Our Lady of Fatima

Their story

In 1917, while the First World War raged across Europe, three shepherd children were tending sheep near the village of Fatima, in Portugal: Lucia dos Santos, who was ten, and her cousins Francisco and Jacinta Marto, who were nine and seven. On May 13 they saw a beautiful lady, brighter than the sun, standing above a small tree. She asked them to return on the thirteenth day of each month for six months, and she asked them to pray the rosary every day for peace and for the end of the war. The lady appeared to the children each month, though in August they were kept from the meeting place when a local official put them in jail and threatened them. She asked for prayer, penance and sacrifices for the conversion of sinners, and for devotion to her Immaculate Heart. The children took her words to heart and offered many small sacrifices. Word spread, and growing crowds came to the field. On October 13, about seventy thousand people gathered in the rain. The lady told the children, "I am the Lady of the Rosary," and many in the crowd reported seeing the sun spin and seem to plunge toward the earth, an event that came to be called the Miracle of the Sun. Francisco and Jacinta died young, during the influenza epidemic that followed the war, and Pope Francis canonized them in 2017. Lucia became a Carmelite nun and lived until 2005. In 1930 the Church approved devotion to Our Lady of Fatima. When Pope St. John Paul II survived an assassination attempt on May 13, 1981, he credited Our Lady of Fatima with saving his life, and one of the bullets was later placed in the crown of her statue.