VATICAN CORNER
On May 12, 2017 Pope Francis traveled to Fátima, Portugal, 90 miles north of Lisbon, to canonize two Portuguese shepherd children during a Mass celebrating 100 years since the children and their cousin saw the Virgin Mary there. The children, Jacinta (age 7) and Francisco Marto (age 9), along with cousin Lúcia de Jesus dos Santos (age 10), told skeptical elders that they had witnessed six apparitions of the Virgin Mary between May 13, 1917 and Oct. 13, 1917. After the Roman Catholic Church validated the children’s visions in the 1930s, Fátima was turned into Portugal’s main pilgrimage site, and nowadays it receives about five million visitors a year. Traditionally, pilgrims walk at least part of the journey to Fátima and many crawl on their knees along the last few yards to a shrine of the Madonna. Approximately 500,000 people came for the 100th year celebration/ canonization and to see Pope Francis. People were overflowing in all directions. After the candlelight vigil Friday night, some pilgrims chained their chairs to the side railings to keep a prime spot for Saturday’s Mass. Makeshift camp sites were set up all along the access roads to Fátima and in recent weeks local hotels raised their room prices tremendously. The sanctuary has two basilicas but the center feature is the much smaller Chapel of Apparitions where the Virgin is said to have appeared in 1917. The two younger children Jacinta and Francisco were canonized for the miracles attributed to them. Pope Francis declared them saints to loud applause at the canonization. They died in the 1918-19 European influenza pandemic. Their cousin Lúcia entered the Institute of the Sisters of St. Dorothy, taking perpetual vows in 1934, receiving special papal permission to relieve her vows in 1948, and entered the convent of Santa Teresa in Coimbra, where she lived until her death in 2005 at the age of 97. She is on track for beatification, the first step toward becoming a saint. Her case could not begin until after her death. The Virgin is said to have confided three secrets to the children, which were not written down until 1941, when Lúcia started writing her memoirs. They were apocalyptic messages foreshadowing the second world war, hell, the rise and fall of communism and the death of a pope, and urged pray for peace and turning away from sin. The first two secrets in Lucia’s account were revealed in 1942. The third secret was long kept a mystery, but the sanctuary’s importance grew after Pope John Paul II credited the Virgin of Fátima with saving his life when Mehmet Ali Agca, a Turkish gunman, tried to kill him on May 13, 1981, the anniversary of the visions. The bullet that struck the pope he later donated and it was placed alongside diamonds in the golden crown of the statue of Our Lady of Fátima. Francis urged all faithful to join him, physically or spiritually, in Fátima. He said: “With all of us forming one heart and soul, I will then entrust you to Our Lady, asking her to whisper to each one of you: ‘My Immaculate Heart will be your refuge and the path that leads you to God.”
Sources: bbc.com, nytimes.com, theguardian.com