After an embarrassing conversation with a friend, in which I wasn't able to offer up a single halfway convincing reason why she should listen to me and take Christianity seriously, I thought it might be time to lay out why I've come to believe.
Thank you for this thorough, interesting look into Christianity, Stephen! Your last paragraph is especially beautiful and true: sometimes, despite all the best rationales for or against, we just believe.
The cases of the martyrs, I think, are especially remarkable... to believe and trust in something so much, you're willing to die for it. There's actually research that says there are more Christian martyrs now, than any other time in history. To this day, Christians account for 75% of those who face some form of religious persecution (https://www.churchinneed.org/christian-persecution/).
So, not only have there been those who have died for this belief, there are still those who are dying for it, and those who still choose it despite knowing it could cost them and their families, their lives. Even if that doesn't lead someone to the same belief, one has to stop and wonder at the strength of that belief.
That, in some way, brings me to my answer as to why I have believed and continue to still... Jesus has just been too good and prsent in my life for me to believe anything else.
That doesn't mean my life has been easy or without difficulty, but through whatever has come, at whatever stage in my faith development, there's always been a sense of Someone / Something else walking with me through it all...
I find it both sobering and inspirational to think about all that the martyrs throughout history have endured for their faith.
Regarding your last paragraph: one of the things that first made me start to doubt my atheism was a realization that I did have something in me, some kind of...wellspring that I could (and always did) turn to when the going got rough. This was early days, so I just thought of it as a minor anomaly that could easily be explained naturalistically. But I had to admit that it did kind of sound like this faith thing that Christians were always talking about.
Fatima is certainly interesting (writing as a non-Catholic). A ton of witnesses, albeit a lot of inconsistent accounts. Does the Catholic Church publish why it validates some apparitions/miracles as worthy of belief and others not? Or does it just publish its conclusions?
For me, the thing I have the hardest time explaining isn't the number of witnesses per se (although that is hard to account for), it's the fact that people saw the miracle in such widely separated locations, and without any expectation that it would involve the sun (or that there would be a miracle at all).
"One youth, who was to become Father Ignatius Pererira, sat in a village school about six miles away from Fatima. His teacher rushed out of the their classroom, followed by the pupils, when a roar went up from villagers outside the school. They stood transfixed, gaping at the antics of the sun, and most became terrified when it zigzagged and came plummeting down. He remembered one unbeliever who had earlier been jeering at the people going off to Fatima. He wrote, “Now he stood there as if paralyzed, stunned, staring at the heavens. I then saw him shake from head to foot, raise his hands to heaven and fall on his knees in the mud crying, ‘Holy Virgin, Holy Virgin’.” This testimony appeared in Professor G. da Forseca’s 1943 book about Fatima
Joaquim Lourenco, who later became a priest and a canon lawyer in the diocese of Leiria, was a pupil at the same school. He witnessed the sun spectacle with Pereira, their teacher and the whole school. He and Pereira are featured in John Haffert’s book Meet the Witnesses, two of the two hundred witnesses personally interviewed by Haffert in the course of his research. (213)
One retorted that it was obviously a case of crowd hysteria and mass hallucination. However, Formigao pointed out that no one had been expecting a solar miracle; no one was even thinking about it. He was soon able to quote people in distant villages who saw the phenomenon independently of any links with the crowd. A number of these would eventually testify in print. A well-known Portuguese author, the Marquis de Cruz, published The Virgin of Fatima in 1937. He first quoted eye-witnesses who were at Fatima on October 13… Then he quoted “the brilliant poet Alfonso Lopes Viera”, with whom he visited the evening of October 30, 1935, on the balcony of the poet’s home in San Pedro der Muel, thirty miles from Fatima. “On October 13, 1917, I had forgotten about the prediction of the three shepherd children when I was surprised and charmed by a spectacle in the skies”, Viera told de Cruz. “It was truly astounding, and I’ve never so much as heard of anything similar to what I watched from this balcony.” (214)"
As for your question: annoyingly, no, I can't find any published reports of miracle investigations, just the conclusions (although I didn't do a thorough search). There's plenty of articles floating around talking about the investigation procedure in general (e.g. https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/08/31/491937448/how-the-catholic-church-documented-mother-teresas-two-miracles), but I'd like to read about particular cases, in detail, from official Church documents if possible. If there are such documents floating around that anyone reading this can point me towards, let me know.
Thank you for this thorough, interesting look into Christianity, Stephen! Your last paragraph is especially beautiful and true: sometimes, despite all the best rationales for or against, we just believe.
The cases of the martyrs, I think, are especially remarkable... to believe and trust in something so much, you're willing to die for it. There's actually research that says there are more Christian martyrs now, than any other time in history. To this day, Christians account for 75% of those who face some form of religious persecution (https://www.churchinneed.org/christian-persecution/).
So, not only have there been those who have died for this belief, there are still those who are dying for it, and those who still choose it despite knowing it could cost them and their families, their lives. Even if that doesn't lead someone to the same belief, one has to stop and wonder at the strength of that belief.
That, in some way, brings me to my answer as to why I have believed and continue to still... Jesus has just been too good and prsent in my life for me to believe anything else.
That doesn't mean my life has been easy or without difficulty, but through whatever has come, at whatever stage in my faith development, there's always been a sense of Someone / Something else walking with me through it all...
I find it both sobering and inspirational to think about all that the martyrs throughout history have endured for their faith.
Regarding your last paragraph: one of the things that first made me start to doubt my atheism was a realization that I did have something in me, some kind of...wellspring that I could (and always did) turn to when the going got rough. This was early days, so I just thought of it as a minor anomaly that could easily be explained naturalistically. But I had to admit that it did kind of sound like this faith thing that Christians were always talking about.
Fatima is certainly interesting (writing as a non-Catholic). A ton of witnesses, albeit a lot of inconsistent accounts. Does the Catholic Church publish why it validates some apparitions/miracles as worthy of belief and others not? Or does it just publish its conclusions?
For me, the thing I have the hardest time explaining isn't the number of witnesses per se (although that is hard to account for), it's the fact that people saw the miracle in such widely separated locations, and without any expectation that it would involve the sun (or that there would be a miracle at all).
From https://catholicbricks.com/2021/10/13/the-miracle-of-the-sun-2/:
"One youth, who was to become Father Ignatius Pererira, sat in a village school about six miles away from Fatima. His teacher rushed out of the their classroom, followed by the pupils, when a roar went up from villagers outside the school. They stood transfixed, gaping at the antics of the sun, and most became terrified when it zigzagged and came plummeting down. He remembered one unbeliever who had earlier been jeering at the people going off to Fatima. He wrote, “Now he stood there as if paralyzed, stunned, staring at the heavens. I then saw him shake from head to foot, raise his hands to heaven and fall on his knees in the mud crying, ‘Holy Virgin, Holy Virgin’.” This testimony appeared in Professor G. da Forseca’s 1943 book about Fatima
Joaquim Lourenco, who later became a priest and a canon lawyer in the diocese of Leiria, was a pupil at the same school. He witnessed the sun spectacle with Pereira, their teacher and the whole school. He and Pereira are featured in John Haffert’s book Meet the Witnesses, two of the two hundred witnesses personally interviewed by Haffert in the course of his research. (213)
One retorted that it was obviously a case of crowd hysteria and mass hallucination. However, Formigao pointed out that no one had been expecting a solar miracle; no one was even thinking about it. He was soon able to quote people in distant villages who saw the phenomenon independently of any links with the crowd. A number of these would eventually testify in print. A well-known Portuguese author, the Marquis de Cruz, published The Virgin of Fatima in 1937. He first quoted eye-witnesses who were at Fatima on October 13… Then he quoted “the brilliant poet Alfonso Lopes Viera”, with whom he visited the evening of October 30, 1935, on the balcony of the poet’s home in San Pedro der Muel, thirty miles from Fatima. “On October 13, 1917, I had forgotten about the prediction of the three shepherd children when I was surprised and charmed by a spectacle in the skies”, Viera told de Cruz. “It was truly astounding, and I’ve never so much as heard of anything similar to what I watched from this balcony.” (214)"
As for your question: annoyingly, no, I can't find any published reports of miracle investigations, just the conclusions (although I didn't do a thorough search). There's plenty of articles floating around talking about the investigation procedure in general (e.g. https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/08/31/491937448/how-the-catholic-church-documented-mother-teresas-two-miracles), but I'd like to read about particular cases, in detail, from official Church documents if possible. If there are such documents floating around that anyone reading this can point me towards, let me know.