On bended knee they came. Thousands of Roman Catholics from around the world arrived this week on a pilgrimage to Fátima, the Portuguese town where three poor shepherd children said, 100 years ago, that they saw a vision of the Virgin Mary.
Many of the pilgrims crawled the final yards to a shrine complex where Pope Francis planned to make two of the shepherd children, Jacinta and Francisco Marto, saints on Saturday. The children, along with an older cousin, Lucia de Jesus dos Santos, said they saw the apparitions six times between May 13, 1917, and Oct. 13, 1917, when Jacinta was 7, Francisco was 9 and Lucia was 10, according the Vatican. The vision told the children three “secrets,” according to accounts.
The younger children will be canonized for a miracle attributed to them. They died in the 1918-19 European influenza pandemic. Lucia, whose beatification process began in 2008, died in 2005 at age 97.
The shrine in Fátima is Portugal’s most renowned pilgrimage site, drawing 5.3 million visitors last year. The main square has a capacity of 600,000 and was overflowing this weekend. The authorities said they expected one million people. This will be Francis’s first visit to Fátima as pope. On Saturday, he will address the faithful during the canonization.
The children’s apparitions were officially recognized as a miracle by the Roman Catholic Church in 1930. The ceremony will take place at Fátima’s main square, which was doused by heavy rains on Friday. A torch-lit procession was planned, and on Saturday, a Mass will take place. The pope will leave soon afterward.
The Fátima visions are considered one of the most seminal events of the 20th-century Catholic Church. Lucia, who said she saw several subsequent visions of Mary and later became a nun, wrote several memoirs in which she revealed the contents of the children’s visions, and the three secrets. The first secret was a vision of hell; the Vatican interpreted the second secret as a prediction about the rise and fall of Communism and the conversion of Russia.
The third secret was revealed only in 2000. It was interpreted as a prediction of the 1981 assassination attempt on John Paul, who credited the Madonna of Fátima with saving his life when a Turkish gunman tried to kill him on May 13, 1981. John Paul donated the bullet to Fátima, and it was inserted into the crown adorning a statue of Mary there.
The approval of a miracle was the final step needed before Jacinta and Francisco Marto could be made saints. The recovery of a Brazilian boy from a severe brain injury was cited by the Vatican as the miracle needed to canonize two children. The boy’s parents, Joao Baptista and Lucila Yurie, broke their silence on Thursday to share the story at the shrine.
The father said that in 2013, their son Lucas, then 5, fell 21 feet from a window at the family’s home and lapsed into a coma. Doctors said he had severe traumatic brain injury and a “loss of brain material.”
Mr. Baptista said he and his wife, as well as Brazilian Carmelite nuns, prayed to the late shepherd children who saw the Virgin Mary in 1917. Doctors said the boy had little chance of survival, or would be severely mentally disabled or in a vegetative state. But six days later, he woke up and began talking, and was later released from the hospital. According to Pope Benedict XVI, the purpose of the Fátima visions, which he described as “private revelations” and distinguished from a “public revelation” like the Bible, is “to help live more fully” in accordance with Christ’s teaching.
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