How Did The Sun Do What It Did At Fatima?

October 9, 2017 by sd

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We all know what happened a hundred years ago tomorrow, on October 13, 1917. What we don’t know is how it occurred.

We speak of course of the “great Fatima sun miracle,” which was witnessed by tens of thousands (probably 70,000), including skeptical and outright atheistic reporters, who watched not only as the sun danced in the sky but how the clothes of pilgrims who’d been doused all night (by an incredible storm) suddenly, like the dirt roads that had been turned into rivulets, were dry.

What about the sun itself?

We know it didn’t actually move, for such a drastic astronomical event would have been reported with apocalyptic tonality worldwide: Witnesses certainly would not have been confined to the apparition site about ninety miles north of Lisbon at Cova da Iria!

No, this was a miracle of perception. The senses of the people, the consciousnesses, like those of the seers, were temporarily taken out of this reality.

Here was one description of the miracle (from The Final Hour):

“Early in the afternoon, when Sister Lucia and her two cousins went into ecstasy, the clouds suddenly parted and Lucia saw Our Lady dressed in white with Saint Joseph beside her holding the Infant Jesus. Then Lucia saw a sorrowful Mary and an adult Jesus Who looked with pity on the crowd and raised His Hand to bless the pilgrims. At the end of her ecstasy Lucia saw Mary as Our Lady of Mount Carmel, dressed in dark brown.

“While this was happening a disc of some sort moved in front of the sun and for ten minutes the sun danced like the firewheels in Ezekiel. Spinning and throwing off stupendous rays of crimson, causing reflections of green, red, orange, blue, and violet on the faces below, it gyrated at least three times, shuddered, and began to plunge downward in a zig-zag fashion, as if to destroy all the earth.”

A sibylline warning, for certain: of an asteroid, and a tilting axis, of nuclear war (let us recall the angel ready to torch the world in the Third Secret)?

One blogger speculated that the miracle itself simulated how the sun would appear if the axis of the earth shifted. (Sister Lucia said that in the 1940s, she was granted a further enlightenment on the Third Secret and it involved the earth’s axis).

We know Scripture itself prophesies times when the heavens and earth “will tremble” or be “shaken.”

The skeptics have had their own theories, most of them falling far short and, in cases, presenting outright implausibility. (Is the above, right the actual miracle? Though it has been promulgated as such many say it is not.)

Some argued it was an atmospheric optical phenomenon called a “sun dog” [left and right]; others that it may have been from stratospheric dust that caused the reported gauzy light and bluish hues. But a sun dog is not inside or at the sun (more a nimbus or refraction to one side) and stratospheric dust hardly explains the dramatic plunging movements (not to mention the dry clothes).

Mass hallucination?

Far too many folks saw the same thing all at once. Some have gone so far as to speculate that the disc described as moving in front of the solar orb was a flying saucer (actually, it looked more like a Host — and has been described at other sites of apparition: I myself have witnessed this).

I have witnessed the “miracle of the sun” a number of times during research over a quarter century, including near Lisieux in France; at Lourdes two years ago; at Betania, in Venezuela; near Quito, Ecuador; in Ireland; at Medjugorje, in Herecegovina; at Zarvanystya in Ukraine; and other places where Mary is said to appear or to have appeared. It’s a case whereby those who are at certain sanctified spots are perception-wise “taken” for a short while out of the normal physical parameters and “see” whatever it is that God ordains them to see beyond the veil of physicality. At Betania, I saw the sun gyrate and cast long rays to the earth that in a remarkable way formed a replication of Our Lady as seen at the Miraculous Medal.

I once spoke to an astronomer named Dr. Joseph Patterson at Columbia University who said that ten seconds would be enough to burn a hole in the retina, that I could not have done what I did without incurring ocular damage. Dr. Patterson said he could think of no normal reason for the sun pulsating the way I described, nor of anything that would account for an off-white disc-like object that seems to move in front of it. Not once did I experience sunspots.  

One morning at Medjugorje the sun cast down rays shaped like a Cross that touched a vineyard not far from me. (During another “solar miracle” there, at the time of an alleged apparition, I saw a couple watching it and when I approached them to see if they were observing the same thing realized it was the famous Miami Dolphin coach Don Shula and his wife).

As Benedict XVI, in his commentary on the Third Secret, said: “In this field, theological anthropology distinguishes three forms of perception or ‘vision’: vision with the senses, and hence exterior bodily perception, interior perception, and spiritual vision (visio sensibilis – imaginativa – intellectualis). It is clear that in the visions of Lourdes, Fatima and other places it is not a question of normal exterior perception of the senses: the images and forms which are seen are not located spatially, as is the case for example with a tree or a house.”

It’s what those who have near-death experiences also say: that a new reality (including a great light) opened before them.

God can create whatever effects He likes.

He can cause an entire vicinity or group of people to be elevated an inch beyond normal reality.

In Kibeho, Rwanda, the seers described how  the environment would suddenly drastically shift during their (Church-approved) apparitions and they would no longer see the crowds of people but instead an entirely different reality. 

Believe what you will. Phenomena do occur, especially when we are not in the confines of a strictly intellectual cognitive approach to Christianity and when, through prayer and fasting, we are open to a world beyond the physical — beyond this limited passing world.

–Michael H. Brown

[Go to five minutes into video:]

[Footnote: what Pope Benedict XVI, as Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, said upon release of the Third Secret:

Continuedhttp://spiritdaily.org/blog/apparitions/how-did-the-sun-do-what-it-did