Pope Francis will travel to Fatima on May 12 – 13, 2017
Sanctuary of Fátima.
On December 17, 2016, the Holy See Press Office announced that Pope Francis will make a pilgrimage to the shrine of Fatima in Portugal on May 12 – 13, 2017, on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the apparitions of Our Lady in Cova da Iria to the three little shepherds: Jacinta, Francisco and Lucia. The Holy Father had said in April 2015 that he wished to travel to Fatima: “If God grants me life and health, I wish to be at Cova da Iria to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the apparitions.” He mentioned it again on October 2 in the plane in which he travelled back from Georgia and Azerbaijan, without specifying a date. In his first official visit abroad, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, president of the Republic of Portugal, received at the Vatican on March 17, 2016, invited the Pope to come to Fatima in 2017 for the anniversary of the apparitions.
Bishop Antonio Marto of Leiria-Fatima wrote in a statement published on the website of his diocese about “the responsibility that weighs on us so that the papal visit is not reduced to the experience of an intense and ephemeral emotion.” He hopes that this event will be a particularly important time for the Church in Portugal, which displays, according to Pope Francis’ wish, the missionary and merciful dimension of the Church. In May, Bishop Marto recalled that Cardinal Manuel Clemente, patriarch of Lisbon and president of the Portuguese Bishops’ Conference, renewed the act of consecration of the dioceses of Portugal to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, exactly 85 years after the first pilgrimage of Portuguese bishops to Fatima and the first act of consecration of Portugal to Our Lady of Fatima, in 1931.
Pope Francis will be the fourth pope to make a pilgrimage to Fatima. Paul VI went there on May 13, 1967, for the 50th anniversary of the apparitions. John Paul II visited there three times, in May 1982, May 1991 and May 2000. Pope Benedict XVI visited the shrine in May 2010.
(Sources: cath-info – iMedia – Radio Vatican – leiria-fatima – DICI no. 347, 23/12/16)
