As evidence of the 34-year-old "Miracle of "Fátima" in Portugal, the Vatican's newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, recently printed Page One pictures which were reprinted by newspapers and magazines around the globe (TIME, Dec. 3). The pictures showed the sun darkened near the horizon, supposedly shortly after noon on Oct. 13, 1917. Thousands of people who had gathered that day, on the same spot where three Portuguese children said they had seen visions of the Virgin Mary, declared that they had seen the noonday sun swirl and dip. The pictures were evidence of the miracle, said L'Osservatore, since they were of "rigorously authentic origin" and had been snapped by a witness who "succeeded in fixing the exceptional scene." Last week, L'Osservatore changed its mind, it now doubted the authenticity of the pictures, and added: "We might very well have been deceived in our good faith."
Actually, the pictures were fakes, according to the Voice of "Fátima, the Roman Catholic journal published by the shrine at "Fátima. "In the interests of accuracy," it said, the world should know that the pictures were not taken in 1917 at noontime, but in 1921 during "an atmospheric effect at sunset." L'Osservatore got the pictures through Federico Cardinal Tedeschini, who had heard about them from Dr. Joao de Mendonca, a Portuguese government official and member of the reception committee at the shrine's anniversary celebration last year. Mendonca explained that his deceased brother, an amateur photographer, had taken the pictures of the miracle.
L'Ossefvatore waited to print the pictures, which had "Fátima, 1917" written on them, until Mendonca had sent the paper a letter, affirming their authenticity. But later Mendonca explained, as the Voice did, that he had been mistaken and the pictures had indeed been taken towards sunset some years after 1917. The 1917 date had been erroneously written on.