Where is Jesus?

Fatima (2020), directed by Marco Pontecorvo, is due to be released on UK streaming services on 25 June 2021.

Last week I watched Fatima with a small group of guests staying at the L’Abri community where I live and work. Fatima is a historical drama based on the alleged miraculous appearances of the Virgin Mary in 1917 to three peasant children near the Portuguese town of Fatima. Over a period of six months Mary appeared to Lucia (10), Jacinta (7) and Francisco (9) – very believably acted by Stephanie Gil, Alejandra Howard and Jorge Lamelas – and revealed three secrets; a vision of hell, a prophesy of the imminent end of WWI, and a mysterious third secret concerning the murder of the Pope (which was only revealed by the Vatican in May 2000). As news of these Marian apparitions spread, people came from far and wide to be present at these monthly visitations, culminating in October 1917 when a crowd of around 70,000 gathered, some of whom claimed they witnessed the sun dancing in the sky.

The film starts by inviting us into a posture of doubt with a fictional Professor Nichols (Harvey Keitel) visiting the aged Lucia (Sonia Braga) in a Carmelite monastery in 1989 (Lucia became a nun in 1928 and died in 2005, the other two children having perished in the 1919-20 influenza pandemic). Nichols is a rationalist debunker of miracles, and the film cuts back and forth from the events of 1917 to his inquisition of the older Lucia. Nichols, however, is not the only doubter that Lucia and the children face. Lucia’s pious and hard-to-please mother (Lucia Moniz) is embarrassed by her daughter’s claims, and the local mayor (Goran Visnjic) briefly imprisons the children rather than have them spread primitive superstition when their community should be embracing the forward-thinking ideas of the recently formed Portuguese Republic. I was disappointed that the conversations between Nichols and Lucia didn’t go anywhere, leaving me wondering whether the film was really interested in exploring the truth or just holding up straw men. On the other hand, I couldn’t help but admire the tenacity of the three children, whose simple faith stood firm when surrounded by adult doubt.

Cinematographically, Fatima suffers from the difficulty of all films which try to portray the supernatural; how do you show something that is numinous without falling into cliche? The film attempts this through sweeping shots, light refractions, wind in trees and tinkling bells, but this often ended up a distraction from the human drama that is unfolding. The rural poverty of Portugal also seemed too Little House on the Prairie for my liking, but perhaps the 12 rating was responsible.

So what is this film attempting to communicate? Fatima has become one of the most visited Catholic pilgrimage sites in Europe, and Jacinta and Francisco were canonised in 2017, the 100th anniversary of the appearances. As the final credits roll to Andrea Bocelli singing Gratia Plena, ‘Full of Grace’, words from the Hail Mary rosary prayer, the film clearly wants to encourage us towards a position of faith rather than doubt. This seems a worthwhile challenge to our contemporary culture which has met the coronavirus crisis with medical science and statistics but undertaken very little deeper questioning. But the issue of faith also formed my discomfort with Fatima.

In her apparitions, Mary told the children that their suffering would atone for the sins of the people. In one scene the child Lucia spends all night crawling across stony ground on her knees whilst praying the rosary, to be greeted in the morning with the news that her mother has recovered from a near-fatal illness and her brother, missing in action on the Western Front, has been found alive and well. Perhaps I am just a narrow-minded Protestant struggling to understand Catholic theology, but this spirituality seemed very far from the gospel of grace that I have found so dear. Which might be why as the film progressed, despite believing in miracles, I strangely found myself siding with Professor Nichols rather than Sister Lucia. ‘Have you ever asked yourself why the divinities that appear in apparitions always match the traditional iconography of the culture in which they appear?’ he asks. I wondered the same thing, especially as the apparition of Mary was very white rather than the Semitic-looking woman she surely would have been.

I realised that my discomfort with Fatima was not so much around the issue of faith, but with what I was being asked to have faith in? The children’s truthfulness? The Virgin Mary and the rosary? The miracle of the sun? It wasn’t until one of the others watching asked, ‘Where is Jesus?’, that I noticed the true object of faith was strangely missing from this film.