History
Fátima
1917
On 13 May 1917, in the middle of the First World War, three shepherd children at the Cova da Iria near Fátima, in Portugal, saw a Lady 'brighter than the sun': Lúcia dos Santos, aged ten, and her cousins Francisco and Jacinta Marto, nine and seven. According to Lúcia's later memoirs, the Lady asked them to 'pray the Rosary every day, to obtain peace for the world and the end of the war'. The apparitions continued monthly until October.
On 13 October, before a crowd estimated in the tens of thousands, the Lady said: 'I am the Lady of the Rosary.' Many witnesses, including reporters from secular newspapers, described the sun seeming to spin and plunge towards the earth, the event remembered as the 'Miracle of the Sun'. This photograph, published in the magazine Ilustração Portuguesa, shows the crowd gazing upward. The bishop of Leiria declared the apparitions worthy of belief in 1930.
Francisco and Jacinta died in the influenza epidemic of 1919 and 1920; Pope Francis canonized them at Fátima on 13 May 2017, the centenary of the first apparition. Lúcia became a Carmelite nun and died in 2005. Above the site rises the Basilica of Our Lady of the Rosary, begun in 1928 and consecrated in 1953, and every day the Rosary is prayed there in many languages.