c. 2005 Religion News Service
VATICAN CITY _ Pope John Paul II and other Catholics mourned the death of the last of the shepherd children said to have received prophecies from the Virgin Mary at Fatima, Portugal, in 1917.
Portuguese Prime Minister Pedro Santana Lopez declared Tuesday (Feb. 15) a day of national mourning for Lucia de Jesus dos Santos, who died Sunday at age 97.
Lucia and her two younger cousins became celebrated throughout the Catholic world for reporting that they had seen visions of and heard messages from the Virgin Mary in the Portuguese countryside starting on May 13, 1917.
The Shrine of Fatima built on the site of the visions is one of Catholicism’s most visited sanctuaries. It attracted 3.75 million pilgrims from throughout the world last year.
It wasn’t until 2002 that the Vatican disclosed the “Third Secret of Fatima,” which was widely expected to prophesy the end of the world.
Vatican doctrinal authorities said, however, it foresaw the suffering of the Catholic Church and the world in the 20th century and the failed attempt to assassinate John Paul, who is described in the message as a “bishop clothed in white _ under a hail of gunfire.”
“Those who expected exciting apocalyptic revelations about the end of the world or the future course of history are bound to be disappointed,” Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said at the time.
Lucia, reporting the first two messages in 1941, said the Virgin Mary showed the children the torments of the damned in hell. She told them that World War I would soon end but, in what was taken as a warning of the impending Russian Revolution, said that unless Russia was consecrated to Mary’s immaculate heart there would be “wars and persecutions of the church.”
The pope _ who was shot and seriously wounded by Turkish terrorist Mehmet Ali Agca in St. Peter’s Square on May 13, 1981 _ has credited the Madonna of Fatima with deflecting the bullet from his vital organs.
Making a pilgrimage to Fatima in 1982, “to thank the Madonna for her intervention to save my life and restore my health,” he consecrated the world to the immaculate heart of Mary. He donated the bullet extracted from his abdomen to be placed among jewels in the crown of the virgin’s statue.
On May 13, 2002, the pope returned to Fatima to beatify Lucia’s cousins Jacinto and Francisco Marto. At the time of the visions, Lucia was 10, Francisco, 9, and Jacinto, 7.
Except for martyrs, the Marto children, who died in an epidemic of Spanish influenza in 1919 and 1920, were the youngest ever to be declared blessed.
The pope received word on Sunday that Lucia had died in the Carmelite Convent of Santa Teresa at Coimbra in central Portugal, where she had lived a life of prayer and contemplation since 1948. She had been blind and deaf for some years.
John Paul, who is making a Lenten spiritual retreat in the Vatican, prayed for her and named Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone of Genoa to represent him at the Tuesday burial, the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano said. Bertone said John Paul gave him a hand-written message to take to the funeral.
In his former post of secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Bertone visited Lucia a number of times to coordinate publication of the Third Secret. He said Monday that, “knowing that her end was near,” the pope recently sent Lucia his “special blessing.”
The Portuguese prime minister and other party leaders suspended campaigning for next Sunday’s national elections for two days, and Santana Lopez declared Tuesday a day of nationwide mourning for Lucia.
MO/PH END RNS
