ON THIS DAY: 13 October 1917 – around 50,000 people gathered at Cova da Iria, a scrubland area near Fatima in Portugal, owned by the Santos family and used for grazing their sheep. They had come to witness what three young shepherd children claimed would be an apparition of the Virgin Mary.
For several months, Lúcia dos Santos (10), Francisco Marto (9) and Jacinta Marto (7) had reported seeing the Virgin Mary on different occasions at Cova da Iria. The Virgin Mary promised Lúcia that in October she would perform a miracle ‘so that all might see and believe’. She would also entrust the children with what became known as the Three Secrets of Fatima.
Word spread and despite heavy rain on 13 October, thousands arrived to witness the visitation. However, no one saw the Virgin Mary on this occasion except for the three children. She told them to continue praying the Rosary every day, and she also informed them that the First World War would end and the soldiers would soon return home.
Then something extraordinary happened. The rain stopped, the clouds parted and witnesses reported that the sun appeared to tremble, spin and ‘dance’ in the sky. Some claimed to see brilliant colours, while others reported that the sun seemed to move towards the Earth. The event became known as the Miracle of the Sun.
The first two of the three secrets were revealed by Lúcia in 1941. The first was a terrifying vision of Hell; the second contained a prophecy concerning Russia, war and the future of the world.
The third secret was written down by Lúcia in 1944 and placed in a sealed envelope. On the advice of her bishop, it was sent to the Vatican with the instruction that it should not be opened before 1960. The Vatican did not release it then, fuelling decades of speculation about what it contained.
The suspense was too much for some. On 2 May 1981, 55-year-old Laurence James Downey, an Australian former Trappist monk, hijacked an Aer Lingus flight from Dublin to London. He demanded that the Third Secret of Fatima be revealed, believing that its publication would save the world. After an eight-hour standoff at Le Touquet Airport in France, he was overpowered and arrested.
Less than two weeks later, on 13 May 1981 – the anniversary of the first Fatima apparition – Pope John Paul II was shot by Mehmet Ali Ağca. He survived and subsequently came to believe that his survival was connected to the Fatima prophecy.
When the Third Secret was finally published in 2000, it described a terrifying vision: a bishop dressed in white, understood by Lúcia to represent the Pope, travelling through a city ‘half in ruins’, before being attacked and apparently killed by soldiers, alongside the deaths of numerous Christians.
Of the three children, Francisco and Jacinta died young, in 1919 and 1920, during the influenza pandemic. Lúcia survived them by many decades, becoming a Carmelite nun in 1948 and living until the age of 97. She died on 13 February 2005.