Hajja Salesjana September October 2017

3 1 which had left them deeply touched. If other children insisted on taking something that was his, he simply said, “Let them have it! What do I care?” The same was true of games: he didn’t care if he lost or won. Actually, he preferred seeing others the victors, if that’s what they wanted. However what this little giant of holiness cared about was communing with nature at the top of the high rocks, while he softly played a flute. “I love God,” was the chorus of one song he played often. “I love Him, too, on Earth, I love the flowers of the field, I love the sheep on the mountains.” It wounded the boy to see anyone rob a bird’s nest, and when another boy caught a small bird, Francisco ran home for coins to buy back the bird’s freedom. Reminding us of his namesake, Saint Francis, birds flocked around him.  After the monumental 1917 apparitions, Francisco often wandered alone behind brush for a wall for hours on end, constantly praying the Rosary. “Our Lady told us that we would have much to suffer, but I don’t mind,” he said. “I’ll suffer all that She wishes! What I want is to go to Heaven!” What hurt Francisco the most, when influenza prevented him from attending church, was the inability to spend time with the “Hidden Jesus” in the Blessed Sacrament. How much we can learn from this little one, we who have the possibility to visit the Blessed Sacrament but often put it off because of the excuse that we are busy. He was felled by the same flu as his sister in an epidemic that killed fifty to a hundred million worldwide. At times his headaches were such that he asked Jacinta and Lucia (who was his older cousin) not to talk too much. Yet the suffering he gladly offered as a way of consoling Our Lady, who had seemed to him to be so sad due to the fact that humanity did not heed to her maternal care and call for penance and conversion. While the famous vision of hell -- related as the first Fatima secret -- did not affect the boy as much as the two female visionaries, Francisco was badly shaken by the appearance of a demon after the apparitions. “It was one of those huge beasts that we saw in hell,” he told Lucia. “He was right here breathing out flames!” If that was a jolt, the approach of death still left him undaunted. The day before he passed away into eternal life, little Francisco told Lucia, “Look! I am very ill; it won’t be long now before I go to Heaven.” He had requested the sacrament of Reconciliation. “I am going to Confession so that I can receive Holy Communion, and then die,” said the child, asking Lucia and Jacinta to remember for him any sins he may have committed and forgotten (which they gladly did!). What made the most powerful impression on him and what wholly absorbed him, wrote Lucia, was God, the Most Holy Trinity, “perceived in that light which penetrated our inmost souls...” “Goodbye, Francisco!” said Lucia, knowing she would live for many years on Earth serving God. “If you go to Heaven tonight, don’t forget me when you get there, do you hear me?” As the scene became moving, Lucia was nudged from the room by her aunt. “Goodbye then, Francisco!” she said to this boy who would always remain one of the very closest persons to her heart -- unforgettable right to her own death more than eight decades later. “Till we meet in Heaven, goodbye!...” And so Francisco’s short life ended while his eternity with God beckoned brightly. Francisco was declared a saint by Pope Francis on the hundredth anniversary of the Fatima apparitions on the 13 th May 2017 at Fatima. He is the second youngest saint in the Catholic church, after his younger sister St. Giacinta Marto.