canonisations crowds Two of the three young shepherd children who in 1917 saw the apparitions of Our Lady in Fatima will be canonised when Pope Francis visits the Portuguese town on May 13, the Pope has said.
During an ordinary public consistory in the Vatican, the Pontiff announced the canonisation of a total of 35 people, most of whom were Brazilian priests and lay people killed by Dutch soldiers in 1645 when they refused to convert to Calvinism during the Dutch colonisation of north eastern Brazil.
Also numbered among the new saints are three young Mexican boys who had been educated by Franciscan missionaries and were murdered for their refusal to follow the local indigenous religion, a Spanish priest who founded an institute for abandoned children and an 18th-Century Neapolitan Capuchin friar who defended the rights of the poor of his day.
The best known saints on the list, however, are Francisco and Jacinta Marto, who died the year following the Fatima visions in the flu epidemic that ravaged Europe in 1918. Aged just 9 and 11 at the time, they were beatified by St John Paul in 2000.
The case for the beatification of the third visionary, Lucia Santos, who became a nun and lived to be 98, concluded its first phase in Portugal earlier this year and is under consideration at the Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints.