Shrines Around the World: Our Lady of Fatima

by Gunther Simmermacher · Published August 19, 2024 · Updated August 19, 2024

The statue of Our Lady of Fatima is carried during the nightly candlelight procession in front of Holy Rosary basilica. (Photo: Günther Simmermacher)

Where’s that?: Fatima is located in northern Portugal, about 130km from Lisbon.

Our Lady’s connection: Apparitions to three shepherd children in 1917.

Around 5 million pilgrims visit the sanctuary that now occupies the field on which five of the six apparitions of the Blessed Virgin to the shepherd children Lucia dos Santos and her cousins Francisco and Jacinta Marto took place between May and October 1917.

The last apparition drew a crowd of tens of thousand to see if the miracle which the children had promised would in fact take place. The “Miracle of the Dancing Sun” convinced them, and many others, that the children were telling the truth about “the Lady more brilliant than the sun”.

Within weeks a small chapel was built on the site, and it soon drew great crowds of pilgrims. In the late 1920s, a hospice was built there and the Stations of the Cross were erected before construction of the basilica began in 1929. The Catholic Church declared the apparitions “worthy of belief” in 1930.

St John Paul II ascribed his survival of the assassination attempt on him on May 13, 1981, to the intervention of Our Lady of Fatima, whose feast it was that day. He later had the bullet that nearly killed him placed into the crown of the statue of Our Lady at the sanctuary.

Pope Francis canonised the younger two visionaries who died in childhood, Francisco and Jacinta, during the centenary of the first apparitions in May 2017; Sr Lucia dos Santos died in old age in 2005 and is awaiting beatification.

Highlights of a pilgrimage to Fatima include the sanctuary with the Rosary basilica and the Little Chapel of the Apparition, the nightly candlelight procession, a visit to Aljustrel, where the homes of the children are beautifully preserved, and the impressive Stations of the Cross.

Published in the June 2024 issue of The Southern Cross magazine