We are accustomed to a society full of messages, incapable of the perennial and absorbed in thousands of activities. To confront this society of ours with a message from 100 years ago, and with an intensity and depth that transcends us is, a prioria task non grata and with a content intended for historical archives. Normally, we are left with our prejudices and our human vision.
The message of Fatima requires not only a believing attitude, but also a capacity to read the events of present history and the world of mankind.
In the 21st century
It is true that the first decades of the twentieth century invited the need for divine intervention on behalf of mankind. But looking at these first two decades of the 21st century, we cannot presume that there has been a radical regenerative change in the safeguarding of man. The truth is that, with greater awareness and with much more violence, the greatest attacks on human dignity and its ethical protection are being committed.
Today, the greatest geo-strategic errors are being projected in the world of national and international politics; military defense today has a destructive force as it never had before; the persecution of Christians and the Church is radically aggressive; Christian life becomes more and more a place of witness and martyrdom, and the world spreads its desire to achieve the "death of God" with its theoretical and practical atheism.
A perennial invitation
As we reach the year 2017, it does not seem to me that we are celebrating a historical centenary, but rather the radical perenniality of the message of Fatima. Our Lady casts her gaze upon us not only one hundred years ago but today, and invites us to be with her, to implore Peace for the whole world and to offer, in total love, sacrifices for the conversion of all those who, distant from God, experience the world of death and sin.
Today, Our Lady's question to the little shepherds touches our hearts: "Do you want to offer yourselves to God to bear all the sufferings that He would like to send you, as an act of atonement for the sins by which He is offended and of supplication for the conversion of sinners?"
It is true that in this changing world it is not easy to continue offering one's life in prayer and sacrifice. But the truth is that none of this is new. At the dawn of this first centenary of the apparitions of the Blessed Virgin at Fatima, the Heart of Jesus asks of us total generosity in a life of prayer and sacrifice, a constant Eucharistic intimacy that makes us probe and draw closer to the Trinity, and a deep trust that pierces our hearts with the certainty that His Immaculate Heart will be our refuge and the way that will lead us to God... And "at last, my Immaculate Heart will triumph!"
Vila Viçosa (Evora, Portugal)
