Pope Francis has advanced the cause for the canonisation of the last of the children who saw the Blessed Virgin Mary at Fatima, Portugal, putting her a step closer to sainthood.
The Pontiff declared as “Venerable” Carmelite Sister Lucia de Jesus Rosa dos Santos (pictured left), the eldest of the three children who witnessed the apparitions in 1917.
Her new status signifies that she lived one or more of the virtues heroically and the search will now begin for two healing miracles as supernatural signs from God that she is a saint.
The first will mean that the Catholic Church can refer to her as Blessed and the second will enable the Pope to perform her canonisation and declare her a saint.
The two other Fatima visionaries, shepherd children Jacinta and Francisco Marto, were canonised by the Holy Father in 2017.
A sister and brother aged 10 and 11 respectively when they died during the Spanish flu epidemic, they are the youngest confessor, or non-martyr, saints in the history of the church.
Sister Lucia, their cousin, was aged 10 years when she also saw the Virgin Mary but died on February 13 2005 at the age of 97.
She entered the college of the Dorothean Sisters in Vilar before she decided to become a Carmelite and spent the last 50 years of her life as a nun in Coimbra, Portugal.
She was the only one of the three who spoke with Our Lady and became the sole custodian of the messages entrusted to her.
She transcribed the messages at the instigation of Bishop José Alves Correia da Silvia of Leiria into four documents between 1935 and 1941.
A later document, dated 1944, contained the so-called “third secret,” was sent to Rome and opened for the first time in 1960. St John Paul II allowed the secret to be published in 2000 with an accompanying commentary.
During the series of apparitions between May and October 1917, the Virgin Mary presented the children with a vision of Hell and also gave them a new prayer for inclusion in the Rosary.
The Virgin told them that she wanted them to establish devotion to her Immaculate Heart throughout the world, and encouraged the faithful to offer prayer and spiritual sacrifices for the conversion of sinners and in atonement for their sins.
Our Lady warned the children that humanity would be plunged into devastating wars and persecutions unless the sinful abandoned their evil ways, and specifically asked that Russia, which at the time was undergoing Communist revolution, was consecrated to her Immaculate Heart.
The apparitions culminated with the famous “Miracle of the Sun” that was witnessed by tens of thousands of people.
No Catholics are obliged to accept any “private revelations” but Pope St John Paul and Pope Benedict XVI each shared very strong devotions to Our Lady of Fatima.
Pope Benedict opened her cause for canonisation in 2008 and the diocesan phase, largely consisting of gathering and examining evidence about her life, was completed nine years later before a biographical dossier called a positsio, was submitted to the Vatican.
Pope Francis will visit the shrine in Fatima on August 5 when he flies to Portugal for World Youth Day.
In his decree announcing the progress of her sainthood cause, Francis said that the distinction between her life and the apparitions “is also difficult because much of her suffering was due to them: she was always kept hidden, protected, guarded. One can see in her all the difficulty of keeping together the exceptionality of the events of which she was a spectator and the ordinariness of a monastic life like that of Carmel”.
In the same decree, Pope Francis also recognised the martyrdom of 20 people killed out of “hatred of the faith” in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War.
Fr Manuel González-Serna Rodríguez, born in Seville in 1880 and appointed parish priest in nearby Constantina in 1911, was arrested on the night of 19 July 1936 by Republican militiamen, and was murdered in his sacristy four days later.
That summer marked the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, numerous other priests were martyred in and around Seville.
Among the martyrs were Fr Mariano Caballero Rubio, whose parish in Huelva burnt down before his arrest, and seminarian Enrique Palacios Monrabà, who was arrested and killed along with his father at the age of 19.
More than 2,000 martyrs of the Communist persecution in Spain have already been canonised, while the causes of some 2,000 others continue to advance.
The Pope also recognised as “Venerable” four other candidates.
They include Sister Mary Lange, who left her native Cuba for the United States because of racial discrimination, and founded the Congregation of the Oblate Sisters of Providence in Baltimore in 1829. The order is dedicated to education.
Salesian Antônio de Almeida Lustosa, who served as Archbishop of Fortaleza, Brazil, and died in 1974, was also declared Venerable.
Also an essayist, scientist and artist, he was “convinced that the first evangelisation consists in restoring dignity to the poorest people and families”.
Francis also recognised the heroic virtues of Venetian priest Antonio Pagani was a Franciscan theologian at the 16th century Council of Trent, and Sister Anna Cantalupo, a Vincentian nun from Catania, who dedicated herself to caring for the sick poor, particularly war orphans, by organising spiritual care for Second World War soldiers passing through the Sicilian city.
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