this statue enjoys a unique status in the view of Carl and others. Yet the aura of the Pilgrim Statue works in tandem with its many copies and different versions of Fatima rather than in competition with them.
The image is the object of great affection, the lady who fondly receives the prayers and veneration of her devoted. More than the somatic delivery of the Fatima message, she is the enactment of it, the visual entrance into the sacred space in which the soul shares the presence of the Virgin, the re-enacted apparition of Fatima. Her very figure is a performance of the original and repeated disclosures during her apparitions. Our Lady appeared to the children on each occasion standing in a small scrub oak, as the statue portrays her. Her gaze is downward, directed to those beneath her. The statue proceeds on a hand-carried palanquin and rests on table and altar so that the gaze can be met by viewers drawing close. Her hands meet before her chest in a delicate gesture of prayer, fingertips just touching (Figure 3). This corresponds to her appearance at Fatima. During several of her apparitions to the shepherd children, she opened her hands at moments of disclosure, emanating light or revealing a vision to the children.(2) On every occasion of her appearance she urged the children to pray the rosary and commend others to do so as a form of reparation. By responding with prayer, especially praying the rosary, pilgrims to the Pilgrim Statue fulfill Fatima’s request. If tracts transmit the scriptural word as sacred information, the statue of Fatima incarnates Mary’s plea to pray and to heed her warning.
Pilgrimage
The image travels to create ‘the occasion for a renewal of consecration to Her Immaculate Heart’ (Anon 1998:4). Her visitation often coincides with a liturgical occasion, generally a Feast Day devoted to Mary. The statue has embodied the message, taking it from information to presence. This shift infuses the experience of the image with something more than communication, pushing it toward a kind of communion. The message intermingles with the messenger, as an encyclical on the Queenship of Mary issued by Pius XII on October 11, 1954, asserted: the statue of the Virgin at Fatima, which Pius crowned in 1946, is ‘the heralding of the ‘sovereignty’ of Mary’ (Pius XII 1954:para4). The campaign of the Pilgrim Statue is greatly enhanced by the doleful countenance and ritual presence of Mary. The devotional practice of reparation pivots on a personal response to the pathos of Mary’s suffering and her power of intercession. Moreover, if Mary is Queen, her global dominion in the post-colonial world does well to avoid the limit of enthronement in one of the formerly colonizing nations, even though that is where she appeared. She travels, even as her devoted Pope, John Paul II, traveled widely. And just as he received enthusiastic popular reception among the faithful, the Pilgrim Statue enjoys its most fervent response, according to its custodian, in non-Western countries such as in the Philippines, Korea, and India (Malburg, August 2006).
The statue is owned by a non-profit foundation registered in Indiana called International Pilgrim Virgin Statue Foundation, Inc., which used to be based in New Jersey, where it was begun by John Haffert, who was also co-founder of the Blue Army. Upon inquiry if ‘the famous statue’ might come to their community, Carl sends correspondents information and guidelines about visits. He stipulates that publications need to be translated and printed for distribution during the visit. These are typically the pamphlet entitled ‘Our Lady of Fatima: Our Mother Comes to Us’ and possibly other tract materials. The Foundation makes general suggestions regarding the format for visits, preferring to cluster several local venues. The visit must be approved by local ecclesiastical authorities, typically the bishops of any diocese to be visited during the trip. Guidelines indicate that the statue may not be exposed to rain or bad weather; it must be transported under conditions that secure its physical safety; and it must not be exposed to hostile crowds or introduced into situations that might result in harm to it. Carl said that he entrusts local bishops and hosts to make security arrangements and acquire necessary government permits. Funding for the ministry in general comes entirely from donations made during the statue’s travels. Hosts cover local expenses and donations taken on site provide further support (Malburg 2007). Pilgrimage and the image itself are not all that construct and exert the image’s power. The traveling statue works integrally with print media and Internet as well as a host of other images of Our Lady of Fatima to convey the blessing and power of Mary to a global audience. This intermediation of the Pilgrim Statue is an important clue to the power of the image. The most widely used tract during the statue’s peregrination does not distinguish between the traveling statue and the one that Pius crowned at Fatima, though they are not the same (Anon 1998:4-5). Indeed, their confusion is to the point: the Pilgrim Statue is very similar to the one in Fatima, performing as the same image on world pilgrimage. If the gift of a tract enjoins the recipient to read it, the Pilgrim Statue enhances the response by coming to the devout as more than information. Bringing the message of Fatima to people around the world, the statue urges them to respond to a personal articulation of the message. Mary told the children to engage in acts of reparation, promising that these would allay the wrath of God. Proponents of Fatima stress this in their literature, even inverting the response from the devout as the condition for the Virgin’s promise of recompense:
We will not have the promise without the response. And Our Lady seems to be traveling the world to evoke our response. Indeed, the visit of the Pilgrim Virgin Statue to you brings a special responsibility. As the Holy Father has said, the triumph depends on OUR response. And if we have had Our Lady’s visit do we not have a special obligation to respond? [Anon 1998:4-5]
The logic of the gift is brought to bear on devotion to Fatima. The visitation of the statue operates as a gift to the devout, obliging them to reciprocation, which will elicit the salutary effect of mercy. The Statue reenacts the apparition at Fatima in the lives of Catholics, which is linked to a sort of millennial sensibility of looming disaster that may be averted by faithful response. By investing the reception of the image with the power of Mary’s presence, who implores a personal response from viewers keyed to the imminent danger of divine retribution, all taken to the believer’s doorstep rather than through the more traditional means of pilgrimage to a holy site, the ministry of the Pilgrim Statue seems fitly designed to enter the international market of religious competition with Protestant and Muslim proselytism waged through tracts, radio, audio tapes, and door-to-door visitation. It is therefore no surprise that Fatima literature addresses the rivalry of Protestantism.(3) The statue and its many copies—many diocesan divisions of the Blue Army possess their own copies of the statue—has helped to de-localize the sacred, as Paolo Apolito has aptly pointed out (Apolito 2005:153). But Fatima imagery never loses connection with Fatima. The Blue Army offers at its webpage what it calls ‘The Pilgrim Virgin Kit’. Retailing for $129.99, the kit consists of a twenty-one-inch-high statue from Fatima, complete with a traveling bag and twenty-five rosary leaflets, rosaries, and scapulars, intended for use in parishes, youth groups, schools, and nursing homes. The Internet ad for the kit points out that the image in each kit comes from Fatima. The origin is important since it authenticates the image. Although each kit’s plastic reproduction of the Fatima statue performs in the place of the Pilgrim Statue, it does not replace it. May Crownings and other special appearances of the Statue are popularly advertised when they happen every few years in a diocese. These events tend to invest a special aura in the traveling statue. Its local appearance is extraordinary since it allows people to venerate the same image they did as children, as in the case of an Indiana woman who emigrated from Austria and made a point of seeing the Pilgrim Statue when it appeared in Northwest Indiana during the fall of 2005. She had previously seen it as a child in 1949, when it visited St. George, Austria (Ridder 2005:B2). In 1967 twenty-five statues of Our Lady were blessed at the Fatima shrine by Pope Paul VI, then delivered as “National Pilgrim Virgin Statues” to two dozen countries, including South Vietnam and Czechoslovakia (Haffert 1982: 243). In this way, the profusion of Fatima images is used to bolster ‘the original,’ an image that in turn authorizes its copies and shares its aura with them, but is itself a copy of an original, which was a new version of a predecessor. In the visual economy of Marian devotion, rather than depleting the aura of the original, copies augment and circulate it. In fact, we should look for different nomenclature to describe the operation of images in these instances since the original-copy distinction fails completely to capture the relation between images.
Reparations and the Penitential Economy of the Sacred
We miss the larger significance of the Pilgrim Statue if we fail to discern its connection to the theology of reparation. The special mission of Fatima is to compensate God for the offense caused by sin. The particular nature of offense evolved over the history of the devotion, in step with Sister Lucia’s ongoing writings, which progressively made known some of the secrets given her by the Virgin in 1917 and thereafter. Most important for the Pilgrim Statue, however, was the Cold War setting following World War II, when the message of Fatima came to stress the defeat of unbelief and Communism as chief offenses and the achievement of world peace through the practice of reparations (Zimdars-Swartz 1991:190-219). Making a pilgrim of the statue promoted the reparation of sin as part of an officially sanctioned, global enterprise of Marian piety and apocalypticism, which was able to appeal to far more people and on a much larger stage than only to those who made pilgrimage to the shrine at Fatima. And today the sculpture is part of a re-scripting of the devotion to Fatima. With the passing of the Soviet menace, the new challenge to the faithful, the commanding new cause of reparation, is abortion.
The interpretation of Fatima’s message has continued to be understood by her devotees as God’s message to the ‘modern’ world, even as the threat of Communism passed. Rose Marie Malburg told me that Russia spread its errors and that the legacy has been a world-wide dissemination of sin. She asserted that the Blue Army continues to fight these errors with the observance of First Saturday prayers, the ministry of the statue, promoting the scapular, and sharing the messages which the Virgin revealed at Fatima. Latter-day sins continue the legacy of errors promoted by Russia and Communism: same sex marriage, sinful amusements, and abortion (Malburg, June 2006). Msgr. Joseph Cirrincione identified as ‘the culture of death’ in his 1990 tract, Fatima’s Message for Our Times, drawing the phrase from contemporary Catholic opposition to abortion (Cirrincione 1990: 40). Carl Malburg listed several tendencies in the last dozen years that register a decline in piety that is alarming. The fall of the Soviet Union resulted in a cooling of devotion to Mary among many Catholics, who felt that the threat portended in Fatima had been averted. Church attendance has also declined as well as attendance at Marian processions. Western Christians generally have become less fervent. The ‘period of peace’ that Mary promised has yet to occur. In accord with the updated, post-Soviet turn in the narrative, Rose Marie said the peace would not take place until abortion ends. Recoding the original prediction that ‘various nations will be annihilated’ if Mary’s requests for reparations were not heeded, Carl asked ‘what is the murder of millions [of unborn children] if not such an annihilation?’(4)
On another occasion I asked Carl about other current problems in the world and how the devotion to Fatima is entering a new chapter of its life following the fall of the USSR. He quickly replied that one of the major problems is the loss of a commitment to being deliberately Christian.
Society is in a post-Christian mode. There is apathy among those who call themselves Christian. They don’t take it seriously. I’m disappointed that people don’t read the signs of the times. God gives us a modern day reminder of what’s in the Gospel. World events give us a call to return to the Gospel. The Holy Father John Paul II talked about Fatima as a ‘Gospel call,’ something to remind us that the Gospel would solve today’s problems. Our Loving Mother tells us how the Gospel would solve the problems. We look at Fatima to tell us how to understand the problems and the solution. [Malburg 2007]
The ‘signs of the times’ recalls the apocalyptic discourse of Fatima prophecies during the Cold War. But now, instead of Russia, a looming danger for Carl is Islam: ‘There is the problem with Islam. If it were a religion of peace, well, some of them don’t want peace. They use it [the religion] for their radical agenda.’ Carl referred to the Battle of Lepanto, October 7, 1571, when forces assembled by Pius V defeated a larger Turkish naval force. The victory was ascribed by Pius V to the Virgin and he dedicated October 7 to Our Lady of Victory, which was later changed to the Feast of the Most Holy Rosary (Davis 2003:374). For the devout, the past is a ‘salvation history,’ evidence of the historical intervention of Our Lady to protect the Church and direct its path toward an unseen, but unfolding future into which Fatima fits very importantly. For example, Carl believes that it was no accident that Our Lady appeared at ‘Fatima.’ The apparition, he proclaimed, signals an encouraging and militant message of hope in the face of radical Islam’s threat to the world. Lepanto becomes in retrospect an event that finds a place in a long history of the Church’s troubled relations with Islam. Fatima’s ongoing call to renewal consists of several practices, all of which form the reparations necessary to curb God’s anger. A pamphlet indicates that reparations are: ‘1) offering sacrifice to atone for our sins, 2) fulfilling our daily duties to the best of our abilities, 3) accepting the responsibilities of our state in life, 4) obeying the Commandments of God’ (Anon 1983:20). The most important practices of reparation, according to Carl, are saying the family rosary and individuals reciting the rosary daily. He stressed that individual practice was only part of the duty: ‘People think that they have only their own personal situation and problems to address. But Fatima calls Catholics to the larger divine economy of reparations. God is offended by sin, but his graces are available through intercessory prayer to Our Lady of Fatima.’
What happens when reparations are made? I asked. ‘Sinners are converted,’ Carl answered, echoing the promise of Our Lady at Fatima. I inquired about the precise mechanics or metaphysics of the transaction. He replied:
Reparations are effective work on the behalf of others and lead to giving grace. Reparations are forms of atonement for damage caused by sin. Mary came at Fatima not as the Queen of Heaven, but as Mother, offering her assistance as the Mother of God. She enjoys a special relationship to God. Honoring her with prayer and fasting is honored by God in the form of graces given to those who pray and those who are prayed for. [Malburg, August 2006]
The devotion of reparations pivots on the need and the power to avert disaster by engaging in an economy that capitalizes human suffering, valuing it not as the absence or disfavor of God, but as a grace or favor that viscerally connects the devout with the sufferings of Jesus, Mary, and the saints. Mary threatened to ‘scatter [Russia’s] errors throughout the world, provoking wars and persecution of the Church,’ if her requests for reparation were not made (Anon 1983:5). Believers are charged with the duty and power to participate in the mystery of the body of Christ through suffering, which attains a release from punishment by removing God’s anger at human offense. Carl referred to ‘victim-souls’ as those individuals chosen by God to suffer and whose suffering gains graces, producing powerful effects. He said that victim-souls are ‘evidence that reparations work.’ Victim-souls are familiar to Americans through their coverage in media. They attract media attention because of their extreme state, the large numbers of people who make pilgrimage to pray before them, and the sometimes controversial state in which they are kept alive by family members. Among the most well-known today in the United States is Audrey Santo (1983-2007), the girl who was severely incapacitated after nearly drowning at the age of three. For over twenty years she was kept alive on life support technology in her home in Worcester, Massachusetts, where many visited her as pilgrims, and reported miracles (Kane 2002). Audrey was taken to Medjugorje, where her family believes she communicated with the Virgin during an apparition. The victim-soul readily becomes a spectacle—in the mediated sense of newspapers and television coverage, but also a spectacle of faith. A spectacle is an image of consuming interest, inviting a fixed gaze by virtue of its extreme, even shocking or harrowing character. A spectacle commands attention to the degree that it eclipses everything around it. Viewers are absorbed in what they see and moved to freight the act of seeing with compelling moral significance (Morgan 2007). The visual transposition of the suffering—whether it is Jesus on the cross, Mary as the Mother of Sorrows, or the victim-soul—into a spectacle makes the suffering available to the economy of reparation through the visual exchange of the gaze. Devotees stand before the crucifix or cult statue or the broken body of the victim-soul, gripped by what they see and drawn into an exchange of devotion for favor. The suffering on which they gaze generates a surplus of spiritual capital that is acquired by the act of visual attention from the devout. To see the holy is to be blessed by it (Morgan 2005: 2-6).
The cult of Fatima represents a dispensational economy of atonement or compensation in which human reparation, guided by the Virgin’s revelatory counsel and assisted by her graces and miracles, satisfies the debt incurred by sin that would otherwise produce just retribution. Devotion to Fatima constitutes an additional means of expiation or compensation for sin, one that Mary particularly favors. In his widely read manual of Marian piety from the early eighteenth century, St. Louis de Montfort asserted that Jesus ‘never resists the prayer of His dear mother, because she is always humble and conformed to his will.’ But the authority of Mary also drew from her office in heaven: Jesus ‘has made her treasurer of all that His Father gave Him for His inheritance. It is by her that He applies His merits to His members, and that He communicates His virtues, and distributes his graces.’(5) For devotees of Marian penitentialism, Mary has remained the spiritual broker expending the capital of divine graces and the reparations of the faithful as she sees fit. The Holy Spirit has chosen her ‘to be the dispenser of all He possesses, in such wise that she distributes to whom she wills, as much as she wills, as she wills and when she wills, all His gifts and graces’ (Grignon de Montfort 1941: 15). Invested with this spiritual capital, Fatima charges believers with work, placing the onus and opportunity on humans to contribute to improving the state of the world and the fate of its people by the reparations the faithful perform. Mary is understood to mirror and participate in Christ’s sacrifice as co-redemptrix and ‘mediatrix’ (Grignon de Montfort’s term). As a tenaciously traditional form of pre-Vatican II Catholicism, devotion to Fatima resists any attempt to streamline or ‘Protestantize’ the understanding of atonement. In a letter of 1970, Lucia wrote that Protestants failed to realize that Paul asked for prayers on his behalf and invited Christians to pray for one another, which should not be seen as contradicting his affirmation of Christ as the single mediator between humanity and God. ‘Shouldn’t Mary, who is the Mother of God,’ she reasoned, ‘pray for us?’ Mary ‘was the first living tabernacle wherein the Father enclosed his Son, the Word made Flesh. She was the first monstrance to hold Him’ (Klauder 1991: n.p.). Mary’s intimate proximity to Jesus makes her image a powerful place to plead for her intercession and to direct compensatory efforts such as the Rosary, adoration of the Host, and vigil and Crowning. In an age when the human self is elevated to a powerful, unprecedented capacity for agency and considered the subjective measure of value and freedom in a secular vision of the world, a statue of Our Lady that comes to the devout might be seen as compromising the traditional practice of pilgrimage. But this misses the emphasis placed on seeing as the medium of revelation and grace. By looking to the image in prayer, devotees enter into an economy of the sacred that revalues suffering as a spiritual capital. Seeing becomes a voluntary submission to Mary’s power to broker reconciliation. She meets the devout in the midst of their daily worlds, charging them with the devotional exercises of reparation that will transform their suffering into the immanence of the divine, warding off social ills. Regarding these ills as forms of rebellion of child against divine father, Marian piety interposes the mother as the best way of reconciling the two by compensating the paternal deity’s offense and checking his indignation. A mother’s tender yet forceful ministrations seek to limit the excesses of father and child alike. The International Pilgrim Statue of Our Lady of Fatima shows how her benevolence and intervention are available at a glance. Redemption happens in the twinkle of an eye.
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Notes
1. Turner and Turner 1978: 209. The Turners relied on the important work of William Christian, Jr., who studied the decline of local apparition cults in Spain—see Christian 1981. Zimdars-Swartz 1991 provides very helpful analysis of each of the primary modern apparitions.
2. For descriptions of these moments see Kondor 1976:111, 161, 165, 167, 173; and Fox 2006:20, 23, 24, 30.
3. See, for instance, the tract by McGuinness and Quill 1992; also Cirrincione 1990:48-70; Klauder 1991.
4. Malburg, August 2006. Quotations of the predictions of Fatima are from Kondor 1976: 109.
5. Grignon de Montfort 1941:17; 15. Grignon de Monfort’s expression ‘totus tuus,’ was adopted by John Paul II as his personal motto. Grignon de Monfort was canonized by Pius XII in 1947.
