Sorrowful Mysteries The Shepherd Children of Fatima and the Fate of the Twentieth Century

Part memoir, part mystery: a powerful exploration of the three secrets of Fátima and a man’s journey grappling with his own faith

In 1917, in Fátima, Portugal, three shepherd children claimed that the Virgin Mary appeared before them and spoke the words, “Do not be afraid.”

Stephen Harrigan first heard the story of Our Lady of Fátima when he was a young boy attending a Catholic school in Texas in the 1950s, struggling to come to grips with a religion that simultaneously soothed and terrified him. The question of what actually happened in Fátima in the early part of the twentieth century, one of the most important, and most mysterious, events in the church’s history, captured his young imagination and has stayed with him ever since.

Sorrowful Mysteries is a detailed and extraordinarily compassionate examination of the appearance of Our Lady of Fátima, an attempt to unravel and put into perspective the lives of the three children, how this life-altering event changed them and the world they knew, and how it intersected with so many of the signal moments of the twentieth century—pandemics, revolutions, world wars, assassinations, and even skyjackings. It is a sweeping story, but also at its heart a very personal one, about Harrigan’s own relationship with Catholicism and his lifelong struggle to break free from a religion that in so many paradoxical ways shaped and defined him.

STEPHEN HARRIGAN is the author of the New York Times bestselling The Gates of the Alamo, Remember Ben Clayton (which, among other awards, won the James Fenimore Cooper Prize from the Society of American Historians for best historical novel), Challenger Park, A Friend of Mr. Lincoln, Big Wonderful Thing: A History of Texas, and The Leopard Is Loose. He is a writer at large for Texas Monthly, as well as a screenwriter who has written many movies for television. He lives in Austin, TX.