The Fatima message was revealed through various apparitions, most of them in Portugal. But not all of the apparitions occurred there.
First, an angel appeared in Aljustrel, Portugal, three times in 1916. Later, the Virgin visited the seers Francisco, Jacinta, and Lucía in the Cova da Iria and Valinhos between May and October 1917.
It was in the apparition of July 13, 1917, that the children were entrusted with the devotion of reparation to the Immaculate Heart of Mary on the first Saturdays of five consecutive months.
After the death of Francisco in 1919 and Jacinta in 1920, Lucia came under the protection of the bishop. The Virgin had already announced to her that she would survive the death of her cousins “some time longer” to be an instrument of the Lord.
“Jesus wants to use you to make me known and loved. He wants to establish devotion to my Immaculate Heart in the world,” Our Lady told her in 1917.
All this remained secret until a few years later.
The bishop arranged for Lucía to study at the Sisters of St. Dorothy school in Porto, Portugal, using the name Dolores to conceal her identity. When she turned 18, she sensed a vocation to the Carmelites, but the nuns convinced her to go to their novitiate in Tuy, near Pontevedra, Spain.
The novitiate of the sisters was in Spain due to the anticlerical laws in force in Portugal at the time.
There the sisters discovered that she didn’t have the school certificate, since taking the exam in Porto would have meant revealing who she was. So they couldn’t admit her to be trained as a teacher.
This is the reason why she was sent to Pontevedra to take care of manual tasks. Lucía’s vocation as a Carmelite nun seemed like a distant dream then. It was in that moment of desolation that the Virgin appeared to her with the Child Jesus.
Apparition in Pontevedra
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It was Dec. 10, 1925, and Lucía’s cell was illuminated.
“Our Lady, as if wanting to instill courage in me, gently puts her maternal hand on her right shoulder, showing me at the same time her Immaculate Heart that she holds in her other hand, surrounded by thorns,” the visionary related.
At that moment, the Child Jesus spoke and said, “Have compassion on the heart of your Most Holy Mother, covered with thorns, with which ungrateful men pierce it at every moment, and there is no one to make an act of reparation to remove them.”
Next, the Virgin urged Lucía to reveal the devotion of the five first Saturdays that had already been communicated to the visionaries in 1917: “Announce that all those who for five months, on the first Saturdays, go to confession, receive Communion, say five decades of the rosary and keep me company for 15 minutes meditating on the mysteries of the rosary, with the purpose of making reparation to me, I promise to assist them at the hour of death with all the graces necessary for the salvation of their souls.”
Lucía recounted that on Dec. 15, “I hardly even remembered that” and that, while doing her tasks, she met a boy whom she tried to teach the Hail Mary and urged him to go to a nearby chapel to say a short prayer.
Two months later, in February 1926, she met the boy again and asked him if he had asked the Heavenly Mother for Jesus, as she suggested. The boy turned and said, “And have you spread throughout the world what the Heavenly Mother asked you to do?”