Hajja Salesjana September October 2017

22 When officials released Fatima seer Lucia dos Santos’ first memoir in 1976, great light was shed on the extraordinary and largely hidden lives of the two younger visionaries, Francisco and Jacinta Marto who are now the youngest saints of the Catholic church. We should often recall how these two siblings, who were Lucia’s cousins and best friends, died very soon after the dramatic apparitions of 1917, when they succumbed, as Our Lady told them they would, to a worldwide pandemic of what became known as the “Spanish flu”, though it may have been brought to Europe from the U.S. during World War I. When people look to cataclysms, they forget this great eruption of influenza that infected five hundred million people around the world and killed between fifty and a hundred million. Was it part of the chastisements, indicated in the secrets, for that era. One is left to wonder? That’s more than twice the number killed during the First World War. And this o u t b r e a k b e g a n immediately, just a year after the last major a p p a r i t i o n held on the 13 th October 1917 when the dazzling miracle of the sun occurred. We use the adjective “major” to separate the famous apparitions at Fatima from May 13 to October 13, 1917, from the ones that occurred afterwards. Many don’t realize that Our Lady continued to appear individually to the visionaries -- in the case of the youngest two, ushering them into Heaven. Jacinta, who died at age 9 -- the year after her brother, who was 10 -- reportedly quoted Our Lady, in those private apparitions, as presenting startling insights. Among them forgotten messages and Jacinta’s own interpretations of the era, the onset of the Roaring Twenties: “The sins of the world are very great.” “If men knew what eternity is, they would do everything to change their lives.” “Men are lost because they do not think of the death of Our Lord and do not do penance.” “Many marriages are not good; they do not please Our Lord, and they are not of God.” “The sins that lead more souls to hell are the sins of the flesh.” “Fashions that will greatly offend Our Lord will appear. People who serve God should not follow fashions. The Church has no fashions. Our Lord is always the same.” Few realize the incredible and intensely deep spirituality of this very young girl -- this mere child, she would be in Year 6 in our school system -- who spent the last years of her short The Incredible Hidden Suffering and Final Words of Saint Jacinta Marto (source: www.spiritdaily.com )