“Fatima after a Hundred Years: God’s Mother Speaks a Crucial Message Then and Now,” by Alfred Hanley, commemorates the centennial of the momentous apparition of Our Lady of the Rosary to three Portuguese peasant children in 1917.
The work demonstrates how compellingly relevant God’s Mother’s prophetic words remain even a century later - about the grave need for repentance, sacrifice and prayer, and devotion to her Immaculate Heart to avert a gathering chastisement upon a world increasingly degenerate.
What makes this study significantly unique, however, is its exposition of how Mary’s landmark forewarnings at Fatima were - in their specificity, global import, and dire urgency - unprecedented in her thirty-six Church approved visitations before Fatima, but emphatically reiterated in the last seven of her Church authenticated appearances after Fatima.
In making the case for Fatima as a watershed event, this study summarizes the messages of all thirty-six Marian apparitions preceding Fatima, identifying their common characteristics as they critically differ from those of Fatima. Then it closely examines the messages of Mary in her seven latest apparitions following Fatima – focusing on Our Lady of All Nations in The Netherlands (1945) as it substantially expands upon the prophecies of Fatima – and observes their common elements as together they advance the urgent appeals of Our Lady of Fatima.
There is no other comprehensive study of all of Mary's Church affirmed apparitional messages as they both compare and contrast, in an essential way, with those of Fatima.
With interest in Marian apparitions running so high today, this work should prove instructional and edifying to both the devoted and the curious. And in a time when there have been hundreds of alleged and many ecclesiastically disapproved Marian apparitions, especially helpful for the guidance of the faithful is the book's thorough treatment of the Vatican's official rules for the discernment and approval of “private revelations.”
Written in a graceful, lucid style – and with heartfelt faith – the book quotes generously from the Blessed Mother's many words and tells in detail of the various personae and images by which she communicates her heavenly messages through two millennia. Such rich detail should well enhance the reader’s appreciation and, indeed, experience of Mary’s complex character yet simple and tender, maternal love for us, so signally evident at Fatima.
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