In 1917, in Fátima, Portugal, three shepherd children claimed that the Virgin Mary appeared before them and spoke the words, "Do not be afraid."

Stephen Harrigan first heard the story of Our Lady of Fátima when he was a young boy attending a Catholic school in Texas in the 1950s, struggling to come to grips with a religion that simultaneously soothed and terrified him. The question of what actually happened in Fátima in the early part of the twentieth century, one of the most important, and most mysterious, events in the church's history, captured his young imagination and has stayed with him ever since.

Sorrowful Mysteries is a detailed and extraordinarily compassionate examination of the appearance of Our Lady of Fátima, an attempt to unravel and put into perspective the lives of the three children, how this life-altering event changed them and the world they knew, and how it intersected with so many of the signal moments of the twentieth century--pandemics, revolutions, world wars, assassinations, and even skyjackings. It is a sweeping story, but also at its heart a very personal one, about Harrigan's own relationship with Catholicism and his lifelong struggle to break free from a religion that in so many paradoxical ways shaped and defined him.