Miracle of the Sun - October 13, 1917

On this day in 1917, a crowd of thousands of people gathered in Fátima, Portugal, to witness a miracle, and many reported seeing unusual solar activity that became known as the Miracle of the Sun.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The Day in History Class is production of I Heart Radio.
Hello Again. I'm Eves and you're listening to this Day
in History Class, a show where we drop history knowledge
every single day. Today is October nineteen. The day was

(00:24):
October nineteen seventeen. A crowd of about seventy thousand people
reported having seen what became known as the Miracle of
the Sun in Fatima, Portugal. Witnesses gave conflicting accounts of
unusual solar activity, but analysis suggested that the phenomenon had
a psychological explanation. In early nineteen seventeen, three Shepherd children

(00:49):
who lived near Fatima said that they had begun seeing
apparitions of an angel and may. They said that they
saw an apparition of the Virgin Mary and Covada idea,
and she said that she would reappear to them on
the thirteenth day of the next six months. The children
told their parents about the apparitions. As words spread around

(01:11):
the town, some people believed the children, while others didn't.
Either way, people began flocking to Fatima to witness a
Virgin Mary sighting. After their third reported sighting, the children
said that the Virgin Mary told them three secrets about
the future. Of course, their sightings stirred up a lot

(01:32):
of controversy in secular and religious circles. A state authority
took the children into custody and tried to get them
to deny the legitimacy of their claims, but they did
not recant, and newspapers continued to pick up the story
of the Virgin Mary sightings as thousands more people made
the pilgrimage to the Koba da Idea fields. The most

(01:55):
anticipated of the visits was the one on October thirteenth,
since the Virgin Mary reportedly told the children that a
miracle would happen that day. Estimates of the number of
people present at the covid Idea fields ranged from around
thirty thousand up to one hundred thousand. The people in
the crowd claimed that they saw a miracle as they

(02:17):
looked at the sun, but what they actually reported being
buried wildly. Some people said the sun came out from
behind rain clouds and danced around the sky. Some said
it changed colors. Others said that the sun moved towards
Earth in a zig zag motion. Still, other people present

(02:38):
said that the sun did not do anything extraordinary. The
event was said to have lasted for ten minutes. Thirteen
years later to the day, the Catholic Church recognized the
event as a miracle that was worthy of belief and
approved the devotion to Our Lady of Fatima. While some
people believe in a supernatural explanation for the miracle of

(03:00):
the Sun, others explained it away with science. Besides general
disbelief in miracles and skepticism, critics doubted the occurrence of
any unexplained solar phenomenon because many people did not see
anything happen, and those who did did not agree on
what they saw. One explanation of the event was that

(03:20):
it was an optical illusion caused by staring at the
sun for too long. Others positive that the pilgrims had
been expecting a miracle to happen, so they saw one.
Still others suggested that it had something to do with
the weather or atmosphere in the area at that particular time.
The Church claimed that it was a supernatural event, and

(03:42):
so did many believers, but many skeptics set the event
is better explained as a psychological phenomenon. Lucia Jesus dos Santos,
the girl who saw the visions of the Virgin Mary
became a calmer light nun and stood by her story
her entire life. Her two younger cousin who also reported
seeing the apparitions, decent To and Francisco Marto, died of

(04:05):
the flue not long after the apparitions began coming to them.
Decent To and Francisco were canonized in TV. I'm is
Chef Cote and hopefully you know a little more about
history today than you did yesterday. No any fellow history
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