Our Lady of Fatima

May 13 is the anniversary of the first apparition of Our Lady at Fátima, Portugal, in 1917. Three shepherd children — Lúcia dos Santos, ten, and her cousins Francisco and Jacinta Marto, nine and seven — saw a Lady "brighter than the sun" above a small holm oak in the Cova da Iria. She appeared six times, on the thirteenth of each month from May to October, and asked for prayer, penance, and the consecration of Russia to her Immaculate Heart.

The "secret of Fátima" — three parts of a vision Lúcia wrote down in 1941 — described hell, the devotion of the five first Saturdays, and a vision of a bishop in white killed by soldiers. The third part, kept secret by the Holy See until 2000, was interpreted by Pope John Paul II as referring to the 1981 attempt on his life, made on May 13 — the very anniversary of the first apparition. He placed the bullet that nearly killed him in the crown of the Fátima statue.

The shrine at Fátima is now one of the largest in the world, with millions of pilgrims each year, the great square of the sanctuary larger than St. Peter's Square in Rome. Francisco and Jacinta Marto were canonized in 2017, the centenary of the apparitions, by Pope Francis. Lúcia, who died in 2005, is venerated at the Carmelite convent of Coimbra where she lived for the last fifty-seven years of her life.