Through no gift of the author's, but by the divine power, this is one of the very great stories of modern times. The remarkable events occurring near Fatima, Portugal, in the months from May to October, 1917, gain significance and new meaning with every passing day; the friends and followers of Our Lady of Fatima, for whom this volume speaks, increase each year by numberless legion in prayerful certitude that what we are revealing here is true.

The author is a witness to this truth, having lived at Fatima for many years, and this plain book's pretension to importance is that it is able to present for the first time to Americans the full and documented background against which God has written His own prescription for peace.

Much of this account is lovely and can be counted on to fulfil almost anyone's story-book expectations, as it tells of the shepherd children, Lucia, Jacinta and Francisco. But it is also a divinely serious narrative recalling, to the likely discomfort of many, the reality of heaven and hell, and bringing to necessary attention other primary matters too often and too long placed out of mind. It is hoped that this book, in its completeness, will provide a kind of text on Fatima, and the author feels obliged, in the face of such ambition, to list the documents on which it has been based.

I have used the Portuguese newspapers of the period, especially the Seculo, the Diario de Noticias, and the Mundo, all at the time important pro-government journals, anticlerical in both policy and tone. They describe the drama of the reported apparitions from a purely secular, non-religious point of view, giving a graphic, if at times a somewhat tongue-in-cheek coloration to those initial pilgrimages to the field called the Cova da Iria, near Fatima, when it was first alleged that the Mother of God had appeared to three peasant children. It is worth noting that the Catholic Press at this time was hardly less sceptical.

A considerable portion of this book is based on the writings of the Portuguese priest, Dr. Manuel Formigao, whose first work on the subject, entitled Os Episodios Maravilhosos de Fatima (The Marvellous Events of Fatima), appeared in 1921. It is a faithful, painstaking account of the good priest's many interviews with the children, and of the impression they made upon him.

In 1919, when Bishop Jose Alves Correia da Silva took possession of the newly restored diocese of Leiria, embracing, among other mountain villages, the parish of Fatima, he set up without delay a canonical inquiry into the apparitions, and the most important testimony supplied in the succeeding months and years were these:

The interrogations of the three children by their local pastor, Father Manuel Ferreira, after each of the apparitions from June to October, 1917. These interviews had been carefully recorded by Father Ferreira at the time, and provided a most valuable reference. It should perhaps be mentioned that the puzzled pastor, while performing this chore for posterity, believed in the apparitions no more than he believed in Santa Claus.

The official canonical questioning of Lucia followed in 1924. New information broadened the picture A letter written to his fiancée by Dr. Carlos Mendes on September 8, 1917, was helpful.¹ Many other witnesses appeared, testifying with amazing consistency to the human, if not the supernatural drama, described in this book. Lucia, during these years of close investigation, had entered the College of Vilar, at Oporto, Portugal, which was directed by the Congregation of Dorothean Sisters. Later she joined their community at Tuy, Spain, and it was here, as a lay sister, that she wrote her memoirs in obedience to the orders of the bishop of Leiria. One could not possibly overvalue these documents, which are four in number and were written in 1936,1937, 1941 and 1942. The first of her memoirs is mainly a biography of her beloved cousin, Jacinta, granting to a serious student only the barest reference to the apparitions.

In the second of her memoirs we first find a detailed account of supernatural experience, and then, almost casually, in 1937, a first reference to the apparitions of the angel. After twenty years of total silence, this particular revelation did not fall lightly, but rather like a bomb.

Lucia's third memoir was richer still. From it many new facts emerge, among them a reference to the famed aurora borealis of January 25, 1938, which in her own view was the sign preceding the outbreak of the second World War, foretold by our Lady in the apparition of June, 1917.

Finally, having been ordered by the bishop to set down a definitive and complete account of everything she remembered, Sister Lucia, on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception of that same year, 1942, after imploring the grace to write with precision and exactitude, began the fourth and most extensive of her memoirs, including all the circumstances and all the details of the apparitions of the angel as well as the more celebrated visits of our Lady to the Cova da Iria in 1917.

It might seem that such abundant assistance from the one most qualified to speak would have been sufficient for a critical history of the apparitions. Yet there still remained some points of obscurity that prompted a series of interviews with Sister Lucia by serious students of Fatima

Unquestionably the one marked virtue of the book you are about to read is that it has been checked for truth and exact detail by Lucia, the surviving seer of Fatima, who is today (having transferred from the Dorothean Order) a Carmelite nun, arid appears almost certainly destined to be a saint of God. She is the author's friend, and she has walked with him in that blessed countryside where once, within the lifetime of so many of us now living, she talked with Mary, the Mother of God.

In writing this book, the author enjoyed the incomparable privilege of living at Fatima from 1943 until 1950, and for this reason was able to question at undisturbed length the most important eyewitnesses to the-great events of 1917. I would like to express my gratitude to all of the many who helped me.

In these pages you will meet Senhor Manuel Pedro Marto, the father of Jacinta and Francisco, who will be known throughout the text as Ti Marto.² He's a sweet old man whose health, like an old mahogany tree, has conquered the years. Living with him still, and my valued friend, is his wife, Olimpia. Others among my friends and collaborators are Senhora Maria dos Anjos, the eldest sister of Lucia; her sisters, Carolina and Gloria, and lastly, among my most indispensable assistants, Senhora Maria Carreira, known in these pages as Maria da Capelinha, or Mary of the Chapel, who died in March of 1949. Still living, and holding me in his debt, is her son John, at present the sacristan of the Chapel of the Apparitions.

It was through these good people, more than through books, that I came to know the true flavour and the undercurrents of the real Fatima story. For instance, every Sunday, for six consecutive months, after he had recited his Rosary at the shrine, old Ti Marto would come and talk with me of his Jacinta and Francisco. Certainly he never spoke of them as saints, nor with a penny's worth of pious posturing. He would just talk of the children he had fathered and loved, and in a very practical, non-sentimental way, of other characters who populate this book, of the parish priest "... his reverence, who didn't believe and didn't want the rest of us to believe"; of the mayor-administrator, a valid villain in those distant days, still living, and perhaps improving, but toward whom Ti Marto in his charity holds no bitterness. These and other subjects he would pursue with great and scrupulous care for the truth. "We must not exaggerate, Father, nor squeeze out of this any more than is really there," he would caution me.

Rarely does Ti Marto hear a chapter or a passage read from a book on Fatima without either correcting some small detail, or else adding a helpful note. "It wasn't exactly like that!" he will interrupt, and then go on with a calm resume of what really occurred. When I asked him if he did not feel a certain pride in being father to such privileged children as Jacinta and Francisco, the old man sincerely shrugged this distinction away. "Our Lady just happened to choose this part of the world," he said, "when she could well have appeared to others. They just happened to be mine, that's all."

It is very possible that Ti Marto's narratives may contain some slight confusions and mistakes. Indeed, to claim a kind of infallibility for this good old man would be absurd. Yet I can assure you that to the best of his ability he has been accurate, and I can further testify that everything I have been able to check with independent witnesses supports him. In this respect the distinguished work on Fatima by the German priest, Dr. Luis Fischer, Die Botschaft unserer lieben Frau von Fatima, underscores the memory and reliability of Ti Marto. A professor at Hamburg University, Dr. Fischer visited Fatima some seventeen years ago to investigate the facts and to write his own scholarly account. Reading it now, we find no contradiction between his testimony and that of Ti Marto. More remarkably, however, we find the same hesitation and difficulty over small and unclarified details, the same words giving trouble—eloquent testimony, it seems to me, that where memory or detail have defeated Ti Marto, no compulsion to be a prophet or an expert has tempted him to gloss over these difficulties. Of his wife Olimpia, of Maria dos Anjos, of Senhora Carreira and the others, I can say the same.

Now it should be kept in mind that most of these good people are illiterate, and entirely subject to what they hear. Suspecting that their own experiences might well have blended through the years with things they had heard, I was alert to detect any mixture of fact and legend. The truth is that none of them, even the older ones, have tripped into confusion between their own personal experiences and what has recently come to light through Lucia's memoirs. When questioned about these new disclosures, the invariable reply was simply, "I know nothing of that." And yet, of course, it would have been so natural for certain suggestive processes to have been set in motion by all the recent disclosures of the children's private penances, their heroic sanctity, the apparitions of the angel, and other matters. "We knew nothing of these things," Ti Marto declares. "Nothing about the cords they wore to bed, nor about their going without food in the fields, Father... nothing, nothing. Even after the apparitions of our Lady, I always thought that the children were very little different from other children."

But as time and accruing evidence make manifestly clear, there occurred in Fatima in 1916-1917 a series of great supernatural events. Three small children saw an angel three times, and they received eucharistic Communion from his hands. The Virgin Mother of Jesus Christ appeared to them at least six times, and spoke with them as a friend and mother, and confided to them a secret of universal interest and importance.

But what of this child, Lucia, now grown to womanhood, upon whose disclosures so much of this story depends? What is she like? What, indeed, must anyone be like, who is confidante to the Queen of Heaven? Ethereal? Wispy in nature? Soft and white as angel cake? A little bit crazy?

The mature Lucia is my friend. She has an absolutely normal personality and is as real as a plate of cookies. As this book will make clear, she is neither gifted nor beautiful by the usual standards, and if I were obliged to point out her outstanding natural characteristic I would say it was her gaiety. No one has been able to detect in her the least sign of morbid temperament or exclusive self-concern. Her daily life, by the testimony of her superiors, presents nothing singular.

"She is an eminently practical religious," I have been told. "The negation, we may say, of poetic idealism."

Actually, I can testify that the impression of nearly everyone who meets Lucia for the first time is one of disappointment, since we are all so impatiently eager to detect some trace of a halo or else to presuppose some other strange mark of the supernatural. In Lucia, if in anyone, the idea of pseudo-mysticism must be rejected.³ Her manner of speech and of expression, whether by the spoken word, or her handwriting, which is certainly commonplace, all testify to complete psychological balance and a mentality entirely free from odd neuroses. To my utter belief in Lucia as a truthful witness, I feel obliged to add the acuteness of her memory, a faculty I have tested numerous times. I recommend her to your complete confidence.

Now what of Fatima, the place, which has become in recent years one of the great shrines of Christendom? Knowing well that in Europe there are shrines as old as the footprints of the apostles, we must realise that Fatima, against this ancient calendar, is almost as new as jet propulsion or nylon shirts. It belongs to our era and it treats of our problems, as the following chapters will disclose. Yet Fatima, the modern shrine, holds a look of great age, resting as it does in the timeless hills of a people whose pedestrian culture was old before America, as a nation, was ever born.

The village is small. Except in times of special pilgrimage it is likely that its population could be loosely lodged in a large New York hotel. The pilgrim in pursuit of quaintness will most certainly be rewarded. He will find donkeys and oxen moving around with the calm assurance of four-legged Chevrolets, and observe among the people customs far older than anyone's memory. The pilgrim will see ladies walking barefoot on their country paths with queenly straightness, all the while supporting on their casual coiffures jugs of wine that well might test a strong man's back, or oranges in heaps that you would not at first believe. Fittingly enough, it resembles a movie set done with Hollywood thoroughness, with the script ripped boldly from a Bible history book.

There must be some reason then, why Fatima, which appears as undisturbed a place as any in the western world, has been able to draw to itself on certain days more pilgrims than have ever crowded, as excess population, the city of Rome itself—with Rome's great treasures, glories, and long tradition as the heart and mind of the Church. A million people (a number equal to one-seventh of the total Portuguese population) have assembled within and about the rocky field near Fatima that is known as the Cova da Iria.

There are no hotel accommodations nor any other shelter for those who come to Fatima at these extraordinary times. There is only this open field and the surrounding slopes of the simple countryside to provide a resting place. Customarily, on these few great occasions, the pilgrims arrive the night before the scheduled devotions. Often it has rained the length of the night, as though to test the fibre of the faithful. It seems fair enough, on the evidence, to say that Christian devotion has never in modern times exceeded the fervour of these demonstrations in the Cova da Iria on the thirteenth day of May or October in any of recent years.

There are not many striking or ornamental sights to see. At Fatima the edifice of greatest interest is perhaps the least of the structures there. This is the Chapel of the Apparitions—simple, surely inexpensive, and likely enough no larger than your living room at home. Its glory exists in nothing but the events it commemorates. The lone touch of grandeur at the Cova da Iria will be found in the great basilica that has risen above the humble land. This is a crowning structure in the manner of the Italian Renaissance, stately and reverent in its setting, and built of the stone, the labor, and the love these hills have returned to their Lady for the visits she paid them less than 40 years ago.

In the classic pattern of great Catholic shrines, remarkable and documented cures have been effected at Fatima. People seem either unduly devoted to miracles or else made furious by stories concerning them, but a great shrine without miracles would be to many like a song that lacked a lyric.

There is clinical certainty that at Fatima the blind have had sight restored, while men and women stretcher-borne have risen from their litters to cry hosannas to the Power that can in one moment banish cancer, loosen the fist of the tightest paralysis, or render whole and clean the shrunken lungs of abandoned tuberculars. More than a hundred contradictions of the natural physical law have been registered at Fatima, and held to be valid only after the most exhaustive and scrupulous examination of all available evidence. The author has himself been present at many miraculous cures, but to those who do not require the spangles of visible prodigy to know that God is in His heaven, the spiritual message of Fatima remains of infinitely greater importance.

The true meaning of Fatima is that God has spoken to us through Mary, the Blessed Mother of His Son. We should pause long enough to reflect that it is not strange for God to speak to us, since He loves us far more than the best of us loves Him. Through all human history He has given His counsel to the conduct of our lives, His light to our doubts, and finally, through Calvary, the blood of His only-begotten Son as a ransom for our sins. Angels and prophets and saints have spoken for Him, but the most glorious of His messengers has been Mary.

At Fatima the world has received, through Mary, God's own prescription for peace. As to another Bethlehem, all hope and charity are carried in her to the lonely Portuguese hills, and to the shepherd children, Lucia, Jacinta and Francisco, whose total and wonderful story I am privileged to tell.

John De Marchi, I.M.C.

Within the parish of Fatima, which is itself a small and modest place, there is a little hamlet called Aljustrel, and to find a less pretentious part of the world, you would probably need an angel for a guide. It is in the precise geographical center of Portugal, some say, though I have never measured it. Actually it is a group of aged and whitewashed houses, some detached and others joined, that tumble at a slight grade down a rocky lane where donkeys and sheep are happy, and an automobile, to proceed in peace, would require the gearing of a goat. It is little different now from the days of 1917, when it was the home of the three little children to whom our Lady appeared.

These children were as ordinary, by all the fair accounts of those who knew them best, as bread and fish, as gaiety and tears, as simple games of fancy, as flowers in the summer fields. They were not conspicuous for their gifts or their delinquencies.

Lucia Santos was older than her little cousins, Francisco and Jacinta. She was born on March 22,1907, in the last of these whitewashed houses on the left-hand side of the descending road. She was the youngest of seven children born to Maria Rosa and Antonio Santos (sometimes called "The Pumpkin").⁴ Lucia had never been exactly pretty, either as a child or as an adult. Scrubbed and posed and supplied with a halo, she could neither then nor now fulfil the holy-picture concept of a flowering saint. As a child, her features were blunt, her eyes alone being luminous and soft. Her lips were too thick and her nose was too flat. Her eyebrows, black as crepe, appeared to form one horizontal line.

Yet Lucia was gay and bright and loved by other children. Her lightness of spirit gave a shine to the dull facade and managed most times to chase the gloom away and out of sight. It was less a redeeming factor in her personality than it was a dividend of goodness. And if, as has been our privilege, you were able to meet and to know the adult Lucia, one note of her personality would ring above the rest—her gladness.

This story of Fatima treats of Lucia in her years of childhood and early adolescence. We know a great deal about her, not only from her memoirs and the gracious help she has herself supplied, but in the endless testimony of living people who knew her well and loved her more These documents are abundant, and throughout the text we will quote them with exact fidelity. Lucia's oldest sister, Maria dos Anjos (which means Mary of the Angels), is a plain woman, middle-aged, as practical as a loaf of bread, and herself a stranger to angels. She recalls her sister with quiet and non-rehearsed affection:

We loved her because she was so intelligent and affectionate (Maria has told us). Even when she had grown to the age of ten and was believed old enough to be trusted with the flocks, she would run to my mother and sit on her lap to be cuddled and kissed. We who were older used to tease her and say, "Here comes the cuddler!"—and we would even be cross with her when we felt it was overdone. But it made no difference. It would be the same the next day. You should have seen her when my first baby was born. She came home from the fields and locked up the sheep and ran as fast as her legs would carry her to my house, which was just across the street from my mother's house. She clutched at the baby and covered it with kisses, not at all like the others around here who thought a baby was just a baby.

Lucia loved children and they adored her. Sometimes a dozen or so of them would collect in our yard and Lucia would be perfectly happy just decorating these little ones with flowers and leaves. She would make little processions with make-believe saints, arranging flowers and thrones and singing hymns to our Lady, just as if they were all in a church. I can still remember the ones she liked best. (Here Maria dos Anjos hummed a well-known Portuguese hymn to our Lady.) And she would finish the hymn by giving the "blessing." She knew so well how to look after children that the mothers used to leave their little ones at our house when they went out to work.

No one could beat Lucia at games. She was always the organiser. The children used to hide under the fig trees and in the bushes or under the beds—anywhere, and when they were all tired from their games they would sit in the shade of the fig trees and listen to Lucia tell stories which never, never seemed to have an end.

It is certain that Lucia was gay and content as a child, not only from the testimony of those who lived with her and grew up with her, but from her own self-possessed and unfaltering recollections. After twenty-five years in a convent, she was able, at the bishop of Leiria's firm request, to recall and document in her own hand the least details of childhood—the dances, the games, the moods of other children, the brightness of costumes, festively, proudly worn. Piety of a melancholy strain never touched Lucia sufficiently to erase the natural delight she found in costuming and fancy frills. She loved dearly to dress for festas, in the bright adornment of jingling gold chains, elaborate earrings, and shawls made gay with feathers and dazzling beads.

In that neighbourhood (Lucia has testified) no other girl was dressed as prettily. I think my sisters and my godmother, Teresa, were surprised to see that one so plain could look so nice. The other children would please me by crowding around to admire my pretty things. I think, too, that all the other children liked me—all but a little orphan girl whom my godmother had adopted at the time of her own mother's death. She seemed to think I would get part of the inheritance she hoped for herself.

There is evidence that Lucia as a child was somewhat supercharged with dancing energy and an inclination to jabber endlessly. Her uncle, the good and patient Manuel Marto, does not indict her for this perpetual motion of lip and limb, he merely states it to have been so. He was fond of her, and recalls her depths of affection. She called him "Father."

"It was all the time 'Father do this' and 'Father do that'" Senhor Marto recalls. "She was full of mischief and I used to think she would either be very good or very bad."

Lucia's home life was orthodox. Her mother, Maria Rosa, was a plain, industrious, unpampered woman who permitted no nonsense. The guiding hand in the house was matriarchal, due perhaps to Antonio Santos's frequent lapses in religious practice, and his surrenderings to thirst. Maria Rosa worried over her husband's bad example to their children, and was an aggressive champion of virtue in a very literal and sometimes muscular way. But of her devotion and fidelity to the teachings of the Church there is no doubt. Maria dos Anjos has attempted to describe her mother's approach to their spiritual growth during those early years.

Our mother knew how to read printed words but could not write. Every night during the winter she used to read us some part of the Old Testament or the Gospels, or some story of Our Lady of Nazare or Lourdes. I dearly remember her saying to Lucia at the time of the apparitions: "Do you think that because our Lady appeared in Nazare and in Lourdes that she has to appear to you?"

In Lent we knew that readings would be about the Passion of our Lord. Afterwards Lucia would give her own account to the other children. Mother taught us doctrine, and would not let us go and play until we knew it properly by heart. She did not want to feel ashamed, she said, when the parish priest examined us. And she had no need to be, for the priest was very pleased with us and even when we were quite small, he allowed us to teach other children in the church. I could not have been more than nine when he made me a catechist.

Mother was never satisfied with our just being able to repeat the words of our catechism. She tried hard to explain everything so we would really understand the meaning of the words. She used to say that just repeating catechism without understanding was worse than useless. We used to ask her all kinds of questions and it seemed that she explained them even better than the priest in church. One day I asked her how it was that the fire of hell did not destroy the damned like the wood in the fire. She asked us if we had ever noticed how a cone cast into a fire could seem to burn and burn without being destroyed. This rather frightened us, and we made firm resolutions not to sin and fall into that fire ourselves.

But it was not only to us that mother taught catechism. Other children and even grown-ups used to come to our house for lessons.

All through May, as well as in the month of the holy souls, we said the family Rosary at home by the fireside, and when we went out with the flocks our mother would always remind us to take our beads with us. "Remember," she would tell us, "to say your beads to our Lady after lunch, and then some Our Fathers to St. Anthony, so the sheep will not get lost."

My mother always insisted that we be home by nightfall, no matter what the occasion. Days of festa made no difference because, with her, the supper hour was sacred. She wanted us to be humble and hard-working and truthful. The least little lie would mean the broom handle for us.

From the beginning mother taught us to love the Church, and especially the Blessed Sacrament. In those days first Holy Communion was not made until children were about ten years old, and we had to know our doctrine well. But Lucia made her first Communion when she was six. And I can still remember how happy mother was, and what a festa we had at home! ⁵ It is clear then—and very clear, that Senhora Santos was a champion of sound doctrine. Her conformity seems to have been rigid, sincere, and touched with her personal gloom. She displayed, for instance, undeviating faith in all pronouncements by Father Manuel Ferreira, the parish priest at Fatima, who one day declared that dancing, indulged in beyond the threshold of the home, was a sinful exercise that made the devil jig with glee. This was uncomfortable news to Maria Rosa and her nimble daughters, none of whom enjoyed the happy practice more than Lucia. But once proscribed by the parish priest, that was the end of the dancing. Lucia, after long years in the convent, seems still to be puzzled by this local interdict:

Someone asked my mother how it was that up to that time dancing had not been considered a sin, but with the coming of the new priest had become one. My mother replied, "I don't know, but the Reverend Father does not want dancing; that is clear; so my daughters will not go to dances. They can dance a little at home because the Reverend Father says that in the family it is not wrong to dance."

For Maria Rosa the voice of the priest was in all things the voice of the Lord. This unvarying confidence in the judgments of Father Ferreira may to some degree explain her long and stubborn reluctance to concede that the Mother of God could have appeared to the likes of Lucia. Father Ferreira vehemently denied any possibility of the apparitions being true, and suggested to Senhora Santos that the violent nonsense in her young daughter's head could be of diabolic inspiration. This judgment surely did not assist any flood of sympathy in Senhora Santos for the tearful and tender pleadings of her little girl: "Mama—believe me!" Maria Rosa, who knew the letter of the law so unerringly, would rather have met a monster than a lie.

"It was only after the apparitions," Maria dos Anjos has since declared, "that the trouble began in our family."

Francisco Marto and his little sister, Jacinta, were Lucia's first cousins. They lived up the road a bit on that rocky and dusty lane that leads through Aljustrel. They were the sixth and seventh children of their good and durable parents, Manuel Pedro Marto and his wife, Olimpia, who became and have remained the warm, valued friends of the author of this book.

We first met Manual Marto in 1943, when brought to his house by Father Carlos de Azevedo, the director of the publication, Voz da Fatima. We got to Aljustrel by walking through fields that in proper season cry out with beauty, but have always been poor and stubborn under that gay dress of flowers worn in summer. What fertility these acres possess was gained the hard way, by the sweat of toiling peasants through succeeding generations. When the Lord sends rain there is a harvest of wheat for June, and in September the land yields back to the worker a fair measure of maize, and grapes for making wine. The olive groves are treasured for the oil they give, and there are the sheep. These things together provide the total and uncomplicated economy of this mountain range, or serra as it is called.

Father Carlos led us past several cottages to one that was hardly different from the rest. These dwellings, almost always of sun-stained stucco, are one story high, and to modern, metropolitan eyes would at first glimpse, suggest all the comforts of an abandoned mineshaft. The neighbourhood lacks, in a loose order of its under-privilege: plumbing, electricity, central heating, refrigeration, television, radios and, except in modest and occasional amounts, cash-money. The people here are neither gadget-blest nor gadget-bound, but sufficient to the tasks and needs of every day and, consequently, free. To sympathisers they would likely say: weep for yourselves.

A group of children (probably relatives) were playing in front of Ti Marto's house that afternoon in 1943. Since it wasn't Sunday, they were shoeless, and by late afternoon as efficiently filmed with earth as young potatoes rooted from the field. Father Carlos asked one of them, "Is Ti Marto home?"

"Yes, Father."

But Senhor Marto had already heard us and had come to the gate. "Come in—please do," he said to Father Carlos. In the Portuguese custom he leaned to kiss our hands, then led us into his straw-strewn yard. "I was just going with the donkey to get some firewood," he explained.

Senhor Marto is a spry and ancient gentleman who gets around. He was past seventy then, and is past eighty now, yet the chances are fine that he will still outlive whatever donkey is currently toting the wood. He is a lean and straight-standing man whom work has fibred like an old stalk of asparagus. He is sincere and kind, and as modest as a prayer should be. Like most of the working people on the serra he can neither read nor write, yet is an intelligent and learned man. A stranger to books, he does not know the intellectual fashions or those choking deposits of pride that erudition too often leaves in the minds and spirits of men who have believed themselves to be in chaste pursuit of God. As a priest, I have been astonished and humbled by his knowledge of theology. Do not ask me how it came to him, but do believe that in the things that matter most he speaks with Pauline clarity, as though the lightning of the Lord had struck him, too. This is Marto, the father of Francisco and Jacinta. In this story he will be our witness many times.

On my first visit to Ti Marto's house I was welcomed into the parlour or living room. It is humble here but not without comfort and a certain abiding charm. It is dominated by the hearth that heats the house when heat is required, and where, at all times of the year, the cooking is done. There are some adornments. A table along one wall holds a variety of religious objects. There are pictures, chief among them a likeness of Pius XII, his hand raised in fatherly blessing to the people of this house.

Ti Marto called from the parlour, "Wife—come here; Father Carlos has brought a priest from Rome."

Senhora Olimpia came in. She moves rather briskly, and she is lively and spirited, and a few years older than her husband. She was the widowed mother of two children before she married Ti Marto, and had seven more by him. She came bearing a great heap of grapes, fresh-picked for her visitors, and a basin of water and a towel for the washing of our hands.

"Please eat the grapes," she said; "we do not need them. Neither my husband nor I drink wine." She looked at Ti Marto in pleased appraisal, as though this were a virtue we would not trip over very often. "Sometimes on Sunday," she explained, "he stays talking in the village, but he never goes into a tavern."

"I would like to hear about your Francisco and your Jacinta," I said.

We began to talk, as we have talked a great deal ever since. This is not an embellished story, but a restrained and honest one, told with love and in good conscience by people who have been very close to God.

It seems agreed by all who remember Francisco Marto that he was a handsome boy, and photographs confirm this. The one or two that have been most published present him at his slick and Sunday best in an outfit almost dudish. The boy's glance at the camera in these pictures appears both solemn and suspicious, but whether of the photographer or his own Sunday clothes, it's difficult to know.

Sister Lucia, the surviving seer of Fatima, in her accounts of him reports that unlike his spirited sister, Jacinta, with her capacity for frolic and self-assertion, Francisco at the age of nine was such a calculating and determined pacifist that a lack of courage would appear to be the only explanation. He was devoted to games and the company of other children, yet by Lucia's testimony was without any appetite for the routine conflicts and tests of will that go with children's games. He was either indifferent to his personal rights or unwilling to defend them. When he was robbed of a treasured possession, Lucia recalls, he would not even protest.

Once each year, we are told, there was glad commotion in Aljustrel when Lucia's, Francisco's, and Jacinta's godmother Teresa made her annual trip to the seacoast. There's evidence that this good lady must have been godmother to everyone in sight and faithfully remembered to return from her journeys with a gift for each child she had sponsored. One of her gifts to Francisco was a lovely handkerchief on which was stamped the image of Our Lady of Nazare. He prized it dearly and displayed it with pride among his friends. But a tragic thing occurred. His precious handkerchief was pirated by one of his companions. Investigation followed. Faithful friends went sleuthing, and the culprit was revealed. But on Francisco's part there was no call to arms. "Let him keep it," he said; "I do not mind." He gave way easily and, it is said in further accusation, with a smile. Lucia has confessed that his docility and habitual yielding inspired her less than it annoyed her:

He would play with all the children without showing preference, and he never quarrelled. But if something happened that he did not like, he would sometimes leave the game. If asked why he left, he would reply, "Because you're bad," or simply, "Because I want to." And although he tried his best at games, he was dull to play with because he almost always lost. His peaceful temperament sometimes used to get very much on my nerves. If I ordered him to sit on a stone, he would meekly do so, as if I had to be obeyed. Later I would be sorry for my impatience and go to him, and he would always be as friendly as if nothing had happened.

The softness of his nature is confirmed by Ti Marto who recalls that Francisco was an affectionate, obedient boy and rarely, if ever, an obstacle in the path of family discipline. But Ti Marto fails to agree with Lucia that he was a thornless personality at home, or a timid defender of his interests. He also dissents from Lucia's view of Francisco's and Jacinta's comparative courage. This is the view of Ti Marto:

He was more courageous than Jacinta. He didn't always have as much patience, and often, for small reason, he would run around like a young bull calf. He was anything but a coward. He would go out at night, alone in the dark, without a sign of fear. He played with lizards and snakes and would roll them around a stick and make them drink out of holes in the rocks. Fearlessly he hunted hares and foxes and moles.

Senhora Olimpia recalls Francisco's talent for capturing lizards and other portable wildlife that are unpopular indoors. She says that his habit was to bring these specimens into the house while her own inclination was to sprint for safety. She marvelled then at the boldness of her son, and today states with certainty that he was never afraid.⁶ Francisco was also devoted to practical jokes that carried the risk of strong reprisal, such as dropping odd and inedible items into the open mouth of his sleeping brother John, and prior to the apparitions, his parents attest, he had once or twice refused to say his prayers, in a rebellious mood that Ti Marto was quick to correct.

But kindness appears to have been a controlling trait. He gave warmth and pity to all the creatures of earth. Once, it is known, he paid the great price of the only penny he possessed, or was for some time likely to acquire, to purchase freedom for a bird another boy held captive. The actual plundering of a nest filled him with horror. Music thrilled him, and he is said to have been adept at coaxing tunes from a reed pipe, in accompaniment to which both Jacinta and Lucia were happy to sing and to dance. Indications are strong that Francisco was a nice little fellow and, on the evidence, at nine years of age, neither a hoodlum nor a shining saint.

Jacinta Marto was a lamb of the Lord, who remains the delight and living lesson of the Fatima story as it is known to date. Because Lucia loved her so, and has made her own earliest memoirs almost a sheer biography of her cousin (with the apparitions mentioned hardly at all), we have a heroine, small but complete, dainty yet brave, and as gay in the paths of sorrow and trial as only the saints can be.

She never grew much bigger than a plaster cherub, anyhow. She died when she was not quite ten years old, already on speaking terms with actual angels, and with Mary, the Queen of the Kingdom. It was the running head-start to heaven that Jacinta had clearly earned.

She was two years younger than Francisco, whom she resembled. Her prettiness was an asset that undoubtedly pleased her, and it was marked enough to prompt the special attention of her mother. Her expression was soft and her features exquisitely modelled. Her health was excellent; her energies endless; she flowed into motion with easy grace and dancing was one of her joys.

"She wasn't as plump as Francisco," her mother reports. "Her eyes were light in colour and brighter than my own when I was young. She liked to have her hair tidy and I used to do it for her every day. A little jacket and a cotton skirt and shoes were what she wore each day, for I was always able to keep my children shod."

Jacinta's grasp on the affections of all who knew her is made clear by endless testimony. "She was a darling," her father still declares, "and none of the others could compare with her."

This is almost excessive praise from the just and moderate Ti Marto, whose inclination would not normally be to raise the prestige of a single child like a bright flag over the rest.

She was always gentle and sweet, and she was like that from the beginning. If she wanted anything she would let us know in her own way, or just give a tiny cry, and then no more trouble at all. When we went out to Mass, or for some other reason left the house, she did not mind. We never had to go through any nonsense because of her. She was naturally good and was the sweetest among our children. When her mother told her some little fib, such as that she was only going to the cabbage-patch, when she was really going much farther, Jacinta would always detect the deception and not hesitate to scold her own mother.

Such rectitude in a child of this age may seem smug to some, or to others suggest a precocious and self-conscious scold. But there is no reason to believe that this was so. Love worked in Jacinta like a motor—a sixteen cylinder apparatus in a very small body. There were countless targets for her affection—her family, her little friends, her sheep—but above all creatures (prior to the apparitions), she loved her cousin Lucia.

The three-year difference in their ages was no barrier to their friendship or freedom of communication. Their love was rare and undoubtedly touched with grace. Envy or competition did not exist between them, though Jacinta now and then moved out from under any premature halo long enough to pout and be unhappy when she was unable to possess each of her cousin's waking hours. When Lucia attained the age of ten and was assigned by her parents the daily task of tending the family sheep, a crisis arose. For Lucia it meant a graduation from endless games with other children to responsible chores in sometimes distant pastures; and for Jacinta, held to village doorsteps, it meant a desolate loneliness that she was not at this age willing to bear. Olimpia Marto solved this problem by permitting Jacinta a few of their own flock to take along with Lucia. Jacinta's desire to praise and to please the older shepherdess is displayed in touching detail by Lucia's own testimony:

My cousin went one day with her mother to a first Communion ceremony at which tiny "angels" strewed flowers before the Blessed Sacrament. After that she would often leave us at our play to gather armfuls of flowers which she would throw at me in the same way. When I asked her why she did it, she said she was doing what the angels did.

By Lucia's account, the gospel stories and the personality of Jesus were in Jacinta's firm possession long before the apparitions raised the faith of these children to a status of angelic knowledge:

When she was five years old, or less, she would melt with tears on hearing the story of the Passion of our Lord. "Poor Jesus," she would say. "I must never sin and offend Him more."

But in the rocky fields of the serra, Jacinta was happy. She had Lucia for the length of every day, and the sheep had become her precious friends. Out of her affection she gave them the choicest names her fancy could provide: "Dove" and "Star" and "Beauty" and "Snow."

She used to sit with them (Lucia says), holding and kissing them on her lap. At night she would attempt to carry a little one home on her shoulders to save it from tiredness, as in pictures of the Good Shepherd she had seen.

Flowers enchanted her. It was her habit to gather them in volume and myriad colours to festoon her hair with their brightness, and especially to make garlands for Lucia. Her aesthetic appetite was not only sharp but, for such a knee-high apprentice to the world's delights, voracious. She had a romantic label for all the natural beauties she was able to behold. The stars were to her "the angels' lanterns," and she would challenge Francisco to eye-crossing, sense-rocking contests in which they would attempt to count each one of them. The sun, casting soft light on the rough hills at the end of the day, was to Jacinta, "our Lady's lamp."

Lucia says that her cousin's singing voice was sweet and that she was fond of perching on some high hill now and then so that her voice-could echo in the valley.

"And the name which echoed best," says Lucia, "was Maria."

Dancing, of course, was an enterprise that flourished endlessly with both of them, and according to Lucia, Jacinta brought to it a special talent and grace. All this is very nice, and very sweet; yet fairness requires those few descriptions by Lucia that reveal some moth bites in her little cousin's mantle of innocence. She could, at times, be disagreeable:

The least quarrel, when she was playing with other children, was enough to put her into a fit of the sulks. To make her return to the game it was not enough to plead and pet; she had to choose both game and partner.

Possessiveness was another fault in Jacinta, and her accustomed success at games, plus pampering, seem now and then to have shaken a little salt on the angels who hovered so near.

I was very upset with her (Lucia has said), because after a game of "buttons" I would have none on my dress when I was called home to meals. She nearly always used to win them from me, and this meant a scolding by my mother. But what could I do when, in addition to sulking, she would not give them back to me? Her plan was to have them ready for the next day's game without having to use her own. It was only by threatening not to play again that I managed to get them back.

Lucia's honest memoirs also provide an admission that in those early days prayer was not as popular as play:

We were told we must say our Rosaries after our lunch on the serra, but as the whole day seemed too short for prayer, we thought of a good way to get it done quickly. We simply said, "Hail Mary, Hail Mary," on each of the beads, and then, at the end of the decade, "Our Father," with a rather long pause. That way, in a very few minutes, the Rosary was off our minds.

Here then were the seers of Aljustrel—human and warm and somewhat less perfect than time and grace would permit them to become.

On those days when Francisco and Jacinta were allowed to join Lucia in taking the sheep to pasture, their mother would wake them to the darkness and the mountain chill preceding dawn. Still half asleep, they would mumble the required prayer of the day: "Praised be the ever holy Sacrament of the Eucharist...."

Senhora Olimpia remembers that they did not always respond with model devotion; they were much too groggy. "They used to make the sign of the cross," she explained, "and then say as much of the prayer as they could. Children of that age very soon get tired of praying."

This ultra-early rousing, of course, was not a calculated penance but a sound concession to the preference of the sheep for nibbling in pasture still fresh with the dew of the night.

While the children were dressing, Olimpia customarily produced for them a breakfast of soup and chewy bread made moist with a splash of olive oil. There's no indication that the morning menu ever got much fancier. For lunch they would carry with them bread and olives and dried fish or sardines, supplemented with anything else the cupboard could provide. The aim of the children was not food, anyhow, but the company of Lucia and the gladness of the day.

Lucia would wait with her flock, and make the choice of pastureland. Sometimes she chose the fields near Fatima or those close by a village known as Moita. But best of all she liked a place called the Cabeco, where her family owned part of an olive grove. This was a pasture on a rise of land that overlooked their village, near home, and lumpy with odd-shaped stones. Grazing was good at the Cabeco, while the olive and pine trees gave pleasant shade when the heat of the day was high.

Other shepherds often joined them here at Lucia's invitation, the sheep to dine off the countryside, the children to play at their games. This mingling of flocks appears to have gone well enough, with never a crisis of ownership, since sheep, like puppies, or sociable cats, always know to whom they belong.

Consistent with her habit of leadership, Lucia was the organiser and leader of the games. Being then, as now, a combination of excellent humour and practical energy, her leadership stirred no resentment. It was natural, and it was encouraged by the dependence of the others. Time and again, not from Lucia's own testimony, but from the willing evidence her old companions provide, their affection for this markedly plain little girl is evident. A middle-aged housewife of Aljustrel, named Teresa Maitias, remembers happily the games they used to play:

Lucia was very amusing. She had a way of getting the best out of us so that we liked to be with her. She was also very intelligent, and could sing and dance and taught us to do the same. We always obeyed her. We spent hours and hours dancing and singing, and sometimes forgot to eat.

Besides the hymns we sang in church I remember one to Our Lady of Mt. Carmel that I still sing as I go about my work, and which all my children have learned.⁷ (Here Senhora Teresa was happy to demonstrate with four verses and a chorus.) We sang folk songs, too, that I can't remember now, and the little boys used to play their pipes while we danced. Lucia's first direct experience of the supernatural—April / October of 1915 Lucia's first direct experience with the supernatural was not shared by Francisco or Jacinta. It was at a time that remains uncertain, though she was probably eight years old. Her own recollections set the event between April and October of 1915 and it must have occurred during one of her first assignments with the sheep. She was with three other girls who still remember, though in a kind of grey confusion, what happened that day on the slopes of the Cabeco.

Lucia's companions were Teresa Maitias, Teresa's sister, Maria, and a little girl named Maria Justino.

"We'd had our lunch," Lucia remembers, "and were just beginning the Rosary, when suddenly we saw, above the trees in the valley below us, a kind of cloud that was whiter than snow. It was transparent and in human form."

The exact emotional reactions of these children are not clear, and later awareness that the figure was an angel has not prompted them to colour the event with imagination. The figure, or visitor, was vague, and admittedly did not etch itself very clearly in their minds.

One of the children reported home to her mother that she had seen something white on a tree and that it looked like a headless woman. This account was enough to raise some lively speculation, but it was a puzzle so beyond solution that, when curiosity had wearied, the problem was shrugged away. Twice again in the days that followed the same strange figure appeared to these children, leaving with Lucia a reaction she could neither describe nor explain.

"The impression slowly disappeared," she has said in this same memoir, "and I fully believe if it hadn't been for the events that followed, we'd have forgotten all about it."

A year or more passed. Lucia, now a veteran shepherdess, was an almost daily companion to Jacinta and Francisco. Only then did the angel appear with radiant clarity at the Cabeco. This was not a gauzy, uncertain citizen of paradise. Its identity was overpowering. Lucia confesses her complete inability to deal with the event in adequate words, but at least has tried her very best. This is her account of what happened in the spring of 1916:

We went on that occasion to my parents' property, which is at the bottom of the Cabeco, facing east. It is called Chousa Velha.

About the middle of the morning it began to drizzle and we climbed up the hill, followed by our sheep, in search of a rock that would shelter us. And so it was that we entered for the first time into that blessed place. It is in the middle of an olive grove that belongs to my godfather, Anastacio. From there one can see the village where I was born, my father's house, and also Casa Velha and Eira da Pedra. The olive grove, which really belongs to several people, extends as far as these places.

We spent the day there, in spite of the fact that the rain had stopped and the sun was shining in a clear sky. We ate our lunch and began to say the Rosary. After that we began to play a game with pebbles. We had only been at it a few moments when a strong wind began to shake the trees and we looked up to see what was happening, since it was such a calm day. And then we began to see, in the distance, above the trees that stretched to the east, a light whiter than snow in the form of a young man, quite transparent, and as brilliant as crystal in the rays of the sun. As he came near we were able to see his features. We were astonished and absorbed and we said nothing to one another. And then he said: "Do not be afraid. I am the angel of peace. Pray with me."

He knelt, bending his forehead to the ground. With a supernatural impulse we did the same, repeating the words we heard him say:

"My God, I believe, I adore, I hope, and I love You. I ask forgiveness for those who do not believe, nor adore, nor hope, nor love You."⁸ After repeating this prayer three times the angel rose and said to us: "Pray in this way. The hearts of Jesus and Mary are ready to listen to you." And he disappeared. He left us in an atmosphere of the supernatural that was so intense we were for a long time unaware of our own existence. The presence of God was so powerful and intimate that even among ourselves we could not speak. On the next day, too, this same atmosphere held us bound, and it lessened and disappeared only gradually. None of us thought of talking about this apparition or any pledge of secrecy. We were locked in silence without having willed it.

This silence was long maintained. The weight of mystery was on them heavily. Their games and songs and dances were begun again, but as though by a controlling plan they chose now to play less with other children, and to remain much more by themselves. It should be mentioned here that while Francisco witnessed and felt the power and glory of the angel, he did not hear what was said. Later, too, in all the apparitions that followed, the partial privilege of seeing and knowing but not hearing the words of our Lady was to be his allotment.

When it is summer on the Serra da Aire, the sun of the middle day is merciless. It parches the hills and wilts nearly everything. The sheep are therefore pastured in the early and the late parts of the day. Always before noon they are returned to the sheep folds while the shepherds themselves find shade from the sun and ease from their morning tasks.

The children often spent these glaring hours in Lucia's garden where an old well rests in shade. The well in summer is covered by a great flat stone, since it is not spring-fed, but is rather a kind of catch-all, used to gather what water it can in the brief season of rain.

The children liked to sit and play on the great rock covering the well, shaded by the laden limbs of fig, almond and olive trees. One day, in the time of siesta, the angel came to them again, and this is Lucia's account:

Suddenly we saw the same angel near us.

"What are you doing?" he said. "You must pray! Pray! The hearts of Jesus and Mary have merciful designs for you. You must offer your prayers and sacrifices to God, the Most High."

"But how are we to sacrifice?" I asked.

"In every way you can offer sacrifice to God in reparation for the sins by which He is offended, and in supplication for sinners. In this way you will bring peace to our country, for I am its guardian angel, the angel of Portugal. Above all, bear and accept with patience the sufferings God will send you."

Again Francisco, hearing nothing of what the angel had said, could hold his curiosity no longer than evening. "Lucia," he asked then, "what did the angel say?"

But Lucia was so stunned by the weight of the supernatural that she asked him please to wait another day, or else to ask Jacinta. But Jacinta, too, found herself not willing or prepared to repeat a word of the angel's message.

"Tomorrow I will tell you, Francisco," she said. "But I just can't talk about it tonight."

On the following day (relates Lucia), the first thing Francisco did was ask me, "Did you sleep last night? I was thinking all the time of the angel and what he could have said."

I then told him everything the angel had said in the two apparitions. But it seemed he did not understand all the words. "What is the Most High?" he asked. "What does it mean that the hearts of Jesus and Mary are attentive to your supplications?" And when I gave him the answer he remained thoughtful for a while before he began to ask other questions. But my own spirit was not yet free to talk of these things. I asked him once more to wait another day. He seemed content then to wait a little, but at the very first chance he was asking questions again, which caused Jacinta to say with some alarm, "Be careful; one should not talk about these things!"

It is strange, but when we talked about the angel, I cannot explain how it was that we felt. Jacinta said, "I don't know what it is that I feel. I can't talk or play or sing or anything."

"I can't either," Francisco said, "but it doesn't matter. The angel is better than anything. Let's think of him."

It was no problem to dwell on the angel. For days they were without capacity to think of anything else. The exhortation to "Pray... pray... offer your prayers and sacrifices to the Most High," did not register with them like some order or recommendation from a parent or a priest. Their senses were barely able to carry the weight of what had been said.

The words of the angel were like a light (Lucia has written), which made us understand who and what God really is—how He loves us and wishes to be loved. The value of sacrifice was for the first time clear. Suddenly we knew its appeal to God and its power to convert sinners. From that moment we began offering to Him all that mortified us, all that was difficult or unpleasant, except that we did not then seek extra sacrifices and penances as we later learned to do. We did, however, spend hours and hours prostrated on the ground, repeating and repeating the prayer the angel taught us.

The summer passed and siesta times were over: Now the sheep were pastured in the fields the length of every day. The children understandably had become more thoughtful, their prayers habitual. One day, Lucia re members, they led their flock from other fields to the slope of the Cabeco. And there by a strange, high-standing stone, they knelt to say first the Rosary, then the prayer the angel had taught them.

While we were there (Lucia has testified), the angel appeared to us for the third time, holding in his hand a chalice, and above the chalice, a Host, from which a few drops of blood were falling. Leaving the chalice and Host suspended in air, he prostrated himself on the ground and repeated three times this prayer:

"Most Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, I adore You profoundly, and I offer You the most precious body, blood, soul and divinity of Jesus Christ, present in all the tabernacles of the world, in reparation for the outrages, sacrileges and indifference by which He is offended. And by the infinite merits of His most Sacred Heart and through the Immaculate Heart of Mary, I beg the conversion of poor sinners."

Afterwards, he rose and took again the chalice and the Host and gave the Host to me and the contents of the chalice to Jacinta and Francisco, saying to them:

"Take and drink the body and blood of Jesus Christ, horribly outraged by ungrateful men. Repair their crimes and console your God."

Once more he prostrated himself and repeated with us three times the prayer, "Most Holy Trinity... etc." He then disappeared. As in the other instances of the angel's appearance, exhaustion and the lock of silence held both little girls. Only Francisco, not having heard the angel, had a question to ask. "Lucia," he said, "I know the angel gave you Holy Communion, but what was it that he gave to Jacinta and me? "That was Communion, too, Francisco. Didn't you see the blood that dropped into the chalice from the Host?"

The little boy, rich with the Feast that was in him, seemed satisfied. "I knew that God was in me," he said, "but I didn't know exactly how." Then he knelt in love and thanksgiving to repeat and repeat the beautiful prayer of the angel.

Some feeling of impudence must invade any writer who attempts by himself to interpret the work of God. Yet it seems here so entirely clear that the angel, in addition to preparing the children for the spiritual privileges yet to come, undertook to demonstrate and underline for our theological health and guidance that the binding orthodoxies of the Church have not been vitiated by time or error. The centuries have left them undamaged. The frailties of all men, including the Church's membership, or even the sins and weaknesses of her priests, so often pointed at in triumph by the Church's enemies, have not chipped the Rock of Peter, nor diminished in any way the irreducible God who supplants the bread in the uplifted hands of any ordinary priest. The Trinity, the Eucharist, the Mass, the Rosary—all have been declared unnecessary trappings by dissenting Christians who, not through God's revelation, but by the fiat of rebellion, have chosen the wilderness of their own convenient interpretations. But here, at Fatima, it does appear that an angel has walked among us with a catechism open in his hands. Lucia has written:

I don't know why, but the apparitions of our Lady produced in us effects quite different from the angel's visitations We felt in both instances the same intimate happiness, peace and joy, but instead of the physical prostration the angel imposed, our Lady brought a feeling of expansion and freedom; and instead of this annihilation in the divine presence, we wished only to exult in our joy. There was no difficulty of speech when our Lady appeared; there was rather on my part a desire to communicate.

Any wise missionary, for good or for evil (and God is the wisest missionary of all), treasures for his cause the conversion and allegiance of children. If it is impossible for a child to encounter a whale reading The New York Times on 42nd Street, New York, this does not mean that he is psychologically unprepared for such an experience. The barriers to his credulity are usually in ratio to his limited frame of reference. His personality is like a huge house only occupied in part; a skilled adult may enter hand-in-hand with Christ, or else, by his own election, with any of several beguiling anti-Christs, and have an excellent chance of settling down in comfortable residence there. This is one of the reasons why Jesus has so sternly and repeatedly warned us against giving scandal to children: He wants them for Himself.

God has set up an honest enterprise. His tap on the shoulder is an invitation but not a lease to paradise. He does not undermine this merit system by making angels of men. He does something fairer than that, and even more thrilling than that. He gives them a chance to become very much like Himself, or like His Mother, who is a person, and not an angel. The fulfilment of this opportunity is not easy; the ascent is invariably steep, with God providing the legs and the power, plus the free choice to climb or not to climb that rests with every man. But God does not make this decision for us. That is our own. And by His own rules there is not much else that God can do.

The children of Aljustrel, for instance, did not forget about the angel they had seen, but their zeal wore thin with the games and private interests that absorbed them in the winter months. Like Peter and James and John, who slept a stone's cast from their Master at Gethsemane, they had not yet been transformed into lovers of the cross, and perhaps with a better excuser.

On the Sunday before the Feast of the Ascension, the village people walked to the parish church at Fatima, some dutiful feet encased in shoes, and as many more unshod.

God preserved us (Jacinta and Francisco's aged mother still declares) from missing Mass on Sunday. We always went, and we brought the children, too, as soon as they were old enough to understand. Sometimes we had to go great distances to other villages, but whatever the weather, rain or shine, I can't remember ever having missed Holy Mass—even when I had children at the breast. I used to get up early and leave everything to my husband who would go later. The only children we did not take were the toddling ones who could not know what was going on, or let you hear Mass properly yourself.

After Mass, with their lunch-bags packed, the children went off with their sheep to the pasture Lucia had chosen—a modest property her parents owned within a rough and rocky spread of land known as the Cova da Iria. They went leisurely along so the sheep could nibble at what random nourishment the roadside would provide. It was a vivid day, and very beautiful. In May-time, then as now, the fields near Fatima are unbelievably gay. The spring flowers bloom in such exaggerated and festive glory that any field you pass attracts the eye like an acre of Easter hats in our own more fashionable precincts. The sky on this wonderful Sunday was cloudless. The bells of the Fatima church were tolling as the sheep strolled into the field.

The children had lunch while their sheep were grazing. They had no expectation this would prove a day that millions would in time commemorate. Lunch was particularly good, with a Sunday dividend added by their mothers. Some of this they saved for later in the afternoon. They said grace and then a Rosary, as was their habit every day. After this they led the sheep to a fresh pasture, higher on the slopes of the Cova da Iria.

They began to amuse themselves by building a little house with odd-sized stones they picked from the field. Francisco was the architect and principal mechanic in this venture, his sister and cousin supplying the rough materials. Their party had just begun to go well, when they were startled by a vivid flash of light. They dropped the stones from their hands and looked about. They hadn't expected lightning on a day so fair, but lightning, whether logical or not, meant to them a thunderstorm. Yet the trees were still. There was no wind. The sky was blue as it had ever been.

"But it could mean a storm," Lucia said; "I think we'd better get ready to go home."

They began to gather their things and look to the sheep, when suddenly another flash of light, strange and unexplained, held them in speechless wonder. Without volition of their own, they walked a few steps forward, and then, as though compelled, they turned their heads to the right.

They saw a Lady, and she was so beautiful that they were never after able to describe her in terms they believed fitting to her radiance and glory. The Lady was young—no more than sixteen years old, and she appeared to be standing on the topmost fragile leaves of a small oak tree, looking down at them with tender interest.

It was a Lady (Lucia has written), clothed in white, and brighter than the sun, radiating a light more intense and clear than a crystal cup would be, were it filled with sparkling water and lit with burning sunlight.

"Please don't be afraid of me," the Lady said to the children; "I'm not going to harm you."

She looked at them a bit sadly, as though to reproach their lack of confidence. Lucia responded to this reassurance. Politely, but directly, she addressed the Lady.

"Where are you from?"

"I come from heaven," the Lady said.

This seemed to the children entirely reasonable. They knew of heaven, both from their catechism and the visits of the angel. It simply was that they had never before been able to conceive that even heaven could produce anyone as radiantly beautiful as the Lady standing before them. They gazed in rapture. The Lady wore a white mantle of breathless purity. It was edged with gold and fell to her feet. In her hands the beads of a rosary shone like stars, with its crucifix the most radiant gem of all. Still, Lucia felt no fear. The Lady's presence produced in her only gladness and confident joy.

"And what do you want of me?" Lucia was brave enough to ask.

"I want you to return here on the thirteenth of each month for the next six months, and at the very same hour," the Lady said. "Later I shall tell you who I am, and what it is that I most desire. And I shall return here yet a seventh time."⁹ Ah, but heaven must be great indeed, thought Lucia, to send as lovely a creature as this. Its gifts and wonders had to be beyond all wild imagining. "And shall I go to heaven?"

"Yes, you will," the Lady said. "And Jacinta?"

"She will go too."

"And Francisco?"

"Francisco, too, my dear, but he will first have many Rosaries to say." Here the Lady's beautiful and compassionate glance rested for a little while on Francisco, and for reasons we are not qualified to fathom, it held a shade of sadness and disapproval. Somewhere in his little heart the Lady must have read a fault that others could not see.¹⁰ In joy they beheld the Lady, while Lucia in her own mind was already populating paradise with friends. She remembered two of her companions who recently had died. And of the Lady then, in her charity, she anxiously asked: "Is Maria Neves in heaven?"

"Yes, she is."

"And Amelia?"

"She is in purgatory," the Lady said. That was sad, thought Lucia. Her eyes filled with tears. She looked once again to the Lady, as though there might be something they could do for Amelia. The Lady then asked them a question that concerned not only Amelia, but all the sons and daughters of earth.

"Will you offer yourselves to God, and bear all the sufferings He sends you? In atonement for all the sins that offend Him? And for the conversion of sinners?"

"Oh, we will, we will!" Lucia said for them all.

"Then you will have a great deal to suffer," the Lady said, "but the grace of God will be with you and will strengthen you."

As she pronounced these words, she opened her hands, and we were bathed in a heavenly light that appeared to come directly from her hands. The light's reality cut into our hearts and our souls, and we knew somehow that this light was God, and we could see ourselves embraced in it. By an impulse of clear and exterior grace we fell to our knees, repeating in our hearts: "Oh, Holy Trinity, I adore You. My God, my God, I love You in the Blessed Sacrament."

The children remained kneeling in the flood of this wondrous light, until the Lady spoke again of things that seemed to them strange.

"Say the Rosary every day," she directed, "to bring peace to the world and an end to the war."

Actually they did not know about war and peace. Amelia and Maria Neves were far more real, but they would obey, just the same; they would remember this, and the Lady seemed to know that they would. She was leaving them now. She was rising and passing from sight....

She began to rise slowly (Lucia has testified), moving to the eastward until she disappeared in the blaze of light that cut her path away and beyond our vision...

For an uncertain length of time the three children remained kneeling near the little oak tree, their eyes fixed on the patch of sky that had received the Lady and taken her from view. Slowly they returned from ecstasy and began with some alarm to seek the sheep they had forgotten. But the sheep were grazing near, the flock intact. All had gone well. The children's hearts swelled large with happiness and peace.

Jacinta glowed. She had been silent in the Lady's presence, but now began to chatter breathlessly, and for her happiness, review each small detail of the experience. Her heart danced with her gladness. Her gentle and effusive nature overran itself with more joy, seemingly, than such a small and dancing vessel could contain.

"But she was so lovely, lovely, lovely—wasn't she, Lucia?"

Yes, Lucia agreed; the Lady had been lovely—more than lovely. Mere recollection of her was so exquisite an experience that it was touched with pain. Lucia held close in memory the words the Lady had spoken, and from that moment began to possess a literal understanding of what the words implied. In her mind they spread like a veil of sorrow across the glow of remembered joy. "Will you offer yourself to God and bear all the sufferings He will send you?" the Lady had asked. "In atonement for all the sins that offend Him? And for the conversion of sinners?"

"You must say nothing about this to anyone," Lucia cautioned her cousin. "Do you hear me, Jacinta?"

"Oh, I hear you, and I will say nothing—believe me," Jacinta said, and there were no forebodings to impede her happiness. The gate of heaven did not seem like a needle's eye to her; it was wider by far than the blue sky over Portugal. There were no misgivings or shadows of sorrow in her sight, for she had not yet turned the coin of salvation to see its other side.

"You won't tell anyone?" Lucia asked again.

"Not anyone. Not even my mother," Jacinta said firmly. As for Francisco, the little boy just walked along, his hands in his pockets, his thoughts his own. The sheep, strolled after them.

Lucia went home that Sunday evening guarding preciously her knowledge of the Lady who came from heaven. Whether she believed the incident too holy to be communicated to others, or instinctively feared the reaction of her family, it is hard to say. Her father, Antonio Santos, was not a man of pious persuasion to begin with, while her mother's invincible orthodoxy seems to have lacked one important ingredient—the leaven of charity. Maria Rosa feared God and His Mother perhaps a little more than she loved them, and appears to have lacked the breadth of heart or imagination that could tolerate, even sentimentally, any "Cinderella" aspects of religion especially in the case of her own daughter.

Lucia was prudently silent. But not Jacinta. Her desire to share the new and shining wonder of the Lady overwhelmed her. No barriers existed between her mother and herself, and she appears to have forgotten the silence she had promised so solemnly.

Jacinta's mother wasn't home that Sunday afternoon. She had made the long journey to Batalha with her husband to buy a pig. Jacinta waited eagerly at the gate for them until they finally appeared, Olimpia first, and then Ti Marto, keeping patient pace with the weary animal they had purchased at the fair. Senhora Marto has herself supplied an account of this meeting on the dusty road in front of their house at the tired end of the day:

My little daughter ran to meet me and clutched me around the knees in a way she had never done before. "Mother," she cried excitedly, "I saw our Lady today, in the Cova da Iria!"

"That's likely, isn't it!" said I. "I suppose you're a saint to be seeing our Lady!" Jacinta seemed downcast at what I said, but she came into the house with me, saying again: "But I saw her!"

Then she told me what had happened, of the lightning and their fear because of it... of the light... and the beautiful Lady surrounded by light so dazzling you could hardly look at it... of the Rosary which they were to say every day. But I didn't believe anything she was saying, and hardly listened to her. I told her she must have taken leave of her senses, to think that our Lady had appeared to her!

After that I went to get some food for the pig. My husband had stayed in the corral to see if it was getting on with the other animals. When we had finished seeing to the animals we went back to the house. My Manuel sat down by the hearth and began to eat his supper. His brother-in-law, Antonio da Silva, happened to be there too, and all my children—as far as I can remember, all eight of them. Then I said to Jacinta:

"Tell us that story about our Lady in the Cova da Iria." And she told us what happened with the greatest simplicity. There had been a most beautiful Lady... dressed in white with a gold cord hanging from her neck to her waist. Her head was covered with a mantle that was whiter than milk, and fell to her feet. It was edged with gold and was so beautiful... her hands had been joined, so... And my little girl got up off the stool and stood with her hands folded on the level of her chest in imitation of the vision.

She said: "The Lady held a rosary in her hand; a beautiful rosary shining like the stars, and a crucifix that shone.... She spoke with Lucia a great deal, but not with me, or Francisco. I heard all that she said. Oh, mother, we must say the Rosary every day; the Lady said this to Lucia. She said too, that she would take us all to heaven, and other things which I can't remember, but which Lucia knows. When she went back into heaven the doors seemed to shut so quickly that I thought her feet would get caught...."

Naturally, a story of such dimensions was not received indifferently in the crowded Marto home. It was enjoyed more than it was believed, even with Francisco's solemn agreement to all his sister had said. A mere lack of belief did not keep Jacinta's older sisters from wanting to hear more, although the boys kept interrupting the story with their attempts at comedy. Olimpia confesses that it was all too much for her. Her own opinion was that if Jacinta imagined herself a saint, and chose to ride her young fancy like a runaway horse, the illusion would pass with a good night's rest.

Ti Marto said very little. A thoughtful man, who respected his children, he wanted most of all to be fair. It was a puzzling story, surely, and he did not think his offspring so remarkable that heaven, after sifting all the children of earth, would have to select his own. But on the other hand, they were good children, and our Lord Himself, in His great charity and wisdom, had often bestowed great favour on the least and most humble of men. For the problem facing him, Ti Marto marshalled together and solemnly reviewed his own theological resources.

For ages our Lady had been appearing in the world at different times and in different ways for reasons most holy, and if she had not come so often to the world in the past, it would be worse off than it was now—bad as that might be. The power of God is very great and even if we do not understand His reasons, we must not oppose His will.

Ti Marto pondered this problem patiently, while by the light of an oil lamp, on that 13th of May, he sipped his potato soup. And today he concludes:

From the beginning I somehow felt that the children were telling the truth. Yes, I think I believed from the first. I was impressed because the children had received no instructions whatever about these things of which they spoke. How could they have said such things if Providence had not assisted them? And why should they lie so outrageously now, when they had always been truthful children?

Ti Marto was the first, and perhaps the only adult in the hamlet of Aljustrel, who believed the strange story told by Jacinta. Senhora Marto did not share his faith, but she was a lady of lively mind who knew a good yarn when she heard one. True or false, she saw no harm in sharing with her neighbours this precocious tidbit dreamed up by Jacinta. Taken purely as a story, it enjoyed a quick success and thorough circulation. As for its impact on the Santos family, we have this report from Maria dos Anjos, Lucia's sister:

First thing in the morning, a neighbour came and told me that Jacinta's mother had said that the child had told her a most extraordinary thing. When I heard it, it gave me rather a shock, and I went straight to Lucia who was sitting under a fig-tree doing I forget what.

"Lucia," I said to her, "I heard that you saw our Lady in the Cova da Iria. Is it true?"

"Who told you?" she almost gasped.

"The neighbours are saying that Jacinta came out with it to Olimpia." Lucia thought for a while and then said to me:

"And I told her so many times not to tell anyone!" I asked her why, and she said it was because she didn't know if it was really our Lady, though it was a beautiful lady.

"What did she say to you?"

"That she wanted us to go for six months running to the Cova da Iria and that she would tell us later what she wanted."

"Didn't you ask who she was?"

"I asked her where she came from and she said: 'I come from heaven.' " It seemed as if she didn't want to tell me any more but I almost forced her to. I don't think I ever saw Lucia so sad. Then Francisco arrived and said that Jacinta had not been able to hold her tongue and that at home everyone knew what had happened in the Cova da Iria. Other people began telling my mother, who from the first refused to take it seriously, but when I told her what Lucia had told me she began to take more notice and went to ask her. Lucia told her exactly what she had told me.

Senhora Santos listened first solemnly, then with in creased alarm to this elaborate story that she was unable to consider either interesting or cute. It bore the twin horns of deceit and sacrilege. The idea of a calculated lie was at any time equal to raising this scrupulous lady's scalp, but where the falsehood was wanton enough to invade the sacred precincts of religion—ah, well—and God preserve us all—stern measures were required. It would not be a happy time.

Later that morning, the children led their flocks once again to the Cova da Iria, but it was not a gay procession. They found their overnight fame a painful distinction. Friends and neighbours greeted them with mock applause, and taunted them about the Lady whose radiant beauty had been like a backstage visit to paradise, less than twenty-four hours before.

Jacinta, hardly taller than the sheep, trudged solemnly on, less disturbed by the disbelief of her neighbours than she was punished to know the pain and trouble her tattling had brought Lucia. Francisco had little or nothing to say. The two girls walked in silence. The sheep, untroubled and obedient, moved along.

In the Cova, Lucia watched her little cousin sit down on a lumpy stone, holding her chin in her tiny hands, and wearing her remorse like a hoop-skirt that was many sizes too big. Lucia, who had no taste for gloom, began to smile.

"All right, Jacinta; let's forget it and play."

"I don't want to play today."

"I'm not angry, Jacinta. Honestly. Why won't you play?"

"Because I'm thinking of the Lady. That's really why."

"So?" Lucia walked closer. "What are you thinking about the Lady, Jacinta?"

"Well, of how she told us to say the Rosary, for one thing. That's important, isn't it?"

"Yes, I think so; it must be terribly important," Lucia agreed. Funny how, when she thought of the Lady, that love and strength grew as big as another world inside of her, leaving no space available for anger or impatience.

"And we oughtn't to cheat any more on the Rosary," Jacinta said solemnly. "We shouldn't say like—well, you know—Our Father, Hail Mary, Hail Mary—that kind of cheating. We should say the whole prayer each time, instead of just the first two words. And the sacrifice part that she mentioned. How do we do that?"

"We'll give our lunch to the sheep," Francisco said. They turned to him, impressed by his suggestion. Francisco remained firm, repeating his resolve, and it was adopted. A brand new, if ridiculously small, champion of the heroic virtues, this reformed lizard-catcher proved himself entirely equal to the program he recommended. How much the sheep enjoyed the bread and cheese we are not sure, but the noontime hunger of the shepherds was very real. Toward the end of the day they were so famished, that Francisco climbed a holm oak tree in pursuit of green acorns, a diet less tasty than chewing one's shoes. But Jacinta protested. No, she said, not the green acorns; bad as they were, those from the cork oak trees were even worse, and thus would provide the greater sacrifice.

And so on that day (Lucia recalls) our food consisted of acorns. At other times we ate pine needles or roots, blackberries, mushrooms and some other things we gathered at the roots of the pines, though I can't remember their names. And if we happened to be near some property belonging to one of our families, we once in a while had a little fruit.

It is easy, of course, and even natural, to look on the eager initial self-sacrifices of children with some suspicion. Very often they are enjoyed more than endured. Lenten denials, for instance, when first undertaken, will at times more than compensate the new penitent for his empty stomach by filling him with a pietistical glow and the excitement of self-drama. Such adventures are common and short-lived. But it seems unlikely that this could have been true with Lucia, Jacinta and Francisco. They did it in secrecy and silence, and, most important, to the tune of no one's applause.

For Lucia, in a comparative sense, this trial of appetite was slight. She had found, without seeking it, a valid martyrdom at home. Her mother's reaction was almost fierce. The goblins of falsehood (for Maria Rosa was convinced Lucia was lying) attacked not only her conscience, but seemed clearly in her eyes to have imperilled her respectable standing in the village. Not content to fret in silence until the case was proved or disproved, Maria Rosa appears to have broadcast her distress with some noisy posturing.

"Why should such things happen to me at my time of life?" she asked. "I have always been so careful about my children telling the truth, and now my youngest has to lie in this terrible way!"

The household commotion was only beginning. Its warmth would increase. The only indifferent witness was Lucia's father, Antonio Santos, who dismissed the whole affair as frantic nonsense dreamed up and sustained by women. Pressed for a more particular opinion, Antonio was even bluntly obscene, and succeeded in detaching himself from nearly all that ensued.

But for Maria Rosa such detachment was not possible. Having launched all the verbal attacks of which she was capable, and having seen them blunted to ineffectiveness by Lucia's unshakeable insistence that the Lady from heaven was true, she took more practical steps, which Lucia herself has described.

One day, before I went out with the flock, she tried to force me to say I was lying. She tried pleading, threats, and even the broom handle. To all this she only received stubborn silence or confirmation of all that I had already said. She told me to go and get the sheep and to think well during the day that she had never allowed her children to tell lies, let alone lies like this! She said, too, that in the evening she would force me to go to those people to whom I had told the story and confess that I had lied and ask their pardon. I went to get the sheep, and that day my cousins were waiting for me. When they saw me crying they ran up and asked me what was the matter. I told them all that had happened and added:

"What am I to do? Mother says that I am to say that I am lying. How can l?" Then Francisco said to Jacinta: "You see, it was all your fault because you told!" My little cousin begged our forgiveness on her knees and said: "I did very wrong but I will never tell anything to anybody again!"

When Lucia's mother at last realised that the threat of her broom and the power of her tongue were limited, she decided, and properly, that Father Ferreira, their parish priest, was better equipped than she to meet the devil in head-on collision. One morning, decisively, she accompanied Lucia to the presbytery.

"Now, when you get there," she said, and she wasn't fooling, "you get down on your knees and confess that you have lied and lied. Then you beg forgiveness, do you understand? You can explain it as you like to Father Ferreira, but unless we are done with this lie, and make the truth clear to all the people you have tried to deceive, I'll shut you up in a dark room—do you hear?"

Lucia heard all right, and her fears were genuine. Father Ferreira was an enormous man physically, and though actually soft of voice and gentle within himself, his awesome reputation with Maria Rosa, who lived by his strictures absolutely, made him appear to Lucia as a mountain of authority, a final word, a Daniel with a sword held poised.

But even to the Reverend Father Ferreira, Lucia confessed no lie. The strange words of the beautiful Lady: "You will have much to suffer," were for the first time etched in clarity. And so too was the grace of God, which stood beside her, bigger than the fear.

The thirteenth of June approached. It was the day designated by the Lady for her second appearance to Lucia, Jacinta and Francisco, who waited eagerly and prayerfully, not to be reassured that what—they had said of this marvellous Lady was true, but simply to see her again, to know her again, and to be embraced in that light of heaven that conducted her to earth. In the weeks since the first apparition, the news of the alleged phenomenon had spread through the parochial limits of Fatima, finding more credence in distant parishes than it enjoyed at home. Locally, it was considered a joke or, at best, a lively scandal.

But to all Portuguese Christians, the thirteenth of June was a distinguished date for a revered and traditional reason; it was the feast day of their great St. Anthony who, to the undisguised pain of so many Italians, was born in Lisbon, Portugal, rather than in Italy, seven centuries before. This is the same St. Anthony whom people of all nations, and sometimes of mixed beliefs, still petition to find lost wedding rings, bankbooks, car keys, relatives, or anything else that tends to get misplaced. To both the Portuguese and the Italians, St. Anthony is a kind of contemporary and benevolent uncle who never wearies of accomplishing the impossible.

Lucia's mother knew all this. Having succeeded by no other means, she courted the hope that the festa of St. Anthony and its attendant pleasures would cause her daughter to forget this wilful nonsense of the Lady. She knew that the day would be glad, the bells would ring, and that all the traditional adornments of the feast, so precious to Lucia, would be repeated. Lucia's sister, Maria dos Anjos, has told us of this:

Our mother knew well how Lucia loved the festa, and she hoped the whole story of the Cova da Iria would pass with it.

"It is a good thing that we are having St. Anthony tomorrow," she said, "and we mustn't say anything to Lucia about going to the Cova. We must talk of nothing but the festa so that by tomorrow she will have forgotten the other foolishness."

We were very careful to do what our mother told us, but of all our plans and preparations, Lucia seemed to take little notice. Except that once in a while she would remind us, "Tomorrow I'm going to the Cova da Iria; that is what the Lady told us we must do."

Thus St. Anthony, for all his goodness and the glamour of his day, could not compete with the Lady dressed in light. Jacinta and Francisco shared Lucia's certainty their Lady would appear as she had promised. Less bedevilled at home than Lucia, they talked of nothing but the joy ahead of them. Their only sadness came from the refusal of their mother to journey with them to the Cova.

"But, Mama," Jacinta insisted, "Our Lady will be there!"

"Well, I'm certainly not going there; and it isn't true that she appears to you. Be sensible, child." Olimpia Marto was not angrily impatient, but she was becoming more and more wearied of this same repeated and unbelievable story.

"She said she will come again, Mama, and she will."

"You don't want to go to St. Anthony?"

"St. Anthony's no good."

"What's that?"

"We mean—well, the Lady is much, much nicer." It was a little too much for Olimpia, who simply went on with her work.

The morning of June 13 was as summery and bright as St. Anthony himself might have ordered it. In the Marto house, Jacinta and Francisco were awake early. They had already made plans with Lucia to pasture the flocks as soon and as swiftly as possible, so that they would not be late for their date with the Lady at the Cova da Iria. They left the house, still munching their rapid breakfast of bread and cheese, and found Lucia already waiting.

"This morning," Lucia explained, "we'll take the sheep to Valinhos. It's closest to hand, and the grass is very good just now."

The flocks dined well on the grass of Valinhos, and as though to co-operate with the shining day and its great events, they went contentedly back to their corral. With most of the morning free, the children went home to dress in their finest Sunday clothes.

"Will you wait for us?" Jacinta asked Lucia.

"Well, not just now," Lucia said and explained she had promised first to go to Fatima to meet some children who had made their first Communion with her. "But I will see you there, Jacinta, and we will then go to the Cova."

Lucia dressed quickly, but with attention to detail. Standing in her new and unscuffed shoes, she carefully arranged her shawl at her shoulders and adjusted a dainty white kerchief on her head. Her mother, silently watching these embellishments, began to believe that they were in honour of the festa at Fatima; her inclination was to congratulate St. Anthony on another of his routine miracles; and when Lucia did go off in the direction of Fatima, Maria Rosa sighed her relief. Her daughter, after all, was just like the rest. Things would be normal again. There would be an end to the family's shame.

But Lucia was dressed for another kind of festa. With her cousins, she believed that the Lady, perhaps more than St. Anthony, deserved the honour of their Sunday best. In Fatima she met the companions with whom she had made her first Communion, and began to exercise on them that effortless salesmanship which appears to have been part of her nature. Years later we were able to interview one of her companions of that day—a Senhora Leopoldina Reis, who told us this:

About fourteen of us who had made our first Communion with Lucia joined together and decided to go with her to tic Cova da Iria. As usual, when Lucia proposed something, no one disagreed.

We were in a group, all ready to go, when Lucia's brother, Antonio, came up to us and said, "Don't go to the Cova, Lucia. If you promise not to, I'll give you some money." And Lucia looked back at him and said, "Money? I don't care about the money. What I want is to see the Lady." And we went on for about 300 feet, with Antonio still trying to stop us. He did not succeed, and while we continued on, I noticed Lucia becoming more serious and thoughtful all the while.

Perhaps it should be explained here that for all their troubles in their native Aljustrel the children were not without some unconditional support from this time on. Among the most zealous and faithful converts to the truth of Fatima, was Senhora Maria dos Santos Carreira, who died in 1949. For long years before we knew her, the name Carreira had given place to one by which she is more widely remembered, Maria da Capelinha (Maria of the Chapel). And like the good Ti Marto, father of Jacinta and Francisco, she will be our witness many times. On their way to the Cova da Iria, on that 13th of June, others who were either curious or devout, joined the procession of the children. Some had travelled ambitious distances afoot, and waiting at the place where now the gate to the sanctuary stands, were a group of women, among them our friend, Maria da Capelinha, who has given us this account:

I had decided once and for all to go to the Cova da Iria on the thirteenth of June. On the evening before I said to my children: "What if we don't go to the festa of St. Anthony tomorrow but to the Cova da Iria instead?"

"What for?" they answered. "No, we'd rather go to the festa." Then I turned to my crippled boy, John. "Do you want to go to the festa or with me?"

"With you, mother," he said.

So on the following day, before the others started for the festa, I came here with my John, who hobbled along on a stick. When we got here there wasn't a soul about, and we went to the roadside where the children would come along. After a while a woman from Loureira arrived and was very surprised to see me there, as she thought I was ill in bed. She asked me:

"What are you doing here?"

"The same as you!"

She sat beside me and shortly after a man from Lomba da Egua arrived, and the conversation we had was much the same as before. Then came some women from Boleiros, and I asked them if they had come away from the festa. "People laughed at us," they said, "but we didn't take much notice. We've come to see what happens here, and on whose side the laugh will be."

Then more people came and at last, about 11 o'clock, the children to whom our Lady had appeared, with some little friends and people from quite far away, Torres Novas or Outeiro, I can't remember which. We all went to the holm oak, and Lucia stopped about three yards in front of it, and looked toward the east. It was very quiet, and then I asked her: "Which is the oak tree where our Lady appeared?"

"This one," she said, putting her hand on it. It was a bush about three feet high, a new strong sapling. It was very well shaped with regular branches. Lucia went a little further away and began looking again in the direction of Fatima, and then went again into the shade of a big tree. It was very calm and still. Lucia sat down near the trunk, and Jacinta and Francisco sat on either side.

Those who had come a long way began to eat lunch and offered some to the children, who each accepted an orange which, however, they didn't eat. I can still see the three of them with the oranges in their hands. Then a girl from Boleiros began to read aloud from a book of prayers which she had brought. As I was ill and feeling weak and tired, I asked Lucia if she thought our Lady would be long in coming. "She won't be long now," was her reply and she watched for the first sign of the Lady's arrival. Meanwhile the Rosary had been said, and just as the girl from Boleiros was beginning the Litany, Lucia interrupted suddenly, explaining there would not be time to continue. She stood up now and called out to Jacinta, "Don't you see the lightning? Our Lady must be coming!" The three children ran for the holm oak tree, while the rest of us hurried after them, and knelt down on the stony ground. I watched Lucia raise her hands, as though in prayer. We heard her speak to someone who, if there at all, was not visible. There was only one mysterious effect to support our impression of another presence there. We heard something buzzing like a small, small voice, but could not understand what it was trying to say.

But to Lucia, to Jacinta, and to Francisco, there was no mystery. Now, as once before, their total senses were surrendered to the Lady from heaven. She stood on the topmost branches of the little oak, gazing on them—maternal, loving, understanding, and yet, in a manner hard to explain, touched with exquisite sadness.

"Please tell me, Madam," Lucia begged, "what it is that you want of me?"

"I want you to come here on the thirteenth of next month," the Lady said. "I want you to continue saying the Rosary every day. And after each one of the mysteries, my children, I want you to pray in this way: O my Jesus, forgive us and deliver us from the fire of hell. Take all souls to heaven, especially those who are mast in need.¹¹ I want you to learn to read and write, and later I will tell you what else I want of you." Stunned though she was by the radiant light and beauty of the Lady, Lucia was not timid. As she has made so clear in her memoirs, the presence of the Queen of Heaven seemed to invite, rather than restrict, communication. Lucia interceded then for an afflicted person whose cause had been recommended to her, and the Lady replied that if this person was converted, she would be cured within the year. Now Lucia asked the question closest to her own heart: "Will you take us to heaven?"

"Yes, I shall take Jacinta and Francisco soon, but you will remain a little longer, since Jesus wishes you to make me known and loved on earth. He wishes also for you to establish devotion in the world to my Immaculate Heart."¹² "Must I remain in the world alone?" Lucia asked. "Not alone, my child, and you must not be sad. I will be with you always, and my Immaculate Heart will be your comfort and the way which will lead you to God." It was at this moment (Lucia has written), that our Lady opened her hands and communicated to us once again the great light in which she was surrounded. In the light we could see ourselves, and it was just as if we were submerged in God Himself. Jacinta and Francisco seemed to be in that part of the light that represented heaven, and I was in the light which poured out over the earth. Our Lady's right hand rested near a heart encircled with piercing thorns. And we understood clearly that this was the Immaculate Heart of Mary that called far reparation from men for all the sins that have sorrowed our Saviour and His Mother.

Now, as in all the apparitions, only Lucia spoke directly to the Lady. Jacinta, as before, was able to hear and to see the Lady with facility equal to her cousin's, whereas Francisco, absorbed like the others with the vision, could hear nothing. Why this was so, we have no idea, since God dispenses His gifts for reasons of His own.¹³ To conclude the story of this second apparition, we will again quote Maria da Capelinha, who was there, and who has faithfully given us her complete impressions: When our Lady left the tree, Lucia got up very quickly and, with her arm stretched out, cried: "Look, there she goes! There she goes!" We saw nothing except a little cloud a few inches from the tree which rose very slowly and went backwards, toward the east, until we could see it no more. Some people said: "I can still see it; it's still there..." until at last no one could see it any more.

The children stayed, silently looking in that direction, until at last Lucia said: "There, now we can't see her any more. She has gone back into heaven, the doors are shut!" We then turned toward the miraculous tree, and what was our admiration and surprise to see that the shoots at the top, which had been standing upright before, were now all bent toward the east, as if someone had stood upon them. Then we began to pull off twigs and leaves from the top of the tree, but Lucia told us to take them from the bottom where our Lady had not touched them. I then noticed a beautiful spray of rosemary growing near and took a piece of that, too, as a souvenir.

Somebody suggested that we should say the Rosary again before going home, but others who had come a long way said that we could say the Litany now, and the Rosary on the way back to Fatima. There was someone there who had. a concertina, but I don't remember hearing him play. After the Litany we all went back to Fatima with the children, praying as we went, and we arrived when the St. Anthony procession was just starting. People saw us arrive, and asked us where we had come from. We replied, from the Cova da Iria, and that we were very glad we had gone there.

Sometime that afternoon, about four o'clock, the children returned to their homes. They did not walk alone, but were celebrities now, in a community not accustomed to bizarre events. They trudged on, weary at the end of the day, dusty in their Sunday clothes, without so much as a tin-plated halo to fortify their vast pretensions. A considerable crowd had followed them home, more amused than impressed, and the joking and the heckling were not cushioned with courtesy.

"Lucia, did the Lady dance on the top of the tree?"

"Haven't you three gone to heaven yet?"

"Jacinta—that cat still got your tongue? Did the Lady speak with you? Are you a saint yet, Jacinta?"

It wasn't easy. Most of it hurt. The irreverence was especially hard to bear. Jacinta, not equal to a noisy exchange of challenges, was quiet at home. The rapid questions overwhelmed her, and her brothers' attempts at comedy cut deeply. Her troubled brows contracted and her lips compressed. She faced them all. Loyally she repeated the Lady's insistence on the Rosary every day, and again she told them the Lady would return each month until October, when she would "say exactly who she was and what she wanted. But of the secret concerning devotion to the Lady's Immaculate Heart, Jacinta spoke not a word; and with equal care she held secret the Lady's assurance that death would come calling soon for Francisco and herself, with heaven beyond that no longer frightening door. It was a big day for such a very little girl.

Someone asked Jacinta then if the Lady she had seen was as beautiful as a girl whom all of them knew. Here Jacinta felt no reticence. Truth required no reflection at all.

"The Lady was much, much more beautiful," she said.

"Like that statue of St. Quiteria, Jacinta? With the cloak all covered with stars?" Jacinta smiled. Recollection of the Lady's image enriched her. She could not explain to them, nor even to herself, the beauty or quality of this fundamental light in which the Lady had appeared. One was aware such beauty came directly from God, and yet it was the true flesh and image of a lady most real.

"No," she said, "St. Quiteria is nothing like her."

"Was she like Our Lady of the Rosary?"

"Much, much more beautiful still," Jacinta said. She tried to help them understand, but there was no fair example she could conjure for the occasion. They gathered closer now with that interest all children and most adults display in the pursuit of superlatives—the biggest, the best, the fiercest, the fairest, and so on. Jacinta could assist them no more. She dropped her glance and chewed thoughtfully at her lower lip. The Rosary, she said again (for this was very important), the Rosary should be recited with fervour every day; and the Lady, she explained, had also told them a secret.

Now the interest came truly alive. A secret? A secret? Yes, a secret, but Jacinta, bewildered, and watching them now, saw that unintentionally she had sharpened their appetites to rawness. And the questioning and the insistence and the ungracious intrusions began, hardly ever to stop while Jacinta lived. Only her father seemed to understand that a secret, to have any value, must be honoured as one.

All the womenfolk wanted to know what the secret was (Ti Marto has told us), but I didn't try to ask her about it myself. To me a secret is a secret, but I remember one time when some women came to our house for no other purpose than to get it out of her. These ladies were wearing a lot of gold jewelry of different kinds, and one of them said suddenly, showing her bracelets and a necklace to Jacinta, "Do you like these?"

"Yes, I do," my daughter said. "Of course I do."

"And would you like to have them?"

"Surely I would." She was an honest child, Jacinta was, and she didn't try to conceal her admiration for these things.

"Then tell us your secret!" this woman said, and with the others, she began to take off her fancy things and jangle them temptingly.

My little girl was horrified.

"Don't! Please, don't!" I remember she said. "I can't tell you anything! I couldn't tell you the secret if you gave me the whole world!"

From having tracked down her story and having labored over it at different times for seven years, we are convinced that if we know anything about Jacinta, it is this: she was valiant, and with her brother and her beloved cousin she had need to be. The evidence becomes more clear that the God who loved them enough to elect them to His special purposes was not going to spare them from the crucible of serious trial. This formula for sanctity was about to be placed on shoulders very frail.

Father Ferreira, the pastor of Fatima, himself had shoulders strong enough to wrestle a horse, but that was not what troubled him now. He began to suspect that he was scheduled for a catch-as-catch-can match with the devil, an opponent of proved and enduring talents. A sincere and dutiful priest, Father Ferreira simply didn't know what to do with these three very small and difficult parishioners. They kept confounding every sane effort to rid them of their illusions. If one could conclude them to be crazy or irresponsible, Father Ferreira reasoned, it would reduce or even obliterate their blame. But there seemed to be a cool, even diabolic, calculation in their cunning. They were able to handle any and all inquisitors without once trapping themselves in the net of their lie. Obviously, great danger rested in their capacity to persuade ignorant and emotional people to accept them as bona fide seers. The dignity of his Church, in a nation already rife with religious scepticism, imposed a hard responsibility on any pastor whose sheep, however small, were displaying the guile of wolves.

Some days earlier, talking to Lucia's mother, Father Ferreira had advised her to allow her daughter to visit the Cova da Iria on the feast of St. Anthony, if the girl insisted, but he recommended too, that shortly thereafter she should conduct Lucia to the rectory where they would endeavour to bury this nonsense once and for all. As the father of Jacinta and Francisco, Ti Marto received similar instructions from the priest.

On the night before their scheduled interview with Father Ferreira, Lucia visited the Marto house. Exactly what would happen to them when they visited their pastor, Lucia did not know. Facing her mother's accusations had been fierce enough, but she had never been obliged to face the challenge of anyone as overpoweringly important as Father Ferreira.

"What's going to happen to us, Lucia?" the other children asked.

Lucia thought about it. "I don't know," she said, "but at home they are doing their best to frighten me. Are you going to the pastor's house?"

"We have to," Jacinta said. "Our mother was told to bring us." For a while she tried to ponder what terrible punishments might befall. Then she turned to Lucia and Francisco. She was resigned, and no more than half-scared. "Why should we worry, anyhow?" Jacinta said. "If they beat us, or anything like that, we can suffer it for our Lord and, like the Lady says, for the conversion of sinners."

On the next day (according to Ti Marto), it was Maria Rosa who took both girls to see Father Ferreira, and I think she brought Francisco with her too. I remember when Maria Rosa came back she said to me, "Well, I took them to see the priest. He kept asking your Jacinta questions, but she wouldn't tell him a thing. 'You don't seem to know anything,' he said to her, 'so you can sit down there, or run away; do anything you like.' All your little Jacinta did was take out her Rosary and begin to say the beads while Father Ferreira questioned Lucia, who answered him very well. But every once in a while, while Lucia was talking, Jacinta would get up and remind Lucia that she must be sure to explain things properly. This was too much for Father Ferreira, who then said to Jacinta crossly, 'When I was asking you questions, you didn't know anything; you wouldn't say anything, but now we can't shut you up. Why don't you speak for yourself?'"

The interview did not bring any satisfaction to the troubled pastor. All he had gained from Lucia was a restatement of the Lady's beauty, and once again, the Lady's recommendation of the daily Rosary. This was a little more than the reverend gentleman was willing to swallow. His reasoning told him that our Lady was not likely to journey down from heaven just to tell people they should say the Rosary. After all, the recitation of the Rosary was an almost general practice in the parish, and the world was full of places in greater need of such advice. And another thing disturbed him. The history of divine communication with individual souls was almost invariably marked by God's further instruction that such sacred tidings be revealed by the chosen few to their confessors or parish priests. Contrary to this tradition, Lucia claimed to be holding some secret to herself. The devil, Father Ferreira became more and more convinced, was working with all his sly and ancient skill. Father Ferreira said aloud, for the first time:

"It could be the work of the devil!"

That was enough. The suggestion did it. For reasons unknown to us, Father Ferreira's speculation placed a very real cloud between Lucia and her beloved Lady.

I began at the time to doubt (Lucia has written), and to wonder if these manifestations of the Lady could be from the devil, trying to deceive me. I had always understood the devil brought with him all kinds of disorder and war, and it was true that since the Lady had first appeared there had not been any happiness or peace in my home. How terribly I suffered. Later I told Jacinta and Francisco of my doubts, but Jacinta would not hear of them. "No, no," she said, "it couldn't be the devil! People say that the devil is ugly and lives under the earth in hell, but that Lady was so beautiful, Lucia, and didn't we see her go up into heaven?"

But such reassurance from the seven-year-old was not equal to banishing Lucia's doubts. It became truly a trial of a soul in the darkest of nights. It was a violated kind of love that Lucia carried in her heart. The ardour for willing sacrifice and mortification had withered to apathy. Lucia travelled so close to despair, that she was tempted to end the whole affair with a false confession to her mother. A solitary lie could purchase peace, she now believed.

"Please, Lucia, don't do it," Jacinta and Francisco pleaded. "Can't you see how terrible that would be?"

But Lucia saw nothing very clearly in this period. She was obsessed with notions of the devil, and her troubles were compounded by a dream.

In this dream (she has told us) I saw the devil laughing at his success with me and he was trying to drag me down to hell with him. Terrified by the nearness of his reaching hands, I began to scream and call for our Lady. I remember that my screams awakened my mother who came running in to me, wanting to know what it was. I can't recall what r said to her, but I do know I was far too terrified to sleep again that night. The dream left a cloud of fear and apprehension in my soul.

Actually, the only moments of peace enjoyed by Lucia and her cousins were in the Cova da Iria, close beside the oak tree where their Lady had appeared. Here solace was sustained. Here too they had the comfort and companionship of Senhora Carreira (Maria da Capelinha) who joined them each day at their prayers. Maria, as we have said, was the earliest champion of Fatima. From the beginning, although weak with illness, she began to beautify the honoured place of visitation as well as she knew how.

On the evening of the feast of St. Anthony (Maria has confided), when my daughters returned from the celebrations at Fatima, they said to me, "Well, mother, was it interesting today in the Cova da Iria?" I told them I was sorry they had not been there themselves. "Did our Lady appear?" they asked, and then I told them all that had happened on that 13th of June. My daughters said, "We must go there on Sunday," and so we did. After a while we saw two people approach whom we knew had come from Lomba de Egua. We remained out of their sight so that we could watch them, and we could see them placing carnations on the branches of the little tree. After that we watched them kneel and say the Rosary, and we were very happy, because we knew, somehow, that it was a holy place. From then on, believe me, I always went to the Cova da Iria. If, at home, I had no strength, I knew that when I got to the Cova, I would be renewed; I would be almost like someone else. I began to clean up around the tree, removing the gorse and prickles and making a little path with a pruning saw. I hung a silk ribbon on one of the branches of the tree, and I continued to place flowers there. Yes, yes, it was always a holy place.

The fame of the children spread beyond their parish to all the towns and villages of the serra , or mountain range. Whether true prophets, or gifted young charlatans, they had a public both pious and sensation-hungry, so that their next meeting with their Lady, scheduled for the 13th of July, would be attended like a bull fight in some far more populous center.

Innocence, joy, and expectation, remained for Francisco and Jacinta, but for Lucia it did not. Doubt multiplied with every reference by her mother or Father Ferreira to the devil and his sharp connivance. On the eve of the great day, with the pilgrims coming from all sections of the mountainside, her despair had mounted to such proportions that she announced to her cousins her decision not to go to the Cova da Iria on the following day. The children were shocked; they looked betrayed; only their love for their Lady was able to rally them to defiance of Lucia, who had guided all their actions till now.

"We will go anyhow," Jacinta said. "And if you're not there to do it, I will speak to the Lady."

Lucia said softly, "Why are you crying, Jacinta?"

"Why? Why do you think?" Her tears, as big as lemon drops, continued to fall. "Because you won't come with us, that's why."

"I'm afraid to go."

"But why be afraid? The Lady will expect you, Lucia."

"I know that she will."

Lucia had never really doubted that the Lady would be there. The question that held her in terror was not one of presence, but of identity. Who was the Lady? And by whom was she sent?

"If she asks for me, Jacinta, you tell her why I'm not there. Because I am afraid it is the devil who sends her to us!"

She turned from them and raced back to the seclusion of her own darkened room, away from her cousins' tearful pleas, away from her own mother's scolding and everlasting questions, away from Father Ferreira's grim authority, away from the devils who plagued her days, and even invaded her dreams.

But on the next day, suddenly, like some dusty crepe raised from the corpse of hope, Lucia's doubts were mercifully dissolved. She could not explain it, nor was she especially anxious to trace the source. The important thing was that faith and joy and hope were restored to her. Exactly when it was time to leave for the Cova da Iria, she ran, free of fear, to her cousins' house.

"I'm coming!" she shouted. "I'm coming with you—wait!"

Olimpia Marto, the mother of Jacinta and Francisco, is today, in her eighties, a happily adjusted lady, free of all imagined care. She is by her very nature a genial assassin of gloom, and we are certain that in 1917 she was rarely, if ever, the victim of foolish fears.

Nonetheless, on this 13th day of July, with her youngest children gone from the house, she confessed her sudden terror. Long before noon the roads and lanes of the serra were crowded with pilgrims. It is likely that never before in her life had she seen an assemblage of so many people in one place. What if, among the thousands, there was one fanatic who might try to hurt her children? What if, among the thousands, there should prove to be, as Father Ferreira's concern implied, one truly evil one? She ran in a kind of panic to Lucia's mother.

"We must go after them, do you hear?" she pleaded with Maria Rosa. "We must go now, or perhaps we will never see them again!"

The more excitable, less optimistic Maria Rosa appears for some reason to have ridden this emotional storm with greater calm than her sister-in-law.

"Olimpia," she said, "if our Lady really appears to them, she will look after them—no? And if not?" Here Maria Rosa shrugged her inability to deal with matters beyond her understanding, but her statement, as it stands, seems to be her first concession that there might, after all, be some truth in Lucia's story. She decided to go with Olimpia to the Cova. To conceal their identities, they tossed their overskirts over their heads and approached the scene by a back road that was little used. Arriving there, they concealed themselves behind some rocks, each holding in her hand a blessed candle. "Because," Olimpia has explained, "if we had seen anything evil, we were prepared to light them."

Ti Marto also made this journey to the Cova da Iria, but in faith rather than fear, and openly, along the road where the press of the traffic was greatest.

This day I left home determined to see what would happen (he has told us). I could not believe the children were telling lies. How many times I had said to my sister-in-law, "Maria Rosa, if people say all this is just the invention of the parents, you and I know it is not true. We have never encouraged them one bit, and even Father Ferreira says it could be the work of the devil!"

But what a crowd of people were there that day. I could not see the children, because there were so many people in the Cova by the tree. I kept getting closer to them, and then I could see two men, one of them from Ramila, and the other from Fatima, trying to make a barrier around the children so they would not be crushed. These men saw me and grabbed my arm and they called to the crowd, "Here is the father, let him through!" And so, down by the oak tree, I got close to my Jacinta. Lucia, I could see a little way off. She was saying the Rosary and the people were responding aloud. When the beads were finished, she jumped up suddenly. "Close your umbrellas," she called to the people who were using them to shade the strong sunlight. "Our Lady is coming!" She was looking to the east and I was too, but I could not see anything at first. But then I saw what looked like a little greyish cloud resting on the oak tree. The heat of the sun was suddenly less severe. A fine fresh breeze was blowing, and it did not seem like the height of summer. The people were silent, terribly silent, and then I began to hear a sound, a little buzz