Fatima: the story of 'the miracle of the sun'

(Vatican Radio) As a Marian weekend takes place here in the Vatican, in the context of the Year of Faith, the original statue of Our Lady of Fatima will be brought here on Saturday 12th of October for the occasion.
A statue with a precious crown which famously has the bullet with which Blessed John Paul II was shot at in Saint Peter’s Square encased in it. You may remember how the date of this attempt on his life took place on the 13^th of May, the same date as that of the first apparition of Our Lady to the three Fatima shepherd children back in 1917. And how this Polish Pontiff believed it was through her intercession that his life had been spared on that occasion. Hence his symbolic gesture of encasing the bullet in the crown as a sign of thanksgiving for the grace received.
But on Saturday this statue is back in Saint Peter’s Square on another significant date regarding the Fatima apparitions : the 13^th of October. The date when in 1917 Our Lady appeared to the three shepherd children from the hamlet of Aljustrel for the final time, in what is known as ‘the miracle of the sun ‘ .
At the time the three children, Francisco, Jacinta and Lucia, had predicted that a miracle would take place on that spot, at that particular time, “so that everyone would believe”, in a message which they had received from heaven.
The Bishop of Fatima of the day wrote in his Pastoral Letter on the Miracle: “thousands upon thousands of persons…saw all the manifestations of the sun…a phenomenon which no astronomical observatory registered and thus was not natural…persons of every category and social class, believers and unbelievers as well as journalists of the principal Portuguese newspapers..”
In this programme, written by Jill Bevilacqua and produced by Sean Patrick Lovett, we tell the story of ‘The Miracle of the Sun”…
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