“I came to ask you to come here on the 13th day of each month for six months at the same time, and then I will return here a seventh time.”

On May 13, 1917, the Virgin Mary appeared to Lucia Dos Santos, 10, and her cousins, Francisco, 9, and Jacinta Marto, 7, in the valley of Cova da Iria.

Our Lady addressed the pain of a world torn by war and revolutions and called for prayer, penance and redemptive suffering to prevent war and to save souls from eternal damnation.

She appeared on the 13th day of each month for the next six months. Mary told the children to say the rosary often… “Through the rosary, you can stop wars.”

On Sunday, October 13, 1917, the “miracle of the sun” was witnessed by an estimated 30,000 to 100,000 people.

Pope Francis is on a two-day pilgrimage to Fatima to mark the centenary of the Marian apparitions. He is the fourth pontiff to visit the shrine, following Blessed Paul VI, St John Paul II and Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI.

Last year, on May 11, he spoke about Our Lady of Fatima during the weekly general audience, saying: “She asks us to never offend God again. She forewarns all humanity about the necessity of abandoning oneself to God, the source of love and mercy.

“Following the example of St John Paul II, a great devotee of Our Lady of Fatima, let us listen attentively to the Mother of God and ask for peace for the world.”

Today, the Pope will declare siblings Francisco and Jacinta saints. Decrees recognising miracles attributed to the intercession of Francisco and Jacinta were approved by the pontiff in March.

Although young, both children devoted the rest of their lives to intense prayer and offered their sufferings in reparation for sin and for the salvation of souls. They died within three years of the apparitions, both victims of the Spanish flu pandemic that spread after World War I.

Francisco and Jacinta were beatified – the last step before sainthood – by John Paul II in 2000. Sr Lucia attended their beatification. She died five years later at the age of 97.

On February 13, 2017, Sr Lucia’s own canonisation process moved another step ahead. Clearly the primary visionary, she was blessed with a long life during which she could record and make known what the Blessed Virgin had revealed to the three children.

The Catholic Church posthumously confers sainthood on people considered so holy during their lives on earth they can intercede with God after death to perform miracles. The miracle connected to Francisco and Jacinta consisted in the inexplicable healing of a Brazilian infant whose parents had prayed to the siblings.

In 1941, the Carmelite nun revealed that Our Lady had entrusted the children with three “secrets”. The first two were revealed soon and concerned a vision of hell, seen by believers as a prediction of the outbreak of World War II, a warning that Russia would “spread her errors” in the world and a need for general conversion to God and prayer.

When asked by the local bishop to reveal the third secret, Sr Lucia was not sure God had authorised her to do so. Ordered by the bishop, she later wrote it down and placed it in a sealed envelope not to be opened until 1960. The sealed envelope was then delivered to the Vatican and eventually published by the Holy See in June 2000.

The third secret intrigued the world for more than three-quarters of a century, inspiring books and cults convinced it predicted the end of the world.

The Holy See said the third secret was a prediction of the May 13, 1981, assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II. May 13 was, of course, the date of the first reported apparition in 1917.

Documents made available to the Times of Malta by the Archbishop’s Curia show that according to the little shepherds’ interpretation of the third secret, as was also confirmed by Sr Lucia, “the bishop clothed in white” who prays for all the faithful is the Pope.

As he makes his way with great difficulty towards the Cross amid the corpses of those who have been martyred (bishops, priests, men and women in holy orders and many laypeople), he too falls to the ground, apparently dead, under a hail of gunfire.

After the assassination attempt, it appeared evident that it was “a mother’s hand that guided the bullet’s path”, enabling “the Pope in his throes” to halt “at the threshold of death”. During a visit to Rome by the then bishop of Leiria-Fatima, the Pope decided to give him the bullet found in the vehicle in which the Pope was travelling during the assassination attempt so it would be kept in the Fatima shrine.

The bishop decided that the bullet should form part of the crown of the statue of Our Lady of Fatima.

In a theological commentary in 2000, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI), then prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said: “A careful reading of the text of the so-called third secret of Fatima, published long after the fact and by decision of the Holy Father in 2000, will probably prove disappointing or surprising after all the speculation it has stirred.

“No great mystery is revealed; nor is the future unveiled. We see the Church of the martyrs of the century which has just passed represented in a scene described in a language which is symbolic and not easy to decipher. Is this what the Mother of the Lord wished to communicate to Christianity and to humanity at a time of great difficulty and distress?

“Is it of any help to us at the beginning of the new millennium? Or are these only projections of the inner world of children, brought up in a climate of profound piety but shaken at the same time by the tempests which threatened their own time?

“How should we understand the vision? What are we to make of it?”

As is clear from the interpretation of the document made by Cardinal Angelo Sodano, then secretary of state, on May 13, 2000, Sr Lucia insisted she had a vision but not its interpretation. The interpretation, she noted, belonged not to the visionary but to the Church.

After reading the text, however, she said that the interpretation corresponded to what she had experienced and that she agreed with the interpretation.

Fatima, which, like the shrine at Lourdes, France, draws huge numbers of visitors, is undoubtedly the most prophetic of modern apparitions.

Commemoration

A commemoration of the Fatima apparitions is being held today at Dar tal-Kleru in Birkirkara.

One of the 13 duplicate statues found at the shrine of Our Lady of Fatima, also known as the International Pilgrim of Fatima, can be found at the chapel at the home for elderly priests.

Confessions will be heard between 10am and 5.30pm, and the Blessed Sagrament will be exposed for adoration.

The holy rosary will be said at 5.30pm followed by a Eucharistic celebration.