"Miracle" On Television: It Has Happened Again at Tre Fontane

On April 18 was the anniversary of Our Lady of Tre Fontane, Rome. I was there but I left before Holy Mass started. According to a report the phenomenon of the Sun Dancing was also seen there It was recorded on film.(1)

I go often there and pray in silence.There were two young  Franciscan sisters who began the rosary when I was leaving. Many people were there. Mass was to be celebrated by a Franciscan Superior. I left to go to the Church nearby, to the place where St. Paul was beheaded.

-Lionel

 "Miracle" On Television: It Has Happened Again at Tre Fontane

 

At the Sanctuary, the sun's "pulsations" are recorded by telecamera. But the church remains extremely cautious. So many eyes saw it, but only the TV camera was able to record it in an apparently objective and incontestable manner: on the 12th of April last, at the Sanctuary of the Three Fountains on the Via Laurentina, the sun pulsated for a considerable time like a heart subject to violent emotion.

At the same time other incredible changes were observed on the sun's surface, all of them faithfully filmed by the machine of an amateur camera-man who happened to be on the spot at the time. As though in a surrealist vision, the sun at one moment turned bright red and at another emerald green. Its colors glowed and its rays were projected outwards so that gigantic shafts of light shone down from the sky onto the thousands of witnesses who had flocked to the hill.

It has become a long-established habit for Romans to gather here each April 12th. The crowd at Tre Fontane included both highly-placed ecclesiastics and personalities from the worlds of politics and the arts. Mass was celebrated, prayers were said, and people waited. Among them was that same Bruno Cornacchiola who with his three children, long ago in 1947, had had a vision of Our Lady that he had certainly not expected. At that time the grotto of the apparition had been foul-smelling, a place of ill-repute, and the hill itself a wilderness of stones and brambles. Today it is a pleasant place with smooth paths, flowering hedges, electric light and drinkable water as well, of course, as the votive tablets and other adornments of the devotion.

These are human manifestations, of course. But at Tre Fontane there have been in addition no lack of heavenly "signs", and these still continue. There have been miraculous cures, often occurring when the "holy" earth has been applied to the affected part of the sufferer's body. There has been a notable improvement in the morality of the "drop-outs" of the neighborhood, and, to top it all, the miracles of the sun, in accordance with a prophecy made in 1979 by Our Lady to the ex-tram-driver and former unbeliever Cornacchiola. Starting from the 33rd anniversary of Her own first apparition, there were to be - precisely as the Virgin of Revelation had prophesied - "many manifestations and graces, both inward and external".

We have to admit that this promise, great and binding as it was, was very precisely carried out. On the 12th of April, 1980, more than 3,000 persons saw, during the Mass and, more precisely, at the moment of the consecration, the solar disc change in shape and color and present the most extraordinary pictures.

"A few days before this year's repetition", said Pompeo Santorelli, the man who pointed his telecamera lens at the sun," some friends had invited me to go with them to Tre Fontane to shoot some film. It wasn't easy to free myself of family commitments, but I managed to do so. I loaded my TV camera and went to the Sanctuary. I had already filmed some shots of the crowd when, during the Mass, when people were beginning to call out that there was a miracle, I decided to swing the lens upwards. In doing this I was afraid of burning out the cathode tube of the camera, but I reasoned that if, in such circumstances, human eyes could focus on the sun without injury, then the camera would probably not be damaged either.

"So I began to film the sun, but to start with on a slant. Then I focused directly on it, and while I was shooting there began the most extraordinary of all extraordinary phenomena: that of the pulsation of the shining sphere."

Signs and portents are, it is said, an alphabet in cipher behind which a message lies concealed. On the eve of dramatic events, the spasms of the sun will seem to many to have a prophetic significance, just as certain dreams have had. The difference this time is that this has been no "dream" - the whole phenomenon has been filmed by a TV camera - even if (and it is important to remember this) the attitude of the Church remains marked by the utmost reticence. - Il Tempo article by A.M. Turi

(1)

http://www.fatimacrusader.com/cr46/cr46pg16.asp

http://www.theotokos.org.uk/pages/approved/appariti/trefonta.html