Pope makes 2 Fatima children saints on centenary of visions
Pope FATIMA, PORTUGAL — Francis added two Portuguese shepherd children to the roster of Catholic saints Saturday, honoring siblings whose reported visions of the Virgin Mary 100 years ago turned the Portuguese farm town of Fatima into one of the world’s most important Catholic shrines.
Francis proclaimed Francisco and Jacinta Marto saints at the start of a Mass marking the centenary of their visions. Watched in the vast square in front of the shrine’s basilica was a crowd the Vatican, citing Portuguese authorities, said numbered half a million.
“It is amazing. It’s like an answer to prayer, because I felt that always they would be canonized,” said Agnes Walsh of Killarney, Ireland.
She said she prayed to Francisco Marto for 20 years, hoping her four daughters would meet “nice boys like Francisco.”
“The four of them have met boys that are just beautiful. I couldn’t ask for better, so he has answered all my prayers,” she said.
The pontiff left Fatima on Saturday afternoon after a stay of less than 24 hours. From his popemobile he saluted the thousands of people lining the streets, who cheered, waved flags and shouted “Viva o Papa!”
Francisco and Jacinta, aged 9 and 7, and their 10-year-old cousin, Lucia, reported that on March 13, 1917, the Virgin Mary made the first of a half-dozen appearances to them while they grazed their sheep. They said she confided in them three secrets — foretelling apocalyptic visions of hell, war, communism and the death of a pope — and urged them to pray for peace and a conversion from sin.
At the time, Europe was in the throes of World War I, and the Portuguese church was suffering under anti-clerical laws from the republican government that had forced many bishops and priests into exile.
“Our Lady foretold, and warned us about, a way of life that is godless and indeed profanes God in his creatures,” Francis said in his homily. “Such a life, frequently proposed and imposed, risks leading to hell.”
He urged Catholics today to use the example of the Marto siblings and draw strength from God, even when adversity strikes. The children had been threatened by local civil authorities with death by boiling oil if they didn’t recant their story. But they held fast and eventually the church recognized the apparitions as authentic in 1930.
The Martos are now the youngest-ever saints who didn’t die as martyrs.
Before the Mass, Francis prayed at the tombs of each of the Fatima visionaries. The Marto siblings died two years after the visions during Europe’s Spanish flu pandemic. Lucia is on track for possible beatification, but her process couldn’t start until after her 2005 death.
Participating in the offertory procession Saturday were Joao Baptista and his wife, Lucila Yurie, of Brazil. They were with their son, Lucas, whose medically inexplicable healing was the miracle needed for the Marto siblings to be declared saints. Lucas and the pope embraced.
The boy, aged 5 at the time, had fallen from a window in 2013 and suffered severe head trauma. His doctors said he would be severely mentally disabled or in a vegetative state if he even survived. The boy not only survived but has no after-effects.
“We know in all faith from our heart that this miracle was obtained with the help of the little shepherd children Francisco and Jacinta,” Baptista told reporters .
In 2000, Pope John Paul II beatified the Marto siblings during a Mass at Fatima and used the occasion of the new millennium to reveal the third secret that the children reported they had received from the Madonna: a “bishop dressed in white” — the pope — on his knees at the foot of a cross, killed in a hail of bullets and arrows.
John Paul II, now St. John Paul, credited the Virgin Mary with saving his life in an assassination attempt in St. Peter’s Square on May 13, 1981 — the same date of the first Fatima vision. SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA — North Korea today launched a ballistic missile that flew about 435 miles, South Korea’s military said. The launch came just days after the election of a new South Korean president and as U.S., Japanese and European militaries gather for war games in the Pacific.
South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff confirmed the early morning launch but had few other details, including what type of ballistic missile was fired. A statement said the missile was fired from near Kusong City, in North Pyongan province, and that the South Korean and U.S. militaries were analyzing the details.
The kind of projectile matters because while North Korea regularly tests shorterrange missiles, it is also working to master the technology needed to field nucleartipped missiles that can reach the U.S. mainland. The Trump administration has called such North Korean efforts unacceptable, but President Donald Trump said Monday that he would be “honored” to meet North Korea leader Kim Jong Un under the “right circumstances.”
Before the missile launch, the South Korean news agency Yonhap reported Saturday that Choe Sun-hui, director general for North American affairs at North Korea’s foreign ministry, said his country would be willing to talk to the U.S. government if — echoing Trump — conditions were right.
Choe was part of a North Korean delegation that recently met with a group of American experts in Oslo, Norway, Yonhap reported.
The launch also comes as troops from the U.S., Japan and two European nations gather on remote U.S. islands in the Pacific for drills that are partly a message to North Korea.
Last week South Koreans elected a new president, Moon Jae-in, who favors a much softer approach than his conservative predecessor, Park Geun-hye, who is in jail awaiting a corruption trial. North Korea needs tests to perfect its missile program, but it also is thought to time its launches to come after the elections of new U.S. and South Korean presidents in what analysts say are efforts meant to gauge a new administration’s reaction.