(RVA News): Pope Francis declared Sister Lúcia de Jesus Rosa dos Santos of Portugal, one of the three seers who witnessed the apparitions of Our Lady of Fatima, a Servant of God and a Venerable on June 22.
The decree recognising the Carmelite nun’s “heroic virtues” was promulgated after an audience with Marcello Cardinal Semeraro, the prefect of the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints.
According to the decree: “[Her life] is also difficult because much of her suffering was due to [the apparitions]: she was always kept hidden, protected, and guarded. One can see in her all the difficulty of keeping together the exceptionality of the events she was a spectator [to] and the ordinariness of a monastic life like that of Carmel.”
This brings Sister Lúcia one step closer to sainthood. The next stage of the process, beatification, will only move forward once a miracle attributed to her intercession is recognised by the Holy See.
Sister Lúcia was one of the children to whom the Blessed Virgin appeared in Fatima in 1917, and her cousins, Francisco and Jacinta Marto, were declared Catholic saints.
In 1921 she joined the Sisters of St. Dorothy, but in 1948, with special permission from Pope Pius XII, she entered the Carmelite convent of Santa Teresa in Coimbra, Portugal, making her vow as a Discalced Carmelite on 31 May 1949 taking the religious name Maria Lúcia of Jesus and of the Immaculate Heart.
Sister Lucia became the sole custodian of Our Lady’s message from the Fatima apparitions after her cousins died due to the Spanish flu. She transcribed them into four documents between 1935 and 1941 at the instigation of Bishop José Alves Correia da Silvia of Leiria
The so-called Third Secret of Fatima document, dated 1944, was sealed and kept in Rome. It was opened for the first time in 1960 and published in 2000 with the approval of Pope St. John Paul II, a Fatima devotee.
Many Catholics in Asia have a devotion to Our Lady of Fatima. The oldest Asian shrine dedicated in her honour is in Karjat, India, which houses a statue from Portugal from 1920, years before the official approval of the Fatima apparitions.
Along with Sister Lúcia, four other Servants of God were declared Venerable on June 22: Sister Mary Lange, Salesian Antônio de Almeida Lustosa, Salesian Antônio de Almeida Lustosa, and Sister Anna Cantalupo, and Vincentian Sister Anna Cantalupo.
