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19.
Our Lady Speaks for Herself
THE
COVA DA IRIA, a depressed tract of land having the shape of a bowl, lies
two miles west of Fatima. As uncultivated recess in the mountainous area
of Portugal, it became an ideal pasturage for sheep. Before that, it had
served another purpose. A hermit of the seventh century lived out her
life there, dying a martyr in defense of her purity, and now enjoys the
posthumous honor of having the place named after her. But St. Iria, or
Irene, had selected the Cova for a hermitage precisely because of its
solitary unimportance. It attracted no visitors.
It attracts them now. Thousands from all over
the world visit there, week after week. It has an inexhaustible drawing
power. The once unimportant Cova da Iria has become its country's focal
point of interest. The basilica that stands overlooking the grounds where
St. Irene used to kneel at prayer under the open sky and where at a later
date shepherds would graze their flocks, outranks the cathedral of Lisbon,
if not in canonical status, in everything else. It may not possess the
bishop's chair, but does have in its keeping the pectoral cross of Pope
John XXIII. He willed it to the shrine. In answer to a popular demand,
the Basilica of Our Lady of Fatima is by far the largest church in
Portugal.
The origin of its fame dates back to May 13,
1917. It was a Sunday, bright, warm, redolent of spring. The children of
destiny, who had already seen an angel three times, had returned from Mass
at St. Anthony's in Fatima. Aljustrel, their own village, consisted of
scarcely more than a dozen houses and at least two overnight enclosures
for cattle. Lucia drove her sheep out of one corral and her cousins drove
theirs out of the other to the main road. The shepherds, having decided
on their grazing locale for the day, urged the flocks onward to the Cova
da Iria.
They arrived at high noon. The sheep meandered
down the slope to the pasturage while the shepherds tarried on the
summit. A flash of strange lightning startled them. They ran down to
their sheep with the intention of sheltering them under the nearest trees
against the threat of a sudden downpour. But then, to their puzzlement,
the sky remained an unclouded blue. They didn't know what to think when a
second flash caused them to turn and look back to the slope they had just
descended. There was going to be no storm. There was something else: a
globe of radiant mist, brighter than the sun, touching the top of a holm
oak, an evergreen no more than three feet high.
The brilliant cloud, if it may be called that,
suddenly revealed out of its centre the form of the most beautiful and
most youthful of women, no older than sixteen; her radiance was stunning
yet, because of the look on her face and the sound of her voice, not in
the least intimidating. She dazzled but did not overpower her little
seers. "Do not be afraid," were her words that put them at ease. "I will
not harm you."
Juan Diego of Mexico, for all his ecstatic awe,
had likewise felt at ease before his glorious Lady of Tepeyac Hill. When
she who looked young enough to be his granddaughter called him her son, an
inburst of joy over the humorous truth of it filled the old Indian's
heart. Their own apparition—after all, of the same Holy Mother—had the
same easing effect on the little Portuguese shepherds.
She wore a different style of apparel, with no
rich blending of colors, no brooch. The only surviving witness,
twenty-five years later as a nun, wrote of the plain but shining white
garments of Our Lady of Fatima to the bishop of Leiria. "It seems to me,"
are her exact words, "that if I could paint—without being able to paint
her as she is, which is impossible since one cannot even describe her with
words of this earth—I would clothe her with a dress as simple and white as
possible, and a mantle falling from the top of the head to the edge of the
robe. And since I could not paint the light and the beauty that adorned
her, I would suppress all, except a fine gold fillet on the edge of the
mantle. This ornament shone on the background of light, like a ray of the
sun, shining more intensely than the rest. The comparison is far from the
truth, indeed, but I cannot express it better."
The Lady all of white and light looked at the
children benignly, if a little sadly.
"Where do you come from?" Lucia asked, feeling
the radiance from that heavenly face until her eyes hurt, yet feeling no
compulsion to keep silent.
"From heaven."
"Will I go there, too?"
"You will."
"And Jacinta?"
"She will."
"Francisco, too?"
"Yes, he will—after he has said many rosaries."
The children noticed that their Lady of Light
carried a rosary, which dangled from her right hand and ended in a cross
even brighter than the beads. She had her hands folded together, as if
ready for prayer.
Lucia who had always found it an effort to
speak to the angel spoke without effort now. In her feminine curiosity
she inquired after the souls of two acquaintances, lately deceased. She
received the obliging answer. Maria da Neves was already in heaven, and
Amelia not yet, but would be. Amelia, who died at eighteen, was serving
time in purgatory until the end of the world. Lucia, interviewed many
years later, corrected the error of earlier reports that the girl had died
in childhood.
Their heavenly Visitant did not tell the
children who she was, but said she would, if they returned here on the 13th
of every month at noon—until October. Then she would tell.
For the present she was asking them: "Will you
offer sacrifices to God and accept all the sufferings He sends you? Will
you do this to make reparation for the sins that so grievously offend Him
and to obtain the conversion of sinners?"
"Yes, we promise." The answer from Lucia, who
spoke for the three, came without a moment's hesitation. She had not been
taken by surprise. The angel had asked the same of them.
The Lady from heaven, smiling her approval,
then added: "You will have much to endure, but the grace of God will aid
you, console you."
The phrase, the grace of God, brought a
gesture from her. She opened her folded hands and from the palms there
burst out rays of light that touched the seers, as Lucia has written,
"penetrating to the depths of our souls and causing us to see ourselves in
God more clearly than in a radiant mirror." The effusive gesture, an
exact imitation of the outbursts of light from the same delicate hands of
Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal, was but acclaiming her anew the
dispenser of all grace. The children may not have known it. They had no
need to know it. They felt it.
There was certainly grace at work in them. For
the three, including Francisco who heard no words but did see the streams
of light, had fallen to their knees. They prayed: "O most Blessed
Trinity, I adore you, My God, my God, I love you in the most Blessed
Sacrament."
The angel had urged the children to pray for
peace, for an end to World War I and the conversion of sinners. Now from
this Queen they heard the same exhortation to the same purpose, except
that she specified they "say the rosary every day." These were her final
words before her radiant beauty faded out of sight.
Did the little shepherds know her to be, not
only from heaven, but its Queen and the Virgin Mother of God? She had not
told them that she was, as she had immediately told Catherine Labouré and
Juan Diego. But they certainly, at the least, felt her to be. The
children had kept their apparitions of the angel a secret among
themselves. They meant to keep their more brilliant vision of the Lady
from heaven no less strictly a secret. They agreed. But seven-year-old
Jacinta, that evening with her mother, broke under the strain. "Mamma!"
she exclaimed, her solemn little face bursting with wonder. "Today I saw
the Blessed Virgin at the Cova da Iria."
Elizabeth at the Visitation, "filled with the
Holy Spirit," ran forward in a rapture of joy to greet her cousin Mary as
"the mother of my Lord" (Lk. 1:42-43). May we not infer that the Holy
Spirit imparted to the little seer at the Cova the same intuitive
recognition? Anyhow, in praying their rosaries from now on, in reciting
innumerable decades of the Hail Mary, the children would be saying
again and again and again, and with a confidence supported by their
visions, all that Elizabeth had said but once.
The parents of little Jacinta were divided in
their reaction to her claim. The mother rejected it as a humorous
impossibility too good to be true. The father kept an open mind.
Manuel-Pedro Marto had never caught the child, nor Francisco, in a lie.
Candor was a characteristic of theirs, and he liked the boy's quiet but
firm acknowledgment of their apparition. Besides, the shrewd herdsman had
been noticing for some time a new seriousness in their demeanor and their
use of terms new to their vocabulary, although neither had breathed a word
to him about their visions of the angel. Ti Marto, which was the nickname
the neighborhood knew him by, became the first of an immediate clientele
to believe that his Jacinta and Francisco saw with his niece a radiant
Presence who might well be the Queen of heaven.
Over in Lucia's cottage it was different. The
air bristled with hostility. When she admitted to having seen with
Jacinta a youthful Lady from heaven who shone with a beauty indescribable,
her father scorned the idea and her mother flew into a rage. No daughter
of hers was going to make a laughingstock of the family. Nor if Maria
Rosa dos Santos could stop it! She scolded. She threatened. She
spanked. Did not Bernadette of Lourdes have to endure the same harsh
treatment a century ago? To offset which, to overbalance which, each
enjoyed the understanding of a greater Mother.
The second apparition occurred on June the 13th,
the patronal feast of St. Anthony parish. The seers had attended an
earlier Mass instead of waiting for the children's Missa Cantata at ten
o'clock, for they were determined to keep their midday appointment at the
Cova da Iria. Their blessed Lady did not fail them. At noon she was
present to their eyes, right over the holly oak, as a month before.
The seers had uninvited company. About sixty
witnesses stood by, watching closely. Though unable to see the heavenly
visitor, they did know from indirect evidence of her presence, her
arrival, the duration of her visit, her departure. We have their
authenticated reports. They all noticed that the normal sunshine dimmed
to a golden haze over the Cova all the while the seers beheld the cause of
their ecstasy. Not a few also had noticed that, to signal the arrival of
the blessed Lady, the touch of her feet on the holm, its top leaves swayed
as under a weight and remained so for a period of between ten and fifteen
minutes. Then, to quote one of the more graphic accounts, "the twigs of
the tree gathered together and bent to a side as if the Lady, when
leaving, had dragged her dress over them."
Their glorious Lady urged the children anew to
return next month on the 13th at the same hour and to pray
their five decades of beads—"a third of the rosary?—every day. Taught a
love for prayer by the angel, they did not always stop after five
decades. Many a day they went through all fifteen mysteries. When asked
years later whether Our Lady carried a rosary of five or fifteen decades,
Lucia honestly replied, "I didn't count them." Now she was being asked to
learn how to read and write.
Lucia countered with a request of her own. "I
wish you would take us to heaven."
"Jacinta and Francisco, yes. I will take them
soon. But you must remain on earth longer. Jesus intends to use you to
promote a greater awareness of me. He wishes to establish throughout the
world a devotion to my Immaculate Heart."
"Only I must stay? Alone?"
"No, child, you will not be alone. You will
have much to suffer, but do not be discouraged. I will never forsake
you. My Immaculate Heart will be your refuge and prepare you for God."
Whereupon the mediatrix of grace, as in the
first apparition, held open her folded hands to let the streams of light
from them envelope the children and give them the sweet inner peace of
being "submerged in God." The phrase is Lucia's.
This time, however, something new was added.
In front of the Lady's right hand there appeared a human heart surrounded
by piercing thorns. The mediatrix of grace, as she had done on the
reverse side of the Miraculous Medal, demonstrated here again her
coredemptional suffering with the dying Savior. She was but picturing to
her visionaries what St. Bernard had said from the pupil when he asked his
audience and gave them the answers: "Do you marvel"—you who mourn the
crucifixion of her Son—"that Mary suffered with him? He could die in
body. Could she not die with him in heart? His death was brought about
by a love greater than any mere man has; hers by a love no mortal ever
had, except herself."
The grace that poured into their souls from
those blessed hands of the Lady, as the seers gazed intently at her
thorn-encircled heart, made it clear to them at last why the angel had
never failed to associate it with the Sacred Heart of Christ. The two
belong together. They could see that now. And with a stronger fervor
they would henceforth close their prayer to the Holy Trinity in reparation
for all the heinous insults to their Eucharistic Lord: "Through the
infinite merits of his Sacred Heart and of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, I
beg of You the conversion of poor sinners."
The third apparition in July drew a crowd of
some few thousands. Interest was spreading through Portugal. No sooner
had the desire of their eyes appeared on the eastern horizon to glide to
her usual spot, her delicate feet taking a stand in a bright and fluffy
little cloud on the little evergreen, than the seers went into their
customary trance. They heard anew the admonition with just a little
different twist: "Come here again on the 13th of next month and continue
to say five decades of the rosary every day in honor of the Blessed Virgin
to obtain the end of the war and peace in the world. Her intercession
alone can bring this about."
Still, the Lady did not actually say she was
the Blessed Virgin. So Lucia asked her for her identification and for
something else: a miracle to prove to the people the genuineness of the
visions. She received the instant reply:
"In October I will tell you who I am and what I
desire." But this much the Lady had promised in the first apparition.
Now she added: "And I will then work a miracle to convince them."
Lucia, whose family were taunting her
mercilessly, had begun to waver under the pressure. Could the apparitions
possibly be from the devil? No! They could not! Everything the Lady was
saying now, as before, disproved that.
"Sacrifice yourselves for sinners," she
implored the children. "And when you do, say: 'O Jesus, it is for love of
you, for the conversion of sinners, and in reparation for sins committed
against the Immaculate Heart of Mary'."
The gesture that accompanied the prayer, the
little mystics were seeing for the third time. But on this occasion the
rays of light from those open hands of such indescribable delicacy seemed
to penetrate the very ground. "Then to the horrified seers the ground
wasn't there. "We saw," the speaker for them relates, "what looked like a
great sea of fire. In it were plunged black and burning demons, and souls
in human form, both resembling live transparent coals. Lifted up into the
air by the flames, they fell back on all sides like sparks in a
conflagration, with neither weight nor balance, amid loud screams and
cries of pain and despair which made one tremble and shudder with terror.
The devils were distinguished from the human beings by their horrible,
disgusting animal forms, unknown to us but transparent as live coals."
The visionaries quivered at the sight and their
cry of dismay was heard by the many bystanders. The eyewitness who
survives continues her account:
"Then, as if asking for help, we raised our
eyes to the Blessed Virgin who said kindly, but sadly; 'You have seen
hell, where the souls of poor sinners go. To save them, Our Lord wishes
to establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart. If they do
what I tell you, many souls will be saved, and there will be peace. The
present war is coming to an end. However, if the offenses against God do
not stop, a worse one will break out during the reign of Pius XI. To
present which, I have come to ask that Russia be consecrated to my
Immaculate Heart and that Holy Communion be received on the first
Saturdays in reparation."
The fact is, the Holy See did not consecrate
Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary until 1942. By then, it was too
late to help prevent World War II. Its fury had broken out years before.
The whole message of Fatima honors the free
will of man. No sinner is forced to repent; repentance must come
voluntarily; but the dispenser of graces has them ever ready to aid the
will to a right choice, if the will remains open to them. Her next
utterance to the children, spoken as a warning to the world, has become an
indictment of human folly. The world did not heed the warning:
"If my admonitions are followed, Russia will be
converted and there will be peace. If not, she will spread her errors
through the world, provoking wars and a persecution of the Church. The
good will be martyred, the Holy Father will have much to suffer, various
nations will be annihilated. But in the end"—let it be remembered as the
conflict between good and evil hastens to the inevitable showdown—"my
Immaculate Heart will triumph. Russia will be converted and the world
will enjoy an era of peace."
The prayer, to be added at the end of every
decade of the rosary, was now given to the seers. They found it a
soothing relief after their vision of hell. Francisco learned it from
Lucia, who with Jacinta had taken it directly from the heavenly voice that
put a tremendous urgency into the words: "O my Jesus, forgive us our sins,
save us from the fires of hell; lead all souls to heaven, especially those
most in need of your mercy."
What about the secret from the third apparition
which Lucia and Jacinta were allowed to tell only unhearing Francisco? It
remains that. The record of it, which Lucia as a nun received the
permission of Our Lady and again of Our Lord in subsequent visions to
write down, she did—just for Bishop José da Silva of Leiria. His
Excellency alone had possession of it until, aware of his imminent death,
he sent it to the Holy See. There Pope John, understanding Portuguese,
read it without difficulty in 1960, respected it, but decided not to
publicize it. He did say in an encyclical at the time, to show how
seriously he took the revelation, that more than ever the world must heed
the plea for prayer and penance from Our Lady of Fatima. The secret lies
hidden in the Vatican archives.
The 13th of August, the promised
date for the next apparition, dawned over the Cova da Iria to find a group
of pilgrims already waiting there. By noon the group had increased to a
crowd the largest yet. The cult was gaining momentum. The rumor had
reached even Lisbon that in July the three young seers of Aljustrel were
told a dreadful secret they dare not divulge and that bystanders did
indeed see the horrified look on their faces and heard their cry of
dismay. Curiosity, not without devotion, ran high.
But the children did not come. They were in
hostile custody. They had been kidnapped.
The disappointed crowd at the Cova, however,
soon forgot about the children. For at noon sharp, the usual hour for the
apparitions, a clap of thunder in a sunny sky and a strong flash of
lightning alerted the people to a strange phenomenon: a white cloud was
descending toward the little holly oak, stayed there awhile, barely
touching it, and then glided back to the eastern horizon to disappear.
The people stood exchanging looks of wonderment when their faces suddenly
caught the rich tints of some possible rainbow. But there was no rainbow
in the sky. It were as if an invisible prism with the strength of the sun
was playing its variety of colors over their bodies, over the landscape,
over everything in sight. Maria Carreira, for one, has reported the
experience of the many. The Lady had been there, they had no doubt,
though herself unseen. The cloud and the rainbow colors without the
rainbow convinced them.
Meanwhile, the absent children were being
detained in the home of Arturo d'Oliveira Santos, the administrator of the
area, who boasted he was no relative of Lucia. This apostate Freemason of
the Grand Orient, which politically dominated the country since the
revolution of 1910, was determined to put a stop to the visions at the
Cova. Superstitious nonsense he called them. So on the morning of the 13th
he drove his carriage over to Aljustrel, got the unsuspecting seers to
climb in when he promised to take them to their heavenly appointment at
the Cova da Iria. He lied. They were easy captives.
Submitting them to the custody of his wife for
the rest of the day and overnight, he hurried them off the next morning to
the town hall where they were harassed and threatened with death in
boiling oil if they did not yield the secret. They refused. They
wouldn't think of disobeying what they knew to be a voice from heaven.
Their captor threw them in jail.
They were released on the feast of the
Assumption, two days after they had been kidnapped. What was the point of
holding them longer? They would not break under the strain to reveal the
secret; they even had their cell mates of various criminal tendencies
praying the rosary with them; and what is more, public indignation over
the villainous capture was mounting. The administrator was indeed saved
from the hands of an angry mob by the intervention of Ti Marto, the father
of Jacinta and Francisco. His scheme, which only made the seers better
known, proved a complete boomerang. It may be said that, in putting the
children in jail, he put himself out of office. His ouster followed
within the same year.
Nor did he deprive his captives of their August
vision, after all. Juan Diego of Mexico had missed an appointment with
the Holy Mother on Tepeyac Hill, only to enjoy the unexpected vision of
her later at a different location. It would be so now, with the resolute
little trio of Aljustrel. Their situation likewise bore a resemblance to
that of another former visionary. They shared with Bernadette Soubirous
the distinction of having gone to jail for the same noble cause and then,
like her, found the next apparition a greater solace than ever the
vexation was distressing. The same turn of events, as at Lourdes, was
about to recur in a remote hollow of Portugal, on August 19, 1917.
The young shepherds had selected the Valinhos
hollow on this Sunday for pasturing their sheep, since it lay closer to
their homes than the Cova or even the Cabeco heights. The afternoon sun
had never shone more fiercely when at about four o'clock a brighter flash
of light drew their gaze to an evergreen oak not unlike the holm at the
Cova. There, above it, stood the same familiar Figure of their former
visions. They had not expected her.
After offering them her maternal sympathy for
the sufferings they had endured for her sake, she reminded them once again
to come to their regular meeting place at the Cova on the thirteenth day
of the next two months and in the meantime to show their love for sinners.
"Pray, pray very much and make sacrifices for
sinners," she pleaded, "for many souls go to hell because they had no one
to sacrifice and pray for them."
In the Providence of God, as shown in that
statement, as often illustrated in Holy Scripture, intercessory prayer and
sacrifice can win graces for others in desperate need of them. Would
Augustine have become the saint he did, without Monica? His grateful
acknowledgment in the Confessions furnishes the answer. No
individual can act, whether for good or evil, and not affect by however
much or little the human race. Every private thought, word, deed, bears
upon the scales of divine justice pro or con. If only ten virtuous souls
could have been found in Sodom, the city would have been spared (Gen.
18:32). The administrator of Ourem locked three little favorites of
heaven in jail, and what did their visitor from heaven say about it?
"Because of the interference," she said, "the miracle I promised in
October will be less striking."
The September apparition, again at the Cova,
drew an estimated turnout of thirty thousand. Already at ten o'clock on
that morning of the 13th the roads to the Cova were jammed. In
her memoirs the eldest of the seers refers to the difficulty they had in
reaching their blessed destination on time. She writes: "Many people,
pressing through the crowd, would fall at our feet to beg us to present to
Our Lady their petitions. Others, unable to reach us, cried from afar,
from the tops of walls or from trees on which they were perched to obtain
a glimpse of us." Their pleas covered a wide range. "For the love of
God, ask the Blessed Virgin to cure my crippled son", one mother said.
Another wanted the sight restored to her child, through the intercession
of Mary. A wife expected the children to request the safe return of her
husband at war. "Get her to convert a sinner dear to me" runs typical of
the fervent appeals which all rather indicate that the faithful in the
throng did not have to wait until October to learn from the visionaries
who their Lady claim herself to be. They already knew.
By noon the natural bowl of the Cova da Iria
had become a vast amphitheatre packed with people. The bright sunlight
softened to a golden tint. It was the signal. Thousands of fingers
pointed to the east. Voices cried: "Look! Over there!"
None in the crowd turned a more eager pair of
eyes to look than the future vica general of the diocese. "To my great
astonishment," wrote Monsignor Joao Quaresma fifteen years after, "I saw
clearly and distinctly a luminous cloud moving from the east toward the
west, slowly and majestically gliding down across the distance." When it
reached the holm it vanished.
The monsignor asked the priest at his side, who
had ridiculed their coming out to the Cova, what he thought.
"I think it was Our Lady," came the chastened
reply.
The soon-to-be vicar general concludes: "It was
my conviction, too. The little shepherds looked on the Mother of God
herself. To us was granted the grace to see only the carriage that had
transported her from heaven to the barren and inhospitable heath of the
Serra da Aire."
During the fifth apparition, which lasted
nearly a quarter of an hour, the familiar admonitions were repeated. The
children were to return in October, go on praying the rosary and doing
penance.
Lucia, lest she might forget, quickly put in
her requests on behalf of the people for their seriously ill relatives or
friends.
"Some I will cure," was the reply she
received. "Other not. The Lord does not trust them."
Meaning what? Presumably, that the cures would
do those of a certain bent more harm than good, since their afflictions
kept them humbly close to God whereas a return to health would foster in
them a proud self-sufficiency.
Lucia spoke up again for the people, stating
their hopeful desire to build a chapel here at the Cova.
The nod of approval, distinguishable out of all
that ambient splendor of the vision, still warms the heart of a child now
grown half a century older.
Her cousins of nine and seven years of age
depended on Lucia to do their talking for them during the apparitions.
For that matter, not hearing, Francisco would have been incapable of
conversing. But even Jacinta, who did hear the blessed Lady, relied on
Lucia to speak for her. Not once did she interrupt the dialogue while
hearing every word of it.
From their apparitions the shepherds, like
Catherine Labouré, knew of history in the making before the events
occurred. "The war to end wars" which Woodrow Wilson felt confident would
be the last, the visionaries just as confidently knew would lead to a
worse unless mankind repented, which mankind showed no signs of doing.
His fine phrases of reassurance, if repeated to them in Portuguese, would
have sounded to the seers like so much rhetorical nonsense. In fact,
while slowly dying in a Lisbon hospital, Jacinta told its mother superior
with pinpoint accuracy: "If men do not amend their lives, Almighty God
will send the world, beginning with Spain, a punishment such as never has
been seen." Political analysts of World War II quite agree that, for all
practical purpose, hostilities did break out in the mid-1930's with the
civil strife in Spain, what with the Communists backing one side and the
Nazis along with the Fascists the other.
Our Lady of Fatima equally foretold the
internal strife which the Church has since endured and is still enduring.
She gave warning that, short of a general repentance, Communism would
infiltrate Christian civilization to threaten its doctrines and that the
Holy Father would have much to suffer. No one has to be told that now.
It has happened. But three little shepherds of Portugal grieved over the
calamity before it happened. Jacinta one day said to her companions as
the three sat in the shade of an olive tree: "I can't explain it, but I
see the Holy Father in a very large building, and he is kneeling at a
table with his hands over his face. He is crying." Again, she could see
a mob gathering outside the building. Some were throwing stones at him,
while others were cursing him and using the vilest language at him. She
sighed, with tears in her own eyes: "Poor little Holy Father! We must
pray for him."
This child of mystic insights did not mention
the Holy Father by name. But, aside from one particular, her vision could
apply to Pope Paul who has had his heart broken by the dissidents and been
known to sob openly as well as in the privacy of his room. What the
future holds may yet include the stones.
Come what will, the faithful who obey the
motherly admonitions of Our Lady of Fatima will not succumb to the
onslaughts of evil. They will never desert her divine Son. They may be
ridiculed, ignored, persecuted, but not defeated. They will retain the
deep inner contentment of a good conscience. They will keep the Faith.
"Tell all the people," was Jacinta's dying request to Lucia, "that God
gives them graces through her."
Doctors and nurses in the two hospitals, where
the child lay suffering and dying for the conversion of sinners, were
astonished at her profound statements. They needn't have been. The
premature saint in her last year and a half on earth enjoyed the finest of
private tutoring in theology. Repeatedly the Mother of God, the same
youthfully beautiful Lady of the Cova and Valinhos, visited her bedside.
Jacinta died at the age of ten in Lisbon, away
from home. Her corpse, laid out for three and a half days in the sacristy
of Holy Angels' Church, gave off a fragrance which no flower could
emulate. They buried it in a vault at Ourem. Like her brother Francisco,
the child went to heaven early in fulfillment of a blessed promise to
them. Our Lady of Fatima did not predict falsely.
Nor had she done with miracles in support of
her authenticity when to little Jacinta's corpse she imparted an unearthly
fragrance (not to mention for the present her earlier miracle of the
sun). She had yet another surprise in readiness to show the child's
rejoicing mourners on September 12, 1935. That day, fifteen years after
the funeral, eighteen years after the miracle of the sun, the remains of
Jacinta Marto were transferred to Fatima. Her coffin was opened. The
young body lay in the satin linings of the box, incorrupt.
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