Late President Thomas E. Dillon and Ambassador Frank Shakespeare in 2006This coming Saturday, Commencement Day at Thomas Aquinas College, marks the 100th anniversary of Our Lady’s first apparition in Fatima, Portugal. Fittingly, members of the Class of 2017 have chosen Our Lady of Fatima as their patron saint. 

As they, and members of the Church worldwide, celebrate the occasion, the centennial calls to mind a lecture that the Hon. Frank Shakespeare — the onetime president of CBS Television who served as the U.S. ambassador to Portugal, and then the Holy See, during the Reagan Administration — delivered at Thomas Aquinas College on February 24, 2006.

As that year’s President’s Day lecturer, Ambassador Shakespeare described the simultaneous, providential rise to power of U.S. President Ronald Reagan, Pope St. John Paul II, and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union. He highlighted the pivotal roles that these three men played — under the protection of Our Lady of Fatima — in the collapse of Communism and the Soviet Union. It was “an epochal period in our country’s history,” he said, “13 years really, from 1978 to 1991, when the whole world changed.”

In honor of the 100th anniversary of Our Lady’s first apparition in Fatima, the College now makes audio of this fascinating lecture available to the public:

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