(FATIMA, Portugal) — Pope Francis added two Portuguese shepherd children to the roster of Catholic saints Saturday, honoring young siblings whose reported visions of the Virgin Mary 100 years ago turned the Portuguese farm town of Fatima into one of the world's most important Catholic shrines. At Mass on the solemnity of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Fatima for the centenary of the apparitions at the Shrine of Our Lady of Fatima today, Pope Francis proclaimed Blessed Jacinta and Francisco Marto saints. Hundreds of thousands of pilgrims were on hand, many of whom had spent days at Fatima in quiet prayer, reciting rosaries before a statue of the Madonna. They clapped as soon as Francis read the proclamation aloud. “It is amazing, it is like an answer to prayer because I felt that always they would be canonized,” said Agnes Walsh from Killarney, Ireland. She said she prayed to Francisco Marto for 20 years, hoping her four daughters would meet “nice boys like Francisco.” “The four of them have met boys that are just beautiful I couldn’t ask for better, so he has answered all my prayers,” she said. “We register them on the list of saints, declaring that they must be venerated as such by the Church.”

The canonization took place on the 100th anniversary of the day when Jacinta, then aged seven, her brother Francisco, nine, and their cousin Lucia, 10, first reportedly saw the Virgin Mary on the spot where the sanctuary was built. They said she confided in them three secrets — foretelling apocalyptic visions of hell, war, communism and the death of a pope — and urged them to pray for peace and a conversion away from sin. At the time, Europe was in the throes of the First World War and the Portuguese church was suffering under anti-clerical laws from the republican government that had forced many bishops and priests into exile. “Our Lady foretold, and warned us about, a way of life that is godless and indeed profanes God in his creatures,” Francis said in his homily. “Such a life, frequently proposed and imposed, risks leading to hell.”

He urged Catholics today to use the example of the Marto siblings and draw strength from God, even when adversity strikes. The children had been threatened by local civil authorities with death by boiling oil if they did not recant their story. After the Church recognised the apparitions as authentic in 1930, people flocked in greater numbers to the site of the visions. He reminded the faithful that godlessness “risks leading to hell” but that Mary came to remind us that “God’s light dwells within us and protects us.” He said we can take the shepherd children “as our examples” whom the Virgin Mary “introduced into the immense ocean of God’s light and taught to adore him.”

“She enveloped them in the mantle of Light that God had given her,” he said. “That was the source of their strength in overcoming opposition and suffering.”

The Martos are now the youngest-ever saints who didn’t die as martyrs. “That was the source of their strength in overcoming opposition and suffering.”

Before the Mass, Francis prayed at the tombs of each of the Fatima visionaries. While the Marto siblings died two years later during the Spanish flu pandemic that followed the First World War, Lucia became a Carmelite nun and died in 2005, aged 97. “Before, we couldn’t even talk about the beatification of children in the history of the Church, because the principle prevailed that they didn’t yet have the skills to exercise the heroic level of Christian virtues” required as a first step, said Cardinal Martins. At the end of the Mass, Francis was to offer a special greeting to the many faithful who flock to Fatima in hopes of healing. Stores selling souvenirs — statues of the Virgin Mary, rosaries, even wax limbs — line the streets, while hotels, restaurants, and cafes rely on a steady parade of tourists and pilgrims. Participating in the offertory procession Saturday were Joao Baptista and his wife, Lucila Yurie, of Brazil. They were with their son, Lucas, whose medically inexplicable healing was the “miracle” needed for the Marto siblings to be declared saints. The boy, aged 5 at the time, had fallen 6.5 meters (21 feet) from a window in 2013 and suffered such severe head trauma that his doctors said he would be severely mentally disabled or in a vegetative state if he even survived. The boy not only survived but has no signs of any after-effects. Pope John Paul II was possibly the most devoted to Fatima, attributing his narrow escape from an assassination attempt at St. Peter’s Square on May 13, 1981—the anniversary of the first reported apparition—to the intervention of the Virgin Mary. The text, written by Lucia, had been kept in a sealed envelope inside the Vatican for decades, with no pope daring to reveal it because of its terrifying contents: a “bishop dressed in white” — the pope — on his knees at the foot of a cross, killed in a hail of bullets and arrows, along with other bishops, priests and various lay Catholics. The message featured an angel crying out “penance, penance, penance!”

The impending canonization of the children had led to speculation that a fourth “secret” remained, but the Vatican has insisted there are no more secrets related to the Fatima revelations.
Pope Francis canonizes Jacinta and Francisco Marto, two of the three Fátima children who reported seeing the Virgin Mary in the spring and summer of 1917. The Martos, who died during the post-World War I international influenza pandemic, are the Catholic Church's youngest saints who did not die as martyrs. The other child, Lúcia de Jesus dos Santos, survived until the year 2005, when she was 97 years old.