i neeD A MiRAcLe
Pope Francis canonises the shepherd children behind the Fatima Secrets but casts doubt on the Medjugorje visions
Hundreds of thousands of people from around the world packed the central square in the Portuguese town of Fatima on 13 May to witness Pope Francis canonise two shepherd children. The ceremony marks a century since Francisco and Jacinta Marto, aged nine and seven, and their cousin Lucia Dos Santos, 10, claimed theVirgin Mary first appeared to them, as a shining figure in an oak tree. She told them she had come from Heaven and they must return at the same time on the 13th day of the next five months. On 13 July, she revealed three ‘Secrets’ (or prophecies). On 13 October, 70,000 people turned up to witness the children in trance, roughly half of whom saw (or imagined they saw) the Sun spinning or “dancing”, changing colour, and falling to earth. The Marto siblings, the youngest nonmartyrs to have been declared saints, died in the Spanish flu pandemic that swept Europe after World War I. Dos Santos, who
They claimed theVirgin Mary appeared to them in an oak tree
became a Carmelite nun and died in 2005 aged 97, was buried with them in Fatima’s basilica in 2006 and is also due to be canonised. Pilgrims came from as from as China andVenezuela to watch the Mass held by Pope Francis, who travelled through Fatima, north of Lisbon, in his Popemobile.
The case for canonising the Marto siblings received a boost when a miracle in the Brazilian state of Parana was attributed to them. Five-year-old Lucas Batista fell from an open window in March 2013 and smashed his skull on the ground 20ft (6m) below. He went into a coma, suffered two heart attacks and had a severe brain injury. His family, followers of Our Lady of Fatima, prayed to the shepherd children for a miracle. Lucas’s father Joao said: “Two days later Lucas woke up and started talking.” He went home six days later. There was in fact an earlier miracle attributed to the children. It said that they had interceded to heal a 70-year-
old paraplegic Portuguese woman who had not walked for 22 years. In 1998 the woman travelled to Rome to testify before aVaticanappointed medical commission, which found that her healing was scientifically inexplicable.
The Fatima Secrets were written down by Lucia, years after the apparitions that the three said they had witnessed. Two were revealed in the 1940s. The First Secret was a harrowing vision of Hell, and threatened another world war unless humankind mended its ways. One portent would be the “great unknown light” in the night skies, signalling an outbreak of war “within the next pontificate”. (The next pontiff, Pius XI, died in 1939, the year World War II broke out.) The Second Secret was a warning that Russia (which underwent the Bolshevik revolution a few weeks after the BVM’s last appearance to the children) would “spread her errors through the world, causing wars and persecution” unless she