Our Lady of Fatima

The children. Aljustrel was a small hamlet in the hill country of the parish of Fatima in central Portugal. Lucia dos Santos, born in March 1907 (the shrine gives the 28th, other sources the 22nd), was the youngest child of her family. Her cousins were Francisco Marto, born on 11 June 1908, and Jacinta Marto, born on 5 March 1910. They kept their families' sheep together, and had little or no schooling. Portugal was at war in 1917, and many sons of the country had gone to the front.

The angel, 1916. Years later Lucia wrote that an angel had come to them three times in 1916: at the Loca do Cabeço in spring, at the well of Arneiro behind her house in summer, and at the Cabeço again after summer. He called himself the Angel of Peace and the Angel of Portugal, taught them to pray, and at the last visit held a chalice and a Host, giving them Communion. The children had kept this to themselves, and it is known only from her later account.

13 May 1917. The children were at the Cova da Iria, a rough hollow where Lucia's parents owned a small plot, when they saw what they took for lightning. Over a small holm oak stood a lady, very young, in white, brighter than the sun, with a rosary in her hands. Lucia did the talking. Jacinta heard but did not speak, and Francisco saw but did not hear. The Lady asked them to come on the thirteenth of each month for six months. She asked them whether they would offer themselves to God and bear the sufferings he would send, for sinners. She told them to say the Rosary every day, for peace and the end of the war.

Lucia had told the others to say nothing, but Jacinta told her mother that same evening. Lucia's own mother did not believe it and was hard on her. The parish priest, Fr Ferreira, suggested that it might be a trick of the devil, and for weeks this tormented Lucia.

13 June. It was the feast of St Anthony. A small group came along with the children. The Lady said that she would take Francisco and Jacinta to heaven soon, and that Lucia would stay longer, because Jesus wished to use her to make Our Lady known and loved and to establish devotion to her Immaculate Heart. She told Lucia to learn to read.

13 July. Lucia had nearly decided not to go, but at the last moment her fear lifted. A far larger crowd stood around them. The Lady said again to say the Rosary, promised that in October she would say who she was and do a miracle so that all might believe, and asked for sacrifices for sinners. On that day, Lucia later said, she showed them the three-part "secret", described below.

August: the children are held. The administrator of the county at Vila Nova de Ourém, Artur de Oliveira Santos, was a strong opponent of the Church, as was much of the government of the time. On 13 August he took the children away to Ourém in his carriage, so that they would not reach the Cova. He questioned them and threatened them, even with death in boiling oil, one child at a time, to make them tell the secret. They did not tell it. On 15 August, the feast of the Assumption, he brought them back to the priest's house at Fatima. On 19 August, while tending sheep at Valinhos, near Aljustrel, the children saw her again. She asked them to go on with the Rosary, and promised the miracle in October, though less great because of what had been done. She told them to pray very much and to make sacrifices for sinners.

13 September. A large crowd now came. The Lady told them to continue the Rosary so that the war might end. She said that God was pleased with their sacrifices, but that they should not wear at night the rough cords they had tied around their waists. Lucia asked about the sick, and she said that she would cure some and not others.

13 October. After days of rain, a crowd reported at 30,000 to 100,000 stood in the mud. Fr John de Marchi speaks of 70,000. Around noon, Lucia asked what she wanted. The Lady asked for a chapel to be built there in her honour, told them to keep saying the Rosary, and said that the war would end soon. When Lucia asked her name, she answered: "I am the Lady of the Rosary." She also said that people must amend their lives and ask pardon for their sins.

As she rose, Lucia cried out to look at the sun. The clouds parted. Many in the crowd said that the sun looked like a dull silver disc that they could look at, that it trembled, whirled, changed colour and seemed to fall toward the earth. The children reported seeing St Joseph with the Child Jesus, then the Lord, then Our Lady under other titles. Avelino de Almeida, a Lisbon reporter for the anticlerical newspaper O Século, who had mocked the affair beforehand, published a sober report of what people said they saw. Not everyone saw it. Some reported nothing. No scientific record shows anything unusual about the sun, and sceptics have proposed explanations such as eye effects and suggestion. The Church has never required anyone to hold a view on what happened in the sky.

Francisco and Jacinta. The influenza epidemic of 1918 struck both. Francisco, who spent long hours in prayer before the Blessed Sacrament wanting to console Jesus, died at home on 4 April 1919, aged ten, after Confession and Communion. Jacinta, deeply moved to offer sacrifices for sinners, suffered long and was moved from hospital to hospital. She died at the Estefânia hospital in Lisbon on 20 February 1920, aged nine, after surgery. Their tombs are now in the Basilica at Fatima.

Lucia. Lucia was sent in 1921 to the Dorothean Sisters' college at Vilar, in Porto, under the assumed name Maria das Dores, away from the crowds. She entered the Dorotheans, spending years in Spain, at Pontevedra and at Tui. In Pontevedra in 1925 and 1926 she reported visions asking for Communions of reparation on First Saturdays, and in Tui in 1929 she reported a request for the consecration of Russia. In the late 1940s she entered the Carmel of St Teresa at Coimbra, and made her perpetual vows there on 31 May 1949. On her bishop's orders she wrote her Memoirs, four of them between 1935 and 1941. She died at Coimbra on 13 February 2005, at 97, and her body was moved to the Basilica at Fatima in 2006.

The chapel. Devotion grew in spite of the state. The small chapel the Lady asked for was built between April and June 1919. It was blown up by dynamite on 6 March 1922, and reopened on 13 January 1923. The bishop opened his inquiry in May 1922.

The wording of the messages comes from Sister Lucia's Memoirs and her answers to questions, written down years later. These are summaries in short form, as she reported them.

The war. The Great War did not end soon after 13 October 1917. It ended on 11 November 1918. Fr Manuel Formigão, who questioned the children, asked about this at the time, for some had understood them to say that it would end that very day. At an official inquiry at Vilar in July 1924 Lucia looked back at this confusion. She was a child when she heard the words and she wrote them down years later. This is one reason why such words are not to be read as if they were Scripture.

This is the part of Fatima that has caused most talk. In June 2000 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith published The Message of Fatima, a single document with the texts, their history and a commentary. It is the Church's own account, and it should be read first. What follows gives it in brief.

Only one secret, three parts. Lucia said that what she saw on 13 July 1917 was one secret in three parts. She wrote down the first two in her Third Memoir on 31 August 1941, with notes in the Fourth Memoir of 8 December 1941. So they were written after the Second World War had begun. They had already been made public by the time of the document. The third part she wrote on 3 January 1944 at Tui, on the order of her bishop.

First part. A brief vision of hell, seen under the image of a sea of fire. Lucia says that it lasted only an instant, and that the children would have died of fear had Our Lady not already promised them heaven. It is the language of a vision, and its point, as the document explains, is the salvation of souls. Pope Francis said in 2017 that Our Lady warned against a way of life that is godless. The Church teaches the reality of hell as a real possibility of human freedom (CCC 1033 to 1037). Fatima's way of speaking is a call to pray and to love, not to despair.

Second part. God wishes to establish devotion to Mary's Immaculate Heart, so that souls may be saved and there may be peace. Lucia reports warnings of a worse war, and a request for the consecration of Russia and Communions of reparation on First Saturdays. If these were heeded, Russia would be converted and there would be peace; if not, there would be wars and persecution, with much suffering for the good and for the Holy Father. It ends with a promise: "In the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph."

Third part. An angel with a flaming sword, whose flames die out against the light from Our Lady, cries out three times "Penance!" Then, in an immense light that is God, a Bishop dressed in white, whom the children took for the Holy Father, passes through a half-ruined city, praying for the dead. At the top of a steep mountain, kneeling before a great rough cross, he is killed by soldiers, and other bishops, priests, religious and lay people die after him. Two angels gather the blood of the martyrs and sprinkle the souls making their way to God. The full text is in the Vatican document, and it is not long.

The history of the envelope. The sealed envelope stayed with the Bishop of Leiria. It went to the Holy Office on 4 April 1957. Pope St John XXIII had it brought to him on 17 August 1959 and chose not to reveal it. Pope St Paul VI read it on 27 March 1965 and also chose not to publish it. St John Paul II asked for it after the attempt on his life. It was brought out of the archives on 18 July 1981 and returned on 11 August. Lucia had written on the envelope that it could be opened after 1960. Asked about this in 2000, she said that the date was her own intuition and that Our Lady had not fixed it.

The publication. On 13 May 2000, at the beatification of Francisco and Jacinta, Cardinal Angelo Sodano announced that the text would be published. It came out on 26 June 2000. Before this, on 27 April, Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone and Bishop Serafim of Leiria visited Sister Lucia at Coimbra. She recognised the envelope and the writing as hers, and agreed that it was a prophetic vision, chiefly about the struggle of atheistic Communism against the Church and the sufferings of the witnesses of the faith in the twentieth century. She also said that she wrote what she saw and that interpreting it belonged to the Pope and not to her.

The Holy See's reading.

• Cardinal Sodano said that the text is a prophetic vision of the kind found in Scripture, which does not describe details like a photograph, and so must be read in a symbolic key.
• He called it a long Way of the Cross, led by the popes of the twentieth century.
• The Pope in the vision falls as if dead. St John Paul II survived 13 May 1981. He believed that a mother's hand had guided the bullet, and the document links the vision with that day.
• Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger's commentary says frankly that the text may disappoint those who hoped for more: no great mystery is revealed, and the future is not unveiled.
• He rules out fatalism. The future is not fixed. The vision exists to move human freedom in the right direction, through penance and prayer. It is not, he says, a film of a future that cannot be changed.
• He notes that the final images may come from devotional books Lucia had seen, and that every vision of this kind passes through the limits of the one who sees it.
• On the words that the Immaculate Heart will triumph, he writes that the heart open to God is stronger than weapons, since Mary's yes brought the Saviour into the world. Since God took a human heart, he says, the choice of evil no longer has the last word.

Disputes, stated honestly.

• Was everything published? Some writers, among them Paul Kramer and Antonio Socci, have claimed that part of the third secret remains hidden. The Holy See denies this. The document states that there is one manuscript and reproduces it in facsimile. In 2016 the Holy See's press office reported that Benedict XVI, as Pope Emeritus, held that the publication was complete.
• Was Russia consecrated? Pius XII consecrated the world to the Immaculate Heart in 1942, with a reference to the peoples of Russia, and consecrated those peoples by name in 1952. St John Paul II made an act with the bishops of the world on 25 March 1984, without naming Russia. Some argue that this did not meet the request. The Holy See's document quotes Sister Lucia's letter of 8 November 1989 that it was done as Our Lady asked, and it concludes that further discussion has no basis. Some reports say Lucia's earlier statements varied. On 25 March 2022 Pope Francis, at the request of the Latin bishops of Ukraine, consecrated Russia and Ukraine by name to the Immaculate Heart, as a prayer in time of war.
• Is the prophecy closed? The document treats the events of the vision as lying in the past. Benedict XVI said at Fatima on 13 May 2010: "We would be mistaken to think that Fatima's prophetic mission is complete." On the flight there, he said that the Church's greatest suffering comes from sin within the Church itself, and that it was not only a matter of attacks from outside. He was not announcing some new secret. He was saying that the call to conversion stands.
• Dates and fear. Fatima gives no date for the end of anything, and nothing in the Church's reading supports fear or date-setting. Any writing that does so does not speak for the Church.

• Pilgrims. The Shrine of Fatima reports about 6.5 million people at one or more celebrations in 2025, up from 6.2 million in 2024, with 5,608 registered groups from 84 countries. For the first time, more pilgrims came from Asia than from the Americas (figures released on 5 February 2026).
• The Rosary. Daily Rosary in families and parishes around the world, and the prayer "O my Jesus" said after each decade.
• First Saturdays. Confession, Communion, the Rosary and meditation on the first Saturday of the month, as a practice of reparation.
• Consecration and prayer for peace. Popes and bishops have made acts of entrustment to the Immaculate Heart. The World Apostolate of Fatima spreads the message around the world. Pilgrim statues of Our Lady of Fatima travel widely, including to Ukraine in 2022.
• Child saints. Francisco and Jacinta, canonised for their heroic love of God and of sinners, show the Church that children can be saints without being martyrs.

Fatima is in central Portugal, about 130 km north of Lisbon, with regular coaches from Lisbon's Sete Rios terminal in about 1.5 to 2 hours.

• Chapel of the Apparitions. The Capelinha, on the spot of the May, June, July, September and October appearances, with the statue carved by José Ferreira Thedim and the bullet in its crown.
• Basilica of Our Lady of the Rosary. Begun on 13 May 1928, consecrated on 7 October 1953. It holds the tombs of Francisco, Jacinta and Lucia.
• Basilica of the Holy Trinity. Dedicated on 12 October 2007 in the presence of Cardinal Bertone, seating about 8,600 people.
• Aljustrel. The houses of Francisco and Jacinta and of Lucia, with the well of Arneiro.
• Valinhos and the Loca do Cabeço. The place of the August appearance, and of the angel's first and third visits, reached by a walk from Aljustrel.
• The big days. The pilgrimages of 12 and 13 May and of 12 and 13 October draw the largest crowds, with the candlelit procession on the eve.