The Young Seers of Fátima

The story of Fátima is widely acknowledged and celebrated all around the world, but little is known about the lives of the three young peasant children who interacted so modestly and serenely with the heavenly figure that suddenly appeared before them on that late-spring day in 1917.

While they were out grazing their sheep around noon in the Cova da Iria district of Fátima, a provincial town in the heart of central Portugal, they beheld a lady ‘all dressed in white, more brilliant than the sun’ up amongst the boughs of an old oak tree.

Bathed in a divine light just a few feet before them, the lady informed them she was from heaven and that they were to return to the same spot at the same hour on the 13th day until October, the period during which she would divulge who she was and what she wanted.

Known as the Secrets of Fátima, her messages involved a horrifying vision of hell; a call for peace in a world beset by war and other atrocities; the spread of communism and its eventual demise; a speedy end to World War I; the sudden conclusion of World War II by the dropping of an atomic bomb; and the attempt on Pope John Paul II’s life on the 13th of May 1981, the bullet of which now exists in Fátima’s Chapel of the Apparitions.

The young seers were seven, nine and ten at that time and the war had reached a critical stage with the USA joining the Allies in April 1917 after Germany had resumed unrestricted submarine warfare against Atlantic shipping, thus escalating the conflict.

Born in the nearby village of Aljustrel on the 22nd of March 1907, Lúcia de Jesus Rosa dos Santos was the youngest of seven children (six girls and a boy) and at the age of six she received her first Holy Communion. Family circumstances then obliged her to start working as a shepherdess, along with her two cousins – Francisco and Jacinta, who by this time had become her sole companions in this activity.

A simple girl known for her candour and honesty, Lúcia was blessed with a very special role during the apparitions, as the lady spoke only to her and gave her a special message that was only to be revealed at a later date, which is perhaps why she remained on earth for a much longer period than her two young cousins who both died during the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-1920.



The Story of Fátima

As an adult, Lúcia went on to live a mostly cloistered life, first in Tuy in north-western Spain before later entering the Carmelite convent of Santa Teresa in Coimbra in March 1948, where she lived a life of prayer and penance until her death on the 13th of February 2005, at the great age of almost 98.

Described by Lúcia in her memoirs as very virtuous and a child ‘only in years’, Jacinta de Jesus Marto was born on the 5th of March 1910, also in the village of Aljustrel. In many ways, she was the most devout of the three young seers and the one who subsequently suffered the most towards the end of her short life.

Jacinta fell ill in October 1918 when she was just eight years old, and following a two-month spell at St Augustine’s Hospital in nearby Ourém she was transferred to Dona Estefânia Hospital in Lisbon where she passed away at 10.30pm on the 20th of February 1920, just three weeks before her tenth birthday.

Francisco de Jesus Marto (Jacinta’s older brother) was a quiet, thoughtful boy with an aptitude for singing and playing the flute. Like the other two seers, he was also born in Aljustrel on the 11th of June 1908 and, according to Lúcia, was very calm by nature and quite moralistic even at such an early age.

He was a boy of few words with a great fondness for birds and animals in general, but just like his sister, Jacinta, he succumbed to the Spanish Flu pandemic and died at home in his mother’s arm on the 4th of April 1919 just ten years old.

Francisco and Jacinta de Jesus Marto were both canonised as saints in 2017 while Lúcia was declared Venerable, the first step in the canonisation of a saint, by Pope Francis in Portugal in 2023.

The bodies of the three seers now rest in the imposing Neo-Baroque Basilica that sits imposingly atop the sanctuary’s huge 37-acre esplanade, which completely fills up with devout pilgrims on the 12th/13th of May and again on the 12th/13th of October every year to commemorate the apparitions.

Dubbed the Lourdes of Portugal, Fátima (indicated on the Google map below) is a pleasant town located just 20 kilometres (12 miles) south-east of Leiria in the heart of central Portugal. Visitors have a wealth of places and attractions of tourist interest in close proximity, such as Tomar (famous for the Knights Templar and the Convent of Christ), the equestrian town of Golegã, Santarém, the monasteries of Batalha and Alcobaça, the big wave surfing mecca of Nazaré and the amazing caves of Mira de Aire.



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