Saints Francisco and Jacinta Marto
The youngest canonised (non-martyr) saint
of the Catholic Church was a ten-year-old shepherd girl from the hamlet of
Aljustrel, Fátima, Portugal. St Jacinta Marto, and her brother St Francisco
Marto were the last of eleven children, born to a poor family in Fátima.
Jacinta was born on March 5, 1910, her brother, Francisco, on June 11, 1908.
The little siblings liked playing and
spending time with their cousin Lucia de Jesus dos Santos while tending
their sheep in the surrounding rocky pasturelands. It was while they were at
this daily duty, one spring day in 1916, that a drizzle made them seek shelter
in a nearby cave. After having lunch and saying the Rosary, the three little
shepherds beheld a strange visitor who said to them, ‘Fear not! I am the
Angel of Peace. Pray with me!’
The young man was transparent,
more brilliant than a crystal pierced by the rays of the sun.[1] He knelt
and bowed low on the ground. The children imitated him. He taught them the
prayer:
My God, I believe, I adore, I hope, and I
love Thee. I beg pardon of Thee for those who do not believe, do not adore, do
not hope, and do not love Thee.
Then he asked them to pray it: the hearts
of Jesus and Mary would be attentive to their supplications.
On May 13 the next year (1917), the same
three young shepherds were visited by a lady more brilliant than the sun.
She told them that she was from heaven. It was Lucia who then began asking her
if she and her cousins would go to heaven. The Lady said yes. But Francisco,
she said, had to say many Rosaries first.
‘Oh, my dear Our Lady! I’ll say as many
Rosaries as you want!’ the young boy replied when
he was told what the Lady had said.[2] The Lady
returned the same day each month [3] and as
more and more people found out about the apparitions, there were mixed
opinions. Some believed them, but many said the children were making it up.
The lives of the little shepherds were
completely turned around. The Lady seemed to have brought them more problems
than solutions and yet, even when they were forbidden by their parents and the
clergy, even when they were imprisoned by the local authorities, they still
returned to the Cova da Iria[4] to see the beautiful Lady.
The Lady had, after all, promised them much
suffering, as well as the grace which would be their comfort.
Francisco was calm and good-natured.
Following our Lady’s revelation that he must say many Rosaries, he would often
withdraw to be alone. ‘Don’t you remember that Our Lady said I must pray
many Rosaries?’ he would answer, holding up his Rosary, when his cousins
asked what he was doing alone.
Our Lady had asked the children to offer up
sacrifices for sinners and to console the Heart of Jesus. It was Francisco who
suggested that they offer their lunch to the sheep. Soon, the little shepherds
were going without drinks on hot days, or eating pine nuts, or tying coarse
ropes round their waists. They wanted to do everything and anything to please
the Blessed Mother.
Francisco was particularly drawn to the
Sacred Heart of our Lord, which he wanted to console at all costs. He was
always filled with thoughts of the Hidden Jesus in the Tabernacle, whom
he sometimes visited for hours, on his knees.
Oh, Hell! Hell! How sorry I am for the souls
who go to hell. And the people down there, burning alive, like wood in the
fire! —St Jacinta Marto
Jacinta was drawn to praying for poor
sinners. She mourned the loss of so many souls of poor sinners to hell. She
offered every penance and mortification, if only to save poor sinners. Our Lady
had taught them a prayer: O my Jesus, forgive us our sins! Save us from the
fire of hell. Lead all souls to heaven, especially those who are most in need
of Thy mercy.
This prayer was often on the lips of the
little Jacinta.
‘I am thinking of hell, and poor
sinners. How sorry I am for the souls that go to hell … the people there,
alive, burning as wood in the fire … Lucia, why is it that Our Lady does not
show hell to sinners? If they saw it, they would not commit any more sins, so
they would not go there,’ she once said to her
cousin.
To the very end, she offered her sufferings
for sinners. Even that of having to die alone, painfully, so far away from all
the people she knew and loved.
It was Francisco who went to heaven first.
He caught influenza during the epidemic of 1918. The disease affected him so
severely that he eventually could not even get out of bed. He remained calm,
taking all that was given to him, never rejecting whatever kind of food, nor
the bitter medicine.
At some point he seemed to recover enough
to give his father hope that he would live long. But the little boy knew
otherwise. ‘Our Lady will come soon for me,’ he would tell his father.
When he was well enough, he would walk to the Cova da Iria.
Once there, he would kneel near the stump of
the holmoak,[5] his eyes
seeking the blue sky beyond which dwelt Our Lady. His eyes sparkled with new
life as he thought of the joy that would soon be his when Our Lady came to take
him up to heaven. (de Marchi 1947)
When he was bedridden again, he would ask
Lucia to go to the Church and give his love to the Hidden Jesus for
him. When Lucia asked him if he was suffering, he replied, ‘Yes, I am. I
suffer it all for the love of Our Lord and Our Lady. I want to suffer more and
I can’t.’
Before he died, he asked Jacinta and Lucia
to tell him all the sins they had seen him commit. These he confessed and
received his First Holy Communion with great joy on April 3, 1919. The next
day, he died.
Jacinta too had caught the influenza. It
worsened daily and caused an abscess on her chest. The little girl was
suffering, but she was the one who would console her mother who was greatly
saddened by the pain her daughter was enduring. She offered all her pain for
sinners. ‘We must make many, many sacrifices and pray a lot for sinners, so
that no one shall ever again have to go to that prison of fire where people
suffer so much.’
Following the advice of a doctor, she was
taken to the town of Ourém in hope of getting better treatment there. Jacinta
knew that she was going to die, but she accepted to go out of obedience to Our
Lady.
In the hospital, she went through two
months of rigorous treatment, joyfully offering up all her suffering and pain
for the conversion of sinners. The situation was not improving. She had a
large, open wound on her chest that was continually running. The doctors
decided to just discharge her, all bones, eaten away by pneumonia, tuberculosis
and pleurisy.
After visiting the Cova da Iria one more
time, she was next taken to Lisbon. Here she first stayed at an orphanage run
by religious sisters. The Blessed Lady continued to appear to her, giving her
comfort and much wisdom beyond her age which she confided in the Mother
Superior.
At one time she said:
My dear Mother, the sins that bring most
souls to hell are the sins of the flesh. Certain fashions are going to be
introduced which will offend Our Lord very much. Those who serve God should not
follow these fashions…
At another:
My good Mother, do not give yourself to
immodest clothes. Run away from riches. Love holy poverty and silence very
much. Be very charitable even with those who are unkind. Never criticise others
and avoid those who do. Be very patient, for patience brings us to heaven.
Mortifications and sacrifices please Our Lord a great deal.
It was in the hospital of Dona Estefania in
Lisbon that Jacinta gave up her soul on February 20, 1920. Prior to this, she
had undergone a very painful operation to remove two of her ribs, leaving an
open wound the ‘size of a fist’ in her chest. She had only managed to
say, ‘Oh, Our Lady! Oh! Our Lady! Patience. We must suffer to go to heaven.’
She did not complain.
On the fateful day, a priest was called to
hear her confession. He promised to bring her Holy Communion only the next
morning. She begged him to bring to her the Lord then, but to no avail. Jacinta
asked to be dressed in the white dress of her First Communion, with a blue
sash.
She died peacefully that very night.
I want first to console Our Lord and then convert the sinners so that they will not offend Him any more. —St Francisco Marto
The two little saints of Fátima were young
children graced, privileged to see the Blessed Mother with their own eyes. This
did not make life simple for them. The Blessed Mother, the Lady from
heaven, wanted them to go to heaven, and the path that leads there cannot
be anything but the Cross.
Jacinta died when she was ten, Francisco
when he was eleven, but they had suffered much. At a young age, Jacinta had a
great zeal for souls. She wanted to save as many as she could from hell;
indeed, all of them if it were possible. Our Lady had showed them a terrifying
vision of hell. She didn’t want people to go there. A simple shepherd girl, she
was no preacher, no important person, but she could offer up her prayers
and her sufferings to save sinners from hell. And she did.
Francisco wanted to console the hearts of
Jesus and Mary. Our Lady had showed the little shepherds her Immaculate Heart
surrounded by the thorns of the cruel blasphemies of human beings against it,
and she had told them how much sins offended and hurt the Sacred Heart of her
Son. Francisco made it his mission to console these two Holy Hearts with all
his sufferings, sacrifices and mortifications.
It wasn’t easy. It couldn’t have been, for
two little children to bear the weight of the whole world, to suffer such great
bodily and spiritual torments with so much resignation and even joy. Their
lives are proofs that if we cling to our Lady, we will find the journey to
heaven, with all its crosses and hardships, sweet and, one might put it, ‘easy’.
God has given us some mission in the world—each
one of us! As we begin the labour of accomplishing that mission, we will be
faced with all manner of hardships, persecutions and sufferings. No saint has
ever become one without these.
It is then that we must turn to our Blessed
Mother. It was she who said at Fátima, ‘I will never leave you, my
Immaculate Heart will be your refuge and the way that will lead you to God.’
It was she who saw those little saints of Fátima, whom she had once marvelled
with her heavenly beauty, through so many adventures of figuring out how to be
pleasing to God, of convincing every one of her message at Fátima, of suffering
with terrible sickness, and of dying peacefully in spite of their pain.
It was she who was with them to the end. It
was she who formed them into saints for her Divine Son. It is she who will form
us, too, into saints for Christ, if only we would trust in her motherly care.
St Francisco Marto and St Jacinta Marto
were beatified on May 13, 2000 by St Pope John Paul II and canonised on May 13,
2017 by Pope Francis. Their feast day is February 20.
To date, Fátima remains one of the most
visited Marian Apparition sites. It was once a lonely rocky field where three
little shepherds went to graze their sheep. Now, because of their witness and
the great power of the Lady from heaven it is a glorious place of hope
and peace.
St Jacinta’s voice, even now, must be heard
as she proclaims:
Tell everyone that Our Lord grants us all
graces through the Immaculate Heart of Mary; that all must make their petitions
to her; that the Sacred Heart of Jesus desires that the Immaculate Heart of
Mary be venerated at the same time. Tell them that they should all ask for
peace from the Immaculate Heart of Mary, as God has placed it in her hands. Oh,
if I could only put in the heart of everyone in the world the fire that is
burning in me and makes me love so much the Heart of Jesus and the Heart of
Mary!
[1] This is the actual description given by Lucia, as recorded in the
Book: The True Story of Fatima by John de Marchi, I.M.C. See
References for details.
[2] Only Lucia was able to hear what the Lady said in the first
apparition. Francisco never, in all the subsequent apparitions, heard our
Lady’s voice, although he saw her.
[3] Except for August 13 1917, on which day the children had been
imprisoned. But she made up for it by appearing to them on August 19.
[4] The place where the apparitions usually happened.
[5] On which the Blessed Mother had appeared.
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