For many years now all true Marian Catholics have been concerned with the meaning and significance of the Fatima Apparitions, and the power that Fatima ought to exert in the lives of all those who claim to love Our Lady. We know that Fatima is important because Our Blessed Mother appeared there. Apparitions of Our Blessed Lady are still considered to be of such great importance all around that, in order to cash in on popular devotion and the respect it generates, rumours of ‘apparitions’ have mushroomed since. The inevitable result of this is that many Catholics now find themselves at odds with Church authorities because of the Church authorities’ steadfast refusal to uphold the ‘authenticity’ of these alleged ‘apparitions’ and ‘messages’. Such counter claims weaken the Fatima message and all it was meant to achieve.

       In Fatima our Blessed Lady asked urgently and insistently for the daily Rosary. But so many claim the same for the unapproved ‘apparitions’. Such claims tend to detract from Fatima’s significance and weaken further the influence it should have in our lives by drawing our attention away from Fatima into other directions. In Fatima our Heavenly Mother showed to the three little children Her Immaculate Heart and insisted on a world wide devotion to it. This has not been claimed by the followers of unapproved ‘apparitions’ who also do not claim reparation as central to their ‘messages’.

       There is one thing all the unapproved ‘apparitions’ and ‘messages’ have in common against Fatima: they are forever ongoing, and they never have a proper ending. This is very important: all the series of so called ‘apparitions’ which sprang up after 1960 are unfinished, which means they can neither get nor presume Church approval. Why is this the truth of the matter? The Holy Church must first be acquainted with everything before She can give Her approval; but She does not have to wait to the end to give Her disapproval if, from what has come to light so far, She is more than satisfied that the series has no Supernatural origin and fails in its claim that it comes from God. Never has the Church given blanket approval to an unfinished series, nor could She ever be so imprudent. But in many cases She has made known Her disapproval before awaiting the end when that which had already come to Her notice seriously lacked the stamp of Divine Truth and veracity. Garabandal and Medjugorje are the foremost examples of this fact.

       So Fatima still has unique features by which it towers over all its rivals. The Holiness of God demands that this should be established before all His faithful servants by a most simple – at the same time that it is the most effective – test. Fatima admittedly has features which, strictly speaking, apply only to Catholics. But for the central message to be of worldwide significance it must contain a request which applies to all the people on earth. This central request was made known to the children and the whole world on 13th October 1917 when Our Blessed Lady, revealing Her identity and credentials, requested from everyone to STOP SINNING. This request of Our Blessed Lady can and must be put to everybody on earth: Jew, Pagan, Christian, Catholic, in all cases where specific Catholic requests no longer apply. It is this request of Our Blessed Lady which the promoters of unapproved ‘apparitions’ do not heed, because unapproved ‘apparitions’ cannot be promoted or even followed without committing a sin: a deliberate sin of disobedience, or credulity, or obstinacy, or of pride and self will. This fact destroys for all times any claim the promoters of unapproved ‘apparitions’ may make that they also love, promote and obey Fatima. In the sight of God such claims constitute a lie because such people refuse to stop sinning, which shows even further the existence of sinful passions and deception in the followers of false apparitions. And as all true lovers of Fatima can testify, such promoters sin in a very significant way against charity through their aggressiveness and intolerance of all those who do not go along with their fancy.

       The glory by which Fatima reflects Eternal Light and towers over all its amateurish and makeshift imitations, lies in the fact that it possess aspects which are unique in the whole history of the world, and consequently cannot be possessed by anything else that makes Fatima appear redundant, less important, or in need of ‘updating’. If the apparitions of Fatima hold the key to our times then they hold the key to the genuineness or otherwise of all other claims. If Our Lady of Fatima, as God’s ambassador, holds total dominance over our times, then She holds total power over all the later ‘apparitions’ and ‘messages’ claiming to come from Her. Far from reported sightings demanding to be considered independently of Fatima, the tables are turned on such claims and the uniqueness of Fatima demands that all reported ‘apparitions’ are considered in Fatima’s Eternal Light and that the reported ‘messages’ be tested against the complete message of Fatima. If reported ‘apparitions’ speak matter-of-factly, almost reluctantly, of prayer and penance and the recitation of the Rosary, and are subsequently disallowed by the competent Church authority, then the message of Fatima must be more than prayer, penance and the recitation of the Rosary in order to show the other ‘apparitions’ as false and mere imitations.

       What, then, are those aspects possessed by Fatima, and not possessed by any pretender? What aspects must be supported by any other claimed apparition in order that its message will coincide with the great message of Fatima? These aspects may be formulated like this:

       Never before at any other time on the tortuous road of the human caravan on the move were three conditions fulfilled at the one time, in great detail, surrounding a miracle of God, which was observed by more than 60,000 people.

1. First there is the prediction of this miracle. And with the prediction of the certainty of its occurrence came
2. secondly, the accompanying prediction that it would take place at a previously mentioned date, time and place, to
3. thirdly prove that a previously given message came from God!

       Not even in the prediction of His own Resurrection, the greatest prophecy of all times, did God include the precise detail that is contained in Our Lady’s prophecy at Fatima. God reserved this stupendous glory only for His Mother in Her Fatima message. This can only mean that God wanted the apparitions and messages of Fatima to be so unique that He wanted us to know that, what Fatima is pointing at, is of the utmost importance for all mankind. So important that God seems to have decreed that it would be impossible for Catholics to resist Fatima, to turn one’s back on Fatima without falling into serious irregularities, deceptions and even sin.

       If the Fatima apparitions of Our Blessed Lady were not so unique, so many followers of the unapproved variety would not be so deceived in thinking their favourite ‘apparitions’ and those of Fatima are comparable, are on a par, and are even the same. So there must be a difference if competent Church authority can declare that one came from God and the others did not come from God. And not only must there be a difference: it must be possible to tell them apart and to point out the difference to Marian Catholics who love their Church as much as they love their Mother.

       Does Fatima really and uniquely span our time, towering over Garabandal, Portavoz, San Damiano, Medjugorje and all the other imitations and frauds? We can point to two prophecies of St. Louis de Montfort which are decisive in settling this matter once and for all. St. Louis wrote in his book True Devotion to Mary:

1. “In the defeat of Antichrist the Ancient Prophecy of the crushing of Satan’s head by the Woman would at last be completely fulfilled”: and
2. “The evils of these times will culminate in Antichrist”.

       This last prophecy sets Fatima apart from all its rivals. If Fatima is as unique as God wants it to be, then it is here that one has to look for the answer. It is from these two prophecies that Catholics would have been in a position to spot the deviations from Fatima in all the other so called ‘revelations’ because false prophets do not adhere to St. Louis’ timetable. For they are all full of atomic warfare, global annihilations as punishments, and then ... nothing, just a period of peace. And then somehow Antichrist.

       But if this timetable of events does not come from God since the ‘apparitions’ which peddle it lack any Supernatural foundation, then there remains only Fatima to be linked with the crushing of Satan’s head: the defeat of Antichrist. And that would then account for the unique importance of Fatima and for its singular place in history. For, if only Fatima decides authenticity, and only Fatima can be related to the culmination of our times in the evils under Antichrist and to their final defeat, then Fatima does not only span this century but all centuries right back to the First Prophecy in Paradise. That would be reason enough for Satan to do everything in his power to divert attention away from Fatima as from the assurance of his own defeat. And the best way to achieve that would be to make enough gullible catholics believe in his own ‘apparitions’ with their own contradictory timetable of global wars and annihilations. Because if this time table comes from the Devil then it can only mean that this world is not heading for annihilation but for enslavement, against which the faithful acceptance of the message of Fatima was meant to protect us, and from which Our Blessed Lady and Her faithful servants will eventually liberate us.

       These faithful servants are not those who, against authentic Catholic authority, promote fanciful ‘apparitions’ which according to that authority and according to their internal contradictions lack any Supernatural foundation. Such unauthorised ‘apparitions’ with their internal self-contradictions could not be believed and promoted without the committing of sins of presumption, credulity, disobedience and pride which, as we saw, fly in the face of the foremost request of Our Lady at Fatima to all humanity: “Stop sinning!” “Stop offending God”.

       The starting point for an overall understanding of this strange phenomenon: that otherwise orthodox Catholics fall for these false manifestations in such great numbers, must be sought and found in the combination of two facts:

1. in the fact that they were not caught in the coarse net that netted the devil the Modernists; a finer mesh had to be provided; and
2. in the fact that there is something wrong with these Catholics in their spiritual makeup to account for the fact that they got caught at all. For quite a number of Catholics have slipped through both nets!

       The systematic search for understanding demands that we disregard all the personal reasons these Catholics may have had for falling for fraud and deceit, and that we bring them under as few common denominators as possible. One of the most compelling reasons, to my mind, by which, if not all, then at least the greatest number of promoters of Garabandal and other false apparitions find themselves thrown together is that false apparitions offer them an escape. To understand this we must appreciate that many of the more serious-minded Catholics have a premonition of difficult times ahead for the Church when being a Catholic means being a member of an ‘endangered species’. And with everybody else, they do not relish the thoughts of persecutions.

       Now Catholics who are attached to this world, who have disregarded the requests of Our Lady at Fatima, who have driven a wedge between those strong requests and the minimum demands made by the Catholic Church; who have not sufficient oil in their lamps to last the long distance and see the dark night of persecutions through, and who feel themselves threatened by the foreboding of approaching disasters, such Catholics, who remain unwilling to err on the side of generosity and so, rather than change themselves, are prepared to change the circumstances: such Catholics are wide open for an escape: for a message that makes them essentially sightseers, passive spectators on a global theatre of the devastation which – according to those false messages – are going to befall wicked humanity, but which will pass them by because of their ‘love’ for ‘our lady of Garabandal’ or for ‘our lady of Medjugorje’.

       The essence of Fatima is diametrically opposed to this: long before God is going to punish this world He is going to allow the evildoers to lay hands on Catholics and to persecute the Church for the salvation of sinners. This demands that these Catholics, in the intervening years since Fatima, prepare themselves by daily immolation in voluntary victimhood in readiness for this holocaust. And that is the main, if not the exclusive, reason why so many of these Catholics were unhappy with Fatima, were readily prepared to ignore it, were only too willing to accept that the Church had watered down devotion to Our Lady and consequently only too pleased to be able to embrace ‘apparitions’ which pointed away from themselves and directed ‘fire’ at the evildoers. As fully paid up members of the ‘salvation club’ they had it made. They had nothing to fear from the evil times ahead and all that remained to be done was to make sure that suitable lipservice was paid to Our Lady of Fatima, while ensuring that nevertheless the ‘escape message’ of Garabandal would reach the greatest possible number of other uneasy Catholics; to sign them up for the ‘salvation club’ called ‘Scapular’, and to make them join the group of passive sightseers, all eagerly awaiting in their box seats the famous ‘warning’: that signal for the devastation of the wicked. It could not be more anti-Catholic and truly diabolical.

       The attainment of this self induced state of paralysis in the face of evil is an explicit and persistent theme of Fr Gobbi’s ‘messages’. The ‘message’ for July 16, 1976 is one example that illustrates the truth of this diabolical thrust: “... I say again, Pay no attention to all the evil which is spreading more and more and flooding everywhere. Disregard also the great evil which Satan is succeeding in spreading even in the Church.” In other words: do nothing to oppose evil because you are fully paid up members of the salvation club due to your ‘consecration’. Sit back and watch the show because soon Jesus is returning to earth to wipe out the evildoers so that you, because of your faithful fulfilling of your ‘consecration’, can live peacefully in a ‘new world’ and take charge in a ‘new church’.

       Unfortunately for these poor souls all ‘doctrines’ of millenairianism, including Gobbi’s version, contradict Catholic Teaching and are condemned by Holy Mother Church. It is truly blasphemous for Fr. Gobbi to specify the wiping out of evildoers as the “fulfilment of the Fatima message” and as the “triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary”. His ‘escape’ route leads spectators to the same grandstand as Garabandal and Medjugorje. No wonder he believes in both these frauds.

       All ‘apparitions’ and ‘messages’ that are aimed at making their recipients passive spectators of the increase of evil stand condemned under the immortal words of Pope St. Pius X: “Evil triumphs because good men do nothing”. And to try to make Our Lady the instigator of this triumph of evil, as Fr. Gobbi and all the others do with their ‘escape’ route, is a totally abhorrent, anti-Catholic and truly Satanic plot.

First written: November 1985
Revised: July 2004.