It had every hallmark of a Catholic Glastonbury: hundreds and hundreds of tents pitched on grass verges just a three-minute walk from the Basilica of Our Lady of the Rosary.This was my first ever visit to Fatima, an important staging post on a mission to make a film for the BBC on Pope Benedict XVI to be shown prior to his visit to Britain this September.
Among the pilgrims was Jose Nunes and his family of four. With the Pope’s arrival less than two hours away, they speedily packed away their cooking pots, groundsheets and tent poles.
“How long have you been coming to Fatima?” I asked.
“For more than 20 years.”
“And why?”
Jose looked at me as though I was an idiot.
“Every time you come, you leave with your soul relieved of its burdens,” he told me. This family were made of serious mettle. They had walked more than 85 miles with all their gear. Opposite them, a man nearly blind, Victor Rodrigues, poked his head out of a tent flap. Through the early morning drizzle I put the same question to him.
“I’ve only discovered Fatima recently, “ he said. “This is my third visit here this year. I meet wonderful, inspired people. They are now part of my family.”
Not for the first time in my BBC filming career has this cerebral rationalist found himself transported to a totally different place by the devotion and testimony of people with the power of belief. Uncannily, Pope Benedict had been elaborating on such themes on the papal plane on his journey over to Portugal with the Vatican press corps. Asked how faith was meant to be proclaimed in a secular world which is indifferent – nay, hostile – to the Church, the Pope avoided neat glib soundbites and waxed lyrical on what has become one of his favourite themes, the limits of human reason. “To think that there’s a pure reason… which exists entirely in itself is an error.” He added: “Reason, as such, is open to transcendence, and only in the meeting between transcendent reality, faith and history is human life fully realised.”
The Holy Father may have thought that, after the recent wave of sex abuse stories in the press, he might have been due a bit of a break on his visit to Fatima. After all, Portugal was, unlike Ireland, Germany and Austria, not reeling from an explosion of new cases. Moreover, he was coming here on May 13, the anniversary of the Virgin Mary’s first appearance to Lúcia, Jacinta and Francisco, the shepherd children, a time for devotion and reflection surely? Well, never underestimate the dexterity and persistence of the press pack to make juxtapositions between the most unpromising of apparently unrelated points. “Did the Holy Father think that there was any link between the third secret of Fatima with its mention of the future sufferings of the Church and its present plight in the paedophile priests scandal?”
he was asked on the plane.
I’d have understood if the Pope had batted this one into touch, but it is the hallmark of this present Bishop of Rome to practise what he preaches, and attempt dialogue, even in the most unlikely of situations. He spoke of the crisis as being “really terrifying” (and this is not a man usually given to hyperbole).
“The greatest persecution of the Church doesn’t come from enemies on the outside,” he said, “but is born in sin within the Church.” I wonder what cardinals Sodano and Bertone make of that. They are two highly influential individuals who have been very quick to highlight what they see as the persecutory nature of some of the media in recent months.
Leaving the press pack and an invited audience of Portuguese intellectuals behind him the Pope appeared in the main square at Fatima to a tumultuous welcome.
By sheer luck I got an eagle’s eye view of him as he swept by, owing to the fact that a security man had seen our BBC badges and ushered us up on to a platform some 15 feet away from the passing vehicle. For a man said to be shy and self-effacing, it is clear that the former Cardinal Ratzinger is clearly relaxing into the public role of being leader of the world’s biggest organised religion.
After his election in 2005 many said that he lacked the pulling power of his predecessor.
But I wonder whether something isn’t going on here that may well have implications for his visit here in September.
A beaming Fr Lombardi, the Holy See’s press spokesman, appeared elated at the huge crowds packing the enormous square.
“The organisers themselves weren’t expecting such large numbers,” he said.
Other observers noted that the estimated half a million people was a bigger turnout than in the year 2000 when John Paul II was the last pontiff to visit.
Could it be that Catholics, feeling under siege from an aggressive secularist lobby, are just voting with their feet and standing up to be counted? Will we see the same scenes in Coventry on September 19 at the beatification ceremony for Cardinal John Henry Newman?
In my wonderful vantage point high above the crowd, I marvelled: First, at the array of flags and faces. this was the Universal Church gathered as I had never seen it before in my life. Then, at the linguistic talents of the Pope.
Here is a leader who addresses his various flocks in his native German, French, English, Spanish, Italian, Latin – and now Portuguese.
He quoted one of his favourite passages from his beloved Confessions of St Augustine, that “God is more deeply present to me than I am to myself”. This God, he reminded a totally silent audience, “has the power to come to us, particularly through out inner senses, so that the soul can receive the gentle touch of a reality which is beyond the senses”. This can only happen if we “cultivate an interior watchfulness of the heart”.
It was pure Benedict. He had done all the clever cultural stuff back in Lisbon. But here he was, asserting in front of the largest gathering Portugal has seen in living memory, the second and vital part of the equation: the transcendence that complements reason. The core of the Fatima communication – penance and reorientation of the human heart back to God – is the keystone of that message.
This was the Pope’s 15th international outing since April 2005 and the ninth to a European destination.
As the veteran Vaticanista, John Allen notes, all five trips this year are within the European continent and, whether by chance or design, they appear to be in order of escalating difficulty, starting with compliant and devout Malta last month, and culminating in testing visits to Britain in September and in November, a Spain that has well and truly laid Franco’s ghost to rest with a new culture that boasts gay marriage and liberal abortion laws.
I wonder whether, as he pondered the legacy of Fatima and its promise of the conversion of Russia, the Pope now sees the net needing to be widened. In Rome last month, I met an Italian senator, Marcello Pera, who co-authored the 2004 book Without Roots with the then Cardinal Ratzinger.
The senator told me that the Pope “despaired” at the spiritual state of Europe, a Europe which boasts secularists who are blind to the Judaeo-Christian roots of human rights language and much that they hold to be dear. It’s not that our leader wants to bludgeon these people into a submission of conversion. It’s a much more subtle message than that.
True to his title, as the Pontifex, the bridge-builder, what the Vicar of Christ is arguing for is for the secular mind to acknowledge the inescapable aspect of that yearning for transcendence in the heart of man that would proffer more respect and engagement with the world of faith. The real danger in the multicultural world we now live in is of a chasm opening up between these two worlds.
In his own words: “I think the mission of Europe in this situation is to find a path to this dialogue, to integrate faith, rationality and modernity in a single anthropological vision of the concrete human person and render that vision for the future of humanity.”
This is no mean task. The recent talk of a newly created Pontifical Council for the New Evangelisation with responsibilities for Europe and America is surely part and parcel of this emerging picture.
Benedict XVI is fond of quoting Arnold Toynbee’s “the fate of a society always depends on its creative minorities”.
I will be very surprised if this does not become a main theme during his visit to Britain.
This Pope measures the spiritual health of his Church less by quantity of lukewarm adherents than by the quality, however small, of people whose lives reflect that dynamic of reason touched by the loving power of the heart of God, which is at the heart of creation.
After seeing Pope Benedict first hand in fine form at Fatima, I expect that we shall see a call to arms in four months’ time.
SIC: TCHUK