This week, on Friday, we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Last apparition of Our Lady of Fatima. October 13th, marks the date when over 70,000 people present in the crowd, including a hostile atheistic Communistic Press, witness the Miracle of the Sun. Even those when a 6 mile radius of the crowd saw it. It was the greatest public miracle since the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

As the three shepherd Children began to see the Virgin Mary, the continuous Rain of three days came to an abrupt stop, the clouds parted and the Sun broke through. Then the sun began to spin and throw off colors. It began to dance about the sky; so violently that at one point seemed to literally break from its obit and plunge toward the earth.

People fell on their knees with fear, some confessed their sins out loud even the bad ones. Then just as it appeared that it was going to crash into the earth and bring the end of the world, the sun stopped and appeared to go back to its normal course. Everybody and everything, including the rain soaked ground was instantly, completely and miraculously dry.

It can never be said enough, however, that Fatima was a message not for just for 1917, but even more so for our times. Our Lady of Fatima warned about the very situation we find ourselves in the modern world. She told us how to avoid the current storms in our culture and in our families and she gave, not a dire prediction of the end of the world, but a great message of hope. That even if we didn’t not head her warnings and so avoid a great chastisement-a great punishment on the world-that in the end her Immaculate Heart would Triumph.

But what is the message of Fatima in its essence? And why is it important to us, to our families and to our world? And how can we, by putting the message of Fatima into action in our lives, bring hope to our world which is so rapidly descending into chaos and as a result is so lacking in hope.

The message of Fatima is in fact the very Formula for bringing down God’s Divine mercy on the world. God is a good Father and He will not let us destroy ourselves; He wishes us to leave sin behind so as to live in the freedom and in the joy of the Children of God, by living under the protection of His Divine Will, which is love and mercy itself. Only then will we have peace.

We must say then that the message of Fatima is a message to be lived. For the message of Fatima is identical to the Message of the Gospel itself, “Repent and believe… for the Kingdom of God is in your midst, because Jesus Christ, the personification of the Kingdom of God, is in your midst, by being truly present in the Holy Eucharist, the Most Blessed Sacrament of the Altar. (The Gospel today warns, the Kingdom of God will be taken from you and given to a people who will bear its fruit).

So how do we live the Message of Fatima? Fatima lived on a daily basis calls us to daily, with God’s grace, to strive in order to leave sin behind and seek union with Jesus and through Him with the Father in the Unity of the Holy Spirit. To accept the mercy of God in our lives and in our families, we have to be truly sorry for our sins, confess them fully and truthfully and seek with the help of God’s grace to amend our lives and leave sin behind.

God’s wrath, God’s punishment on the world is always directed toward sin. God hates sin so much because He loves us so much—sin is the antithesis of love; and so, sin separates us from God and one another. Sin does not hurt God, but it hurts us.

Therefore, sin is the cause of all the division in the world, in our families and within ourselves; therefore as well, sin is the cause of all the unhappiness in the world and in our lives. And, as our Lady of Fatima said, “War is a punishment for our sin.” In other words, unrepentant sin leads to war…war within ourselves, our families, our communities and churches and yes even in our world. It’s not that God causes war but we do.

Conversely Peace is caused by the world seeking God’s Mercy through the forgiveness of its sins. And since Peace begins in our hearts and in our families, let us be peacemakers by firstly opening ourselves up to God’s mercy by seeking it as individuals and together as families in the Sacrament of Mercy—Confession and let us do it now. For God promises us mercy not tomorrow.

And to atone for our sins; in other words, to help repair and heal the effects of sin in our lives, families and world, as well as to reverse the downward spiral of world by the unrepentant sin in the world, The Angel of Fatima cried out, “Penance, Penance! Penance!

Sister Lucia later said, the Penance that Angel called for her was not taking on some physical hardship like laying on a bed of boards or wearing a hair shirt, it was merely carrying out our daily duties faithfully according to our state in life. Doing everything we are supposed to do on a daily basis for love of God and love of neighbor; this includes both out material duties and our spiritual duties. This necessarily means we must be in a state of grace, with no unconfessed serious or mortal sin on our soul.

In this way, we also begin to fulfil another aspect of the Message, that of daily prayer. Everything we do, when we do it for love of Jesus and neighbor and in the state of grace, becomes a prayer. Prayer also includes, as Our Lady requested the daily praying of the Holy Rosary and wearing the Brown Scapular.

The Praying of the Rosary as a way to chain the devil up in our lives in our families. The Holy Rosary is a family prayer by families for families-individual families, the family of the Church and the Family of man. And the Rosary leads us to the greatest of all prayers…not the “Our Father,” but the Holy Mass. The Holy Mass is the greatest of all prayers because it is the prayer of Jesus to the Father on our behalf; the prayer of the Head of the body, Jesus and the prayer of the body, the members of the church, united to the head.

The members are united to the head, by attending Holy Mass yes, but by offering themselves along with Jesus’ own self offering to the Father in love. The wearing of the Brown Scapular is a way of asking the Blessed Mother to help us to offer ourselves completely at Holy Mass and to do so with out fear; to totally offer ourselves at Holy Mass to Jesus through Mary in union with St. Joseph. The holy Mass is then at the very Heart of the Fatima Message and the end to which that Message directs us..

The Holy Mass participated in with full, active, conscious and fruitful participation is the source of the Authentic Christian life and the end to which that life is directed to—because it contains in His fullness the Alpha and Omega—Jesus Christ our Lord! Hence the Holy Mass provides us with the very means to live the Fatima message and so to life the Gospel itself-it provides us with the means to become one with Jesus and so take His mercy out into our world.

And this brings us to the final aspect of the Father Message--the Promise. The Blessed Mother came to Fatima seeking those little souls who want to love God with their whole Heart, soul and mind and all their strength and their neighbor as themselves. These littles souls, who would give themselves to her so that she could help them live her message of Fatima would become heaven’s instruments of bringing God’s Divine Mercy and Love down upon the world.

Through these little souls of Our Lady, heaven will bring about through Triumph of Her Immaculate Heart, the Next Greatest Miracle since the Resurrection, a time of peace that the world has never seen before. This unprecedented time of peace in the world and in families and individual hearts, will be brought about by the conversion of the world to the Truth of the Sacred and Eucharistic Heart of Jesus truly present in all the tabernacles of the world and truly being offered on all the Altars of the world at Holy Mass as the only way to the Father—and so the only way to life, eternal life and so eternal salvation...

O most Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, I adore Thee profoundly. And I offer to Thee the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Jesus Christ, truly present in all the tabernacles of the world and truly being offered on all the Altars of the world, along with my whole heart, in reparation for the outrages, sacrileges and indifference for He Himself is offended and through the infinite Merits of His most Sacred Heart and the sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of the blessed Virgin Mary, I beg of thee the conversion of poor sinners (including myself). Amen.