Where’s that: North-west Spain
Our Lady’s connection: Apparition in 1925
In 1925, the Blessed Virgin revisited Lucia dos Santos, the surviving visionary of the three children who had seen Our Lady at Fatima in 1917. By now Sr Lucia was 18 years old and a postulant at the convent of the Dorothean Sisters in Pontevedra, in the north-west of Spain.
On the evening of December 10, while she was in her cell, Sr Lucia had an apparition of the Child Jesus and the Blessed Virgin Mary. The Virgin appeared holding a heart encircled with thorns, while the Child Jesus said to Lucia: “Have compassion on the Heart of your Most Holy Mother, covered with thorns which ungrateful men pierce at every moment without anyone to make an act of reparation to remove them.”
Our Lady then spoke, revealing what is now known as the devotion of the Five First Saturdays. She requested that on the first Saturday of five consecutive months, the faithful go to confession, receive Holy Communion, pray five decades of the rosary, and keep her company for 15 minutes while meditating on its mysteries — all with the intention of making reparation to her Immaculate Heart.
Sr Lucia’s mother-superior and confessor advised her to wait before making the contents of the apparition public. But on February 15, 1926, while Sr Lucia was emptying the garbage in the convent garden, the Child Jesus appeared to her, berating the young Sister for not doing more to promote the devotion.
The apparitions to Sr Lucia have not been canonically investigated by the Church, but the Five First Saturdays devotion is now considered a central part of the Fatima spirituality. The convent in Pontevedra is a hugely popular pilgrimage site.
Sr Lucia would later become a Carmelite nun, living in the order’s convent in Coimbra, Portugal, where she died in 2005.
Published in the December 2025 issue of The Southern Cross
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