Pilgrims in Portugal Prepare for Pope’s Visit, and Canonization of Fátima Siblings<br />The children, along with an older cousin, Lucia de Jesus dos Santos, said they saw the apparitions six times between May 13, 1917,<br />and Oct. 13, 1917, when Jacinta was 7, Francisco was 9 and Lucia was 10, according the Vatican.<br />Thousands of Roman Catholics from around the world arrived this week on a pilgrimage to Fátima, the Portuguese<br />town where three poor shepherd children said, 100 years ago, that they saw a vision of the Virgin Mary.<br />Doctors said he had severe traumatic brain injury and a "loss of brain material." Mr. Baptista said he<br />and his wife, as well as Brazilian Carmelite nuns, prayed to the late shepherd children who saw the Virgin Mary in 1917.<br />Many of the pilgrims crawled the final yards to a shrine complex where Pope Francis planned<br />to make two of the shepherd children, Jacinta and Francisco Marto, saints on Saturday.<br />Lucia, who said she saw several subsequent visions of Mary<br />and later became a nun, wrote several memoirs in which she revealed the contents of the children’s visions, and the three secrets.<br />According to Pope Benedict XVI, the purpose of the Fátima visions, which he described as "private revelations"<br />and distinguished from a "public revelation" like the Bible, is "to help live more fully" in accordance with Christ’s teaching.
