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Jacinta and Francisco
by James W. Demers
God is always right. He called Abraham to sacrifice. Abraham, already in old
age, complied. He called Moses to teach His law. Moses, already in old age,
served. He called Jacinta of Fatima to allow her brief life to unfurl as a
living lesson of sacrifice in service to His greatest law, the law of charity,
charity toward sinners. Immediately upon being called, this tiny seed began to
unfold before our eyes into a garden of grace, to become a contradiction to
this vain age that deplores virginity, does not comprehend sacrifice and values
celebrity as the ultimate achievement of the esteem-filled modern man or woman.
In shunning celebrity, offering her suffering body and vibrant intellect in
continual sacrifice to console God, she became a veritable icon of the power of
virginity. She was seven when she was called. A mere ten when she was chosen.
Bouquet of
Grace When a mother can weep no more, the tears of her children are
treasured ever more preciously. When the Mother of God stepped through a
‘door in the sky’ and descended to earth on May 13, 1917, She chose
as Her pedestal of honor the leaves of a small holm-oak tree in the Cova da
Iria. There in the ‘Cove of Peace’ to share Her burden She had
gathered a bouquet of three of the most endearing souls ever to grace the
annals of the saints, Lucy dos Santos, 10, Francisco Marto, 9, and his little
sister Jacinta, then only 7.
She who was
Immaculately Conceived, Perpetual Virgin, Mother of the Divine and of All Men,
Glory of Every Childhood lived by man, the Very Image of the Will of God, found
in the child Jacinta, a vessel perfectly primed to resonate with Her own sorrow
for sinful mankind.
The three
children, already schooled in prayer and sacrifice by the Precursor Angel who
had instructed them at the hill of the cave, the Cabeço and at the
family well, the Arneiro, could never have guessed that they were being
prepared for the company of the Virgin Mother of God. Every word, every
gesture, every moment of their lives after their first visit with Our Lady
confirms how ready they were to respond to Her bidding. The Precursor Angel, at
the Arneiro, had recommended they accept and bear with submission the
sufferings Our Lord would send them. In their first encounter with Our Lady
they were asked, “Are you willing to offer yourselves to God, and bear all
the sufferings He will send you, in reparation for the sins by which He is
offended, and in supplication for the conversion of sinners?”
For Jacinta,
this intense grief for the suffering of Christ — a sincere and fathomless
comprehension of the evil of sin — was as a tear from the eye of the
Glorious Mother, fallen to earth and caught by the soul of this frail petal of
a child, thereafter to act as a prism through which the sorrow of God filtered
the great offenses of mankind. Through the prism of Jacinta we can glimpse a
reflection of the very vessel of grace that was the child Mary Herself,
consecrated a virgin and presented to the temple by Anne and Joachim. The
entire five months of the Fatima phenomena would not end their intimacy. Our
Lady would continue schooling the child Jacinta, who reflected her own virtues
in so many brave, childlike ways. Our Lady would even join her in the parish
church of Fatima to teach her how to pray the Rosary, long after the great
events had become part of the history of the Church.
Jacinta, the Budding
Saint The youngest of seven children born to Olimpia and Ti Marto of the
hamlet of Aljustrel, just 1½ miles from the parish church of Fatima, she
was christened Jacinta, Portuguese for hyacinth, the flowering rods that
festoon the high Alto Plano of northern Portugal. They blossom in the spring,
reach full flower in summer, their clustered petals unfolding into the mauve,
blue and purple that are the very hues of Christ’s Passion. Then in autumn
they fall back.
It was in the
spring, May 13, 1917, that Jacinta, nurtured by the incandescent rays of Our
Lady appearing to the children for the first time, began to embrace and immerse
herself in the Passion of Our Lord. By summer she had bloomed into a victim
soul, totally intent upon suffering for the salvation of ‘poor
sinners’. With the great drama of the Miracle of the Sun on October 13,
1917, now an historic fact, Jacinta had already begun to embrace the flesh and
blood martyrdom that would consume her tiny frame and free her giant soul a
short two years later. Fittingly, upon having glimpsed Heaven through the
‘door in the sky’ by which Our Lady appeared, Jacinta would describe
it as full of beautiful flowers.
Using Human
Failing
Through the
spellbinding unfolding of the great Fatima phenomena, Heaven employed human
failing to ensure the unparalleled events taking place in the Cova da Iria were
known and talked about. Jacinta’s endearing nature was the first put to
use. From the beginning the unique and separate individuality of the three
children was recognized. Unlike Francisco who could see Our Lady but not hear
Her, Jacinta, like Lucy, could both see and hear Her, but only Lucy spoke to
Her. Their different subjective responses to what they saw, heard and were
asked would continue to add color and dimension to the greatest story since the
Life, Death and Resurrection of Our Lord.
Immediately
after the May 13, 1917, noon-hour apparition of Our Lady, during which they
committed themselves to make sacrifices to console God, Jacinta promised Lucy
not to tell anyone what they saw. But she could not restrain herself from
blurting out the news to her mother and father as soon as Olimpia and Ti Marto
returned by donkey cart from the market. Jacinta was the first publisher of
Fatima. Her direct, energetic telling of events remains an inspiration to
publishers and writers to this day.
After June 13,
when Jacinta and Francisco learned that Our Lady would soon come for them, to
take them to Heaven, Jacinta’s every moment was permeated with a profound
understanding that in the short time left, much suffering would be required of
her.
After July 13, when they were entrusted with the Three Secrets, the vision of
hell horrified Jacinta “… to such a point that all penances and
mortifications to her seemed insufficient to save souls from hell
…”1
Sister Lucy is
insistent that the details of the Secret made a greater impression on Jacinta
than on herself or Francisco — so much so, that within a few short months
Jacinta had made a total offering of her life in sacrifice to God.2
In fact, Sister Lucy also expressed the view that, “Jacinta was the one
who received from Our Lady a greater abundance of grace, and a better knowledge
of God and of virtue.”3
It was Jacinta
who kept uppermost in the minds of all three that they must pray much for the
Holy Father, whose fate, we have now learned, was intimately encompassed in the
Great Secret. Whenever she offered sacrifices to Jesus, she would add,
“… and for the Holy Father. At the end of the Rosary she always added
three Hail Marys for the Holy Father.”4
On August 13,
when they were abducted by ‘The Tinsmith’, the Mayor of Vila Nova de
Ourem, it was Jacinta, locked with her brother and cousin among hardened
criminals in a cell, who brought the prisoners to their knees by having a medal
hung on the wall and praying before it. Her only thought when threatened with
being boiled in oil (a threat taken quite seriously since Our Lady had said She
would come for them soon) was that it meant they would soon see Our Lady again.
On
August 19, when Our Lady compensated for the missed rendezvous in the Cova on
the 13th by surprising them on the roadside in Valinhos, the ‘little
valley’, between Aljustrel and the Cabeço, we detect clearly that
the appearance of Our Lady, though sensibly announced as impending to Lucy, was
actually delayed until Jacinta was present, a proof of her role that can be
recognized as unique in all the other instances of the apparitions as well. Yet
never failing to respond to the natural impulses of childhood, she raced home
from Valinhos with a branch of the tree on which Our Lady stood to prove
through its fragrance of roses that, yes, The Lady had come to console them for
their having been forced to miss the August 13 appointment in the Cova.
At Valinhos
Our Lady gave them a mandate that dominated the remainder of Jacinta’s
life. “Pray, pray much and make sacrifices for sinners, for many souls go
to hell because they have no one to pray and make sacrifices for them.” In
those words we have the very blueprint for the child Jacinta’s destiny.
After
September 13, when the crowd in the Cova witnessed a luminous globe glide to
earth, Jacinta assumed a deeply intense understanding of her role in consoling
God. A photograph was taken in Reixida, in the garden of Maria do Carmo
Menezes, who had taken the seers into her home to give them a respite from the
crowds in Fatima. In the photograph the eyes of Jacinta are as portals onto the
Passion and Death of Our Lord. Fathomless yet direct, they reflect the eternity
of suffering that so overwhelmed her in the Vision of Hell of July 13. She
repeatedly struggled with the reality that Hell never ends. Though her heart
knew she was destined for Heaven, her eye was ever on the endless suffering of
those who will not cease offending God. Lucy would report that Jacinta’s
pity for sinners condemned to Hell was so intense that it would often bring her
to a state of dizziness.
“Even after
years and years, Hell still doesn’t end?” she would ask.
Then she would
throw herself on her knees repeating again and again the prayer taught them by
Our Lady, “O my Jesus, save us from the fire of Hell, lead all souls to
Heaven, especially those who are most in need.” By October 13, her total
immersion in her role of sacrificial victim made her, as it were, a living
cross, as shown in a remarkable photograph taken when she is being carried on
the shoulder of a chauffeur who cried to the crowd: “Make way for the
children who saw Our Lady.” He might just as well have cried: “Make
way for the Cross,” for the child on his shoulder was already so
intimately united with It.
Jacinta: Grace in
Bloom Time and again it is Jacinta who brings the discomforts of the
three children into focus and reminds Lucy and Francisco that they must offer
up everything to appease God, “… Who is so sad.” She takes the
lead in giving her lunch to others who are without food. She embraces thirst,
an unthinkable instinct for a child. She joins Lucy and Francisco in wearing a
knotted rope around her waist, so rough it drew blood, for a penance so
discomforting Our Lady had to tell them to ease off on it. “God is pleased
with your sacrifices, but do not wear the cord at night as that is too
difficult for you.” When Lucy is taken away to be interrogated by the
parish priest, Father Ferreira, or the Mayor of Ourem, it is Jacinta who leads
Francisco in offering up their worries and tears for sinners. When a cynical
irreligious woman scorns them from her window as they pass by, it is Jacinta
who throws herself in the dust of the road within view of the woman’s
window, and raising her hands unself-consciously to Heaven, prays for the
woman’s soul. The woman converts on the spot, exclaiming that she had
never seen anything so beautiful.
A Vision for the
21st Century?
It is Jacinta
who has the vision of the Pope down at the Arneiro, the family well:
“… I
saw the Holy Father, in a very big house, kneeling by a table, with his head
buried in his hands, and he was weeping. Outside the house, there were many
people. Some of them were throwing stones, others were cursing him and using
bad language. Poor Holy Father, we must pray much for him.”
Then at the Lapa
do Cabeço she saw him once again and said to Lucy, “…
can’t you see all those highways and roads full of people, who are crying
with hunger and have nothing to eat? And the Holy Father in a church praying
before the Immaculate Heart of Mary? And so many people praying with him?”
These
visions occurred after the Great Secret of July 13, 1917, and before October
1918, when the Spanish influenza felled both Jacinta and Francisco.5
It is
absolutely certain that Jacinta saw her visions as an extension of the words of
the Secret, “… persecutions of the Church and the Holy Father …
who will have much to suffer.” Time and again Jacinta repeated how much we
must pray for the Holy Father, with such a concern for his welfare and survival
that it has caused the mystery of his identity to haunt the eight decades
intervening between her visions of him and our present day.
Was the Pope she
saw in her vision the Pope of her own day, Benedict XV, whose warnings that the
Versailles Treaty was merely the first step toward a second great war were
rejected and vilified?
Was it Pius XI
who reigned over tumultuous Europe between the wars and saw his Quas
Primas teaching on the Kingship of Christ virtually ignored by all the
world, including the clergy?
Was it Pius XII,
whose declaration of the Dogma of the Assumption brought a torrent of abuse
from liberal dissenters then gathering their assault forces for the new
pontificate looming on the horizon?
Was it John
XXIII, who before he died despaired of what the Second Vatican Council had
initiated?
Was it Paul VI,
who ended his reign in torment over the unprecedented laicization of priests,
walking the corridors of the Vatican in tears each Wednesday, the day he signed
the official permissions?
Was it John Paul
I, who died amid clouds of mystery after only 33 days in office, who had said
after a visit to Sister Lucy in the Carmel of Coimbra as Cardinal Luciani, on
July 11, 1977: “Hell exists and we can fall into it.”6
Or was it John Paul II?
Is John Paul II
the Pope of Jacinta’s vision? Is it he who installed in the crown of Our
Lady at the Capelinha the bullet of Mehmet Ali Agca that felled him on May 13,
1981, as a tribute to Our Lady who deflected death from him?
Is the Pope of
Jacinta’s vision the same who was shouted down in Latin America by
Marxists emboldened by the liberation theology of that region’s dissident
clergy?
Is it the Pope whose fight for the unborn and condemnation of
aberrant sexuality cause him to be vilified daily by his own aberrant clergy?
Is it
the Pope who over the past 20 years has seen convents and seminaries become, in
the words of Our Lady of La Salette, “… the pastures of
Asmodeas?”
Is it the Pope
whose reign has seen seminaries and the ordained priesthood denying that Mass
is a Sacrifice and outrightly rejecting the Real Presence?
If the Pope
Jacinta saw in her vision is the Pope described above, then he is the same Pope
who knelt before a table to beatify her and her brother Francisco on May 13 in
the year 2000, in the face of critics who scoff at the notion that children so
young could earn sainthood. Might it also be this Pope that Jacinta saw praying
before the Immaculate Heart, about which Our Lady promised … “In the
end, My Immaculate Heart will triumph, the Holy Father will consecrate Russia
to Me.”?
It is critical
to an understanding of the greatness of the soul of Jacinta to remember that
she was only 7 years of age when she heard the Pope mentioned five times in the
first two parts of the Secret. Her future visions of the Pope and the contents
of the third part of the Secret continually worked their weight on her soul and
drew from her a response so purely sacrificial as to rank among the greatest
achievements of the saints.
A Lesson from
Childhood
The reality of Jacinta living out her full martyrdom in
her primary years contains for critics and advocates alike a cherished lesson.
Throughout history the faith and the Church have been edified, fortified and
often rectified by mature women of great sanctity, the most commonly remembered
being Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Avila and Thérèse of Lisieux,
all now Doctors of the Church. The world-weary observer who in true humility
can accept that his own sin-laden soul is momentarily out of the running for
such honors, will be unable to resist a generous movement of the heart toward
Jacinta, one that will overthrow cynicism so that he can say with pride in the
child Jacinta of Fatima that she was a Doctor of Suffering.
This is the same
Jacinta to whom Our Lady would appear at the church in Fatima to teach her how
to pray the Rosary in consolation for the suffering to come. On August 6, 1918,
Father Ferreira, the parish priest of Fatima confirmed in his Memoir:
“Jacinta
affirms that Our Lady appeared to her another three times. The first time was
in the church at Fatima, during Mass, on Ascension Thursday, May 18, 1918. At
that time Our Lady taught her how to say the Rosary. The second time was at
night, at the opening of the cave (the Cabeço), while the whole family
was sleeping. The third time, in the house, was above a table; the Blessed
Virgin was immobile and silent.”
Then at the
beginning of January 1919, Our Lady came with special instructions.
Lucy
relates the story:
“‘Our
Lady came to see us,’ Jacinta said. ‘She said that She would come
soon to get Francisco to take him to Heaven. She asked me if I wanted to
convert still more sinners.’ I said yes to Her. She told me that I would
go to the hospital and that there I would suffer a great deal; that I am to
suffer for the conversion of sinners, in reparation for the sins committed
against the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and for the love of Jesus. I asked if you
(Lucy) would come with me. She answered no. That is what is going to be the
most difficult for me. She said that my mother would take me to the hospital
and that then I would stay there alone.”
On May 13, in
the first encounter, Our Lady had said, “Then you will have much more to
suffer, but the grace of God will be your comfort.”
This is the same
Jacinta who, when Francisco was on his death bed and ready to enter Heaven,
proved unmistakably that the child seers understood fully the whole Message of
Fatima by advising him to “Greet in my name Our Lord and Our Lady and tell
Them that I will suffer everything they wish for the conversion of sinners and
in reparation to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.” That comment alone puts an
end to those critics who say the devotion to the Immaculate Heart was an
accretion added on with time to the story of Fatima. It also clarified for all
time that Reparatory Devotion to the Immaculate Heart can be fully comprehended
and committed to by children.
This is the same
Jacinta who, so imbued with the spirit of true sacrifice, utters no cry when
her small body is wracked with pain from “purulent pleurisy, and osteitis
of the seventh and eighth left ribs.” Who climbs out of her sickbed to
kneel on the stone floor and pray in a manner that would add to her suffering.
This
is the same Jacinta from whom Doctor Castro Freire extracted two ribs without
the aid of chloroform but using only local anaesthetic, leaving a wound into
which a hand could be inserted. Jacinta’s only cry was the repetition of
Our Lady’s name, as she bore her sufferings with what Dr. Freire called
“the resignation of a saint, and no one ever heard her complain.”
But
not even Dr. Freire could measure her greatest pain — that of being left
alone. Warned by Our Lady that she would die alone in a hospital in Lisbon,
unattended, far from Aljustrel and her parents, she offered up her loneliness
to God: loneliness for Lucy who had been her guide and teacher; loneliness for
Francisco who, though he saw Our Lady only after some praying and never heard
Her voice, nevertheless was the first of the three to be taken there by his
Heavenly Mother, although he was told by Our Lady that to attain Heaven he
would have to say many Rosaries. Francisco: Silent
Sonata of the Soul
Certainly in Jacinta’s solitude she must have heard in her
mind’s eye, carried on the winds of memory from the high Alto Plano of the
north all the way to her hospital window in Lisbon, the plaintive sigh of the
reedless peasant flute Francisco was playing on May 13, two and a half years
before, on the glorious day the door opened in the sky and the Mother of God
smiled down upon them. Certainly the unmistakable image of her already departed
brother must often have been her companion. In his long, tubular toque, snug
peasant bolero jacket, imitative of the adult Portuguese farmer — the
‘little man’, as he was called by the early scrutineers of the seers
— Francisco’s every expression, immortalized by photographers of the
day, exhibited the seriousness with which he embraced the duties of his youth.
At 9
he was already a shepherd, welcomed eagerly by his cousin Lucy to assist her
with the sheep, and mandated by his parents, Olimpia and Ti Marto, to be
responsible for his sister Jacinta, two years his junior.
In our complex,
self-serving world of today we can scarcely imagine three young children
dependable enough to shepherd sheep all day, save for the hot noon hours, in
pastures separated two kilometers from home by hills and meadows and trees.
It
draws a gasp of apprehension to the faint-hearted who hear that Francisco, the
only boy in the tiny trinity before the holm-oak, could not see Our Lady until
he had begun to do what he was told to do: “Say the Rosary.” But
being kept from hearing Our Lady was not intended to show Francisco as less
favored simply because he was the only boy in class. He was being accorded the
consideration of his individuality by the same Mother who home-schooled the
Child Jesus, the only Son of God. Noteworthy is the fact that he immediately
drew out his Rosary and began to pray. It would have been unthinkable to him,
in Lucy’s company, not to have it in his pocket. Still, he never heard the
sound of Our Lady’s voice. Everything Our Lady said was relayed to him by
Lucy. If Jacinta was the first publisher of Fatima, Lucy was the first teacher
and Francisco the first student. Even so, we must remember that on August 13,
in the prison in Vila Nova de Ourem, no one had to tell Francisco what to do
when he was hauled out of the cell to be ‘boiled in oil’. He went
bravely, his nine-year-old heart as stout as the heart of Edmund Campion on the
way to the scaffold or that of Thomas More on the way to the block.
Francisco, of
the three seers, if perhaps not at first, but ultimately, is the most easily
recognizable. Jacinta’s profound sense of sacrifice and Lucy’s
intense and all-encompassing maturity almost distance us from them and make us
feel they have dimensions to their souls we do not have. Francisco is almost
the ‘everyman’ of the group, exhibiting all the anxieties and
apprehensions that are our daily companions in the modern world. He is perhaps
more accessible because he is most down-to-earth in his ‘little man’
concerns. The proof of this recognition is actually and literally carved in
stone. When the statues of the three seers kneeling in the cave of the
Cabeço was unveiled, a cousin standing nearby exclaimed: “…
but that IS Francisco! That is him!” The sculptor had slightly idealized
Lucy’s broad peasant facial features and seemed almost intimidated by
Jacinta’s finely drawn ascetic face, but Francisco he carved man-to-man,
just as he saw him. Just as he was. How fitting that it was here in stone that
this attribute of Francisco should be identified, for it was here that the
three met the Precursor Angel, identified by Lucy as distinctly male, the Angel
being the first time the trio had a ‘fourth’, who complemented
Francisco’s boyhood.
It is not
recorded that Francisco ever played his flute again. It is documented in
Lucy’s Memoirs that he sought out isolation and silence. A monastic sense
seems to have governed his childhood after the May 13 visitation by Our Lady.
The ‘little man’ became for all intents and purposes a ‘little
monk’. He sought out the solitude of the church and especially the
companionship of Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament and was restless always to
be in The Presence again. He would separate from the others and the sheep, as
Lucy reported, and she would have to go search for him, finding him, once, as
she tells it, secreted in some bushes where he was fervently praying. We
glimpse, perhaps, in these, his solitary walks into the hills, a reflection of
the hidden life of Jesus, who lived subject to Mary His Mother and Joseph, yet
still sought solitude among the fig trees and the fields, from where He no
doubt watched the elders winnowing the wheat from the chaff. After the great
events of May to October, 1917, school was a painful burden to him. Never
enthusiastic to engage in the curriculum process, he was much less so after, so
much so that he could not learn his catechism with sufficient expertise to make
his First Communion. The endearing pathos of the small boy crying outside
against the wall of the church because he was excluded from the First Communion
of his classmates goes to the very heart of every man and boy who ever gave a
wrong answer in class. It was too early in the century to comfort him by saying
that Einstein failed one grade four times and Churchill was only accelerated to
the next class because his pout was so formidable.
No doubt, even
in his great grief, he was offering it up to Jesus who was “… so
sad.” It gives a shudder to the adult reader to contemplate that if Our
Lord could appear “… so sad,” to an innocent nine-year-old boy,
how fearsome would be His appearance to any of us. Naturally, popular sentiment
prompted the pious to assume that Francisco would cherish becoming a priest.
His response to a group of women whose attentions he found suffocating, upon
their asking him if he would like to become a priest, invigorates the heart of
anyone who as a child was pandered to by well intentioned souls who overwhelmed
with their pretensions: “No,” he said.
Then what would
he do with his life? He told them simply that he wanted to die and go to
Heaven. Bravo Francisco! You learned your lessons well.
Spanish
Influenza when it struck Portugal found a special harvest in the young, both
frail and hardy. It ravaged Francisco’s youthful frame. He prayed
continually. His mother Olimpia was in awe of his response to suffering, his
endurance of it, his calm and peaceful acceptance. He was brother to a child
mystic, Jacinta, cousin to a girl who would enthrall the world for the
remainder of the century, Lucy, but first of all he was a dutiful son to
Olimpia and Ti Marto. And he knew he had a Heavenly Mother who would come to
get him and bring him to Heaven. And so She did. Visible to his eye where She
appeared between the bed and the doorway, he surrendered to Her holiness and
beauty as he had wanted to do since first he began that oh-so-necessary Rosary
on May 13, 1917. Though he was the last to see Her in the Cova, and never heard
Her voice, He was the first to enter Heaven. Francisco had graduated. Francisco
in the duration of his brief life unwittingly provided proof that children are
always heard by God. And how God must delight in them. We can guess the purity
of his intent in breathing the music of his heart into the flute in those early
months of 1917. Whereas in the beginning he momentarily altered the instrument
of the flute by making it resonate with his breath, later, after the visit of
Our Lady, he pursued silence. He became the hollow reed through which the Holy
Ghost, playing back to him, breathed the melody of grace into him and altered
the instrument of Francisco’s soul forever. The mystical music that was
Francisco would thereafter be heard only in the tearful sighing of child
suffering, and the soft, holy murmur of a child’s prayer.
Jacinta
Joins Her Brother
And now, some
two years later, Jacinta lay in her own hospital bed, waiting for Our Lady to
come and take her to join Francisco. So certain was Jacinta of frequent visits
by Our Lady as she suffered in her hospital room in Lisbon that once she calmly
asked an attendant to step aside so as not to block her view of the location
where the Virgin Mother of God customarily appeared.
It appears that
Jacinta died alone, unattended, even unvisited by the priest from whom she had
requested the Viaticum. Though Father Reis had heard her confession on the
evening of the 20th of February 1920, he did not give her the Last Sacrament,
for he considered that she looked better than she had in some time. But within
a few hours of his departure she died peacefully, having for several days been
free of pain. Our Lady had prevented her from experiencing any more physical
suffering.
But she was
alone only to the human eye. The great and inspired Father Faber, in his
exhaustive detailing of the Passion in Mary at the Foot of the Cross, as
well as the incomparable Alban Goodier in The Passion and Death of Our Lord
Jesus Christ, allude to the Sorrowful Mother retracing the route of
Christ’s Passion along the Via Dolorosa and gathering up with angels the
drops of His Precious Blood before the Resurrection drew them back to His
Glorified and Resurrected Body. One can easily imagine the Mother of God
returning to a room in a hospital in Lisbon and gathering up one of Her
precious tears fallen to earth years before and caught by the soul of Jacinta
of Aljustrel, to bring to Her Son further proof that in His choice of friends,
God is always right.
Perennial
Grace From the moment of her death the fragrance of roses surrounded her
body, while it lay in humble state for pilgrims to visit. Fittingly, the coffin
of the small seer rested in the Church of the Angels. Pilgrims came forward
with rosaries and pictures to touch the clothes of the little one and to pray
within the fragrance of roses which never left her body.
Antonio Rebelo
de Almeida, associate of the House of Funeral Directors stated, “It seems
still, that I see a little angel. Asleep in her coffin, she appeared living,
with her lips and cheeks a beautiful pink color. I have seen many dead people,
young and old, and I have never seen anything like her. The agreeable perfume
which the body exhaled cannot be explained naturally. The most incredulous man
could not doubt it. … the little one had been dead for three and a half
days, and the odor which she emitted was that of a bouquet of all sorts of
flowers.”
Then the body
was finally enclosed on Tuesday, February 24, 1920.
On September 12,
1935, 15 years after she was gathered up by Our Lady, Heaven once more set in
motion a display of human nature at its most idiosyncratic to further the
lesson of Fatima and to delight all who heard of it. When the aura of sanctity
known to all who met Jacinta had refused to fade from the people’s memory,
Bishop da Silva of Fatima ordered the transfer of Jacinta’s body from the
family vault of the Baron of Alvaiazere in Vila Nova de Ourem to the cemetery
of Fatima. The pious faithful were determined to open the coffin. It was
decided to do so.
On Sept. 12, 1935, 15 years
after her death, Jacinta's body was found to be incorrupt, as shown in the
photograph (above) taken at the time that her sealed coffin was
opened.
The coffin was opened. Inside lay a long body-envelope of
lead, sealed airtight to prevent the spreading of any mischief from the Spanish
Influenza that had taken Jacinta’s life and ravaged Portugal 15 years
earlier. They pierced the lead envelope and peeled it back to reveal her face.
Of the photograph taken of the incorrupt features, Sister Lucy would say,
“… she looks like she just fell to sleep.” This was the face and
eyes that had looked up when Jacinta was on her knees before the holm-oak and
saw Our Lady in a pillar of cloud rising from the censoria of unseen angels,
like the pillar of cloud that led the Israelites through the desert of earthly
deprivation to the glorification of the body promised to all who do as God
commands. Such a glorification of the resurrected body we can be certain awaits
Jacinta at the Resurrection of the Dead. To provide what can only be
interpreted as a stunning acknowledgment of the fecundity of grace, Heaven gave
a sign. As the lead envelope was fully opened, the officials went to work in
their myriad and exhaustive ways, detailing the findings. We owe to their
diligence one of the most enchanting revelations of Fatima: They discovered
that Jacinta’s body was measurably longer than at the time of her burial.
She had continued to grow even in death. Her body had been wrapped in that
coffin from 1935 to 1951. They prepared a new coffin at that time and found her
body had grown.
Jacinta, the
tiny vessel overflowing with grace, demonstrated that prayers of praise to God
last forever. Her life of sacrifice in charity to sinners was a prayer of
praise to God that would never be forgotten by Heaven.
The seers immediately
after the apparition of July 13 and the vision of hell
A Vital Link to
Childhood
Francisco, named after that most endearing of saints, St. Francis,
was Franciscan through and through. It might be said that he was not merely a
child embodiment of one of the Little Flowers of St. Francis. He was one of the
little flowers of St. Francis. The Church, in beatifying Francisco, has given
the child in all of us a reminder that in God’s heart there is always a
part of us that remains pure and virginal, so that God always has a grip, no
matter how slight, on even the most hardened human heart.
Jacinta’s
intimacy with Our Lady and with God is mystically familiar to us all. Through
her enthusiasm for God we can revisit the realm of purity that was the
landscape of our childhood, where we always knew that God was not isolated atop
the rarified heights of some high Himalaya, but was as real and present as the
air children breathe.
In our
disordered, aberrant age, when the purity of childhood is actively warred
against, the Church, in the beatification of Jacinta and Francisco, has given
renewed vigor to those religious and lay persons who have chosen to cherish
forever the state of virginity that was Christ’s. In the innumerable
modern campaigns for “social justice”, almost anyone can find a way
to claim that he is living in imitation of Christ. Was not Our Lord sympathetic
to the sick, the poor, the dispossessed? Yet Jacinta’s simple purity
overwhelms the pretensions of those who would distort Christ’s message to
mean social justice without saintly virtue.
Jacinta’s
purity in imitation of Mary and Her Divine Son also affirms the dignity of the
truly virginal priesthood.
When Sister Lucy
wrote in a poem about Jacinta, “In deepest suffering, Jesus loving
…” she could have found no more precious words to describe the
sacrificial celibate priesthood. In today’s disorientation, both within
and without the Church, the priest who cherishes his virginity and lives his
life in daily immolation of his human sexuality, who would face death rather
than surrender his purity to any but God, is our hope for the future, for the
faith, for the Church, for the salvation of souls. To these priests the very
mention of the name Jacinta provokes tender emotion, an involuntary
acknowledgment that in her they find an example which gloriously justifies the
sacrifice which their striving for chastity demands of them. There is even a
more profound lesson to be learned for the priesthood from the tiny child of
Fatima. Our Lady Herself was the tabernacle of the Most High, carrying God in
Her virginal womb. Yet Christ did not call even Her to the priesthood.
Jacinta, in
all her humility, stands in complete contrast to the ‘we would be as
priest’ women of today’s Church. In everything she did she matched
pain-for-pain the suffering of her brother and of the adults who surrounded
her. She never made any claim for attention or special treatment and spurned
any praise from pilgrims in search of a saint. She was pure and virginal first
and last, with the heart of a martyr and a soul wide open to God. That is the
perfect description of the priest who daily sacrifices the good of marriage for
the greater good of souls.
It is the virgin
priest, living in imitation of Christ’s holy purity, who is ensuring for
the Bride of Christ the eternal husbandry of the Order of Melchisidech.
Jacinta, now a flower on their altars, is a gift from the Church to the virgin
priest. Jacinta was, and remains, definitive proof that, as in all things, in
His choice of flowers God is always right.
Footnotes:
1)
Frère Michel de la Sainte Trinité, The Whole Truth About
Fatima, Volume II, The Secret and The Church, p. 40.
2)
Ibid, p. 118.
3) First Memoir of Sister Lucy, p. 33.
4) Ibid, p. 34.
5) Frère Michel de la Sainte
Trinité, The Whole Truth About Fatima, Volume II, The Secret
and The Church, p. 40.
6) Frère François de Marie
des Anges, FATIMA: Intimate Joy, World Event Book Two, Fatima,
Mary’s Immaculate Heart and Your Salvation, p. 12.
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