0. IntroductionThis is the first installment in a series of articles surveying the evidence for Catholic miracles. My objective is to present the miracle case for Catholicism in a way that is rigorous enough to persuade those that are strongly predisposed towards skepticism. That means every claim has to be established by contemperanous sources and every skeptical explanation has to be excluded by multiple lines of evidence.In this post, I focus on the evidence for Our Lady of Fatima. In the first section, I demonstrate that skeptical explanations of the apparitions that were reported by the seers are untenable. In the second section, I demonstrate that skeptical explanations of the Miracle of the Sun are not tenable either. In the third section, I conclude that the best explanation is that Fatima was divine vindication of Catholicism. In the fourth section, I respond to the strongest objections to that conclusion.1. Six ApparitionsAn adequate theory of Fatima has to explain the six apparitions.(Preannounced schedule) - Between May 13th and October 13th, 1917, Lucia dos Santos (age 10), Francisco Marto (age 9), and Jacinta Marto (age 7) reported six apparitions. After the first apparition on May 13th, Lucia reported the apparition told the children to return to the same location, the Cova da Iria, once a month for six consecutive months, on the thirteenth day of each month.1 On August 13th, the children were detained by a local official, which prevented them from visiting the Cova that day.2 On August 19th, the children reported a ‘make-up’ apparition at Valinhos, a field about a mile away from the Cova.3 The rest of the apparitions conformed to the schedule that had been announced in May.4
>>17983820Continued here https://motivacredibilitatis.substack.com/p/our-lady-of-fatima#footnote-anchor-49-169864342
>>17983820>Lucia dos Santos (age 10), Francisco Marto (age 9), and Jacinta Marto (age 7)so just because a bunch of kids had an imaginary friend you all believe it is true, lmao
>>17983820>Brown people recieving a vision that they're supposed to be worshiping a white woman.Correct but not for the reason you think.
>>17983828Recently, my friend Ethan Muse started a substack which I’d encourage you to all read. Ethan is a Catholic and also happens to be the smartest person I’ve ever met, someone whom I never win arguments with, even on topics that I know about and he doesn’t. His first post is dedicated to arguing for the veracity of the Fatima miracle—that a genuinely supernatural event did occur.Sound crazy? Ethan comprehensively addresses all the leading objections, presenting multiple lines of evidence against each of them. I’m not a Catholic, to be clear, but I think his post is surprisingly compelling, and I want to hear what skeptics think about it.But a lot of the comments left by skeptics are dripping with snark, often while merely repeating objections that he rebutted at length, as if they didn’t even read the post. Even though I’m not a Catholic and don’t ultimately buy the conclusion of the post, this annoys me. When someone does dozens of hours of serious research and compiles a compelling case for their findings, you shouldn’t brush it off glibly just because you disagree with the conclusion. If you couldn’t last five minutes in a debate with the article author, then you shouldn’t be snarky and glib about how much of an ignorant rube he is.I choose the Ethan example deliberately because I assume few of my readers are Catholic. A lot of people get annoyed when people they disagree with are overconfident and snarky, but tolerate snot coming from their own side. Liberals get annoyed by overconfident and low information conservatives, but tolerate liberal ignorance and condescension—and vice versa.
>>17983835>compelling casebwahaha
>>17983845>>17983835
>>17983820do Guadalupe next
>>17983860>children being pressured into affirming Catholicism explicitly by catholic priests every fucking daycompelling case?
>>17983892If you feel so strongly about it compile your thoughts into a comment and leave it under the article on the substack page
>>17983902Seems like you are admitting you cannot defend your "miracle" yourself. Christards have a such ridiculously low bar for their standard of evidence when it comes to their religion. Apply the same thing to other faiths and suddenly you become super skeptical
>>17983919>>17983835
>>17983956Yes I am aware you have zero brain power beside quoting a masturbatory post. Let's mock it too shall we?>Ethan is a Catholic and also happens to be the smartest person I’ve ever met, someone whom I never win arguments with, even on topics that I know about and he doesn’t.He admits his homosexual friend is always right even when speaking out of his ass. He just likes the taste of his cock what can I say? It's a catholic choir boy tradition after all>objections that he rebutted at lengthNothing I have pointed out was defended in any way shape or form. But even if it was "lengthy" that doesn't mean it has any substance.>someone does dozens of hours of serious researchIf all it takes to debunk the central premise is 5 minutes of reading then that is time wasted>you shouldn’t brush it off glibly just because you disagree with the conclusionStraw man, nice! How about you try to defend one point I was supposedly wrong? Can't? Then call your faggot to this thread
>>17983829I don't think the portugese are any browner than the jews
>>17983892The children were interrogated by a very skeptical clergy. The Catholic Church in Portugal in 1917 was under siege from a revolutionary government of freemasons. Between the loss of property and several priests jailed for protesting the general situation looked dire. A lot of the clergy would have been far more interested in daily events related to government rather than the supposed visions of children.
Pagan idolatry, either an outright fiction or the lying wonders of demons.
In order to really understand Our Lady of Fátima, you have to understand Portugal and Portuguese history. The site itself is near the site of the Battle of Aljubarrota. This was the battle that made Portugal. It happened on August 14, 1385, the eve of the Feast of the Assumption. King João I and St. Nuno Álvares Pereira, the Constable of Portugal, linked up the Portuguese army with a contingent of Englishmen and Gascons to fight a combined Spanish and French army. They hill camped and prevailed over the numerically larger opponent.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UO21jHZ1u4https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jowtiKZ2Qnw
It was from Portugal that a great deal of activity occurred during the European Age of Discovery. It was the son of King João I, Prince Henry the Navigator who began to organize information related to maritime activity. It had already been the case that Italian mariners had discovered some of the Canary Islands, just a few miles off the African Coast. But it was the Portuguese who discovered the truly Atlantic Islands like the Azores and Madeira. Then the breakthrough occurred when in the year 1434 AD Gil Eanes passed Cape Bojador. This cape had long been considered the limit on sea navigation. Over the course of generations the Portuguese were soon sailing all over the world. In 1488 AD Bartolomeu Dias passed the Cape of Good Hope on the southern tip of Africa. In 1498 AD Vasco da Gama sailed to India. In 1499 AD João Fernandes Lavrador sailed to Canada. In 1500 AD Pedro Álvares Cabral sailed to Brazil. In 1512 AD António de Abreu sailed to the Maluku Spice Islands. In 1513 AD Jorge Álvares sailed to China. In 1543 AD a group of Portuguese were brought by a Chinese junk to Tanegashima, Japan. In 1589 AD João da Gama, the grandson of Vasco da Gama, discovered the mysterious Dagamaland in the North Pacific. Portuguese merchants and missionaries spread to many of the newly sailed to places.
Tragedy struck in 1578 AD when King Sebastian died at the Battle of Alcácer Quibir in Morocco. With no heir, Spain invaded in 1580 AD and the country was subsumed by the Spanish until 1640 AD. Through decades of war against the Spanish on land and the Dutch at sea, Portugal freed itself from foreign rule. The Brazilian gold rush of the 1690s made Portugal rich. But much of these riches were lost on November 1, 1755 AD, the Feast of All Saints, when an earthquake, tsunami, and fire destroyed Lisbon. Portugal and its remaining empire survived multiple invasions from Spain with British assistance. By 1900 AD Portugal was a quiet constitutional monarchy long used to living as the minor ally of the mighty and vast British Empire.
>>17983828The miracle of light prophesied by Mary was seen by thousands. Still it did also prophecy that WW2 would start in the reign of a Pope that died months before Hitler invaded Poland. This failed prophecy doesn't prove that the visions were fake though, it proves only that the entities fail at prophecy.Also iirc before the virgin Mary appeared, children did see an angel and another woman that did not claim to be the virgin.
Portuguese stability came to an end on February 1, 1908 AD when King Carlos I and the Prince Royal Luís Filipe were assassinated. Prince Manuel became King Manuel II but was deposed by freemasons on October 5, 1910 AD as the country underwent revolution. King Manuel II went into exile in Britain, unwilling to risk civil war to restore the monarchy.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_October_1910_revolution#Anticlericalism>At home, the policy polarized society and lost the republic potential supporters, and abroad it offended American and European states which had their citizens engaged in religious work there, adding substantially to the republic's bad press. The persecution of the church was so overt and severe that it drove the irreligious and nominally religious to a new religiosity and gained the support of Protestant diplomats such as the British, who, seeing their citizens' religious institutions in a grave dispute over their rights and property, threatened to deny recognition of the young republic.>Soon after the establishment of the Republic, on 8 October 1910, Minister for Justice Afonso Costa reinstated Marquess of Pombal's laws against the Jesuits, and Joaquim António de Aguiar's laws in relation to religious orders. The Church's property and assets were expropriated by the State. The religious oath and other religious elements found in the statutes of the University of Coimbra were abolished, and matriculations into first year of the Theology Faculty were cancelled, as were places in the Canon law course, suppressing the teaching of Christian doctrine. Religious holidays turned into working days, keeping however the Sunday as a resting day for labor reasons. As well as that, the Armed forces were forbidden from participating in religious solemn events. Divorce and family laws were approved which considered marriage as a "purely civil contract"
>Bishops were persecuted, expelled or suspended from their activities in the course of the secularization. All but one were driven from their dioceses. The property of clerics was seized by the state, wearing of the cassock was banned, all minor seminaries were closed and all but five major seminaries. A law of 22 February 1918 permitted only two seminaries in the country, but they had not been given their property back. Religious orders were expelled from the country, including 31 orders comprising members in 164 houses (in 1917 some orders were permitted to form again). Religious education was prohibited in both primary and secondary school.>In response to the several anticlerical decrees, Portuguese bishops launched a collective pastoral defending the Church's doctrine, but its reading was prohibited by the government. In spite of this, some prelates continued to publicize the text, among which was the bishop of Porto, António Barroso. This resulted in him being called to Lisbon by Afonso Costa, where he was stripped from his ecclesiastic functions.>The secularization peaked with the Law of Separation of the State and the Church on 20 April 1911, with a large acceptance by the revolutionaries. The law was only promulgated by the Assembly in 1914, but its implementation was immediate after the publishing of the decree. The Portuguese Church tried to respond, classifying the law as "injustice, oppression, spoliation and mockery", but without success. Afonso Costa even predicted the eradication of Catholicism in the space of three generations. The application of the law began on 1 July 1911, with the creation of a "Central Commission". As one commentator put it, "ultimately the Church was to survive the official vendetta against organized religion".
>>17985398>>17985401These types of rabid shock-secularizations are actually somewhat common in the Latin-Iberian world (I am including America here). Mexico at least had similar episodes during the 1870s and 1920s. Colombia during the early19th century. Rosas in Argentina did not actively hate the Catholic curch but did keep a lid on them. Forced them to wear marks of alligiance to him and such.
>>17985416Yes, it's a disturbing phenomenon. I still can't say if it began with the French Revolution or with King Henry VIII of England.
Children never make up stories for attention, the only explanation is that some dead woman appeared, Roman Catholic Christianity is vindicated, all other religions BTFO because OPs really really really smart devout Catholic friend cannot possibly be wrong. >the crowd did not see the apparitionOops. Cancel the pilgrammage.
>>17985448>>17983835
>>17985449Stop linking to the same post that I already addressed and promoting your blog.
>>17985461You clearly haven't read the article. It's perfectly appropriate
>>17985464Not reading your blog Ethan, go shill elsewhere.
On May 24, 1911 AD, the Feast of Mary Help of Christians, Pope Pius X issued the encyclical Iamdudum.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iamdudumhttps://www.papalencyclicals.net/Pius10/p10por.htm>the Bishops have been savagely attacked, and two of the most prominent of them, the Bishops of Oporto and Beia, men who are illustrious by the integrity of their lives and by their great services to their country and the Church, have been driven out of their sees and stripped of their honors.>First, so far as property is concerned, the Portuguese Republic severs itself from the Church in such a way that it leaves her nothing at all from which to provide for the decency of the house of God, the maintenance of the clergy and the exercise of the manifold duties of charity and piety. For by the articles of this decree not only is the Church despoiled of all the property, whether real or movable, which she holds by the strongest of titles, but she is deprived of all power of acquiring anything for the future.>It is decreed under the heaviest penalties that the acts of the Bishops shall on no account be printed and that not even within the walls of the churches shall there be any announcement made to the people except by leave of the Republic. It is, moreover, forbidden to perform any ceremony outside the precincts of the sacred buildings without permission from the Republic, to go round in procession, to wear sacred vestments or even the cassock. Furthermore, it is forbidden to place any sign which savors of the Catholic religion not only on public monuments, but even on private buildings;>it is unlawful to form associations for the fostering of religion and piety;>it is not even lawful to publish, without permission publicly given, the commands of the Roman Pontiff.
>>17985440What cope is this, the church and its various branches (such as monasteries) are as much a political animal as any other organisation or entity.
>>17985561You don't believe in property rights?
>>17985563For monasteries? Not after the Norman Conquest saw the wholesale looting of English monasteries to enrich Norman ones
>>17985440Disturbing? I would not call them disturbing. Unless you are a trad-cath or something. Though attacking and taking ecclesiastical land is as old as monarchies and priesthoods iirc.
>>17985564So because William the Conqueror looted English monasteries to enrich Norman monasteries, you would justify Henry VIII looting the monasteries to enrich his general coffers and the creation of the English fleet?>>17985567Do you not consider the actions of the Bolsheviks to be disturbing?
>>17985567The Pagans suffered the same thing around the time of Theodosius.
>>17985571I'm saying that your only issue with monasteries being looted is that an ostensible non-Catholic was the one doing the looting. IIRC more monasteries in Ireland were raided by patrons of rival monasteries than were raided by the vikings
>>17983820>On August 13th, the children were detained by a local officialThis itself proved prophetic.
>>17985579I suppose it comes down to the degree. In the case of England it isn't just that the monasteries are looted of all valuable possessions and their valuable arable land taken away. It's that the physical buildings were sacked. And the priests and monks were not allowed to hold mass even in the ruins.I myself am a Californian. I know that Franciscan missions were secularized by the Mexican government. The valuable possessions, the horses, pigs, cows, ect. were all carried away. In some cases even the vineyards were plucked from the earth and moved onto great estates. The surrounding land was divvied up into great ranches. But in the end the missions were kept as parish churches. The priests still said mass, and life went on. Curiously when the Americans invaded California they cited what the Mexicans had done to the Franciscan missions of California as one of the reasons for the necessity of American rule.
One last point about the California Missions. US President Abraham Lincoln had a hand in returning some mission land to the Catholic Church.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rancho_Laguna_(Alemany)>After reading a letter from Bishop Alemany, President Abraham Lincoln signed a proclamation on March 18, 1865, just three weeks before Lincoln's assassination, that restored ownership of some the mission property to the Roman Catholic Church.
One of the things I have heard a Russian Orthodox priest note regarding Our Lady of Fátima is the days of the apparitions. May 13, June 13, July 13, August 19, September 13, and October 13, 1917 AD. These are all days that in the Julian calendar of the Russian Orthodox Church would be rendered as May 1, June 1, July 1, August 7, September 1, and October 1, 1917 AD. He considered that to be significant because the children would very likely not have known the Russian calendar system. These are also feast days in the Russian Orthodox Church. For example October 1 is the feast of the Intercession of the Theotokos.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercession_of_the_Theotokos
To add, the Russian and Greek Orthodox do believe that the Virgin Mary appeared to the children at Fátima. They do believe in the Miracle of the Sun.But they do not fully believe in the things that were said to the children. In particular those things that are in conflict with the dogmas of their churches.
We should also consider what happened after the apparitions of Our Lady of Fátima. The Miracle of the Sun occurred on October 13, 1917 AD. Less than two months later on December 5, 1917 AD Sidónio Pais began a military coup against the revolutionary masonic government.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/December_1917_coup_d'étathttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidónio_Pais>Pais was born in Caminha, 1 May 1872, the eldest child of Sidónio Alberto Marrocos Pais, a notary of Jewish descent, and Rita Júlia Cardoso da Silva, both natives of Caminha.>During this period he also belonged for a short period to a masonic lodge in Coimbra, although he does not appear to have been very active.Despite being a Jew and a freemason he led a coup deposing Minister of Justice Afonso Costa and restoring the social position of the Catholic Church within Portugal. This is caricatured in the picture. One year later on December 14, 1918 he was killed by an assassin. The revolutionary government of Portugal continued to prove dangerously unstable.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Portuguese_Republic#Heads_of_state_and_government>The First Portuguese Republic was an unstable period in the History of Portugal. In a period of 16 years (1910–1926) Portugal had 8 Presidents of the Republic, 1 Provisional Government, 45 Prime Ministers and 1 Constitutional Junta
>>17985981>political instability means a claimed miracle is legit???
>>17986433There was political instability both before and after the miracle.
>>17985581In what way?
Not your blog ethan
