c. 2000 Religion News Service
VATICAN CITY _ Pope John Paul II, who believes he owes his life to the Madonna of Fatima, will return to her Portuguese shrine this weekend to beatify two young “shepherds of Fatima” exactly 19 years after he was shot and seriously wounded by a would-be assassin.
The pope will declare Giacinta and Francesco Marto blessed Saturday (May 13) during a mass outside the Basilica of the Cova da Iria, which stands in the field where three shepherd children reported seeing visions of the Virgin in 1917. The third shepherd, now a 94-year-old Carmelite nun, will attend the beatification.
The Madonna of Fatima gained a worldwide following over the decades, in part because of the mystery over the third of the “secrets” the shepherds said she told them. The first predicted the early deaths of two of the children and the second the rise of communism in Russia, but the third has been divulged only to popes.
The pilgrimage will be the third John Paul has made to Fatima to mark the anniversary of the attack on his life by Turkish terrorist Mehmet Ali Agca during an audience in St. Peter’s Square on May 13, 1981. John Paul underwent two operations to repair severe abdominal wounds.
Ali Agca, who received the pope’s pardon during John Paul’s dramatic visit to him in a Rome prison in 1983, sent his wishes for a “buon viaggio” (good trip) to the pope from the maximum security prison at Ancona where he is now held.
The gunman, a member of the right-wing Gray Wolves, attacked the pope on the 64th anniversary of the shepherds’ first vision, and John Paul later told Cardinal Eduardo Pironio, “I owe my life entirely to the Madonna of Fatima.” He visited Fatima in 1982 and again in 1991 to pray at the shrine.
Originally scheduled to beatify the children along with several other candidates for sainthood April 9 in a Holy Year ceremony in St. Peter’s Square, John Paul agreed in March to make an unscheduled overnight visit to Fatima at the urging of Portuguese bishops.
The pontiff, who will celebrate his 80th birthday next Thursday (May 18), will fly to Lisbon Friday (May 12) on his 92nd trip outside Italy since he was elected Roman Catholic pontiff in 1978. After a brief private meeting with Portuguese President Jorge Sampaio at Portela International Airport he will travel on by helicopter to the village of Fatima, 80 miles north of Lisbon.
Although other young children have been beatified as martyrs, the Marto children will be the youngest on record to be declared blessed, one step below sainthood, on the basis of a miracle.
Giacinta was 7, Francesco 9 and their cousin, Lucia dos Santos 10 when they reported seeing the apparitions of a “most beautiful lady,” who told them she was the Madonna.
Francesco died April 4, 1919, at the age of 11 in the influenza epidemic that swept Europe following World War I, and Giacinta died Feb. 20, 1920, aged 10, of purulent pleurisy.
It took a ruling by the pope for the Congregation of the Causes of Saints to accept a single miracle attributed to prayers made jointly to Giacinta and Francesco. The miracle was the otherwise unexplained healing on Feb. 20, 1989, of Maria Emilia Santos, who had been paralyzed for 22 years by tuberculosis of the bones.
According to the children, the Madonna imparted a secret to them on each of her apparitions on May 13, Aug. 13 and Oct. 13.
In the first she told them the dates that Giacinta and Francesco would die. In the second, two months before the Russian Revolution, she asked for the consecration of Russia to her “immaculate heart” and warned that if this did not happen Russia “will spread its errors in the world, causing wars and persecutions against the church.”
Lucia told the third secret to Popes Pius XII, John XXIII, Paul VI and John Paul II, but it has never been made public. Speculation links it to the Apocalypse signaling the end of the world.
But Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, prefect of the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said in an interview with the Portuguese Radio Renascenca in 1996 that “the third secret has nothing to do with the Apocalypse and the end of the world.”
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More recently, Archbishop Jose Saraiva Martins, prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, also said there is no cause for alarm about the secret. “The fact that it has not been made public does not necessarily mean that this is due to the announcement of catastrophes, just that it is not necessary to know this part,” he said.
During his trial in an Italian court for attempting to assassinate the pope, Ali Agca claimed that he had acted as part of a Bulgarian conspiracy engineered by Soviet secret agents. But when three Bulgarians accused of orchestrating the plot went on trial in 1985, he withdrew his charges and linked his actions to “the third mystery of Fatima” and the impending “end of the world.”
DEA END POLK
