Msgr. Peter Elliott
Description :Looking at the question of whether children can achieve heroic sanctity through the recently beatified Jacinta and Francisco Marto.
Can children be saints?
Whatever replies others may have given to this question, on May 13 2000, in Fatima, Portugal, Pope John Paul II beatified two children who died respectively at the ages of 11 and 10, Francisco and Jacinta Marto. Their cousin, Sister Lucia, a Carmelite nun aged 93, was present at the solemn Mass of beatification.
We know these children as the three visionaries of Fatima, the ones chosen by God to receive messages of hope and peace for humanity, divine appeals and warnings, even timely prophecies only revealed by the Church at the beginning of the Third Millennium. These calls for \"prayer and penance\" were given through the Blessed Virgin Mary herself. On May 13, 1917, the first apparition took place on the field known as the Cova da Iria. On this same day, May 13, 1981, an assassin's bullet struck the Pope who returned once again in gratitude to Fatima to beatify the children.
These are the two youngest persons ever to be beatified in the history of the Catholic Church, that is, apart from young martyrs. Yet, in a sense, theirs was a path of martyrdom. Both of them, in the last years of their short earthly lives suffered greatly in body and spirit and that is the point to begin in giving praise to God for their sanctity.
Their heroic practice of the virtues is surely the best place to begin. Without heroic virtue or martyrdom the process of beatification and canonization cannot succeed. These reflections in praise of the virtues of these two children are drawn from various recollections and memoirs of Lucia herself. The virtues of faith, hope and love shine through her vivid memories of the shepherd children of Fatima. Faith, hope and love…
FAITH
The courageous faith of Francisco emerged in prison, where the children were taken to terrify them, an attempt to force them to deny what they claimed to have seen. As Lucia tells us, the boy was prepared to die rather than deny what he had seen. In this he was exactly like the men and women who were the witnesses of the Resurrection of Jesus, the people who saw the risen Lord, who could say with the convinced faith of Saint Peter, \"Lord, to whom else shall we go? You have the words of eternal life!\"
Likewise, through Lucia's memoirs we see how the childlike faith of Jacinta the little shepherdess was tried and tested during her final illness, when her small body was racked with the aching pains of the influenza, that was sweeping the world at that time, often incurable. Her realism was reflected in her reply when Lucia asked if she was feeling better. \"You know I am not getting better. I have such pains in my chest. But I don't say anything. I am suffering for the conversion of sinners.\" Her final illness fulfilled her spiritual thirst for making personal sacrifices for the conversion of sinners, a practice she developed as Our Lady had requested. Ultimately, as Our Lady had told her, this little child was to die alone, separated from her parents and friends in a hospital in Lisbon on February 20th 1920. That was the final cross for Jacinta. She felt it deeply and admitted that frankly to her cousin, but she feared not. She trusted in God and his Blessed Mother. Her practice of the virtue of faith was remarkable not only in its simplicity but in its realism.
Francisco shared this courageous sense of mortification and self abnegation with his younger sister. For example, Lucia recalled how they both felt abandoned in prison, and really believed they would be martyred, and yet here they offered even this abandonment as a sacrifice for sinners and for the Holy Father, Pope Benedict XV. Note their consciousness of the Vicar of Christ at that moment of fear and stress. This indicates a sense of the wider Church, which rapidly grew in their lives, going beyond the limitations of their culture and narrow experience of life in a small community in a remote place in a humble land. Faith in Jesus Christ means faith in his Church, fidelity to all her teachings. Their courageous experience in prison also reveals the single-mindedness, the purity of heart, the candid faith of children that Jesus presented as the model of all faith.
They both grew rapidly in the practice of prayer, the essential language and dialogue of faith. Francisco's prayer life developed an ascetical quality, a portent of the kind of adult faith already emerging in this young man. Had he lived longer, no doubt he would have found his vocation in a contemplative life, as did his cousin Lucia. He preferred to pray by himself, to \"console Our Lord \" as he put it. His mortification helped tame the boisterous side of his personality, revealing a spiritual maturity well beyond his years, and this is quite at variance with the developmental theories of some educationalists of the last century.
HOPE
The second theological virtue given by the Holy Spirit is hope. In spite of the pressures they endured, these children, like all true saints, had a sense of joy about them. This too has to be taken into account in any process of beatification. The Church does not beatify gloomy people because a lack of joy may well indicate a weakness in living out the virtue of hope.
Jacinta loved to dance, although she gave this up as a sacrifice for sinners. She rejoiced in the beauty of creation, especially collecting wild flowers. There is a quietness and stillness about her joy. Francisco, on the other hand, was more open and outgoing than his sister; social, friendly and smiling boy, according to Lucia. Both children retained a sense of humour throughout the final years of their lives. It was tempered by the burdens placed upon them but seems to have bubbled up in healthy reaction to the somewhat ludicrous behaviour of some of the faithful who fussed over them.
Joy never left them amidst all the trials that came with the responsibility Our Lady had placed on them. When their time for leaving this world drew near, they did not fear death. They accepted what Our Lady had predicted for each of them - imminent death. But they looked forward to heaven with inner joy because they both trusted in her Immaculate Heart. With this motherly heart, Mary never abandons her children, a truth we all need to learn again and again. Knowing this, Francisco and Jacinta lived the virtue of hope in a spirit of joyful trust in whatever God willed for the future.
LOVE
We have reflected on their faith and hope. Now we have enter the golden realm of third and greatest virtue, charity, love - caritas, agape. How well they learnt how to cultivate this sublime virtue in the best school - the school of Mary's Immaculate Heart, the temple of love that can never be separated from the blazing furnace of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
Love points to the Eucharist, \"summit and source\" of all grace in the Church. Devotion to the Eucharist is essential in the life of any saint. Lucia bears witness to these children's love of the Eucharist, \"the Hidden Jesus\" as both Jacinta and Francisco called our Lord ever present in the most Blessed Sacrament. Both of them loved to visit the Blessed Sacrament in churches, and both felt the pain of not being able to do this during their final illnesses. Their practice of the love of God found its focus in their devotion to \"the Hidden Jesus\" in the sacrament of his love.
It was a time when the intentions of Pope Saint Pius X had not yet been fulfilled everywhere. In that part of Portugal, Children were at least ten years old before they received their First Communion. So both Francisco and Jacinta valued Holy Communion deeply, approaching the Eucharist with reverent preparation and thanksgiving. Both of the children received the Eucharist as penitents. It is particularly moving to read Lucia's account of how Francisco prepared for his death on April 4, 1919. His last confession and Communion were uppermost in his mind. The sacraments of Jesus' pardon and union with us were his main concern. He knew he was preparing for the great and final journey.
Both of the children took sin seriously. Their innocence and purity was not naïve or bland. There was much spiritual courage involved in their own struggle to maintain fidelity to God's will under adverse circumstances. Those circumstances were not merely the hostility they encountered in the early phase of the apparitions, but something more insidious and enticing for a child, the great attention they attracted, which included attempts to spoil them, or to make them into little celebrities, and this is also recorded by Lucia. They seemed to see through this, to perceive the temptations involved, and by grace they rose above the choice of creatures and chose the love of God.
The virtue of love included the love of others. With their different temperaments, Francisco and Jacinta always showed a sense of charity towards others, of concern for other people's needs. This is an essential factor in discerning the sanctity of candidates for beatification. Both children responded to requests for prayer from people in need. Their deeper lives of prayer and sense of union with God did not cut them off from others. Indeed they attracted people, at first curious to see the little visionaries, but then able to see that in themselves these were extraordinary children. Their love of God was thus filled in an outgoing and generous love of others. The supreme infused virtue, charity, love, greatest gift of the Holy Spirit
It therefore comes as no surprise that the holiness of Francisco and Jacinta is described by Lucia as almost tangible. This is borne out in what Lucia recorded. These are the coments of some local women about her cousins: \"It's a mystery one cannot fathom! They are children just like any others. They don't say anything to us and yet in their presence one feels something one cannot explain and that makes them different from all the rest. \" Likewise: \"We've just been talking to Jacinta and Francisco; when with them we feel that there is something supernatural about them.\"
In the light of such testimony, we know that these children are not being beatified just because they saw Our Lady. An apparition does not cause holiness. We know from other instances, that contact with heaven is not necessarily an automatic cause of personal sanctity. The children of Fatima responded to the messages Mary brought us all. They did not merely pass these messages on as instruments. They were the first to respond to a divine call to arms, to the spiritual combat called for in an age of revolution, when the golden chain of the holy rosary must be raised against tyranny, persecution and increasing moral corruption. The children of Fatima were not merely channels, but willing agents who cooperated with divine grace, spiritually mature youing people who, with heroic fortitude, allowed grace to change their lives in the space of three or four years.
As Lucia describes their warm and natural relations with parents and other relatives, we also see the children of Fatima emerge clearly as saints of the family. In these times we need strong Christian families built on holy marriages. May Blessed Jacinta and Blessed Francisco intercede for all our families, and especially that children will grow to be like them, in lives of faith, self sacrifice, charity and holiness.
So we return to the question with which we began. Can children be saints? Through an act of her chief Pastor and Teacher on earth, the Catholic Church replies \"yes!\"
© Published by permission of Msgr. Peter Elliott 2001
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