“I know, I know, the saints are not impressed.” This is how I would immediately follow up my sometimes sheepish admission that my husband and I were going to be making a pilgrimage to Fatima and Santiago de Compostela not on foot via the Camino, but aboard a luxury cruise ship.
What self-respecting Catholic would visit a site as holy as Fatima only to return to a drink package and all-you-can-eat buffet?
Of course you do not have to look at it this way.
From Tourist to Pilgrim
As relatively new empty nesters, we have many friends who have walked the Camino, and we respect them so much. For us, visiting religious sites by ship makes sense—it’s something we’ve been doing our entire married life. I will say, though, that I noticed an unmistakable shift in our experiences when we went from being tourists to being pilgrims on these trips.
One can visit the holiest sites—the Vatican, even the Church of the Holy Sepulcher—but gain nothing from it, passing through only as a tourist. At the same time, the most mundane of places can offer beautiful signs of God, if only we look with eyes of faith and convert ourselves from tourists to pilgrims.
On this trip, our ship would visit the Canary Islands before sailing up the coast of the Iberian Peninsula to Lisbon, Porto (where we would visit Fatima), and A Coruna (where we would visit Santiago de Compostela).
Midway through the cruise, we had left Gran Canaria, with its 500-year-old cathedral commissioned by Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, and were at dinner when suddenly the chimes that precede the captain’s daily announcement played. I gave my husband a quizzical look. These updates on weather and sea conditions always came at 10am. Why an announcement during dinner? The sounds of conversation and clattering dishes lowered.
He began, “This is your captain, may I have your attention?”
The sounds dimmed further.
Then he added, “Your undivided attention.”
Now you could hear a pin drop.
The captain told us that because of Hurricane Kirk (which I had not heard of until that moment), our ship would skip Porto and A Coruna; instead we would stay in Lisbon for two nights.
We had just lost Fatima and Santiago de Compostela.
After processing the initial shock, we began plotting what we might do—could we get off the ship in Lisbon and independently get ourselves up the coast? How bad could the weather be? The roller coaster continued when we learned that the Celebrity Apex (to whom I’ll be eternally grateful) added a tour to Fatima on our second day in Lisbon, so those who had booked it from Porto would be able to go. We said, “Rejoice with us; we have found our lost Fatima!”
Finding Fatima
Two days later, undaunted by driving rain and 30mph wind gusts, our bus left the city, factories, and suburbs of Lisbon and began heading upward through hills, the dusky light and foggy air adding to the mystery.
After about 90 minutes, we saw signs for Fatima and Cova de Ira. Our Catholic tour guide explained that due to the holy nature of the site he could not accompany us any further, but he pointed out for us the major sites of the sanctuary, including the Chapel of the Apparitions, built where Our Lady appeared to the three pastorinhos (or Little Shepherds), Lucia, Jacinta, and Francisco, in five of the six apparitions.
Covered in rain gear, our group got off the bus and entered the esplanade, down two stories from the street. As I walked down the steps, lifting my head slightly against the rain, a complex bigger than St. Peter’s Square came into view: the beautiful, neo-baroque Basilica of Our Lady of the Rosary on one end, the modernist, wagon wheel-shaped Basilica of the Holy Trinity on the other, and the humble Chapel of the Apparitions in the center.
The Chapel of the Apparitions
With a few minutes before Rosary was set to begin, we walked towards the Chapel. As we drew nearer, the Basilica of Our Lady of the Rosary grew larger and larger in the background, a stunning mirror image of its 200-foot tower perfectly reflected in the wet concrete. We would never have seen its grandeur exaggerated were it not for the rain!
Our guide had warned us that the Chapel of the Apparitions was so small that three Chapels could fit inside our tour bus. I had thought he was exaggerating, but he was not. Thankfully, the area around the Chapel itself (which we could not enter) was surrounded on all sides by an altar rail and a partially covered seating area.
In front of the Chapel behind glass stood the famous statue of Our Lady of Fatima with her ornate crown. We learned that Mary did not appear to the children wearing the crown; it was offered by the women of Portugal in 1946 as thanksgiving for Portugal not entering World War II. Pope St. John Paul II, whose assassination attempt some believe was prophesied in one of the Secrets of Fatima, placed the bullet from that attempt in the crown when he visited in 1982.
The Face of the Little Shepherds
When it was time for Rosary to begin, a young, dark-haired priest walked out from behind the Chapel and began leading us in prayer in Portuguese. His voice, projected on loudspeakers, reverberated over the steady sound of rain on the pavement.
It was surprisingly hard to follow the Portuguese at first, and I found myself studying the priest’s face as he systematically scanned the crowd with each decade. His face was as steel as the sky on that rainy day. He had a sort of furrowed brow that seemed to ask, “Why don’t you understand?”
I realized it was exactly the same look as I’d seen on the faces of Lucia, Jacinta, and Francisco. Who among us, when first seeing the famous photo of the Fatima children, the pastorinhos, hasn’t wondered: Why do they look so serious? What is that aspect in their eyes?
Maybe it was the vision of hell that haunted their faces. Maybe they were righteously angry that no one believed them—not even their parents—and they had been hauled off, even threatened, to recant multiple times. They did not recant, of course. Undoubtedly, something about their encounters changed them, strengthening their supernatural faith, infusing them with grace and fortitude so they would not back down.
Only a short time after the last of the apparitions, little Jacinta and Francisco Marto died of what came to be known as the Spanish Flu—a virus many compared Covid to. We should be ashamed. Can you imagine the reaction of the Fatima Children if they were told by their parents or, God forbid, their priests, not to go to Mass for fear of a virus?
Could I imagine this Portuguese priest leading the Rosary in front of me now, as the wind whipped around us, telling us, “No Rosary today due to the hurricane, stay home, stay safe”? Oh, the comforts we take for granted, the ridiculous things we tell ourselves, we of little faith. Without supernatural faith, we should fear a virus or a storm more than we fear sin, more than we fear hell.
I publish Catholic textbooks for a living, and I love to include sacred art in activities. Sometimes we hear that the art is “too scary” for young people—even children much older than the Fatima children were. A painting of the Crucifixion or Last Judgement is not pastoral, they claim.
Dare I say, the pastorinhos are not impressed.
Are we doing young people today any favors by shielding them from depictions of the reality of sin? The Blessed Virgin, the Theotokos, immaculately conceived so as to bear God Himself in her womb, and who tenderly cradled His tortured body taken down from the Cross, surely did not think so. The effects of sin are scary. While we would never separate them from the saving message of Christ, warnings are merciful, the very essence of pastoral.
After Rosary, the priest offered Mass, and just after the consecration, the sun came out. We had our own little miracle of the sun, like the one in 1917 which the Church’s investigation concluded was “worthy of belief” in 1930.
Do we believe? Not even necessarily in the apparitions themselves, but in the truths they conveyed: Hell is real. Pray for sinners. Pray the rosary every day.
Home now, as we get ready to go to Sunday Mass, I remember the faces of the Little Shepherds, and the face of our priest that day at the Chapel. Why don’t you understand? Why do we not do as Our Lady asked?
Author’s Note: This article is part of a series “From Tourist to Pilgrim.” While it features some Catholic sites, such as the House of the Virgin Mary in Ephesus, Coptic Churches in Cairo, Notre Dame Cathedral in Papeete, Tahiti (and perhaps one day, Santiago de Compostela), it will also feature others, such as boulevards of Westminster and the unclassified roads of Salisbury, which are decidedly not.
The Bible tells us that some listeners of Jesus’ parables heard one story, while those who listened with the ears of faith heard a totally different one. When you listen, look, and walk by faith in even the most touristic of sites, when you see the signs and know their meanings, it is like you are transported to a totally different place, the treasures in plain sight are suddenly in vivid technicolor as the mortal coil of the grayscale secular world shuffles around you. So let us look with the eyes of the pastorinhos—the Little Shepherds. Let us see as true pilgrims do.
Photo by Natacha de Hepcée on Unsplash
