The Book of Love (39 page)

Peter was quiet, considering the question. Bérenger responded. “Fascinating idea, but it leads me to ask this question: to your point, the apparitions occurred in famine-torn rural Ireland in the late nine-tenth century, when no one would have had any frame of reference for the scenario you just presented.”

“So why bother?” Peter continued. “Based on your heretical theory, why would the apparitions attempt to show themselves in this way to a people who could not even begin to comprehend what they were trying to convey?”

Maureen stopped walking as an idea hit her. “Because they weren’t conveying the message to them.”

“What do you mean?” Peter wasn’t following her line of thinking.

“Just maybe…they were conveying the message to us. In the future. In a time when we could reinterpret it.”

It was Bérenger’s turn to question. “But why?”

“You don’t think that’s arrogant?” Peter asked. “To say that these events happened all for our benefit?”

“I’m not saying that they happened for us specifically. I’m saying that they happened in order to leave clues for anyone who was motivated to find them and inspired to follow them. And we are. Our obligation is to not let those clues go undiscovered.”

“For those with ears to hear and eyes to see,” Peter mused.

Bérenger was struck by a thought. “Maggie mentioned Saint Patrick
in the presentation, and that he had declared Knock a holy place. Think about it. What do we know about your patron saint?”

Peter responded first. He was passionate about Patrick’s legacy in Ireland. “The miracle of Patrick is that he did not shed one drop of blood in his conversion of the Irish pagans to Christianity. He converted them through understanding and integration.”

“And where do you think he learned that strategy?”

Maureen wasn’t sure where he was going and listened as Bérenger continued.

“From the Prince of Peace, who was his ancestor. Saint Patrick was the grandnephew of Saint Martin of Tours, the French saint who shows up all over bloodline history. I’ve tracked his lineage and can almost definitively prove that he was the direct descendant of Sarah-Tamar.”

“San Martino!” Maureen was excited by where the connections were taking her. “Matilda’s church of the Holy Face in Lucca was named after Saint Martin of Tours.”

Peter was grasping it too. “And built by an Irish saint Finnian, who was inspired by Patrick.”

Peter was shaking his head in wonder. “Remember who Saint Patrick’s true successor was? Saint Brigit. A woman. A very powerful woman. One of the greatest leaders in the early Church.”

Maureen was speaking quickly now, putting it all together. “So Patrick is a direct descendant of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, and he declares that Knock will be a holy place after he sees this in a vision. His successor is a powerful woman, who is also a prophetess. Are we saying that the early Celtic church was founded by our people? By heretics?”

Bérenger nodded. “I think it deserves consideration. Perhaps there were others in Knock that night who also witnessed the apparitions—but who saw something very different, something that the Church would not have recorded in the eyewitness accounts for obvious reasons.”

“A vision for those with eyes to see?” Peter asked. “You think there were heretics still living in County Mayo in the eighteen hundreds?”

“I don’t think we can rule it out,” Bérenger said.

Maureen nodded her agreement, her mind racing with the possibilities. They continued on their way across the Tiber, making their crossing on the monumental bridge that joins the edges of Vatican City to the rest of Rome. Bernini’s majestic angel sculptures shone in the moonlight as they passed.

“One thing that has always fascinated me about these visions of Mary is that many of them happen to children.” Maureen addressed her next question to Peter. “She appears to the very innocent, the very young, and the very poor. And she tells them secrets, right?”

Peter nodded now in agreement. “Usually, yes. She also tends to appear in times of great stress. Knock occurs when Ireland is recovering from the famine, the vision at La Salette occurs in France as that country is healing from the revolution, and Fátima has the backdrop of the First World War. In the midst of all this turmoil, secrets of faith are imparted to children by the Holy Mother. This is integral to the apparitions. Knock is unique in that it is one of the few Marian apparitions where there are no secrets and there is no contact, possibly because she is seen by adults as well as children. This is why she is called Our Lady of Silence.”

“But Knock is also unique, correct me if I’m wrong, in that the Marian figure is not alone. She is accompanied by companions who are as important as she is herself.”

Peter nodded. “That is true.”

“So what do we know about the secrets that Mary gives to the children in her other apparitions?” Maureen asked. “Are they ever revealed?”

“Sometimes, like in Fátima, the secrets were revealed a little at a time over the years,” Peter explained. “But some of the others were taken to the grave because the children refused to tell them.”

“And why do you think that is? Could it be that Mary told them something they were too afraid to share? Something that could be deemed…heretical?”

Bérenger found that the more time he spent with Maureen, the more uncannily similar their thought processes became. He joined in.
“You think Mother Mary is appearing to tell the children, ‘The true teachings of my son are not being honored’?”

“That’s where this is leading me.”

Peter shook his head. “We have no way of knowing, do we? I have to confess that I never really looked at it this way and I don’t think I can now, either. I think these are beautiful, religious experiences that are had by pure believers during times when an increase of faith was vital to their communities. Children can see Our Lady because they are as pure as she is. I really don’t think it’s anything more than that.”

Maureen was tired, and she wasn’t even sure she wanted to make a case for the Marian apparitions being anything other than what they appeared to be. She just felt the need to voice these questions. It was interesting to her that Knock Shrine had become the focal point of the Catholic conservative movement in Ireland. Agenda-driven programs criticizing contraception, divorce, and homosexuality were born and nurtured around Knock. Wouldn’t it be somewhat ironic if these apparitions that were used as a backdrop for intolerance were actually of a heretical nature? It was something to think about, but it was just one of many things that Maureen had to consider as the tortuous path of history continued to take her on a completely unpredictable journey.

The three of them had a late dinner in the Piazza della Rotonda, but Maureen rarely joined in the conversation. Finally she admitted that she just wanted to be alone for a few hours to contemplate all that was swirling through her consciousness. Something was nagging at the back of her brain, and she had to give in to it, to see where it would take her.

Back in her room, she flipped open her laptop and began trawling online to find out more about Marian apparitions. She wasn’t certain what she was looking for or why these suddenly mattered to her quite so much. But she had learned not to ignore her instincts regarding such
things. Maybe something would jump out at her, help her to understand why this was suddenly important.

Peter was right. With the exception of Knock, all the apparitions that Maureen found had similar characteristics: they were witnessed by very poor children who were also illiterate. These children were all told “secrets”—some to be kept in perpetuity by the chosen child, others to be shared at designated times with the world. Was the Church censoring these secrets? Fabricating them? Some of the eyewitness accounts were written in ornate and flowery language, utilizing phrasing that simply could not have come from the mouths of illiterate children.

One of the young visionaries from a French village near the Swiss border, La Salette, was a fifteen-year-old shepherdess. Mélanie Calvat was so poor that her parents had sent her out to beg in the street from the time she was three years old. Despite her lack of education, it was the perspective of history that she had given this verbatim report of her vision to the Church:

Maureen thought about this for a moment. She didn’t know any fifteen-year-old girls in the twenty-first century who used words like
scintillating
or
intangible
, much less spoke in this type of prose. It sim
ply didn’t seem possible that these words could have been spoken by an illiterate and terrified girl in 1851. This was the equivalent of a press release from the Vatican: an obvious marketing tool.

She noted one interesting sentence in Mélanie Calvat’s testimony, one that invited deeper exploration. This was the sentence referring to the “second secret”:

As Maureen searched for further documents on Mélanie Calvat’s statements, she found no further information on this “new religious order,” nor did it appear that the Vatican had elaborated on it in any detail. Could the Virgin have been referring to the Order of the Holy Sepulcher? Was the “new” religious order in fact a reference to restoring the true teachings of her son—and his wife?

One more critical element that Maureen took note of: virtually every account of a secret revealed during an apparition had some discrepancy or objection around it. Either the child recanted later or claimed that he or she was misrepresented. Some refused ever to speak of the revelations that were entrusted to them by Mary.

And some were never allowed to speak.

Most famous of these was Lucia Santos, the oldest child to witness the multiple apparitions in the Portuguese hamlet outside Fátima. Lucia was a special child with a sunny disposition, and by the accounts of her relatives there was “something magical” about her. She took her first communion at six, years earlier than usual, because hers was such a spiritual nature that she was known to lecture other children on the nature of God. At the age of ten the little shepherdess, along with her two cousins, Jacinta and Francisco, witnessed an apparition of Our Lady while walking through the fields near their home. The date was May 13, 1917. Lucia would later describe her vision in terms similar to the apparition from the Book of Revelation, chapter twelve, “And a
great portent appeared in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun.” The apparition identified herself as Our Lady of the Rosary and emphasized the importance of reciting the rosary daily. The lady explained to the children that it was the key to personal salvation but also to world peace. From May to October of 1917, the Lady appeared on the thirteenth day of each month, at the same time.

More than 70,000 people witnessed the final apparition on October 13, 1917. Although it had dawned dark and rainy that day, by the time of the Lady’s appearance the sun had burst through the sky in a show of light and color, and it appeared to be moving back and forth across the sky. This dazzling astronomical event became known in Portugal as the Miracle of the Sun, and it converted many skeptics into believers on that day. Of all the Marian apparitions, Fátima remained the most famous because this miracle, in which the sun was said to dance, was witnessed by so many.

Key to the Fátima apparitions were the three secrets that the Lady imparted to the children. These were not immediately revealed to the public. They were, in fact, kept as secrets between the children and their religious advisers for many years following the apparitions. Sadly, both of Lucia’s cousins, Jacinta and Francisco, died shortly after the events at Fátima. It is believed that they were merely two of many children who were lost to a flu epidemic spreading through the Iberian Peninsula at the time.

Lucia Santos became the only surviving child to know the truth of the Lady’s secrets. She was subsequently committed to a series of convents for the duration of her long life and took vows of silence as a Carmelite nun. Lucia’s deep spirituality would indicate that her vows were voluntary and a part of her calling; however, Maureen wondered about the vows of silence, which appeared extreme. Lucia was not only under a traditional monastic vow of silence, she was under restrictions from the Vatican not to speak to anyone about the apparitions without express approval from the Holy See. As she grew older, these restrictions were tightened to the point of strangulation, as Lucia was forbidden to have any visitors who were not deemed acceptable by the
Church. Even her personal confessor of twenty years was ultimately denied the right to visit her. In the final years of her life, no one except Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger were allowed to gain or grant access to Lucia Santos, who now lived in an imposed solitary confinement. Despite Church claims that Lucia was an esteemed and venerated member of their community, she died in 1995 from complications of an upper respiratory infection because the cell she lived in was damp and mildewed and her aged body could not recover from the multiple, prolonged infections she suffered.

Immediately upon her death, an edict was issued by Cardinal Ratzinger, who was the head of the Inquisition—now known by the politically correct term Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The order called for Lucia’s monastic cell to be sealed off as if it were a crime scene. It had been reported throughout her life that Lucia never stopped having visions, and that perhaps she never stopped writing about them. It appeared that the Church was taking no chances that this visionary may have been hiding accounts of her experiences somewhere within her cell. What they found was unknown to anyone except the pope, his congregational general, and the select council of clerics who were committed to the preservation of the holy apparitions. While a number of books claiming to be Lucia’s personal memoirs were released during the course of her life, these came out under the direction of the Church. As Lucia was never allowed to discuss any aspect of Fátima freely, it was impossible to know if these Vatican-approved biographies truly represented her visions and experiences, despite the fact that they had her name on the cover. Not surprisingly, the Fátima secrets as they were ultimately revealed focused on the conversion of the world to Catholicism, beginning with Russia, and other issues very specific to Catholics and the preservation of the faith in its traditional and established form.