Nature & Signs in the Sky
Sun miracles, unseasonal flowers, snow in August, a house that should not stand: Catholics have long said that creation itself can be pressed into service as a sign. The danger is astrology by another name. The gift is wonder that stays humble.
The file
How this section is read
The Gospels already have weather that will not behave: a storm that stops at a word, a darkness at noon, a catch of fish where there were no fish. Later centuries kept a file of days when the sky, or the snow, or a sun that should have been ordinary, was reported as doing something a crowd could point at. The Miracle of the Snow, 5 August, on the Esquiline in Rome — a legend of a summer fall that marked the plan of St. Mary Major. The sun at Fátima on 13 October 1917, which reporters had come to mock and then had to describe. Zeitoun, 1968, a luminous woman over a Coptic church, photographed from a Cairo street.
Natural signs are the easiest to over-read and the easiest to under-read. A sun that dances may be a retinal event in a fasting crowd. It may also be the only language a parish had for something it could not name. The Church’s caution here is the same as elsewhere: doctrine first, then the sky. No Catholic is obliged to a meteorology. Many Catholics have, all the same, gone outside on those days and looked up.
Each page is a dated event with witnesses, not a horoscope. The sun at Fátima is not given a picture from another afternoon.
1 sign
