OCTOBER 13, 1917: THE MIRACLE OF THE SUN IN FATIMA PORTUGAL

Magiliw na inaalala ng buong ka-Kristianuhan sa tunay na Iglesia ni Cristo ang mga pangyayari noong ika-13 ng Oktubre taong 1917 sa Fatima, Portugal kung saan ang Mahal na Inang Birheng Maria ay nagpakita sa tatlong paslit na pastol ~ Sina Santa Lucia, Santa Jacinta at San Francisco ~ na may mensahe ng pag-asa.

Makatutulong ang mga artikulo sa ibaba upang lalo nating maunawaan ang totoong pangyayari noong panahong iyon, magtika, magbalik-loob sa Diyos, manalangin, at gumawa ng mga mabubuting bagay para sa Diyos at sa kanyang bayan ~ ang bayang kanyang hinirang ~ Iglesia Katolika, nag-iisa, banal, pangkalahatang Iglesia ni Cristo.

• How the Miracle of the Sun dazzled the sceptics
• Miracle of the Sun
• The story of Fatima: the apparitions, the miracles and the journey to sainthood
• 100 Years of Fatima 
• Our Lady of Fatima: The Virgin Mary promised three kids a miracle that 70,000 gathered to see 
• 'Miracle of the sun' broke darkness of Portugal's atheist regimes 
• The modern miracle of Fatima

MAHAL NA BIRHEN NG FATIMA, IPANALANGIN MO KAMI!

Our Lady of Good Help: The Only Approved Apparition in the United States

This is the only officially recognized Marian apparition in the United States
By Larry Peterson | Jul 28, 2016

Source: Aleteia

The deadliest fire in U.S. history was no match for the Blessed Mother

On October 8, 1871, in or around a place called Peshtigo, Wisconsin, several men were setting small fires in the woods. This was a common practice in clearing land for expanding railroads or for expanding farm land. Except, on this particular day, something unexpected happened. A cold front moved into the area creating winds that were close to hurricane force. The winds fanned the flames and the resulting Peshtigo Firestorm still can claim the ignominious title as the “deadliest wildfire” in American history.

To this day, no wildfire in the U.S. has ever caused more deaths. It is estimated close to 2,500 people perished in the raging 2,000-degree inferno. But there is an incredible side-bar to this story. Miraculously, there was a small group of people who were not harmed at all and they were right in the middle of the blaze. They were with Adele Brise.

Adele Brise was 24 years old when she arrived in Wisconsin with her parents from Belgium in 1855. A devout Catholic, Adele had a great devotion to the Blessed Mother and prayed daily. On Sunday, October 2, 1859, Adele was walking home through the woods when she saw a woman clothed in white standing between a hemlock and a maple tree. The woman was encased in a bright light and had a yellow sash around her waist. A crown of stars was above her long, blond hair. Adele, filled with fear, began praying and the vision disappeared. She told her mom and dad about it and they told her that maybe it was a soul in need of prayers.

The following Sunday, Adele was on her way to Mass with her sister and another woman when she saw the apparition a second time. But her sister and friend, who were walking a bit ahead of her, did not see anything. As Adele returned from Mass, the Lady appeared to her for the third time. Adele, who had confided in her parish priest about the mysterious lady, did as he had told her. She asked the Lady the question, “In the Name of God, who are you and what do you wish of me?”

The Lady answered, “I am the Queen of Heaven who prays for the conversion of sinners and I wish you to do the same. You received Holy Communion this morning and that is well. But you must do more. Make a general confession and offer Communion for the conversion of sinners… Gather the children in this wild country and teach them what they should know for salvation.”

The Virgin Mary's Apparition in Zeitun (Egypt) - 1968

Virgin Mary Apparition Caught on Camera

Narinig niyo na ba ang tungkol sa "Our Lady of Zeitoun'?

Malamang, hindi masyadong pamilyar sa inyong pandinig ang salitang "ZEITOUN'.  Ito ay isang lugar sa bansang EGYPT. 

Ano naman ang kahalagahan ng salitang "Zeitoun" sa ating pananampalatayang Kristianismo? Kung alam ninyo ang kwento ng 'FATIMA' (Portugal) o ng 'LOURDES' (France), magkakaroon kayo ng interest na alamin ito sapagkat ito ay nangyari lamang kamakailan-- NOONG 1968 lamang!

Witnessed by Millions: The Confounding Apparition of Our Lady of Zeitoun

by ChurchPOP Editor

via faithofthefathersapparitions.blogspot.com / ChurchPOP

Israel had just prevailed in the Six-Day War the previous year. Egypt lost the Sinai Peninsula to Israel. On both sides, passions were high and people were scared. The whole Middle East was in turmoil.

And it was in the midst of this chaos that Our Lady appeared.

[See also: The Earliest Alleged Marian Apparition Dates to… A.D. 40]

[See also: The Night Charles Dickens Was Haunted By the Spirit of… the Virgin Mary?]

It was the evening of April 2, 1968. A Muslim bus mechanic named Farouk Mohammed Atwa was working across the street from St. Mary Coptic Church in Zeitoun, a district of Cairo, Egypt. The church is revered as one of the locations Christians believe the Holy Family stayed during their flight to Egypt.

Suddenly, something on the roof of St. Mary’s caught his eye: a figure that appeared to be a young woman. He pointed it out to a few people nearby who saw the same thing. Worried that someone was about ready to commit suicide, they called the local police. A crowd gathered to watch the spectacle. Then, after just a few minutes, the beautiful figure quickly vanished.

Over the next few days, everyone was talking about it. Who was it? Where did she go? What did it mean? The police said it was just some light reflecting in a weird way from a street light – but the crowd knew that wasn’t the case.

Then, exactly one week later, on April 9th, the figure appeared again! Like the first time, she stuck around only for a few minutes before disappearing. And it started to dawn on people what was going on: it was the Blessed Virgin Mary!

Here is a picture (also see article picture at the top):

via zeitun-eg.org

She started appearing more frequently, sometimes staying around for hours at a time. She sometimes appeared to be bowing toward the cross on the church or blessing those watching on the streets below. And sometimes there appeared around her what some took to be doves of light.

Here is a picture of some of the purported doves:

via zeitun-eg.org

Huge crowds flocked to see her. Church officials, government officials, scientists, believers, and skeptics all saw her. The President of Egypt at the time, President Gamal Abdel Nasser, visited the site and saw the apparition. TV crews captured it on film. Newspapers took pictures and wrote stories about the phenomenon. The police did another thorough investigation, but came up short: they could find no natural or human explanation.

Egyptian Gazette of Friday, April 11, 1969 / via zeitun-eg.org

Soon, the head of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria, Pope Kyrillos VI of Alexandria launched an investigation. At the same time, a group of Catholic nuns who saw the apparition sent a report to the Vatican, who in turn sent their own team to investigate, and who also the apparition. Because the apparition was on a Coptic church, though, the Vatican decided to let the Coptic Church officials make a ruling.

Which they did on May 5th, 1968: the apparition was real!

But that’s not all: the Egyptian government also did an investigation and, amazingly, publicly accepted the apparitions to be real as well.

In all, the apparition was witnessed by somewhere between hundreds of thousands and millions of people, until Mary appeared for the last time in 1971.

Here’s a short video about the apparition:

Our Lady of Zeitoun, pray for us!

Dahil sa Di-Maipaliwanag na Himala, Isang Agnostic Scientist, Nagbalik-loob sa Iglesia

Narito ang isang kuwento ng himala na nangyari sa Lourdes, France... Mula sa ChurchPop:

Alexis Carrel was born into a Catholic family in a small town in France in 1873. He attended Mass regularly and went to Catholic schools run by Jesuits. Unfortunately, by the time he went to college he was an agnostic. He completely rejected the Catholic faith and wasn’t even sure if there was a God.

However, he wouldn’t stay that way. And an extraordinary miracle from Lourdes helped lead him back.

As an agnostic, Carrel studied biology and medicine and went on to become a world famous scientist. He developed a way to allow organs to live outside the body, a huge step toward organ transplants, and he developed new techniques for cleaning wounds. Most importantly, though, he invented techniques for suturing large blood vessels, which earned him a Nobel Prize in 1912.

This is why his opinion about alleged miracles at Lourdes mattered so much.

Although the original apparitions at Lourdes had occurred in 1858, people in the early 20th century (as they are today) were still claiming to be cured by the water there. Despite the large number of alleged cures, the French medical establishment was firmly against the possibility that anything supernatural was happening.

Carrel himself was also a strong skeptic. That is, until he met a girl named Marie Bailly.

He was on a train to Lourdes with a doctor friend to see the hysteria for himself in 1902 when he came across Bailly, who apparently had something called tuberculous peritonitis. It was a fatal disease. She was only half-conscious and had a swelled belly. Trying to help, Carrel gave her morphine, but said he didn’t think she’d even survive the rest of the trip to Lourdes. Other doctors on the train came to the same conclusion.

When they arrived, her friends carried her to the grotto, and three pitchers of water from Lourdes was poured on her. With each pour, she said felt a searing pain throughout her body. To the amazement of the doctors present, her belly started to flatten back to a normal size almost immediately and her pulse returned to a normal rate.

By that evening, she was well enough to eat a normal dinner.

The scientist in Carrel didn’t know what to make of it all. He had to admit that everything he knew about medicine made it seem like her cure was indeed miraculous. But he knew that publicly claiming to have witnessed a miracle would ruin his career. So he just stayed quiet about it all. He didn’t even want people to know he had gone to Lourdes.

However, Bailly’s cure quickly became national news. News outlets reported that Carrel had been present, but that he didn’t think there was anything miraculous about what happened. This wasn’t exactly accurate, so he was forced to publish a public reply. In it, he scolded religious believers for generally being too quick to claim something unusual was miraculous, but he also criticized the medical establishment for ruling out the possibility of miracles, saying that Bailly may indeed have been cured miraculously.

This was a public scandal! How could someone so steeped in science and so accomplished in medicine say that Bailly’s cure might have been miraculous? His career in France was over. Unable to work in hospitals any longer, he moved to Canada, and eventually the United States. He joined the Rockefeller Institute of Medical Research in New York and spent the rest of his career there. (Marie Bailly, for her part, joined a convent.)

So he had been convinced the woman’s cure could have been miraculous – what did that mean for him spiritually?

He didn’t know what to do with it exactly, since fully admitting to himself that he had witnessed a true miracle at Lourdes would require him to rethink his religious beliefs (or lack thereof).

It took him 25 years of working it out in his heart and mind, but finally, in 1939, he decided to meet with a Catholic priest in order to seriously consider returning to the Church. They became friends, and three years later he announced, “I believe in the existence of God, in the immortality of the soul, in Revelation and in all the Catholic Church teaches.”

And just two years after that, he died. But not without receiving Last Rites on his deathbed.

God had brought him back just in time.

Pray for Alexis Carrel, may he rest in peace!

KAABANG-ABANG! Fatima Miracle Story to Be Made Into Major Hollywood Film

by ChurchPOP Editor -

Andreas Praefcke, Wikipedia / ChurchPOP

Maybe Hollywood is finally realizing that the Christian faith has some great stories?

According to Variety, a few major indie film companies (including the company behind Pan’s Labyrinth) have teamed up to create a film version of the Fatima apparitions.

Though casting has not yet been announced, they plan to start filming this summer and hopefully release the film next Spring for the 100th anniversary of the supernatural events. There are already plans to have a special Mass in a cathedral near the Cannes film festival next year for the project.

Fatima is a small town in Portugal in which three children claimed to have visions of the Blessed Virgin Mary in 1917. The series of visions culminated with a crowd of thousands witnessing a “miracle of the sun” on a day predicted by the children.