Sorrowful Mysteries: The Shepherd Children of Fatima and the Fate of the Twentieth Century

Historian Harrigan (The Leopard Is Loose) provides a colorful account of the 1917 appearance of the biblical Mary to three young shepherds in the village of Fátima, Portugal. The visions—in which a beautiful, shimmering woman informed the children that WWI would soon be ending, and divulged three secrets that weren’t disclosed until later—took place against the backdrop of a country unsettled by the shockwaves of WWI (nearly 100,000 Portuguese men had been sent to fight in Africa or on the Western front). Harrigan traces how the prophecies inspired believers crushed by poverty and political upheaval, while sparking fear in the country’s anticlerical government, which believed the visions stemmed from attempts to revive Catholic sentiment among the public. In the decades afterward, Harrigan writes, the visions seeped into the Catholic imagination, ramping up apocalyptic anxieties as believers awaited the 2000 release of a letter in which one of the shepherd children disclosed Mary’s final revelation about the “fate of the world.” Harrigan uses the events of Fatima to paint a vivid portrait of Catholicism as an all-consuming faith that played on 20th-century anxieties with supernatural visions, apocalyptic imagery, and tales of eternal torment for sinners. Rendered in novelistic detail, this is a fascinating history of a mysterious event and its complicated legacy. (Apr.)