Our Lady of Fátima

On May 13, 1917, in a hollow called Cova da Iria, near Fátima in Portugal, three children tending sheep said they had seen, above a small holm oak, a woman dressed in white with a rosary in her hand. They were Lúcia dos Santos, who was ten, and her cousins Francisco and Jacinta Marto, nine and seven. The woman told them to come back to the same place on the thirteenth of every month, until October. Each time more people came: in the end, on October 13, there were tens of thousands, in the rain, and what they said they saw in the sky has gone down in history as the Miracle of the Sun. Francisco and Jacinta died just a few years later, in the Spanish flu epidemic: he at eleven, she at nine. Lúcia lived until 2005 and was a Carmelite nun in Coimbra. The apparitions of Fátima are among the most famous recognized by the Catholic Church, and they are tied to the three “secrets” that people argued about for a century. The third was made public in 2000. There is a coincidence that did the rest: on May 13, 1981, John Paul II was shot in Saint Peter’s Square. He credited that Madonna with his survival, and had one of the bullets set in the crown of the statue of Fátima. The Smorfia puts the Madonna at number eight. If your name is Fatima, today is your name day.