February 20--Sts. Francisco and Jacinta Marto, Holy Children

                  

Our saints today are proof that age is no barrier to holiness. They were ten and nine when they died from the 1918 influenza pandemic. They are the youngest non-martyrs canonized. St. Jacinta and her brother St. Francisco along with their cousin Lúcia dos Santos were blessed with the apparitions of Our Lady of Fátima on the 13th of each month May through October 1917. Mary asked them to learn to read and write and to pray the rosary “to obtain peace for the world and the end of the war.” They were told to pray for sinners and the conversion of Russia. After the apparitions they practiced austere self-mortifications, such as prostrating themselves to pray for hours or kneeling with their heads on the ground.

Pope Pius XI denied their causes for sainthood because he decided that minors could not fully understand or practice heroic virtue. However, in 1979 the Bishop of Leiria-Fátima asked that the world’s bishops to petition the pope for their causes. The Congregation for the Causes of Saints decided that children could be blessed with the grace to be “spiritual prodigies.” Pope St. John Paul II declared them venerable in 1989 and blessed in 2000. Pope Francis canonized them on May 13, 2017, one hundred years after the first appearance of Mary to them.

Children are gifts from God to their parents. Parents are blessed to be able to share the faith with these new disciples in the haven of the domestic Church, the home. Children are God’s opportunities to bring parents closer to God so the children can also be closer to God. Holiness is both our calling and a grace from God. Sts. Francisco and Jacinta Marto show us that even children can know holiness. May they pray for us and our children.

*https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0f/ChildrensofFatima_%28croped%29.jpg   Attributed to Joshua Benoliel, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons