text: Good points, Monica. Here's the other issue. The story of Jesus Christ has a certain continuity the Marian apparitions don't. Perhaps that's what you meant by the notion that we are culturally disposed to believing in birth, death, and rebirth. On the other hand, the Mother of God's warning that Russia must be "converted" seems to reflect a lot of discontinuity, given that Russia was one of the first Christianized nations and received the faith directly from Byzantium. What did she think happened to this faith when the Soviet revolution occurred? Did it go away? What happened to the deification of the hundreds of thousands who never stopped believing? Surely she knows better. Not only that, but Mary's preoccupations at Fatima seem curiously steeped in the Roman Catholic cults of the time, like devotion to the immaculate heart of Mary and the sacred heart of Jesus. 
  
  I imagine the mother of God takes it all with a grain of salt.