THURSDAY, JULY 27, 1961:

Santander Cathedral

CONCHITA IS STRONGLY REQUESTED
TO GO TO SANTANDER. FIRST MENTION
OF THE FUTURE DOUBTS AND DENIALS

Conchita left for Santander with her mother, Aniceta, and her aunt and godmother, Maximina. The pretext was to change her ideas and have a simple interview with Msgr. Fernandez. This trip was to last one week. Plotted by Don Luis Odriozola and by one of Conchita's uncles, curate of the parish of the Consolacion at Santander, this stay was really to draw the visionary away from the main site that already stood out in the Garabandal "events."

The priests and physicians, members of the "Special Commission" questioned the visionary every day at Santander. Verbally jostled about, even threatened to be sent to "a house for the mentally ill," she was forbidden to receive Communion, to go to confession and to attend Mass. Instead, she was taken to the beach and the movies. They were hoping to dissuade her from returning to her village.
Doctor Pinal tried to hypnotize Conchita to "find out the magic fluid from which she held her power of suggestion over her little playmates," 'concluding' that this was coming . . . from her braids! The girl ended up by "acknowledging" that she had not seen the Blessed Virgin, but she did not swear not having seen her.

On the day of her arrival, Conchita fell into an ecstasy right in the middle of the street in front of the church of the Consolacion. At the same time, at the Pines, the three other visionaries also had an apparition of the Blessed Virgin. This was Conchita's only ecstasy in the capital of the Cantabrian region.

In an interior locution, Conchita learned, in these doubly significant circumstances, that "there would come a time when she and her companions would deny their apparitions and doubt everything." When she returned to Garabandal, she confided this news to her mother and her aunt.

Aniceta, a widow since many years and head of the family, watched over her children carefully. She asked for several signs to confirm the authenticity of the phenomena. she obtained them and had no longer any doubts. She died in 1990.
Maximina, Conchita's first confidante, always supported her godchild and never doubted the supernatural origin of the apparitions. She is one of the best "reporters" of these events.
[Excerpted from 'Garabandal' Book, pages 69, 70.]

The parallel to Fatima is unbelievable. There, the local administrator "arrested" the three tiny children, put them in jail with the regular criminals, and even threatened them with death by being boiled in oil! But the big difference was that the three children of Fatima did not deny the apparitions and refused to tell the authorities the "Secret." That had to be a supernatural "grace" because even adults tell everything and agree to anything under that type of pressure.

Poor Conchita was all alone, bombarded by the Commissions questions and examinations, aged intellectual men against a young farm girl with no education . . . I wonder if they even believed in the supernatural at all? The blind will lead the blind . . . Of course, all this happened at the beginning of the "events of Garabandal", so there is no denying the supernatural in the thousands of apparitions and signs yet to come. "Everything is possible for him who believes."(Mark 9:23) And as the old saying goes: "For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who don't believe, no proof is possible." (Bishop Sheen?)
Deacon John