SAINTS FRANCISCO AND JACINTA

Feast Day - February 20

Lived (Francisco; June 11, 1908 - April 4, 1919. Jacinta; March 11, 1910 - February 20, 1920)

Patron Saint of Bodily ills, Portuguese children, Captives, People ridiculed for their piety, Prisoners, and Sick people.

Francisco and Jacinta Marto, the youngest children of Manuel and Olimpia Marto, were Portuguese illiterates, and Shepherds, who tended to their families’ sheep with their cousin Lúcia in the fields of Fátima, Portugal, but they had a rich oral tradition. All three children, but particularly Francisco and Jacinta, practised tough self-mortification.

The brother and sister are said to have witnessed several apparitions of an Angel in 1916. Lúcia later recorded the words of several prayers she said they learned from this angel.

According to Sr. Lúcia's memoirs, she and her cousins saw the first apparition of Mary on 13 May 1917. At the time of the apparition, Francisco was 9 years old, and Jacinta was 7.

On the first apparition, Mary is said to have asked the three children to say the Rosary and to make sacrifices, offering them for the conversion of sinners. She also asked them to return to that spot on the thirteenth of each month for the next six months.

These siblings were victims of the great 1918 influenza epidemic that swept through Europe. In October 1918, Both lingered for many months, insisting on walking to church to make Eucharistic devotions and prostrating themselves to pray for hours, kneeling with their heads on the ground as they said the angel had instructed.

On April 3rd, 1919, Francisco declined hospital treatment and died at home the next day. Jacinta was moved from one hospital to another in an attempt to save her life, which she insisted was futile. Francisco declined hospital treatment. She developed purulent pleurisy and endured an operation in which two of her ribs were removed. Because of the condition of her heart, she could not be fully anaesthetised, and suffered terrible pain, which she said would help to convert many sinners. On 19 February 1920, Jacinta asked the hospital chaplain who heard her confession to bring her Holy Communion and administer Extreme Unction because she was going to die "the next night". He told her that her condition was not that serious and that he would return the next day. The next day Jacinta was dead; she had died, as she had often said she would, alone.

When the cause of their beatification begun in 1935, the children were exhumed and Jacinta's face was found incorrupt; but Francisco's had decomposed. By 1951, when she was again exhumed for her reburial in the Basilica, Jacinta had begun to decompose also.

On May 13, 2000, Pope John Paul II beatified them and they were canonised by Pope Francis on May 13, 2017, on the centennial of the Apparition of Fatima.