When the World Trembles,
Our Lady Has Already Given the Answer

Peace entrusted by God to the Immaculate Heart — the message of Fatima and Akita for our times

Wars blaze across the Middle East. Economies buckle. Fuel grows scarce. Even in India — once a land of quiet pluralism — Christians face persecution, and many faithful whisper anxiously of the end times. The signs are unmistakable. But the faithful need not be surprised. Heaven spoke first.

Over a century ago, on a hillside in Portugal, three shepherd children — Lucia dos Santos and her cousins Francisco and Jacinta Marto — heard words that would echo through every subsequent generation of crisis. Our Lady of Fatima did not promise an easy century. She promised a solution.

From her very first apparition, she pointed clearly to where that solution lay — not in human effort, but in divine mercy channelled through a mother’s heart:

“[Jesus] wishes to establish devotion to my Immaculate Heart in the world. I promise salvation to those who embrace it; and these souls will be beloved of God like flowers arranged by me to adorn His throne.”

Second Apparition of Our Lady of Fatima — June 13, 1917

Peace, then, is not a political achievement. It is a gift — entrusted by God not to parliaments or armies, but to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. This is the axis around which the entire Fatima message turns. And the path to that peace is equally clear:

“God wishes to establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart. If what I say to you is done, many souls will be saved and there will be peace.”

Our Lady of Fatima, July 13, 1917 — Fatima in Lucia’s Own Words, Sr. Lucia, Secretariado dos Pastorinhos, 2004

Sr. Lucia, the sole surviving Fatima visionary, spent her life clarifying what Heaven asked. The solution was never vague piety. It was concrete: the Rosary, the First Saturdays, reparation offered to the Immaculate Heart. She wrote with urgency:

“The Most Holy Virgin in these last times in which we live has given a new efficacy to the recitation of the Rosary… There is no problem, I tell you, no matter how difficult it is, that we cannot resolve by the prayer of the Holy Rosary.”

Sr. Lucia — Letter to Fr. Umberto Maria Pasquale, SDB, 1957; cited in Fatima: The Great Sign, Francis Johnston, TAN Books, 1980

And lest anyone think the urgency had passed, Heaven spoke again — decades later, and half a world away.

On October 13, 1973 — the very anniversary of the Fatima Miracle of the Sun — Our Lady appeared at Akita, Japan, to Sr. Agnes Sasagawa. The wooden statue wept 101 times. And her words carried the same weight, the same remedy, the same warning:

“As I told you, if men do not repent and better themselves, the Father will inflict a terrible punishment on all humanity… The work of the devil will infiltrate even into the Church in such a way that one will see cardinals opposing cardinals, bishops against bishops… The only arms which will remain for you will be the Rosary and the Sign left by my Son.”

Our Lady of Akita, October 13, 1973 — approved by Bishop Ito, 1984; confirmed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as consistent with Fatima

Cardinal Ratzinger — later Pope Benedict XVI — confirmed that Akita and Fatima speak with one voice. Heaven was not contradicting itself. It was repeating itself, with greater insistence, to a world growing harder of hearing. The remedy remains unchanged: turn to the Immaculate Heart. Pray. Make reparation. Trust the promise that cannot fail:

“In the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph. The Holy Father will consecrate Russia to me, and she shall be converted, and a period of peace will be granted to the world.”

Our Lady of Fatima, July 13, 1917 — Fatima in Lucia’s Own Words, Sr. Lucia, Secretariado dos Pastorinhos, 2004

The Triumph of the Immaculate Heart is not a distant hope contingent on human achievement. It is a certainty, waiting on human cooperation. Every Rosary prayed, every sacrifice offered, every First Saturday kept is an act of co-operation with Heaven’s own plan. The world trembles. But Our Lady has already spoken the word of peace. Our task is to believe it — and to live it.

This June, across every deanery of the Archdiocese of Goa and Daman, the faithful are invited to give that cooperation its most powerful expression yet — keeping watch through the night, from First Friday into First Saturday, in reparation to the Twin Hearts of Jesus and Mary. The Lord once asked His disciples: “Could you not watch one hour with me?” (Mt 26:40). This is Goa’s answer — one night, all of us, together.

Come as clergy. Come as laity. Come as families. Every parish represented, every deanery united — the same prayers, the same hour, across all of Goa. Devachea Mogachem Zagronn is not a programme. It is our Yes to what Our Lady has been asking for over a century. The Two Hearts are waiting.