Saint Francisco Marto

Yet in that silence, the little shepherd’s short life opened onto a spiritual world all his own, full of light.

He longed for only one thing: to be near God to console Him. That simple, deep wish ran through his whole short life, from carefree days herding sheep on the sunny, windswept hills to the months he spent in bed with influenza. He lived just ten years on earth.

He grew up in a well-ordered, devout family, and faith entered his heart through the church bells, the family’s evening prayers, and the fair, peaceable way his parents treated their neighbors. As soon as he was big enough to help, Francisco and his little sister Jacinta took the sheep out with their cousin Lucia, roaming the hillsides all around.

In the memoirs she wrote later, Lucia remembered Francisco as a gentle boy who loved nature and hated quarreling and competing. He loved to watch the sun rise and to listen to the birds singing in the bushes, and he knew how to find joy in the simplest games. Whenever the children squabbled over a toy or a game, Francisco would usually smile and give way:

“You take it, I don’t mind!”

It was still very much a child’s life: there were times when they got lost chasing butterflies and picking flowers, and times when they agreed to pray the Rosary the “quick way”, saying only the words “Hail Mary” and “Glory be” to get through the beads fast and get back to their games. Holiness did not turn him into a little old man; it grew inside a simple child’s soul that God’s grace was changing day by day.

When Lucia asked Our Lady whether Francisco would go to heaven, Our Lady smiled kindly and answered:

“Yes, but he must pray many Rosaries!”

Those words were engraved in the heart of the nine-year-old, and became the purpose of every day he had left.

On August 13, 1917, the administrator of the Ourém district, an atheist hostile to the Church, had all three children carried off and held at his house. He questioned them relentlessly, threatening to drop each of them into a cauldron of boiling oil unless they admitted that the apparitions were a lie and revealed the secret.

Facing the threats of a grown man with power over them, nine-year-old Francisco did not flinch. He prayed and bravely encouraged his sister and cousin:

“If they kill us, we will go straight to heaven with Our Lady, so what is there to be afraid of!”

In the cell with the common criminals, the three children knelt down and prayed the Rosary, and their innocence so moved the prisoners that they too knelt, took off their caps and prayed along. Unable to break the children, the administrator returned them to their families on August 15. Because of this arrest, Our Lady’s August apparition did not take place on the thirteenth at Cova da Iria as usual, but on the 19th, at another place nearby called Valinhos.

“The hidden Jesus” was a child’s tender, simple name for the Lord present in the Eucharist. The ten-year-old did not go to the tabernacle to ask for things for himself. He went out of pure love: he wanted the Lord to be less lonely.

No more hillsides full of wildflowers; the boy’s world shrank to a cramped sickbed. High fever tormented his body, and racking coughs wore him out. Yet Francisco never complained. He held his Rosary tight in his thin hands, quietly offering all his pain to Jesus in reparation.

Knowing he would soon go to God, he begged to receive Holy Communion, for the first and last time. On the evening of April 3, 1919, after he had made his confession, a priest brought Communion to the sickroom. Francisco’s pale face lit up with joy as he received “the hidden Jesus” into his heart.

On May 13, 2000, Pope Saint John Paul II beatified the brother and sister Francisco and Jacinta at Fátima. On that same date in 2017, the centenary of Our Lady’s apparitions, Pope Francis canonized them. The Church celebrates the two young saints on February 20 each year.