Catholic apologist Jimmy Akin joins Cy Kellett to explore the fascinating topic of Marian apparitions, focusing on which ones have the strongest evidence. Delving into the well-known case of Our Lady of Fatima, Jimmy highlights the miraculous events and predictions associated with the apparitions, including the remarkable “miracle of the sun” witnessed by many, and the prophetic insights that have intrigued believers and skeptics alike.
Transcript:
Jimmy: All the Marian apparitions that we know of, which one has the best evidence behind it? I would say there are two plausible candidates. And which one you pick is going to depend on the criteria that you use when you say best evidence.
The first one that’ll be more familiar to most people is Our Lady of Fatima, where Our Lady reportedly appeared to three shepherd children in 1917 in Portugal. This was a monthly event that went on for about six months. Mary promised that at her last appearance she would give some kind of miraculous sign that other people would be able to perceive, and that was reported.
At her final appearance, many people saw the sun behave strangely in the sky, and this is called the Miracle of the Sun. About 70,000 people, including some non-believers, reported seeing the Miracle of the Sun. So that’s pretty significant evidence. You get 70,000 people to agree on something; that’s quite noteworthy.
In addition to that, Mary had given some predictions to the three children. One of them is recorded with no doubt before its fulfillment. The fulfillment of the so-called third secret, or really the third part of the Secret of Fatima, did not happen until 1981. Sister Lucia, the seer who reported the secret, had written it down years before that. It involved, among other things, an assassination attempt on the Pope, which happened in 1981 when Mehmet Ali Agha tried to assassinate John Paul II.
So I think we have significant evidence there. There were other predictions associated with Our Lady of Fatima, such as about World War I and how it was going to end, but then a worse war, namely World War II, would break out if people didn’t repent, and various other predictions. These are found in Sister Lucia’s memoirs of the event.
Even though she reports receiving these predictions before they were fulfilled, the memoirs that contain the reports were actually written after those early predictions had been fulfilled. So the evidence is not as compelling in terms of fulfilled predictions as if we had them documented and on record before the fulfillments. A skeptic could come along and say, well, she knew what had happened and she either let that color her memory or even that she just faked those predictions.
Now, that won’t explain the papal assassination attempt, but it could explain the others. I would say that it doesn’t invalidate those predictions, but it requires giving credence to something that you wouldn’t have to just give credence to if it had been on record clearly before the fulfillments happened. So I’m not saying she didn’t get those predictions; I think she did. It’s just you can’t prove it to a skeptic as well.
So that leads to the other candidate that I would propose for best-supported apparition, and that is Our Lady of Zaytun. Zaytun is one of the suburbs of Cairo, Egypt. Between 1968 and 1971, the Virgin Mary appeared repeatedly at St. Mary’s Coptic Parish in Zaytun.
The apparition was first noted actually by a group of Muslims who saw a woman on top of St. Mary’s Parish and thought she was maybe going to commit suicide, maybe jump off the roof, and they intervened. Other people noticed what was happening. This was the first of a set of appearances that lasted basically for a three or four-year period and were seen by many, many people: by Coptic Christians, by Catholic Christians, by Orthodox Christians, by Muslims, by non-believers, and by Protestant Christians.
Loads of people saw Our Lady of Zaytun on some occasions. It was estimated that as many as 250,000 or a quarter of a million people witnessed the apparitions at once. Over the course of the three years, it’s estimated that more than a million people saw the apparition. So that’s larger in numbers than the people who saw the Miracle of the Sun.
Also, many of these people had cameras and took photographs of the events. The authorities also got involved in testing these apparitions. They thought, well, okay, we’ve got this glowing figure up on top of St. Mary’s Parish. Could it be generated by some kind of electrical equipment, you know, shining lights up there? So they cut off the power to the entire block, and yet the glowing phenomena remained.
They also did physical inspections and couldn’t find anything causing these. So they’re very well documented. What Zaytun does not have that Fatima does is a set of predictions, at least one of which is known to have been on record before it was fulfilled.
So Zaytun has photographic evidence that is better than Fatima. It also has more witnesses than Fatima. But Fatima has a record of at least one major fulfilled prediction that is known to have been on record before the prediction was fulfilled.
I would say those are the two best-supported Marian apparitions in terms of the evidence for them that you could present to a skeptic and say, well, how would you explain this? They tried to explain it this way; that didn’t work. They tried to explain it this other way; that didn’t work. So how would you explain it if you don’t accept it as a Marian apparition?
One of the things you’ll notice about both of those is they both occurred in the 20th century. That’s a reflection of the fact that we have better evidence capturing tools today than we did in the past. Like all those photos and videos that were taken of Zaytun, and there were even some photos and so forth taken of Our Lady of Fatima. There were also reporters, including skeptical reporters at Fatima, who were able to document things.
Because these occurred very recently, there was an opportunity to gather evidence and larger quantities of evidence than for apparitions reported in the past. I would expect that pattern to continue in the future because our evidence-gathering capabilities are so much better today than they were in the past, and so much information from the past has been lost.
Anyway, I would expect that both now and in the future, the best-documented Marian apparitions are probably going to be among the more recent ones.