The Lady of the Rosary in God and the World

The Marian apparition mentioned in my preceding post links up in an interesting way with this passage from God and the World: 

Q (Seewald): Basically, the message of Fatima is not very complicated at all. It was expressed in this way by the three children who saw the visions: "I am the beloved Lady of the Rosary! ... I have come so that men may become better. They must stop giving such pain to God."

A (Pope Benedict XVI): Indeed, the message itself is quite simple. And Lucia, the only surviving one of the children, has placed more and more emphasis on this simplicity and has said, Don't take notice of all the other things you are told about; it's all just a matter of faith, hope, and love. I too have been able to have a brief conversation with her. She said it then with great emphasis: Tell people that!

What she meant was: the angels we saw at first helped us to learn to practice faith, hope, and love, and the content of the whole message is that we should learn this. That is what the Mother of God wants to make us aware of and, by doing this, to purify us and convert us. Penitence is in fact this inward conversion of our existential attitude, stepping outside of the current trend, which leads away from God and leads us only to ourselves. Penitence is conversion, coming out of oneself, self-giving, which becomes love and which in turn presupposes faith and creates hope. 

I believe that all these appearances of Mary, so far as they are authentic, do not bring us something to set beside the gospel. They offer no satisfaction to people's curiosity, no sensations or anything like that, but bring us back to the simple and essential things, which we are so easily inclined to overlook. Nowadays especially, with the complexity of all our problems, Christianity often becomes so complicated for us that we can no longer see the forest for the trees. It is a matter of being led back to the simple heart of it, not to anything else, but to the essentials, to conversion, to faith, hope, and love.