Our Lady of Fatima

From May to October 1917, three shepherd children in a village near Fátima, Portugal, reported six apparitions of a luminous woman who identified herself as Our Lady of the Rosary. Lúcia dos Santos was ten years old; her cousins Francisco Marto was nine and Jacinta Marto was seven. The apparitions would become among the most scrutinized Marian events in Church history, and two of the three children would eventually be canonized.

The first apparition came on May 13, 1917, at a field called the Cova da Iria. The children had been tending sheep when a flash of light led them to a small holm oak tree, where a woman brighter than the sun stood holding a rosary. She asked them to return on the thirteenth of each month for six months, to pray the rosary daily for peace, and to make sacrifices for sinners. She told them they would face suffering but promised all three would go to heaven. The First World War was then at its height.

At subsequent apparitions the woman revealed what became known as the Three Secrets of Fátima: a vision of hell, a call to devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary and the consecration of Russia, and a third secret sealed by Lúcia and not disclosed publicly until 2000. The Vatican's interpretation of the third secret identified it as a prophetic vision of 20th-century persecution of the Church, including an attempt on a pope's life — widely understood as referencing the assassination attempt on John Paul II in 1981.

Word spread rapidly. By the sixth and final apparition on October 13, an estimated 70,000 people had gathered at the Cova da Iria despite heavy rain. After the apparition, the crowd reported an extraordinary solar event: the sun appeared to spin, change colors, and plunge toward the earth before returning to its place. This event, observed simultaneously across a wide area and documented by journalists present, became known as the Miracle of the Sun.

Bishop José Correia da Silva of Leiria issued his formal recognition of the apparitions in 1930. Francisco died in 1919 and Jacinta in 1920, both taken by influenza; Lúcia lived until 2005 as a Carmelite nun. Pope John Paul II beatified Francisco and Jacinta in 2000, and Pope Francis canonized them on May 13, 2017 — exactly one hundred years after the first apparition.