On
bended knee they came. Thousands of Roman Catholics from around the
world arrived this week on a pilgrimage to Fátima, the Portuguese town
where three poor shepherd children said, 100 years ago, that they saw a vision of the Virgin Mary. There, Pope Francis proclaimed two of the shepherd children, Jacinta and Francisco Marto, saints on Saturday.
Many of the pilgrims crawled the final yards to a shrine complex in
Fátima, where the children, along with an older cousin, Lucia de Jesus
dos Santos, said they saw the apparitions six times between May 13,
1917, and Oct. 13, 1917, when Jacinta was 7, Francisco was 9 and Lucia
was 10, according the Vatican. The vision told the children three “secrets,” according to accounts.