May 13: Three Children in a Field, a Pope in a Square, and the Boy Who Became Stevie Wonder

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In 1917 and 1981, May 13 produced two events separated by 64 years and separated by very little else — both involve a figure of enormous Catholic significance, both involve a crowd of witnesses, and both were subsequently interpreted through the lens of Marian prophecy. The connection is not accidental; it is the connection that John Paul II himself drew, lying in the ambulance after he was shot, when he reportedly said “Mary, my mother” and later credited the Virgin of Fatima with deflecting the bullet that would otherwise have killed him. He donated the bullet to the shrine at Fatima. It is embedded in the crown of the statue there today.

The calendar, which doesn’t plan these things, produced a date that would acquire its own mythology.

The Apparitions at Fatima, 1917

On May 13, 1917, three shepherd children — Lúcia dos Santos, 10, and her cousins Francisco Marto, 9, and Jacinta Marto, 7 — were tending sheep in a rocky field called the Cova da Iria near the village of Fátima in central Portugal. According to their account, a woman appeared above a holm oak tree, surrounded by brilliant light, and spoke to them. She identified herself, eventually, as “Our Lady of the Rosary” and asked them to return to the same spot on the 13th of each month for six months.

They returned. The crowds grew — from a handful of curious neighbors in May to an estimated 70,000 people in October, who witnessed what became known as the Miracle of the Sun: a phenomenon in which the sun appeared to spin, change colors, and plunge toward the earth before resuming its normal position. The accounts of this event are numerous, varied, and contradictory in their details — some witnesses saw it, others standing nearby saw nothing unusual. The Catholic Church does not require belief in the miracle as a matter of faith; it approved the apparitions as “worthy of belief” in 1930, which is a careful distinction. Francisco and Jacinta both died within three years — of influenza during the 1918-1919 pandemic — and were canonized by John Paul II in 2000, making them among the youngest non-martyred saints in modern Catholic history.

Lúcia lived until 2005, dying as a Carmelite nun at 97. She claimed to receive the messages of Fatima — including the famous “Three Secrets” — and transmitted them to the Catholic hierarchy. The first two secrets, revealed in 1941, described visions of hell and predicted the Second World War and the rise of Soviet Russia. The Third Secret was withheld by the Vatican until 2000, when John Paul II (now a beatified figure himself, canonized in 2014) authorized its publication. The text describes a bishop in white being shot by soldiers — which the Vatican interpreted as a prophetic vision of the 1981 assassination attempt. Others found the interpretation strained. The argument continues.

What is not disputed: the Fatima apparitions produced one of the most visited pilgrimage sites in the Catholic world, generating millions of visitors annually. The shrine was visited by John Paul II three times. The bullet that wounded him is there. The children who saw the vision are saints. A peasant field in rural Portugal became, over the course of a century, one of the most theologically significant sites in global Christianity.

Fifty Years of Stevie Wonder

Stevland Hardaway Morris was born on May 13, 1950, in Saginaw, Michigan, six weeks premature. He was placed in an incubator with oxygen concentrations that were too high — a common medical practice of the era for premature infants — and lost his sight as a result of retinopathy of prematurity. He was born Stevland Morris, grew up in Detroit, taught himself harmonica, piano, and drums before age 10, and signed with Motown Records at 11.

The name “Little Stevie Wonder” was Berry Gordy’s invention. The “Wonder” was aspirational — a bet on potential. It turned out to be conservative. By 21, Stevie Wonder had renegotiated his Motown contract to give himself full artistic control — an almost unheard-of concession from Gordy, who ran Motown like a benevolent autocracy. The records Wonder made in the period from 1972 to 1976 — Music of My Mind, Talking Book, Innervisions, Fulfillingness’ First Finale, and Songs in the Key of Life — are among the most acclaimed consecutive albums by any artist in the rock era. He played most of the instruments himself, composed the songs, and produced the records. The five albums earned him five Grammy Awards for Album of the Year — Innervisions, Fulfillingness’ First Finale, and Songs in the Key of Life winning in consecutive years, which has never been done by anyone else.

“Superstition” was written for Jeff Beck, who had helped Wonder learn guitar. Beck intended to record it first. Motown convinced Wonder to release it himself. It reached number one in January 1973. Beck’s version came out later and was a lesser record — a fact Beck has always acknowledged without bitterness. Some songs know their home.

The commercial arc of Wonder’s career after the mid-1970s was different from the artistic peak: Hotter Than July (1980) was excellent; the 1980s brought chart success and some compromises; I Just Called to Say I Love You won an Oscar in 1985 and was, by his own implicit admission, not the work he was proudest of. But the 1972-1976 run remains intact, and the artists it has influenced — from Michael Jackson to Prince to Kanye West — form an almost comprehensive map of pop music’s subsequent decades.

A Pope Is Shot in St. Peter’s Square

On May 13, 1981, Pope John Paul II was riding in an open popemobile through St. Peter’s Square, greeting a crowd of approximately 20,000, when Mehmet Ali Ağca, a Turkish far-right militant who had previously escaped from a Turkish prison after killing a journalist, fired two shots. Both bullets hit the Pope. One passed through his abdomen, narrowly missing his aorta. The other grazed his right elbow. He survived after five hours of surgery and months of recovery.

Ağca was captured immediately — a crowd of bystanders tackled him. He later offered several contradictory explanations for the shooting, claiming at various points that he was working for Bulgarian intelligence (and through them, the Soviet KGB), that he was acting alone, that he was the reincarnation of Jesus Christ, and that he had been paid. The Italian government convicted him of attempted murder. The Bulgarian Connection theory was investigated extensively and never conclusively proven or disproven. Ağca was pardoned by Italian President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi in 2000 at John Paul II’s request, having already been pardoned by the Pope in person during a 1983 prison visit. He was extradited to Turkey, where he served additional time on other charges, and was released in 2010.

John Paul II visited the Fatima shrine three times: in 1982 (the first anniversary of the shooting), 1991, and 2000. At the 1982 visit, he donated the bullet to the shrine. The connection between May 13, 1917, and May 13, 1981, is a coincidence that became, in the Pope’s theological interpretation, something more than coincidence. Whether one finds that interpretation compelling depends on how one reads the relationship between historical event and divine intention — a question the calendar cannot answer, but keeps raising.

The Ice Saints: Day Three

May 13 is the feast day of Pope Saint Servatius (in the German tradition, Pankratius is the 12th, Servatius the 13th, and sometimes cold Sophia on the 15th completes the quartet). Servatius was a 4th-century bishop of Tongeren in what is now Belgium, and according to tradition he predicted the invasion of Attila the Hun into Gaul — which he did not live to see, dying in 384, roughly 70 years before Attila’s campaigns. His tomb became a pilgrimage site, and his feast day acquired the reputation for cold snaps that the Ice Saints tradition as a whole carries.

After May 13, folk tradition says, you are safe to plant. The gardening proverb in German is: “Vor Servaz kein Sommer, nach Servaz kein Frost” — before Servatius, no summer; after Servatius, no frost. In practice, this holds often enough to be useful and fails often enough to require qualification. The American equivalent, in gardening forums, is the last frost date — a statistical concept that expresses the same underlying reality in probabilistic rather than hagiographic terms.

Also on This Day

• 1607: English colonists begin construction of the first permanent structures at Jamestown, Virginia. The date of May 13 or 14 is disputed in sources — the settlers arrived in the area on the 11th, selected the site on the 13th or 14th, and began construction immediately. What they built was a triangular palisade fort with a church, storehouse, and some basic dwellings. Most of it was destroyed by fire in January 1608.
• 1914: Joe Louis is born in Lafayette, Alabama — seventh of eight children of a sharecropper, raised in Detroit. He is 21 years old when, on this same date in 1935, he defeats Primo Carnera — a former heavyweight champion — by technical knockout in the 6th round at Madison Square Garden, his first major title elimination bout. He becomes heavyweight champion two years later and holds the title for 12 consecutive years, a record that has never been matched.
• 1888: Brazil abolishes slavery — the last country in the Western Hemisphere to do so. Princess Imperial Isabel signs the Golden Law (Lei Áurea) while acting as regent in her father Emperor Pedro II’s absence. Approximately 700,000 enslaved people are freed. The Brazilian monarchy collapses the following year in a military coup; republicans and former slaveholders, furious at the abolition, provide much of the support for the coup. The connection between abolition and the end of the Brazilian Empire is direct.
• 1958: Vice President Richard Nixon’s motorcade is attacked by anti-American mobs in Caracas, Venezuela — the most serious physical assault on a U.S. Vice President in American history. Nixon remains calm throughout; his composure becomes part of his political identity. The incident contributes to the Eisenhower administration’s reassessment of its Latin America policy.
• 1981: Thirteen minutes after Mehmet Ali Ağca shoots Pope John Paul II in St. Peter’s Square, Italian police have him in custody. He is carrying a Browning 9mm semi-automatic pistol. He is 23 years old. He will spend the next 19 years in Italian prison before the Pope personally requests his pardon.

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