The Miracle of the Sun — 13 October 1917

This is the element that changes everything. Without a prior announcement, the miracle of the sun would be — at worst — a singular meteorological event; at best, an intense subjective experience of several thousand people. It is the announcement three months in advance that makes it an objective fact of history, comparable to a reproducible scientific experiment: there is a protocol (an apparition at a set date), a measuring instrument (the crowd present), and an expected result (a sign that all could see).

13 July 1917: the promise

During the third apparition, on 13 July 1917, Lucia — then aged 10 — asks the "beautiful Lady" to work a miracle to confirm their words. The reply is preserved in Sister Lucia's Memoirs:

"In October, I will say who I am and what I want; I will work a miracle that all may see and believe." — Our Lady to Lucia, 13 July 1917^[5]

The news spreads rapidly throughout Portugal. The anticlerical Portuguese newspapers — O Século, O Mundo, O Diário de Notícias — mock the affair and publish derisive articles, branding the children "impostors" and "miracle frauds"^[6]. This publicity has the opposite effect to the one the sceptics expected: it draws tens of thousands of people, among them many militant atheists and journalists come to denounce an anticipated hoax. A professional photographer carries his bulky equipment all the way to Cova da Iria — a remarkable feat for the time, 170 km north of Lisbon^[7].

13 August 1917: the arrest by a Freemason

On 13 August 1917, the administrator of the canton to which Fátima belongs — Artur de Oliveira Santos, a Republican and notorious Freemason^[8] — has the three children arrested at nine o'clock in the morning, takes them away in his car, and has them confined first at his home and then at the public prison of Vila Nova de Ourém for two days. He threatens them, interrogates them separately, and promises them death in a cauldron of boiling oil to make them confess to a lie. None of them gives way. What is particularly remarkable is that these terrified but unshakeable children maintain their separate accounts without inconsistency — a fact noted by their interrogators themselves.

This absurd arrest, far from stifling the affair, multiplies public curiosity tenfold and sharply increases attendance at the subsequent apparitions:

The arrest of the three little visionaries by the anticlerical Republican authority is, paradoxically, one of the major demonstrative elements of what follows: the children would no longer be able to evade rigorous examination after the miracle. The hostile press and the authorities would have every opportunity to investigate with hostile intent — and would never find anything.

On 13 October 1917, under a downpour that had been falling since 8:30 in the morning and a uniformly overcast sky, the crowd waited on the sodden ground. Around 1:00 p.m., the sky began to clear. At precisely 1:30 p.m. — coinciding exactly with local solar noon — the prodigy began. The most complete account is due to Canon Casimir Barthas, one of the principal French historiographers of Fatima, in Il était trois petits enfants (1942)^[9] :

"Suddenly the rain stopped and the clouds, opaque since morning, dispersed. The sun appears at the zenith, like a silver disk that the eyes can gaze upon without being dazzled and, at once, it begins to turn upon itself like a wheel of fire, casting sheaves of light in every direction whose colour changes several times. The firmament, the earth, the trees, the rocks, the group of the seers and the immense multitude appear successively tinted with yellow, red, blue, violet…

The luminary of day stops for a few moments. Then it resumes its dance of light in an even more dazzling manner. It stops again to begin a third time this firework display so fantastic that no pyrotechnician could have imagined its like.

How to describe the impressions of the crowd? Ecstatic, motionless, holding its breath, this people of seventy thousand beholders contemplates…

Suddenly, all those who make up this multitude, all without exception, have the sensation that the sun is detaching itself from the firmament and, in zigzag leaps, is rushing down upon them! A tremendous cry bursts forth at once from every breast. 'Miracle! Miracle!' cry some…; 'We are all going to die!' one hears here… Others say: 'How beautiful it is!'…

The rotation of the sun, with the intervals, had lasted ten minutes. It was observed, let us repeat, by all those present without exception: believers, unbelievers, peasants, city-dwellers, men of science, and even by freethinkers." — Casimir Barthas, Il était trois petits enfants, 1942, p. 162-164

The five simultaneous phenomena

Five distinct elements mark the course of the prodigy, each massively attested by the witnesses:

1. The rotation of the sun like a wheel of fire for about ten minutes — the sun appears "like a silver disk", bearable to gaze upon without pain, contrary to every physical expectation of observing the sun at the zenith.
2. The multicoloured rays (yellow, red, blue, violet) projected onto the crowd, the landscape, the trees, the clothes — "our faces were now red, now blue, now yellow"^[10].
3. The zigzag descent towards the earth — the sun seems to detach itself from the sky and plunge down in menacing leaps upon the crowd, provoking general panic and cries of "We are all going to die!".
4. The return to its initial position — after several minutes of apparent descent, the sun regains its place in the sky and becomes bright again as usual.
5. The instantaneous drying of the soaked clothing of a crowd of over 40,000 people — massively attested by witnesses^[11] and occurring in the minutes following the end of the solar dance. No known meteorological phenomenon can dry wool and cotton garments soaked with water for several hours within minutes.

It is this accumulation of five phenomena — each already extraordinary in isolation — that makes the miracle of the sun incomparable. An atmospheric lens might conceivably account for the apparent optical phenomenon; but neither the rotation, nor the colours, nor the descent, nor the return, and above all not the drying, can be reduced to a halo optical effect.

Sister Lucia's personal testimony

Lucia dos Santos, the eldest of the three seers, provided in her Memoirs — written between 1935 and 1941 at the request of her bishop, Bishop José Alves Correia da Silva — the most precise description seen from the children's vantage point, right beneath the holm-oak of the apparitions:

"Our Lady disappeared into the immensity of the firmament. Then, beside the sun we saw Saint Joseph with the Child Jesus and Our Lady dressed in white, with a blue mantle. Saint Joseph and the Child Jesus appeared to bless the world with the gestures they made in the shape of a cross with their hands. Soon after, this apparition disappeared. I saw Our Lord and Our Lady who gave me the impression that she was Our Lady of Sorrows. Our Lord appeared to bless the world, as Saint Joseph had done. This apparition disappeared, and it seemed to me that I saw Our Lady again in a form resembling Our Lady of Carmel." — Sister Lucia, Memoirs (IV), § "13 October 1917"^[12]

This series of superimposed visions — Holy Family, Our Lady of Sorrows, Our Lady of Mount Carmel — was perceived by the three seers alone, while the crowd contemplated the solar dance. The distinction is important: the Marian vision remains private, the solar prodigy is public. It is the conjunction of a materially verifiable sign and a complementary interior vision that constitutes the signature of the great apparitions recognised by the Church.

The testimony of Maria Carreira

Maria dos Santos Carreira — nicknamed "Maria da Capelinha" (Mary of the little chapel) because she took charge of guarding the site after the apparitions — was the first adult layperson to believe the seers and to follow every episode. Her testimony, given in 1922 during the preliminary canonical inquiry conducted by the Leiria commission, is one of the most precise:

"I saw the sun very pale and it was raining heavily. We took shelter under our umbrellas. Suddenly the sun began to shine strongly and we all closed our umbrellas. The sun began to turn, to turn, to turn, casting rays of every colour: yellow, green, blue, red. Everyone was trembling. And the sun seemed to fall upon the earth. Everyone cried out: 'Save us, save us! Our Lady, save us!'" — Maria Carreira, testimony of 1922 to the diocesan commission of Leiria, in De Marchi 1956^[13]

Maria Carreira had little education and never varied her accounts until her death in 1949. She insists, like all the direct witnesses, on the ordered sequence of the phenomena — first the cessation of the rain, then the appearance of the disk, then the rotation, then the colours, then the descent. No confusion. No chaotic simultaneity. The solar dance follows a scenario that the witnesses clearly distinguish.

The articles published in the Portuguese anticlerical press in the days following 13 October 1917 constitute — by their internal contradictions — one of the most paradoxically convincing proofs of the reality of the miracle. All the articles were collected and translated from Portuguese into French under the coordination of Prof. José Eduardo Franco (CIDH – Universidade Aberta / CLEPUL, Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon), drawing on the holdings of the National Library of Portugal, the General Library of the University of Coimbra, the Public Library of Porto and the archives of the Sanctuary of Fatima^[14].

O Século — the most influential anticlerical organ

The newspaper O Século, the most influential in republican Portugal at the time, published on 15 October 1917 a report signed by Avelino de Almeida, a lay journalist and open atheist who had come specifically to unmask the hoax. The headline speaks for itself: « Coisas espantosas! Como o sol bailou ao meio-dia em Fátima » — "Astonishing things! How the sun danced at midday in Fatima." The text denies nothing:

"Before the astonished gaze of the people, whose bearing carried us back to biblical times, and who, pale and bareheaded, contemplated the azure, the sun trembled, the sun made sudden movements unheard of, outside all the laws of the cosmos, the sun 'danced', in the typical expression of the peasants. […] Now it falls to you, reader, to seek explanations." — Avelino de Almeida, O Século (Lisbon), edition of 15 October 1917^[15]

This testimony is central. Avelino de Almeida is no gullible believer; he is a convinced anticlerical republican writing in the press organ most hostile to the Church in Portugal at the time. He had everything to lose by confirming a phenomenon his readers expected to see debunked. Yet he maintained his account all his life.

Avelino de Almeida confirms his account in Ilustração Portuguesa

Two weeks later, on 29 October 1917, Avelino de Almeida published in the illustrated magazine Ilustração Portuguesa a long double-page report accompanied by photographs taken by the photographer Joshua Benoliel and his team. Far from retracting under pressure from his anticlerical colleagues, he maintained and refined his testimony, adding this striking passage:

"Did the sun really dance at midday in Fatima? […] I will express no opinion. But allow a journalist who saw, who observed, who never for an instant took his eyes off the sky, to swear that he would never have thought he saw what he saw. If all the other onlookers claim to have seen the same thing, then collective suggestion must have been practised on a scale unprecedented in history — and with unprecedented success." — Avelino de Almeida, Ilustração Portuguesa, 29 October 1917^[16]

This second article — illustrated and widely circulated — had a considerable impact. Avelino de Almeida was ridiculed by his anticlerical peers, accused of having betrayed the republican cause. He never gave way, and continued until his death in 1932 to attest that he had seen the phenomenon with his own eyes^[17]. This testimony, signed, dated, illustrated, published by a militant atheist in the official anticlerical press, in itself constitutes a historical datum of the first order.

O Dia — independent corroboration

The newspaper O Dia of 17 October likewise reported:

"The silvered sun, wrapped in the same sepulchral fire, had been seen spinning within the circle of the clouds. A cry rose from every mouth, and men fell to their knees on the sodden ground. […] The light took on a lovely azure colour, as if it had passed through the stained-glass window of a cathedral, and spread over the people who stood with hands outstretched." — O Dia (Lisbon), edition of 17 October 1917^[18]

The typology of anticlerical explanations

The Bolloré-Bonnassies analysis of the Portuguese anticlerical press identifies the following typology of the explanations advanced in the days following 13 October:

No anticlerical newspaper denies that something extraordinary happened on 13 October at Fatima. The complete absence of any serious investigation into the "priests and Jesuits who supposedly masterminded the swindle", even though the republican authorities held "power, the police, the judiciary and the press"^[19], is itself an admission: no material evidence could be produced in support of a hoax theory.

Worse still, these newspapers advance mutually incompatible theses: a hoax presupposes a premeditated staging; a meteorological phenomenon presupposes an unforeseen event. To maintain both at once, as some articles do, is logically impossible^[20].

The most decisive aspect for the apologetic investigation is that the phenomenon was observed up to 40 kilometres from Cova da Iria, by people who were not on the site and who were sometimes unaware even of the existence of the apparitions^[21]. It is this fact that makes any hypothesis of collective hallucination impossible — one founded on the shared suggestion of a gathered crowd.

The Testimony of Alburitel (18 km to the East)

Rev. John De Marchi, who spent several years in Fatima in the 1940s collecting direct testimonies^[22], reports several particularly decisive cases. In Alburitel (18 km east of Fatima), an unbeliever who had spent the morning "mocking the simpletons who had gone off to Fátima just to see an ordinary little girl" is seized by the prodigy:

"He now seemed as if paralysed, his eyes fixed on the sun. Then he began to tremble from head to foot and, raising his arms to heaven, he flung himself on his knees in the mud." — Anonymous witness of Alburitel, reported by John De Marchi, The True Story of Fatima, 1956^[23]

Father Inácio Lourenço Pereira (10–11 km to the West)

Father Inácio Lourenço Pereira — nine years old at the time of the events — recounts precisely what he saw from his primary school perched 10–11 km from Fatima:

"I attended the primary school of my native village, a small village perched on a solitary hill, right opposite the mountain of Fátima, ten or eleven kilometres away. It was about noon when suddenly we were alarmed by the cries and clamour of men and women passing along the public road in front of the school. […] Outside, in the square, the assembled people were weeping and shouting, pointing at the sun, without even hearing the questions our anguished schoolteacher was asking them. […] I stared fixedly at the star; it appeared to me pale and stripped of its dazzling brightness; it seemed like a globe of snow turning on itself. Then, all at once, it appeared to descend in a zigzag, threatening to fall upon the earth. Panicked, absolutely panicked, I ran to put myself in the midst of the people. All were weeping, expecting from one moment to the next the end of the world. […] During the long minutes of the solar phenomenon, the objects placed near us reflected all the colours of the rainbow… Our faces were now red, now blue, now yellow, etc." — Father Inácio Lourenço Pereira, written testimony, in De Marchi 1956^[24]

The Poet Alfonso Lopes Vieira (40 km in Leiria)

In Leiria, 40 kilometres north-west of Fatima, the poet and jurist Alfonso Lopes Vieira likewise observed the phenomenon from the balcony of his house, without having retained any memory of the little shepherds' predictions:

"On this day of 13 October, while I had retained no memory of the little shepherds' predictions, I was marvelled by a dazzling spectacle in the sky, entirely new to me, which I witnessed from this balcony." — Alfonso Lopes Vieira, Portuguese poet and jurist^[25]

The simultaneous observation of the phenomenon tens of kilometres away, by witnesses who were not at Cova da Iria and who sometimes had no knowledge of the predictions, definitively rules out the hypothesis of collective hallucination, which would presuppose a shared suggestion — impossible at a distance and outside the crowd^[26].

This is the demonstrative core of the Bolloré-Bonnassies investigation into Fatima^[27]. To account for the phenomenon observed on 13 October 1917 by 40,000 to 70,000 witnesses of every condition, at varying distances of up to 40 km, there are in logic only six possible explanations. The rigorous examination of each makes it possible to eliminate five of them. The sixth is the only one rationally admissible.

Hypothesis 1 — "Nothing happened at all: it is a legend"

This hypothesis has never been formally upheld by anyone, neither by contemporary sceptics nor by later academics. It is invalidated by four cumulative elements:

• The abundance of testimonies, including those of anticlerical journalists present (Avelino de Almeida for O Século, O Dia, O Mundo) — who had no interest in confirming the slightest extraordinariness
• The archival photographs taken on the spot by a professional photographer — which show a very dense crowd collectively looking in the same direction
• The Portuguese press review of the following days: no newspaper — not even the most hostile — maintains that the phenomenon did not exist
• The total silence of the anticlerical republican authorities regarding a factual refutation, which would nevertheless have been easy to organise at the time

Hypothesis 2 — "It is a cosmic phenomenon"

The idea would be that a real astronomical event (gravitational disturbance, abnormal eclipse, nearby meteorite, temporary alteration of the sun's motion) coincided with the children's announcement. This hypothesis is swept away by contemporary scientific observations.

On 18 October 1917, the daily O Século publishes an article in which it questions Augusto Frederico Oom, head of the Lisbon astronomy observatory, who formally states:

"Had there been a cosmic phenomenon on that date, […] it could not have failed to record it." — Augusto Frederico Oom, Lisbon astronomy observatory, in O Século, 18 October 1917, p. 2^[28]

The Lisbon observatory reports having noted no abnormal phenomenon on 13 October 1917 — only a slight disturbance coming from the west, unrelated to what was observed at Fatima. No international observatory noted any alteration in the sun's motion that day. Yet if a real cosmic event had occurred (apparent rotation of the sun, zigzag descent), it would have been observed all over the world, not only within a 40 km radius around a Portuguese village.

Bishop José Alves Correia da Silva, Bishop of Leiria, underscores this decisive point in his episcopal decree of 13 October 1930:

"This phenomenon, which no astronomical observatory recorded, and which consequently was not natural, people of every condition and of every social class saw with their own eyes… even people who were kilometres away, which destroys any explanation by collective illusion." — Bishop José Alves Correia da Silva, Bishop of Leiria, episcopal decree of 13 October 1930^[29]

Hypothesis 3 — "It is an exceptional meteorological phenomenon"

This is the hypothesis defended by certain serious scientists, notably Diogo Pacheco de Amorim^[30], a Portuguese doctor of mathematics, and the physicist Stanley L. Jaki^[31], a Benedictine priest and historian of science (Templeton Prize laureate 1987). Both propose the idea that high-altitude ice-crystal clouds could have broken up the sunlight (an amplified halo effect), and that "air lenses" (of different composition or temperature) could have created an apparent focusing of the sun. Jaki supposes in particular that "the transparent clouds veiling the sun formed an enormous natural lens."

This hypothesis meets with five fatal objections:

1. Announcing it three months in advance is completely incompatible with an unpredictable weather phenomenon. Three illiterate children cannot predict, to the exact date and hour, a phenomenon that modern meteorology itself can only forecast 24–48 hours ahead.
2. No analogous phenomenon has ever been observed elsewhere under similar conditions. Pacheco de Amorim himself acknowledges: “we cannot give an explanation for so complex and mysterious a phenomenon, but only compare it […] to known phenomena.”
3. The dancing of the sun and its apparent zigzag fall cannot be explained by an atmospheric lens effect: “a lens does not create the impression of seeing the sun dance and fall to the earth, as the witnesses saw it.”^[32]
4. The instant drying of the soaked clothing of a crowd of more than 40,000 people, massively attested, is explicable by no known meteorological phenomenon. Shoes and garments of wool and heavy cotton, soaked since 8:30 a.m., cannot dry in a few minutes even under blazing sun without wind.
5. The possibility of staring at the sun without pain at the zenith for ten minutes contradicts elementary ophthalmic physiology. Direct observation of the sun at noon in broad daylight normally causes temporary blindness in less than 30 seconds.

Hypothesis 4 — “It was a collective hallucination”

This hypothesis is one of the most frequently put forward, and the easiest to refute, because it rests on a concept that psychiatry does not recognise. “The concept of collective hallucination is not admissible in psychiatry, neurology, psychoanalysis or clinical psychology”, notes the Bolloré-Bonnassies investigation^[33], citing Henri Ey, Traité des hallucinations (Masson, 1973, 2 vol., 1,800 pp.), and the Encyclopédie de psychiatrie (the standard reference in the field).

According to Henri Ey, hallucination is “a perception without an object resting on an internal psychological experience” which occurs systematically in a context of imbalance or deconstruction of the personality, accompanied by behavioural disturbances. A true collective hallucination would require the same cerebral dysfunctions to occur identically and simultaneously in different brains in the absence of any objective external cause — which is medically and logically impossible^[34].

Phenomena documented as collective psychoses or affective contagions do exist, but they always involve small groups under very particular conditions — generally anxiety-ridden and nocturnal. Two well-documented examples show the difference from Fatima:

• The “cursed bread” affair: on the night of 24–25 August 1951, in Pont-Saint-Esprit (Gard), a massive ergot poisoning (the active ingredient of LSD) provoked scenes of collective madness. The physical cause was identified and the individual visions differed sharply from one another^[35].
• The “ghost of the cook”: in 1897, Edmund Parish reported that sailors collectively glimpsed the ghost of their dead cook, which turned out to be “a piece of wreckage tossed by the waves”^[36].

None of these cases resembles Fatima: no poisoning, no night, no shared anguish, no small group. On the contrary: an open plain, noon in broad daylight, 40,000 to 70,000 healthy witnesses, unbelievers shoulder to shoulder with devout believers, and — above all — observation from 40 km away by people who were unaware of the announcement.

“Listed as examples of collective psychoses […] are cases in which a physical cause is clearly identified. These are far removed from the events of Fátima, announced three months in advance.”^[37]

Hypothesis 5 — “It was a hoax”

This is the hypothesis most frequently cited by the anticlerical newspapers of 1917. It is also the only one that could be a priori compatible with the prior announcement of the miracle. But it does not withstand analysis, for five cumulative reasons:

1. The event took place at the zenith of the sky, in broad daylight, at 1:30 p.m. This is “the one place where it is impossible to stage a hoax”^[38]. No mechanism known in 1917 could project a solar illusion visible simultaneously by tens of thousands of people across a 40-km radius. The first massive aerial projections (films, holograms) would not appear until a century later.
2. The supposed perpetrators are: three illiterate children aged 7, 9 and 10, in a very poor village of 200 inhabitants, under a regime hostile to the Church that would have been delighted to unmask a fraud. “Can one imagine Lucia agreeing to spend eighty years in a convent to cover up a lie? Worse still, to go on deceiving the pope himself eighty years later?”^[39]
3. No technical hypothesis has ever been put forward — even by the most determined sceptics — to explain how such a spectacle could have been fabricated from whole cloth.
4. In the decades that followed, despite international attention, no one ever produced the slightest testimony of a hoax; the three main witnesses never altered their accounts, nor gained money or personal honour.
5. The arrest by the Freemason Oliveira Santos in August 1917 gave the hostile authorities two days of separate interrogations of the three children. No contradiction was found between the accounts — a fact noted by the interrogators themselves. A hoax under threat of torture by boiling cauldron would not have held up with three illiterate children.

Hypothesis 6 — “It was a miracle”

The field of hypotheses thus narrows to the only remaining possibility. The circumstances of Fatima correspond perfectly to what Christian theology expects of a miracle of God publicly manifested:

• A prodigy inexplicable by the known laws of nature
• Announced in advance (three months earlier), at a precise date, hour and place
• By uneducated children (illiterate, seven to ten years old)
• Seen by an immense crowd (40,000 to 70,000 witnesses, extending up to 40 km)
• Amid the hostility of the powers that be (anticlerical republican regime, Freemasonry in power)
• With the explicit aim of bringing forth faith — “I will work a miracle that all may see and believe”

The sole condition for accepting this final hypothesis is the existence of God, a condition which is not, moreover, “an unreasonable hypothesis” — it is precisely the subject of the entire argument of the Bolloré-Bonnassies work, of which this chapter forms the conclusion regarding public miracles.

Several photographs taken on site by the professional photographer present have been preserved and published. The Bolloré-Bonnassies investigation identifies five decisive elements established by these shots^[40]:

1. All faces turned towards the sky — the photographs show a crowd raising their gaze high towards the sky, at a place « où aucune supercherie humaine n'est possible, spécialement à cette époque ». Unlike Lourdes — where the Virgin appears in a rocky grotto, a place where one could imagine staging — at Fatima the scene unfolds in the open sky above a slightly rolling plain, with no terrain allowing any optical device at altitude.
2. Everyone looks in the same direction — towards one precise point in the sky where something is happening. This detail rules out the hypothesis of random individual hallucinations: there is manifestly a real object in the sky that everyone is following with their eyes simultaneously.
3. The children appear shy, worried, ill at ease with their sudden and burdensome notoriety in the photographs taken before the miracle. « Difficile d'en faire les acteurs d'une supercherie. »
4. The chronological sequence rain → clearing sky is documented by the morning photographs (crowd in the rain, soaked ground) and the midday ones (clear sky, visible sun). This invalidates the meteorological hypothesis of a « simple événement » atmospheric continuum.
5. The later photograph of Sister Lucia with Pope John Paul II at the beatification of Francisco and Jacinta on 13 May 2000 attests to the importance attached by the Church to the miracle of Fatima more than eighty years after the event.

The lighting of the phenomenon in the photographs is itself remarkable: despite the driving rain of the morning, the sudden midday clearing and the brightness described as « argentée », the images of the five successive moments show a photometric coherence difficult to reconcile with staging. The original negatives — kept in the archives of the Sanctuary of Fatima and the national library of Portugal — were examined on several occasions during the 20th century without any trace of trickery, montage or double exposure being identified^[41].

No other event in modern history brings together this combination of falsifiability and evidential convergence. As the Bolloré-Bonnassies investigation puts it in the conclusion of chapter 20:

« Ce qui s'est passé à Fátima le 13 octobre 1917 est l'événement le mieux documenté et le moins contestable de toute l'histoire des phénomènes apparemment surnaturels publics. Il rassemble tous les éléments demandés par la science moderne pour qualifier un fait : prédiction, témoins en nombre, hostilité initiale d'une partie des témoins, observation à distance, preuves photographiques, absence d'explication naturelle. » — Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies, Dieu, la science, les preuves, Trédaniel 2021, chapter 20, conclusion^[42]

The argument is all the stronger because the public authorities of Portugal in 1917 — Republicans, anti-clericals, Freemasons — had every interest in publicly debunking the hoax. For decades they had at their disposal all the means of the State (police, judiciary, press). They never produced anything. This administrative silence is, in itself, testimony against the hypothesis of a fraud.

In Faussaires de Dieu, Joachim Bouflet compares 1917 with three Italian cases: Bonate (1944), Gimigliano di Venarotta (31 May 1948) and Acquaviva Platani (15 April 1950). He notes five common features: the prior announcement by the seer; an identical and simultaneous perception by those present; observations in distant localities; a fear before the transcendence of the Creator; and finally, a sign marking the end of the alleged apparitions^[43].

This comparison does not amount to recognition: Bouflet specifies in his investigation that "none of these apparitional events has been recognised by ecclesiastical authority". He reports the bishops' reserve in the face of the multiplication of false visions in post-war Italy and the risk of religious exaltation, while stressing that neither the little seers nor the orthodoxy of the message have been called into question. He distinguishes these three dossiers from almost all other accounts of spinning suns, whose descriptions most often seem to him to be plagiarisms of those of Fatima. The five resemblances therefore serve to compare the testimonies; on their own they do not constitute a verdict of authenticity^[44].

Beyond its Catholic framework of reception, the miracle of the sun therefore constitutes — for contemporary Christian apologetics — one of the most solid empirical arguments in favour of the existence of a spiritual reality that transcends the physical laws. It joins, in the scientific dossier of Dieu, la science, les preuves, the cosmological arguments (Big Bang, fine-tuning), biological ones (origin of life, irreducible complexity), and historical ones (the resurrection of Jesus, the Holy Shroud of Turin). Each of these arguments on its own can be disputed; their convergence forms a rational presumption of exceptional strength.

The decree A Divina Providência (13 October 1930)

After a rigorous canonical investigation lasting more than twelve years — medical reports from the seers, depositions of direct witnesses, examination of verified predictions (notably the forthcoming deaths of Francisco and Jacinta, announced and occurring in 1919-1920) — Bishop José Alves Correia da Silva, Bishop of Leiria, publishes on 13 October 1930 — thirteen years to the day after the miracle — his pastoral letter A Divina Providência. The most frequently quoted passage concerns precisely the miracle of the sun:

« This phenomenon, which no astronomical observatory recorded and which consequently was not natural, people of every condition and every social class saw with their own eyes — believers and unbelievers, journalists from the most important newspapers and anticlericals, and even people who were several kilometres away, a fact that destroys collective suggestion. » — Bishop José Alves Correia da Silva, A Divina Providência, 13 October 1930^[45]

The episcopal decision comes down to two sentences of authority:

« By virtue of the foregoing considerations and others which we omit for the sake of brevity, and humbly invoking the Holy Spirit and placing ourselves under the protection of the Most Holy Virgin, we deem it fitting, as Bishop of Leiria, and having heard the Reverend Counsellors of our diocese: 1° to declare worthy of faith the visions of the children at Cova da Iria, parish of Fatima, in our diocese, from 13 May to 13 October 1917; 2° to permit officially the cult of Our Lady of Fatima. » — Bishop José Alves Correia da Silva, A Divina Providência, 13 October 1930^[46]

Taken up by five successive popes

This decree has been implicitly ratified by five successive popes:

• Pius XII, « the pope of Fatima », consecrates the whole world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary on 31 October 1942 in accordance with the request of 13 July 1917. The consecration is renewed on 8 December 1942 and then on 7 July 1952.
• John XXIII entrusts the 1917 secret to the Holy Office (1959) and authorises the opening of the canonisation process of Francisco and Jacinta.
• Paul VI makes a personal pilgrimage to Fatima on 13 May 1967 for the fiftieth anniversary of the apparitions and publishes the apostolic exhortation Signum Magnum.
• Saint John Paul II is struck by Ali Ağca's bullets on 13 May 1981 — the anniversary of the first apparition of Fatima — and attributes his survival to the « maternal hand » of Our Lady of Fatima^[47]. He travels to Fatima in 1982, 1991 and 2000, beatifies Francisco and Jacinta on 13 May 2000 and publishes the third secret on that day.
• Benedict XVI goes there for the 93rd anniversary (12-13 May 2010) and states that Fatima's prophetic mission « is not finished »^[48].
• Francis celebrates the canonisation of Francisco and Jacinta Marto on 13 May 2017 at Fatima — an event that places the historical authenticity of the miracle at the highest level of ecclesiastical validation. During the canonisation homily, the pope declares: « Under Mary's protection, let us be sentinels of the dawn in the world who contemplate the true face of Jesus the Saviour, the one that shines at Easter. »^[49]

This magisterial continuity across seven pontificates (from Pius XII to Francis) is, in itself, a powerful argument: no pope has expressed the slightest reservation about the reality of the 1917 miracle of the sun. The beatification cause of Sister Lucia (1907-2005), opened on 13 February 2017 by Bishop Virgílio do Nascimento Antunes, Bishop of Coimbra, is under examination at the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints.

• Our Lady of Fatima — the apparitions of 1917 — main article on the Marian dimension (seers, secrets, message)
• The Holy Shroud of Turin — another major public miracle studied in God, Science, the Evidence
• Eucharistic miracles — convergent body of evidence
• Our Lady of Guadalupe — Mexican apparition of the 16th century
• Criteria for discerning supernatural phenomena — canonical methodology