Pope makes 2 Fatima children saints on centenary of visions
FATIMA, PORTUGAL — Pope 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 basilic a was a c rowd 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!”
Franc i s c o a nd Ja c i nt a , a g e d 9 a n d 7, a n d t h e i r 10-year-old cousin, Lucia, reported that on March 13, 1917, the Virgin Mary made t h e f i r s t o f a h a l f - d oz e n appearances to them while they grazed their sheep. They said she confided in them three secrets — foretelling apocalyptic visions of hell, war, communism a nd t he de a t h 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 hi s homily. “Such a l i f e , frequently proposed and imposed, risks leading to hell.”
He urged Catholics today to use the example of the Marto siblings and draw streng th 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, c redited 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.