Jacinta Marto

The "work" of Jacinta is intertwined with her role as a visionary of Fatima. In 1916, according to the account of the three children, the Angel of Peace, presented as the protector of Portugal, appeared to them several times to prepare them for prayer, adoration, and sacrifice, giving them communion during one apparition. On May 13, 1917, at the Cova da Iria, a "Lady" whom tradition identifies as the Virgin Mary appeared to the three shepherds and asked them to return on the thirteenth of each month. Six apparitions followed, until October 13, 1917, and the widely attended episode known as the "miracle of the sun." The Virgin is said to have requested the prayer of the Rosary, penance, and reparation for the conversion of sinners. Jacinta, marked by a vision of hell reported in the memoirs of Lúcia, then offered herself as a "victim" for sinners. Her mission unfolded in secrecy and silence: she did not preach, but until her death performed the sacrifices and prayers inspired by what she had seen and heard, turning an ordinary childhood into a spiritual testimony.

Hagiographic sources, beginning with the official notice from the Vatican City State and the homily of John Paul II, insist on Jacinta's interior conversion. From an initially egocentric temperament, she moved to a heroic self-giving for her age. Her spirituality was organized around three axes: Eucharistic devotion, suffering offered for the conversion of sinners, and concrete charity. She shared her meals with the poor and practiced small fasts as acts of reparation. Lúcia reports that, for Jacinta, "to pray and to suffer out of love was her ideal; that was what she spoke of." Her thoughts also turned toward the Pope, for whom she prayed and suffered. This spiritual intensity, judged extraordinary in a child under ten years old, established her reputation for holiness. She accepted her illness and the prospect of dying alone, far from her loved ones, as a final consented sacrifice. It is this coherence between the experience of the apparitions and a life of heroic virtue that the Church would retain to recognize her path to holiness.

Jacinta Marto was beatified, along with her brother Francisco, by Pope John Paul II on May 13, 2000, at Fatima, on the eighty-third anniversary of the first apparition. The canonization process succeeded thanks to the recognition of a miracle: the unexplained healing of a young Brazilian, Lucas Batista Maeda de Moura, who fell from a window in March 2013 and suffered a severe traumatic brain injury. His family and some Carmelites invoked the two shepherds; the child recovered without any aftereffects. The Congregation for the Causes of Saints concluded that the healing was scientifically inexplicable, and Pope Francis approved the decree on March 23, 2017. The canonization was celebrated by Francis on May 13, 2017, on the square of the Fatima sanctuary, the day of the centenary of the first apparition. Jacinta and Francisco thus became the first non-martyred children canonized by the Church; Jacinta, who died at the age of ten, is the youngest non-martyred saint. Her liturgical feast is set for February 20, the day of her death.

Jacinta's legacy is inseparable from the message of Fatima, one of the most visited Marian shrines in the world. Her remains rest in the Basilica of Our Lady of the Rosary of Fatima, a pilgrimage destination for millions of the faithful. With Francisco, she embodies in Catholic devotion the call to pray the Rosary, to penance, and to consecration to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, which are central themes of the 1917 apparitions. Her figure as a child who attained holiness nourishes a pastoral care aimed at the youngest: she is readily proposed as a model for children and presented as an intercessor for the sick, due to the illness she herself endured. Numerous parishes, schools, and foundations in the Lusophone world and beyond bear her name or that of the "pastorinhos" (the little shepherds). Cinema and devotional literature have contributed to spreading her story. Canonized during the centenary of Fatima, she remains one of the youngest saints in the Roman calendar, a sign of the universality of the call to holiness.