The other week at a going-away party for my one (Irish) (artist) friend and her boyfriend, I cornered this (Portuguese) grad student who I had met before, and I grilled him and his visiting (Portuguese) friend about what they know about Fatima:
1) Supposedly attendance at the annual pilgrimage is like 1 million, and Portugal only has like 10 million people (I haven't checked these numbers; I'm just repeating them). People they know who have gone have been relatively normal, and not like some Catholic crazies.
They also knew the basic outline of the apparition narrative, including the date of the final miracle, just from being Portuguese.
2) I guess there's this saying in Portugal, that the "3 Fs of the Portuguese dictatorship" were:
- football.
- fado (=traditional music).
- Fatima.
As they said, those were what distracted people from looking at what was really going on, and doing anything.
3) One of them had heard that some (Portuguese) priest went and recently wrote an entire book debunking the apparitions; he was so disgusted by the modern apparition industry, they said, that he went back and examined early accounts and came up with this whole expose/.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment