Today February 20

Today is the feast of Blessed Francisco (1908 - 1919) and Jacinta Marto (1910 - 1920), youthful siblings and visionaries. There's a lot to say about these little saints, and the Fatima-philes certainly have: making them sort of plaster poster children for Marian devotion and/or the coming apocalypse. I won't do that, but I won't portray them inaccurately: they WERE the unnaturally reverent and penitential figures they are portrayed to be, but only AFTER their unique Marian visions (once a month on the 13th from May to October 1917). They were entirely normal and delightful children -- Jacinta was very competitive and lively and loved to dance, her brother Francisco was easygoing and animal-loving and musical (he'd play flute while others danced). The fact that they gave up all that after their first encounter with the lovely lady dressed in white doesn't negate the fact that they were once as I described. After the vision of hell, particularly, Jacinta was subdued, downcast and ascetic. Francisco focused more on the pain of Jesus on the Cross and the great desire to comfort Him. Now I'm a great one for penance and especially giving up or "offering up" things, but how wearing tight and painful rope belts around your waist helps Jesus kind of escapes me. Even the lovely Lady admonished them not to wear them at night since they were unable to sleep for the pain. (But then how is the DAY wear of these torture devices helpful? I'm not exactly sure.) Besides, they had plenty else to offer up in reparation for their own and everybody else's sins: the disbelief and even spankings from their parents, the arrest and threats from the anti-clerical governor, the over-enthusiastic crowds that never gave them a moment's peace. This was especially hard on Francisco, a very solitary little soul.

Francisco enjoyed visiting the Blessed Sacrament and his visits there, lasting hours on end, showed his simple and fervent faith. He was very honest and straightforward and even at his death (from the worldwide influenza epidemic of 1918 - 1919), he directly asked his sister and cousin Lucia (also a Fatima visionary) what sins he had committed (that they remembered). Lucia remembered that he'd clung to his mother when she was trying to go on out-of-town errands and Jacinta remembered when he'd thrown stones at boys who were doing the same to him, and when he stole a dollar to buy a musical instrument (which he'd given up since the visions, of course). He'd already confessed those sins but he did so again.

He was a big rosary buff (even more so after the Lady became visible to him only after he started saying it -- she was both visible and audible to the girls) and he reminded his sister when she said Mary asked people to pray for sinners, "We are not just to pray for sinners, we are supposed to make sacrifice for sinners. We have been told to pray for world peace and an end to war." This message was cemented onto the struggle against Communism, but it's really a radical and pacifist message, one just as valid today even after the fall of Communism in Europe.

Jacinta, so mature (according to the testimony of her cousin Lucia, "She was a child only in years"), had plenty to offer up when her final illness came. At least Francisco died in their mother's arms. Jacinta was sent away to a hospital where she knew she would die all alone. It was a horrible sacrifice for the sweet little girl. But she embraced it in a heroic spirit. Her last words were: "I have seen our Lady. She told me that she was going to come for me very soon and take away my pains. I am going to die. I want the Sacrament." The nurse ran to find a priest, but when she came back, Jacinta was already dead. Her body was found incorrupt after an exhumation in 1935. Blessed Francisco and Jacinta, pray for us.