Også to barn kan bli hellige

The Pope in Fatima: Even Two Children Can be Saints

This is documented by the Jesuit Molinari, Postulator of the Society of Jesus

Rome (Italy), May 9th (VID) - A 24-hour trip to Fatima, from the afternoon of Friday 12th to Saturday the 13th, for Pope John Paul II, to beatify Francisco and Jacinta Marto, the two sheep tending children of the apparitions of the Virgin Mary of 1917, and perhaps a meeting with the third seer, Sister Lucia.

John Paul II's new trip, will be the 92nd outside of Italy, for the recurrence of the apparitions of the Virgin Mary. The crowd of faithful which will converge on the Portuguese Sanctuary has been calculated as at least 500 thousand faithful.

In the latest number of "La Civiltà Cattolica" (Catholic Civilization), the bimonthly review of the Jesuits, Father Paolo Molinari, Postulator of the Society of Jesus, concerned himself with answering questions if saintliness was possible in the very young. Francisco as a matter of fact died at ten years and nine months of age, on the 4th of 1919, while Jacinta died at nine years and eleven months of age on the 20th of February, on February 20th, 1920.

Father Molinari in the article entitled "The Children of Fatima", retraces the stages of the lives of the two children, their suffering, the incomprehension, the threats and the persecutions by their detractors which they had to deal with, and highlights their Christian death.

Francisco and Jacinta Marto, observes Father Molinari, "are and remain children who, according to the strengths of their age, faithfully responded to the free initiations of God and consequently lived in an authentically Christian way, which goes beyond that which one normally encounters in good children of their age who have a Christian education".

Their arrest, the threats which they resisted "just as they also refused to reveal the secret and therefore the faithfulness demonstrated to the promise made to the Lady, highlighting the fact that children as well, moved and supported by the grace of God, are able of carrying out extraordinary acts and truly "heroic" ones in the strict sense of the word".

The third seer, Sister Lucia dos Santos, is today 92 years old. She lives in the Carmelite convent of Coimbra, since 1948, having obtained by Pope Pius XII the permission to move there after the solemn profession on October 3, 1934 as Sister Dorotea.

Vidimus Dominum