A somewhat strange occurrence that happened to three little shepherd children in a bush in the middle of nowhere, many decades ago, has today become a subject of intense media frenzy. That unusual mystifying experience soon catapulted the three hitherto unknown children to the vault of global attention. Since then the little town where the mysterious event took place has been conferred the status of a Mecca of sorts. The shepherd children are Lucia dos Santos and Jacinta and Francisco Marto. The place is at the Cova da Iria in Fatima, Portugal. The year was 1917. We may ask: What sort of children were Lucia, Jacinta and Francisco? What kind of life did they lead in the Portuguese countryside? The answer to these questions might explain how the three children were able to become friends with Our Lady. It might also shed light on why God decided to pour a drop of heaven into the chalice of their simple lives.
Several accounts of the modest, frugal and simple life of the Santos and Martos families have emerged. But what runs through the accounts is a fine portrait, a thread of profound religious upbringing. Lucia’s mother, Maria Rosa dos Santos, was the family catechist. In the summer, she would teach the children religion while other people were taking their siesta. In wintertime, religion lessons were held in the evening after dinner. The family would sit by the fire roasting chestnuts and sweet acorns. During the corn harvest, the Dos Santos and Martos families would shuck the ears together. So the children grew up in an atmosphere of peace. They grazed their flock, played their games, learned their catechism, attended the local parish, and would have fun racing to see who could jump first onto the floats during the Corpus Christi procession.
In mid 2004, Lucia’s health deteriorated. “No one wants to die, but it’s very hard being old! Our Lady said that I would remain for a while…but look at how much time has passed already!” She was kept constantly informed about the progress of John Paul II’s illness. Her cell as a Carmelite nun contained a little statue of Our Lady of Fatima, a gift from John Paul II. The rosary she held was also a gift from the pope, one he had sent her for her birthday. On February 13, 2005, she opened her eyes, looked for a moment at her sisters and the crucifix, and then closed them forever. She was ninety-seven. Her last words were: “I offer this suffering for the Holy Father.” Pope John Paul himself closed his eyes too a few weeks later, on April 2, 2005, the eve of Divine Mercy Sunday.
After 100 years, Fatima remains a stable centre of religious fervour. Crowds of pilgrims still flock to Fatima. Fatima offers a space in which visitors can rediscover the warmth of encounter with God, and can recover the tangible, concrete experience of the divine that is the hallmark of the Gospel. Fatima, like all Marian shrines, offers a rich feast of popular piety to undernourished souls who cannot feed on the cold, dry liturgies invented by the specialists in the things of God. At Fatima, pilgrims sing, dance, participate in processions, cross the square on their knees, shed tears, implore favours, write messages and toss them at the feet of the Virgin. They light candles, send postcards, and buy scapulars and rosaries. “The heart has reasons of which reason is unaware,” Blaise Pascal once said. Fatima helps us rediscover the reasons of the heart, the physical side of religion. It presents us with reasons to believe, without eliminating the possibility of finding reasons to doubt. Fatima brings us into contact with God who, through Mary, wants to be a gift to us.
Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin has said that the importance of Fatima rests on the fact that the Blessed Virgin Mary chose poor, simple, illiterate children – not the wealthy, learned or influential – to convey a powerful message of love, hope and forgiveness to the world. This implicitly means that if God and his Blessed Mother take children seriously, we have a duty too to take children seriously, and not do anything that might injure or violate their faith, their emotions, their bodies or their conscience. Fatima is about the call to repentance and conversion, which is the perennial message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI said in his interview with the German journalist Peter Seewald, in the book God and the World(2000), the whole drift of the secrets of Fatima is the centrality of the call to repentance. “The whole secret is a dramatic call to the freedom of men, a call to change ourselves.” We need to grasp this message as something that is still perennially relevant to us, after 100 years. The message of Mary speaks to the men and women of every age and time with its originality, newness and depth. What is demanded is our capacity to enter anew into the scene of Fatima and listen attentively to what Our Lady is saying to us.
In other words, if the message of repentance and conversion and holiness is to resonate in our own spiritual lives, we ought to make a definitive commitment to pray the rosary every day – like Mary instructed – for ourselves and for sinners. The message of Fatima ought to become the guiding light of our journey to sanctity. It is here that we ought to proceed humbly and resist the urge for sensationalism. Thus to write about Fatima means to deal with phenomena such as apparitions, miracles, children offering their lives for the conversion of sinners, destruction and mayhem, the martyrdom of the good, the consecration of Russia, and shining angels who pour water out of a crystal jar onto the souls who approach God, not to mention the trembling, uncertain step of “the Bishop dressed in White.” All of this is enough to make your head spin.
In a culture corroded by secularism and an increasingly pronounced indifference toward anything that cant be perceived by the senses or analysed rationally, Fatima hits a chord of faith that bypasses the head to touch the heart. Cardinal Bertone is right when he says that we need to rediscover the importance of a maternal faith that is not afraid of the emotions. We need a mother. As he opened the Holy Door at the Basilica of Saint Mary Major, Pope John Paul II exclaimed: “The story of every human being is written first of all in the heart of his own mother. No wonder, then, that the same thing was true of the earthly life-story of the Son of God.”
The white-bearded Capuchin Archbishop of Boston, Cardinal Sean O’Malley, the only US prelate to attend the canonisation of Saints Francisco and Jacinta Marto in Fatima shared his thoughts with Catholic News Agency on the lesson of Fatima: “I think the lesson is that children are called to holiness. When Francisco and Jacinta were beatified [in the year 2000 by Pope John Paul II], Cardinal José Saraiva Martins who was the Prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints talked about how modern families entrust their children to professional teachers in school for 15, 20 years of formal academic formation, but sometimes they’re not really prepared for life. And these Fatima children, their parents were probably illiterate peasants but they taught them how to lead a good life, how to have a deep faith in God, how to love, how to serve, how to work. And in such a short life, they achieved great sanctity and holiness and the fact that the Blessed Mother chose them is very significant. So I think there’s a great lesson in this. All the saints’ lives are sermons for us but in these children, it’s a reminder of how precious children are and that they too are called to sanctity and parents have a great responsibility to transmit the faith to their children and prepare them for life – this life and eternal life.”As it would turn out, Jacinta and Francisco are the first children non-martyrs to be canonised by the Church.
Father Ojeifo is a priest of the Catholic Archdiocese of Abuja.
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