Msgr. Roger J. Landry

National Blue Army Shrine, Ashbury, NJ

108th Anniversary Celebration of the Sixth Apparition of Our Lady of Fatima

October 13, 2025

To watch a video of the meditation, please click below: 

To listen to an audio recording of today’s meditation, please click below: 

The following outline guided the meditation: 

• Introduction
  
  
  
  • Today under rain that is evocative of the downpours that occurred in the Cova d’Iria 108 years ago, we joyfully celebrate the anniversary of the “exclamation point” of the Fatima apparitions: the “Miracle of the Sun” that took place on October 13, 2017. This Miracle involved a clear prediction, a solar phenomenon, and a scientifically inexplicable general dessication, all three of which combine in a compelling way to help skeptics gain confidence in Our Lady’s appearances and believers gain motivation to act on the message Our Lady came to Fatima to impart.
  
  
  • Let’s begin with the prediction. During the third apparition of Our Lady in July, ten year-old Lucia, prompted by the advice she had received from others, said to the woman from heaven, “I would like to ask who you are and whether you will do a miracle so that everyone will know for certain that you have appeared to us.” The woman replied, “In October, I will tell you who I am and what I want. I will then perform a miracle so that all may believe.” When Lucia related to others that response, suspense quickly began to build. In August, the Lady reiterated, “In the last month I will perform a miracle so that all may believe,” and in September, she said again, “In October I will perform a miracle so that all may believe.” By the time October 13 arrived, a vast throng of about 70,000 had assembled around the Cova d’Iria in Fatima as the children arrived to pray the Rosary. Those crowd included secularists, anticlerical forces, journalists and skeptics, all of whom wanted to be eyewitnesses, when no miracle took place, of what they termed an ongoing “fraud.” It had been raining incessantly since the previous night, the fields were soaked and muddy, and despite umbrellas, the people were drenched.
  
  
  • When the children arrived, slightly before 1 pm, the woman appeared, seen again only by the shepherd children. She said she wanted a chapel built, asked them to continue to pray the Rosary every day, revealed herself as “the Lady of the Rosary,” divulged that World War I would soon end, and called on everyone to amend their lives and ask God’s forgiveness. Then she rose toward the east and turned the palms of her hands toward the dark clouds that were obscuring the sun. Immediately the sun broke through the clouds and appeared to be an opaque grey disk that turned to silver. “Look at the sun!,” Lucia shouted, and people found to their surprise that they could peer directly at the intense sun without being blinded. Over the course of the next ten minutes, the sun whirled madly, “danced” like a giant circle of fire, careened toward earth and zig-zagged back to its normal position. People shrieked, wept and dropped to their knees in the mud and water. The colors of everything — the air and ground, trees, faces, and clothes — changed yellow, blue, amethyst, red and white. Soon the cry “miracle!” started being heard everywhere.
  
  
  • Some assert that it was a Mass hallucination. Atheist Richard Dawkins, in his book The God Delusion, admits, “It is not easy to explain how seventy thousand people could share the same hallucination,” but then he went on nevertheless to propound that they all had to be hallucinating collectively because it would be “even harder to accept that it really happened without the rest of the world, outside Fatima, seeing it too — and not just seeing it, but feeling it as the catastrophic destruction of the solar system.” But it’s not scientific or even reasonable to dismiss out of hand the data to which about 70,000 collectively attest and to pretend as if they were all simply deceived.
  
  
  • Here’s why the third part of the miracle, the one of dessication, is important. Many of the eyewitnesses described the intense heat of the sun as it careened toward earth. After the sun had returned to its place, they recognized that their soaked clothing and the drenched ground were all completely dry as if it had never rained. That physical reality doesn’t happen by mass hallucination or a spiritual vision. Engineers and physicists say that an extraordinary of amount of energy would have been necessary to dry up that much water so fast. Regardless of our incapacity to explain the data, it’s impossible to dispute it. 70,000 people, however, clearly saw — and felt — something, and the earth itself transitioned within minutes from saturated to dehydrated. All of this has led both faithful and skeptics present to conclude that the pre-announced miracle had in fact occurred and has moved so many others since, including the hierarchy of the Church, to find their testimony credible. And if that part of the children’s testimony proved true, then it certainly lends far greater believability to everything else that the children say that “the Lady of the Rosary” told them. It likewise should lead to a much greater commitment on our part to act on what Our Lady was permitted to come from heaven to earth to announce.
  
  
  • Our Lady appeared in Fatima as the Mother who received us at the foot of the Cross, with a message for us and for all her other children. She was coming not fundamentally to impart information, but formation, to lead us, as she led the shepherd children, to her Son. She came as a missionary from heaven, calling the pastorinhos and all of us to conversion, to consecration, to action because, as she said, the salvation of souls was at stake. Mary is the Queen of Apostles, the one St. John Paul II called the Star of Evangelization, and we see her fulfilling this role in Fatima. Her Son’s first words in his public ministry were “repent and believe in the Gospel,” and she came to Fatima to announce, “Penance! Penance! Penance!,” to ask the shepherd children, and through them all of us, to pray and make sacrifices for the conversion of sinners, and then to live our faith through entering into Mary’s own faith through entrusting ourselves to her immaculate heart. That’s what I want to talk about today: Mary’s work as a missionary, reminding us of the stakes of the Church’s mission and summoning us, at 7, 9 and 10, Jacinta, Francisco and Lucia, or at whatever age we presently are, to take seriously the missionary dimension of our baptism.
  
  
  
  


• Joy to be here
  
  
  
  • My name is Monsignor Roger Landry. I’m National Director of the Pontifical Mission Societies in the United States, tasked by the Church in helping to promote missionary spirituality and identity among American Catholics and to involve us through prayer and sacrifices to share in the mission Christ has entrusted us all, to go and announce the Gospel to every creature, to call people to repent and believe, to proclaim “repentance for the forgiveness of sins to all nations, beginning in Jerusalem,” to herald his kingdom and bring the gift of the salvation he won for us to all those who do not know it yet, or haven’t embraced it yet, or who, having once believed, have turned away. It’s ultimately to help American Catholics learn from our Lady’s example in Fatima how to participate in her Son’s mission out of love for him and out of love for all those he entrusted to Mary on the Cross.
  
  
  • It’s a great joy for me to be with you today here at the Blue Army Shrine, where for the last 47 years the World Apostolate of Fatima has helped the United States and the world ponder what Our Lady said and did in Fatima and resolve to live and spread the way she interpreted with urgency the living out of our faith in her Son today. I have always had a great devotion to Our Lady of Fatima. When I was a seminarian, I lived in Portugal for a summer learning Portuguese and almost every Saturday I would take the bus from Lisbon to Fatima to pray. I became great friends with a Portuguese family who likewise loved to go to Fatima on the 13^th of each of month from May to October and so I accompanied them during that summer on those visits in which hundreds of thousands would come. After my ordination as a priest of the Diocese of Fall River, Massachusetts, I was assigned to a Portuguese parish where everyone had an intense devotion to Our Lady of Fatima and so I sought to feed that devotion and was much nourished by it. On the first anniversary of my priestly ordination, the future Pope Benedict XVI, at the behest of St. John Paul II, published his brilliant commentary on the message of Fatima, especially the third part of the message, and I began to teach that lesson, in Portuguese and English, throughout southeastern Massachusetts and beyond. I likewise had the joy, when I was working for the Permanent Observer Mission of the Holy See to the United Nations in New York, to host a huge event there — with a standing room only crowd in a room that fit 560 delegates — in the presence of the Pilgrim Statue of Our Lady, to celebrate the 100^th anniversary of the Fatima apparitions and Mary’s call for peace. So to be here with you to celebrate our Lady, to tha