Fátima: the reception by catholic newspapers

Abstract

With this article we studied the reception in the Portuguese catholic movement of the Fátima marian visions (May to October 1917). The debate in the main catholic diary of those days (A Ordem) is the starting point of your study, which deals also in some detail with the way in which the pilgramages of the 1920s are reported in Novidades (the sucessor of the former as the national catholic diary). Your objective is to grasp how - before the eclesiastical authorities made their positive position clear (through the pastoral letter of October 1930 by the bishop of Leiria) - Fátima was coopted into the arsenal of catholic militancy, how that shaped in a certain way the image of Fátima, and what all this can tell us about the dominant ways of thinking, sensabilities and strategies in that milieu.