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My Almost Miraculous Encounter
When a crying statue visited, I wanted to believe
The statue cried real tears! Everyone said so.
This was, if not miraculous, pretty darn impressive. And then we got word that the remarkable statue of Our Lady of Fatima was coming to our suburban Minneapolis school and church. This was the Catholic equivalent of a celebrity appearance.
In 1917, three children claimed to have witnessed Mary, the mother of Jesus, materialize while they were out tending their sheep in Fatima, Portugal. The children, ages seven, nine, and ten, weren’t believed at first. But the kids insisted the lady kept visiting them and told them to pray for peace. Soon, hundreds of people gathered in the spot in hopes of seeing the apparition. Only the children were privy to visions of the woman, but many devotees claimed to have witnessed a strange phenomenon in the sky. Two of the children died a few years later of the Spanish flu. But the third, Lucia, became a nun and lived to be 97 years old in 2005. When this statue was commissioned in 1947, Lucia declared it a good likeness of the woman she and her cousins saw. To make matters more remarkable, the icon was occasionally witnessed shedding tears. Although the Catholic church didn’t officially declare the statue’s tears as miraculous, the traveling statue did draw the faithful to see her.
