The Fatima Children Are Canonized

2024 Author: Steven Freeman | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 08:15

Pope Francis travels to Portugal this Friday to celebrate the canonization of two of the three children who starred in the famous apparitions of the Virgin of Fatima, of which 100 years have passed.

Also known as the Little Fathers of Fatima, they were imprisoned and threatened with being burned in oil after they revealed that they had seen the Virgin Mary in the mountains surrounding this small town in the interior of Portugal. Even the heads of the Catholic Church doubted the veracity of the children's story.

The apparitions made Fatima a sacred pilgrimage center to which some 6 million people from all over the world travel annually.

In the ceremony to be held on Saturday, the holy pontiff will make saints of Francisco and Jacinta Marto, the brothers who with their cousin Lucia Dos Santos saw the Mother of Jesus while shepherding their sheep.

Jacinta was 7 years old, Francisco 9 and Lucia 10 when the Virgin first appeared to them on May 13, 1917. The brothers died two years later during the Spanish flu epidemic that devastated the entire planet, while Lucia became a Carmelite nun and died in 2005. Her canonization process is also underway.

According to Lucia, the Virgin appeared six times in the field where they looked after her flock of sheep. In the last appearance in October 1917, they witnessed the so-called miracle of the sun, by which - according to the cowherd boys and other witnesses - the Sun circled the sky.

The children were jailed for denial of the visions, but remained firm. After the Church recognized the authenticity of the apparitions in 1930, Catholics began visiting the holy site.