FÁTIMA, Portugal: Pope Francis canonised two Portuguese shepherd children during a Mass on Saturday, a century after the children and their cousin said they first saw the Virgin Mary here.
The children, Jacinta and Francisco Marto, along with an older cousin, Lúcia de Jesus dos Santos, told sceptical elders that they had witnessed six apparitions of the Virgin between May 13, 1917, and Oct. 13, 1917, when Jacinta was 7 Francisco was 9 and Lúcia was 10, according to the Vatican.
After the Catholic Church here validated the children’s visions, it turned Fátima into Portugal’s main pilgrimage site, nowadays visited by more than five million people a year, many crawling on their knees the last few yards to a shrine of the Madonna.
Organisers had expected as many as one million people to attend the pope’s Mass. In the end, slightly fewer probably came — although no official figure was available on Saturday morning — which some attributed to the overcrowding concerns that the pontiff’s visit had generated.
“It’s really unique to have a centenary, canonization and the pope, all at the same time, so I think some people got scared about coming and not even being able to enter Fátima,” said José Ferreira, a priest visiting from Lisbon.
Still, the crowd was a sight to behold, with pilgrims overflowing in all directions from an esplanade designed to hold 400,000 people. After a candlelit vigil on Friday, many spent the night on the main square. Among them was Gabriel Barbosa, 22, a student from Brazil, who said, “You do special things for a special event.”
To keep a prime spot for Saturday’s Mass, some chained their foldable chairs to the side railings.
Traditionally, pilgrims walk at least part of the stretch to Fátima. Some then cross the esplanade on their knees, sometimes crawling, to reach the Chapel of the Apparitions. Lara Saavedra, a 28-year-old nun and theology student, said she had walked 22 kilometres (about 13 miles) to Fátima early on Friday and then spent the night on the esplanade, getting ready for Saturday’s morning Mass.
In recent weeks, many local hotels had raised room prices to stratospheric levels. All along the access roads to Fátima, pilgrims set up makeshift campsites.
“Fátima doesn’t, in any case, have the logistical capacity for everybody, but the young are flexible and can adapt,” Ms Saavedra said.
The sanctuary is home to two basilicas, but its most important feature is the much smaller Chapel of the Apparitions, which stands where the Virgin appeared to the children in 1917, on the side of the esplanade.
State employees were granted a public holiday on Friday for the pope’s visit. Many foreign pilgrims said they had planned to travel for Fátima’s centenary celebration before Francis decided to attend. Still, they acknowledged that the pope’s presence made it far more special.
“There are priests who just look at you from a distance, but he’s simple, humble and wants to touch and greet people spontaneously,” said Nancy Hernández de Ambulo, who was among a group of 22 pilgrims visiting from Panama. “His humbleness is extraordinary.”
Nora Sumangil travelled from New York with her husband, Renato, having first visited Fátima in 2015 in very different circumstances. “It really felt very peaceful then,” she said. “This time, it’s about sharing the excitement and the energy with all these people.”
After Fátima, the couple planned to head north and walk part of another major Catholic pilgrimage, the Camino, to the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela.
Indeed, Fátima is one of several important Catholic sanctuaries, but “it’s different to others because this is the place of the mother of God,” said Carlos Osoro Sierra, the archbishop of Madrid, who was among a cohort of senior foreign Church officials in attendance.
“It’s also different because the Virgin appeared at a moment of great difficulties, when the world needed reconciliation,” he added, in reference to the First World War. “This message of conciliation certainly remains very relevant today.”
The younger children died in the 1918-19 European influenza pandemic. Their cousin, Lúcia, whose beatification process began in 2008, died in 2005 at age 97. The Virgin confided three secrets to the children, which were not written down until 1941, when Lúcia started writing her memoirs.
The first two secrets were interpreted as foretelling a world war and the dangers of Soviet Communism. The third secret was long kept a mystery, but the sanctuary’s importance grew after Pope John Paul II credited the Virgin of Fátima with saving his life when Mehmet Ali Agca, a Turkish gunman, tried to kill him on May 13, 1981, the anniversary of the visions.
The bullet that struck the pope was later placed alongside diamonds in the golden crown of the statue of Our Lady of Fátima.
John Paul visited Fátima three times and beatified the siblings in 2000. The Vatican then interpreted the third and final secret as a prediction of the failed assassination.
“If there had not been an assassination attempt, John Paul would never have focused so much on Fátima,” said Grazina Kasprzycka-Rosikon, owner of Rosikon, a Polish publishing house that recently released a book on Fátima. “He, of course, already knew about Fátima, but he then asked to get all the documentation possible, because he realised this wasn’t a coincidence.”
On Friday, Pope Francis met Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, Portugal’s president, and he then held another meeting with António Costa, the prime minister, ahead of Saturday’s Mass. Still, unlike other popes who made more extensive visits of Portugal, Francis wanted to limit himself to a pilgrimage to Fátima. He was to return to Rome later on Saturday.
While Fátima and its two new child saints were the focus for worshipers on Saturday, some also wanted to recall the plight of others. João Ferreira, a Portuguese graphic designer, carried a pole on which he had attached the flags of Portugal and Syria.
“There’s all this great energy among the people here, but there are also the people in Syria who are suffering,” he said.
Courtesy: The New York Times