Welcome, friend.
        Are you ready for a totally unique internet experience?  Here, you are going to be able to explore ideas that you will find interesting, enlightening and sometimes maybe even inspiring, without ever being assaulted with distractions by way of either donation requests, or of extraneous and most often irrelevant commercials!
        I have only been able to make this possible, from the day I published my first website in 1996 to this day, by paying the full freight of my WWW mission out of my own pocket, rather than expecting my guests to pay those costs through their donations, or third-party business interests to pay them, through the pasting of their commercials all over my web-pages.

Please click on whichever device
that you will be using
to explore our websites today:
Smart-phone-or-Tablet.jpg

OR   ComputerIcon


[ this file's actual name is :]
http:///what-would-Jesus-think.info/
about/the-RCC's-Lady-of-Fatima-hoax.htm

LadyOfFatima-crowd.png

The "Lady of Fatima" Hoax

How can anyone dare to question the authenticity of an event that has not only received the blessing of the "One and only Holy Catholic Church", but MiracleOurLadyFatima_poster.jpgthe endorsement of the world's most powerful movie industry, with its 1952, "Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima" extravaganza? see note 1
        That would certainly have been unimaginable prior to the arrival of the twenty-first century. But people no longer put blind, unquestioning faith in either Hollywood or the Vatican, and it is now possible for a scholar like Lucien Gregoire to research the actual historical records, discover all kinds of problems with the official story of the 1917 apparitions at Fatima in Portugal, and to write and publish a book that shows that there is no more historical foundation for the official story of "our Lady of Fatima" than there is for the story of Santa Claus (another Roman Catholic myth)!
        The author shows how wrong and tragic it has been for the Catholic Church to bless and promote the whole Fatima apparitions story, based solely on the testimony of a single witness, as you will see below.
       The Catholic Church's leadership has a long history of perpetuating all kinds of stories about its "saints" without a shred of actual historical evidence to support those stories. You can find ten excellent examples of what I mean at the well-known ListVerse web site, which produces a variety of "top ten" lists of items of large-scale interest, and has one devoted to 10 Beloved Saints The Church Just Made Up.
        Mr. Gregoire's book, on the other hand, is a report on the findings of a researcher who actually invested a considerable amount of his own, time, effort and money to


        Mr. Gregoire doesn't ask anyone to believe what he says. He tells us what the evidence proves, and precisely where we can go to check out that evidence for ourselves.

the messenger and the messages of Fatima :

According to the only one to three persons who saw and or heard her, the "lady" who appeared at Fatima identified herself as "our Lady of the Rosary", and referred a lot to her "Immaculate Heart".  
       And her MESSAGES were : 
LadyOfFatima

Lady: "I want you to come here on the 13th of the coming month and to continue to say five decades of the Rosary every day in honor of our Lady of the Rosary to obtain peace in the world and the end of the war.
        Lady: " Each time you do bodily penance for sinners, repeat: 'O Jesus, it is for your love, for the conversion of sinners and in reparation for the sins of the flesh committed against the Immaculate Heart of Mary. '
        In the 1917 newspapers, the "Lady" predicted the deaths of two of the three children of the Fatima apparitions and the end of World War I. Strangely, she did not predict the world-wide flu pandemic of the next year, 1918, which killed four times as many people in that one year as were killed in the four years of World War I.
        According to Lucia, the "˜Lady" of Fatima also predicted World War II. The trouble with that "prediction" is that instead of revealing this in 1917, Lucia kept this revelation "secret" for 24 years, and only made it public in 1941, when that war had already been under way for two years!

the timeline of the
six apparitions at Fatima:

    Attendance/press coverage of the Fatima apparitions:

  1. May 13, 1917 no crowd/post-event reporter only.
  2. June 13, 1917 crowd up to a hundred/two reporters .
  3. July 13, 1917 crowd two thousand/a dozen reporters .
  4. Aug 19,1917 no crowd/no reporters .
  5. Sep 13, 1917 crowd of five thousand/forty reporters.
  6. Oct 13, 1917 seventy thousand or so people/hundreds of reporters.

the witnesses of Fatima :

3FatimaChildren

Although there were supposedly three children involved in the apparitions above, the beliefs people have about "Our Lady of Fatima" are based for the most part on the testimony of only one witness, the ten-year-old Lucia Santos. After the first vision, when her two, younger, intellectually-challenged cousins failed to corroborate her version of events, Lucia annouonced that it was the Lady's idea that they only be allowed to see her in subsequent apparitions, not hear her. And, as Lucia explained, "Francisco and Jacinta believed in me as if I had absolute authority over them." Yet, when separated from her, while being asked by a reporter about discrepancies between their versions of the appartitions, Francisco ended up saying that he hadn't actually seen or heard anything himself.

The "Miracle of the Sun":

Millions of Roman Catholic believers have been persuaded to make pilgrimages to Fatima and to contribute God-only-knows how much of their gold and silver to the Fatima cult, largely on the basis of a spectacular "Miracle of the Sun" on October 13, 1917, by which almighty God supposedly provided confirmation of the Our Lady of Fatima appearances for all the world to see. That was the the day of the "grand finale" of the six apparitions, when some seventy thousand witnesses had gathered at Fatima, including hundreds of reporters, among them correspondents of The London Times, The New York Times, the Vatican's own official newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, and other world press. and God-only-knows how many other witnesses in Portugal and the rest of the world for whom the sun was visible at the time.

Here's an example is what
the Roman Catholic faithful
have been taught about
this so-called "miracle":

"The Miracle of the Sun at Fatima, which took place exactly a century ago, on October 13, 1917, was one of the most stupendous, if not the most stupendous event of the 20th century. And yet it is hardly known outside the Church, and not well enough known within it.
        The people who braved the terrible rainstorm which struck Fatima that day had gone there because of the promise of a miracle. Exactly what sort of miracle they didn’t know, but they knew that something exceptional was going to happen. Many sceptics and unbelievers were also drawn there in the expectation of a fiasco in which the Church would be turned into a laughing stock.
        The previous July, Our Lady had told the three Fatima children that she would perform a miracle in October, and this sensational report spread throughout Portugal, ensuring that a huge crowd was present on October 13, despite the appalling weather. Then, while the three seers saw visions of the Holy Family, the crowd of at least 70,000 people were mesmerised as the Miracle of the Sun unfolded. What happened was so incredible that even non-believers couldn’t deny it, as this report, which appeared in the secular Lisbon paper O Dia, indicates:
        The silver sun … was seen to whirl and turn in the circle of broken clouds. A cry went up from every mouth and the people fell on their knees on the muddy ground. … The light turned a beautiful blue as if it had come through the stained-glass windows of a cathedral and spread itself over the people who knelt with outstretched hands. The blue faded slowly and then the light seemed to pass through yellow glass. … People wept and prayed with uncovered heads in the presence of the miracle they had awaited. The seconds seemed like hours, so vivid were they.
        Meanwhile, José Almeida Garrett, a young lawyer, reported that “The sun’s disc did not remain immobile. This was not the sparkling of a heavenly body for it spun round on itself in a mad whirl. Then, suddenly, one heard a clamour, a cry of anguish breaking from all the people. The sun, whirling wildly, seemed to loosen itself from the firmament and advance threateningly upon the earth as if to crush us with its huge and fiery weight.”
        Eyewitnesses to the miracle said that the sun danced in the sky, the colour of the whole landscape changed successively, and the sun seemed to come down towards them, so that many of the crowd thought it was the end of the world. It was also seen at a distance by various people, undercutting the idea that it was simply a collective hallucination. Something else that suggests that the miracle was genuine is that the people at the Cova felt the heat of the sun as it approached them. Their clothes and the ground – which had been soaked by the torrential rain – were dry at the end of the miracle.
        A point worth focusing on is that many of the witnesses thought it was the end of the world, so terrifying was their experience. So we can also see the Miracle of the Sun as a foreshadowing of what will actually happen at the end of the world, and also as an indication that we are living in a time of crisis, of judgment, when we are called to stand up for the Church and for the truth."
  [ from http://catholicherald.co.uk/issues/october-13th-2017/how-the-miracle-of-the-sun-dazzled-the-sceptics/ ]

Now, here is what the
newspapers
reported at the time:

What do you suppose all of reporters who had been sent there by their newspapers to report on this newsworthy event did with this once in a life-time story? When Mr. Gregoire went back in history to look at microfiche copies of the next day's newspapers (i.e. Oct. 14th) to find the answer to that question, he found no mention of anything about the most stupendous event of the 20th century by the hundreds of journalists responsible for telling the world what they had witnessed at Fatima on Oct. 13th, 1917. The only thing that they could report about the behavior of the sun in their papers the next day is that, after a period of rain, the sun came out at around noon. There was no notice of any spectacular event in Fatima in any local paper, or anywhere else in Portugal, nor in the Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, The London Times or The New York Times.
        Since I was able to check this out for myself at the nearby New Haven, CT public library, that is what I did; and I can share the results with you. There were reports about things that had happened the previous day from all around the world that the editors found newsworthy, but not a word about what Catholics are told was the most stupendous event of the 20th century.

Top left of front page of NYT for Oct. 14th, 1917,

Top Right of front page of NYT for Oct. 14th, 1917

part of page 2 of NYT for Oct. 14th, 1917, showing that the NYT was paying attention to Vatican news

There was a similar event that happened here in the U.S.A. since then, where many thousands of people went to an isolated site, far out in the country to witness a spectacular event. It was called "Woodstock". But unlike Fatima, where the news people had nothing newsworthy to report, the news people who had been sent to Woodstock reported that the thousands of "pilgrimas" at that event were not only soaked by the rain, but they were rewarded by seeing and hearing the performances that they had been promised to see and hear there!
       In actual fact, if there was any "Miracle of the Sun", the reason that no one had anything to write about it in any newspaper on Oct. 14th is that it didn't occur on the day before that date, but on the day after it.
        The very first paper to report on that "miracle" was the atheistic anti-Catholic paper, because Portugal's notorious anti-Catholic atheist, J J da Silva Graca, invented the whole story of the "Miracle of the Sun" in order to poke fun at the Roman Catholic Church. He was the owner and publisher of a serious daily newspaper, called , and a weekly tabloid called Ilustracao Portuguesa. Da Silva Graca first introduced his fantasy "Miracle of the Sun" on the front page of his more serious O Seculo at on the 15th of October as pictured below:

O_Seculo-10-13-1917.jpg

Experienced publisher that he was, however, he probably knew that it would take days, if not weeks, to get a hoax as big as this off the ground, And so two weeks later, Da Silva Graca used his Ilustracao Portuguesa pictured below to lauch his full-blown version of the phony miracle:

Ilustracao_Portuguesa-10-29-1917.jpg

The important fact above was confirmed by none other than Lucia Santos, who wrote in her 1942 Memoir IV:

"Most convincing of all is that this miraculous event was first published in O Seculo, the leading atheist anti-Catholic paper in Portugal."

Another important witness at Fatima that day was a priest named Jose da Silva. Not only did he see no "miracle of the sun" on that day, but he was also very disillusioned that Jesus did not appear as previously promised by "the Lady". When that priest was appointed the bishop of that very area, just two years later, and he shared the sceptism and embarrassment of the other priests of his diocese over the whole Fatima story, Bishop da Silva asked the only remaining visionary, Lucia Santos, to leave his diocese forever, to become a nun, and to stop telling others about these visions of hers!

        Mr. Gregoire says that there is no public record of Lucia Santos ever mentioning the "miracle of the sun" until decades later, when that legend had taken off without her. In fact, an article came to the attention of Mr. Gregoire – who met and spent some time with Albino Luciani before he became Pope John-Paul the First – about a visit that the then Cardinal of Venice had made with Sister Lucia Santos at the Carmelite Sisters convent in Coimbra, Portugal in July of 1977, where he asked her why she hadn't said anything about that miracle on the day that it supposedly occurred, and her answer was that she hadn't seen it. (Messaggero Mestre, Jul 10, 1977)
        This is the very same Lucia Santos who wrote in her 1942 Memoir IV:

"Most convincing of all is that this miraculous event was first published in O Seculo, the leading atheist anti-Catholic paper in Portugal. We must give credit to its courageous journalist, Avelino de Almeida, who – despite his deficiency in learnings – honestly reported what he had witnessed, while so many of our faithful journalists hesitated for fear of heckling and ridicule."

Our Lady of Fatima
resurrected !

It must have been very humiliating nine years later when, in 1930, this same Bishop Jose da Silva, was summoned to Rome and was instructed, probably by the Secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli (the future Pope Pius XII) to reverse himself and to approve the "cult" (his term) of Fatima, at least within his jurisdiction. But the message would no longer be about converting Portugal (where the R.C. church had regained control of the government in 1926). From 1930 on, the world would be told by Cardinal Pacelli, who, it was reported, had been told by sister Lucia, who had supposedly been told by "the lady" in a new apparition on June 13th of 1929 that they should now pray the rosary (etc., etc.) for the conversion of atheistic Russia.
        In 1941, Pius XII instructed Lucia to put into writing "the Lady's" dialogue of 1917. It was completed in 1942.
        In 1943, the Vatican engaged novelist John de Marchi to interview witnesses and to write books based on her memoir. Instead of reporting what actually happened at Fatima in October of 1917, they turned a farce designed by an anti-Catholic to embarrass the church into the most stupendous event of the 20th century, in service of then Pope Pius XII's campaign to rally the millions of Roman Catholics around the world, including those in the Catholic AXIS nations of Italy, Germany, Spain, along with Portugal, to counter the threat of the Soviet Union. The power of 'the church" then promoted that fictitious version of the story as historical fact through all kinds of publications, radio and TV transmissions and a Hollywood movie in 1952, "The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima". All of this deceit benefitted the Church mightily, but what good did it do for God or for mankind?

AugustineOnIgnorance.png

Was the "Lady of Fatima" to blame for the deaths
of five healthy Martos family adolescents?

the Lady's bad news :

According to Lucia (the only person who was ever allowed by "the Lady" to hear her words) these are the initial instructions that the Lady gave to the three children:

"I want you to come here on the 13th of the coming month and to continue to say five decades of the Rosary every day in honor of our Lady of the Rosary to obtain peace in the world and the end of the war. Lady: "Each time you do bodily penance for sinners, repeat: '0 Jesus, it is for your love, for the conversion of sinners and in reparation for the sins of the flesh committed against the Immaculate Heart of Mary.'
       

And then ( according to Lucia) she added this prediction which eventually came true in spades :
        Lady: "I will take Francisco and Jacinta to heaven soon."

Lucia's deadly embellishments
of "the Lady's" message :

In her Memoir IV in 1942, Lucia Santos tells us:
        "After the 3rd vision, I found a piece of bristled hemp rope that had fallen from a cart and tied it around my arm. ' Look this hurts, ' I told my cousins: we tie it around our bodies, we can offer it as a sacrifice for sins committed against the Immaculate Heart of Mary. '
        "From that day forward, Francisco and Jacinta wore the rope about their waists under their clothes day and night inflicting ongoing pain, often moving them to tears...
        "One day we were picking plants off a wall and pressing them together to hear them crack. While picking the plants we happened to catch hold of some stinging nettles. Jacinta no sooner felt the pain than she squeezed them more tightly in her hands. 'Look. Look, here is something else we can use to mortify our bodies for sins committed against the Immaculate Heart of Mary. '
        "From then on Francisco and Jacinta would thrash each other with stinging nettles. With each lashing, they would cry out in pain and repeat over and over again: O Jesus, it is for your love, for the conversion of sinners and in reparation for the sins of the flesh committed against the Immaculate Heart of Mary. '
        "Long periods of thirst and hunger provided continual mortification for Francisco and Jacinta.
        "In one case, in the month of August in the Serra da Aire—when the heat hangs like a hot stove over all that is living and dead—they abstained from drinking water until sunset for thirty consecutive days.
        "Too, when tending sheep, they would feed their lunch to the sheep and go hungry. In what little they did eat, they took particular care to avoid eating anything like fruit which might quench their thirst.
        "As their thirst reached unbearable levels, Francisco and Jacinta would repeat over and over again:
        O Jesus, it is for your love, for the conversion of sinners and in reparation for the sins of the flesh committed against the Immaculate Heart of Mary. '
        "For the long months when they were confined to bed dying, they wore the penitential cord I (Lucia) had suggested that they wear to torture themselves "in reparation for sins committed against the Immaculate Heart of Mary.'
        "A few days before he died, Francisco gave me the rope he had wound about his body. Hold this for me. if my mother finds it she will take it away from me.' It was wet and dark particles of skin clung to its bristles." (pp. 100-101)
        There is no record that Lucia ever wore the rope or took part in any of these ghoulish charades or went without food when hungry or without water when thirsty. Nor is there any evidence that she ever tried to stop her cousins from killing themselves.  (p. 103)

Lucia persuaded her two younger, relatively mentally-challenged cousins to engage in such severe self-torture that it may well have led to the death of at least the youngest child, Francisco.
        In order to show how and why Lucia intentionally hastened the prophesied deaths of Francisco and especially of Jacinta, the author devotes five pages of his book to an exposé ( from Mosby's Medical Diction, Edition 10 : 2016) of why arsenic poisoning has long been one the world's favorite murder weapons. As this online article explains, "Easy to buy, almost tasteless and lethal in tiny doses, arsenic was once regarded as the perfect murder weapon – especially in the hands of women –." Gregoire also contrasts "acute", "environmental", and "slow" arsenic poisoning, explaining the differences in symptoms, progression and ease vs. difficulty of detection in each situation, and how the brain, the kidneys, the liver, the lungs and the skin are variously effected. (pp. 137-141)
        In a later chapter, Gregoire explains what happens over time to the bodies of people who have died of arsenic poisoning, depending on whether and how those bodies are embalmed, and whether and how those bodies are entombed. He then compares this to was found when the bodies of these two children were actually dug up years later, and shows that the evidence points to Jacinta's body having been preserved by the presence of arsenic. ( pp. 173-180)

Within four years of the spectacle
at Fatima, in addition to
Francisco and his sister Jacinta,
three other Marto children also
came to premature, tragic deaths !

    Child died at
age:
on
date:
official
cause:
more probable
cause:
1) Francisco Marto8Feb. 1919mortal
dehydration
gradual
suicide
2)  Jacinta   Marto7Feb. 1920prurient
pleurisy
gradual
arsenic poisoning
3)  Florinda Marto15 March 1920 cerebral
aneurism
immediate
arsenic poisoning
4)  Joàc     Marto10May 1921innocent
disappearance
foul
play
5)  Teresa  Marto12May 1921fatal
fall
foul
play

Ironically, while the parents who lost all of these children were true believers of everything that their niece, Lucia, said about "the Lady", her own mother always insisted that Lucia was a liar and a fraud who shouldn't be trusted or believed.

Did Pope Francis offer
Francisco and Jacinta as
models for suicidal self-torture?

PopeFrancis&Fatima.jpgThe Catholic church has always claimed – without offering any supporting evidence from any medical records – that Francisco and Jacinta both died because of the "Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-19".
        However, by delving into the historical record of that world-wide pandemic on the one hand, and into their own personal medical records on the other, Lucien Gregoire was able to determine that :

 


Before Pope Francis declares Lucia Santos a saint, because of visions that she claims to have received from "Our Lady of the Rosary", don't you think it would be a good idea for the Roman Catholic Church to do the kind of research that Mr. Lucien Gregoire has done?

Was this girl Lucia300 really a saint?

GoneToLiveWithGod Is heaven for real ?

This web page is just a quick overview of the extensive, informative, and profoundly insightful arguments that the author makes in much greater detail in his 2018 book, called
"Is Heaven For Real? - Suicide driven by faith", which is now available in both digital and paper versions at Amazon.
        The page references on this web page are to the paperback edition. So there is no guarantee that they will coincide perfectly with e-book editions.

Was " the rosary" God's idea ?

In his time, just as in ours, there were various religions that used repetitious prayers like the rosary, and here's what Jesus thought about that practice:

Matthew 6_7-8.png In 1090, Peter the Hermit probably adopted the idea of the rosary from the Hindus. And then St. Dominic and his order made it popular in the thirteenth century.
        Did Jesus' mother in heaven forget Jesus' sentiments? Or did churchmen on earth forget what Jesus had taught a thousand years earlier?

Note 1: It's amazing to see how slavishly Hollywood has promoted the interests of the Roman Catholic Church for the past 80 years or so. See my RomanCatholicism&Hollywood and correct me if I am wrong, but it looks like Hollywood has produced ten times as many movies that showed the Roman Catholic Church in a good light as portrayed it in a bad light, and – unlike most of the critical ones – many of the favorable ones were block-busters!

Take it from Stephen;
there is much more where
this came from, at my
ITYS-Banner website ColbertToldUso.gif
If ever you are moved to critique,
support, or enlighten me,
here's the way to do it :
email image
David@CatholicArrogance.Org
Star-of-David-RCA