(The Immaculate Heart of Mary depicted in stained-glass, St. Thomas Becket Church, Veneta, OR.)

Happy 100th Anniversary of Our Lady's first apparition at Fatima! It's hard to believe it's been 100 years...I can still remember hearing this story as a child, and it seeming to be so recent. My grandfather was born in 1917 - he would have been 100 this year. 

How touching and beautiful that Our Lady came and shared her heart with the three children (and with all of us), knowing that we would need the kindness, sympathy, and love of our mother's pure Heart to get us through the rough times ahead. She didn't come as an angry parent during World War I, wanting to punish us or threatening us with World War II and other evils, but as a sweetly, beautifully, sad mother, offering us a refuge in our trials and an answer to our problems. 

Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for us!
"The appeal of Mary at Fatima is once more an appeal for love, for love alone can save us and save the world. To have recourse to this devotion without a spirit of personal love for God's Mother and merely from the 'utilitarian' motive of warding off world disaster would be to miss the real spirit of the Blessed Virgin's appeal for the love of her own children...If we examine our own hearts and souls we shall be able to answer for ourselves the question as to how necessary it is for each of us to make personal reparation...for our own infidelities and sins and continued abuse of grace. Now -- today -- is the time for us to begin this devotion which will surely transform our lives, will obtain for us through Mary from Her Divine Son graces so powerful and so lovingly compelling that it will make of our lives a feeble foretaste of the very joys of Heaven."

~ Rt. Rev. William C. McGrath, P.A., Fatima: Hope of the World, imprimatur 1945.