For most of public opinion, her name is linked to the Third Secret of Fatima, messages entrusted to three Portuguese shepherd children by Our Lady in 2017. Now the decree on heroic virtues, promulgated today with the approval of Pope Francis, renders them venerable. brings Sister Lucia dos Santos back to her truest dimension: a Christian who has witnessed with her own life of faithfulness to the Gospel. Certainly a Christian who witnessed an extraordinary event like the apparition of the Virgin on May 13, 1917 in Cova da Iria (five more will follow, by October) when she was 10 years old while she was in the company of her two little ones Cousins: Jacinta and Francesco Marto (7 and 9 years old respectively).
Four other Servants of God are also venerated with Sister Lucia dos Santos, including two Italians: Don Antonio Pagani of the Order of Friars Minor, founder of the Society of the dismissed Sisters of the Immaculate Conception, and Anna Cantalupo of the Society of the Daughters of Mercy of San Vincenzo de’ Paoli. Also honored was the martyrdom of twenty victims of the Spanish Civil War in 1936: priests, seminarians, lay people and lay people being blessed.
The third secret was revealed in 2000
Much has been written and all is known about the apparitions of Fatima, as well as the three messages that the Virgin entrusted to the three Portuguese shepherd children. Particular attention was always paid to the third, written by Sister Lucia in a letter addressed to the Bishop of Leira in 1944, the contents of which could not have been disclosed before 1960, but which remained secret – by decision of the Bishop of Leira, popes who have been in contact since that date followed until 2000, when in Fatima, on the occasion of the beatification of Jacinta and Francesco Marto, the two visionaries who died when they were children, John Paul II decided to make this public and also to make a statement. Rite attended by Sister Lucy, then 93 years old, who also confirmed the interpretation of the third secret and recognized in history the attack that John Paul II suffered precisely on May 13, 1981 in St. Peter’s Square.
The desire for a normal religious life
But Lucia dos Santos, born in Aljustrel on March 28, 1907, was not only a visionary to whom Our Lady appeared. After the events of 1917, he remained in Fatima until 1921 (in the meantime Francesco had died in 1919 and Jacinta the following year) to enter the College of Vilar in Porto incognito with the Dorothea sisters. In 1925 she became a postulant of the same congregation and made her temporary vows on October 3, 1928 and her perpetual vows on October 3, 1934. Evidently the events of Fatima continued to haunt her religious life. In the period between 1935 and 1941, commissioned by the Bishop of Leira José Alves Correia da Silva, he wrote four documents entitled “Memoirs” in which he described the events of the apparitions that he witnessed and greeted in the company of Francisco and Jacinta. These texts also include the so-called “Third Secret”.
He met Paul VI. and John Paul II
In order to live her vocation more intensely, it was Sister Lucia herself (who had changed her name to Sister Lucia of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart) who, in 1948, chose the Carmelite Order and asked to join the Carmel of Coimbra. Here she spent her life. For the rest of his life he followed the monastic rhythms of prayer and work. Carmelo, which was the destination of several Church officials to meet Sister Lucia (including the then Patriarch of Venice Albino Luciani, later John Paul I). He also met Paul VI three times (1982, 1991 and 2000) in Fatima. (1967) and John Paul II together. “He heroically lived the virtue of the faith, both in the way he faced the ecclesiastical and civil procedures surrounding the apparitions and in attempting to do God’s will in all things and help others gain their trust to be strengthened in him”, says the website of the Dicastery of the Causes of Saints -. His long life was marked by heroic hope and a deep desire to “go to heaven.” He died on February 13, 2005, a few weeks before John Paul II, with whom he developed a special and intense relationship. Always under the gaze of the Madonna, to whom both were devoted.