Fatima: Jacinta, the Reparatrix

Human profile
Jacinta de Jesus Marto was born on March 11, 1910. She resembled her brother Francisco in appearance and had a beautiful oval face with a generous lower lip, tidy hair, and a small and well proportioned body. “She wasn’t as plump as Francisco,” her mother reported.

She was somewhat vain, liked to dress prettily, always had her hair well combed and in place, and liked to put flowers in them. She had a good singing voice and like her cousin Lucia, she loved to dance to the sound of her brother Francisco’s flute. She had fun at games but unlike her brother, she was a bad loser. Very self-centered, she had to choose both the game and partner and in this she was very uncompromising.

Furthermore, she did not have the free and independent spirit of her cousin Lucia. She was more dependent and in this matter, she was very close and very attached to her cousin; she would not do anything by herself and so to her one day spent without Lucia was one sad and meaningless day.

Morally she was irreproachable like her brother. She was taught never to lie; she came even to rebuke her own mother when the latter told her some small fib or white lie: “So, you lied to me, Mother? You told me you were going to one place but you went to another… lying is ugly, you know!” If she did not want to tell the truth she would remain silent and no one was able to draw a word out of her mouth. One day when Lucia got tired of so many interrogations and hid herself, the visitors asked Jacinta for her cousin’s whereabouts and to avoid lying she remained very silent: What did you tell them when they asked you about me? Asked Lucia. Oh, I kept very, very quiet! Because I knew where you were and lying is a sin.

The most important and pronounced aspect of her personality is her delicate sensitivity; it was so delicate that it seemed to be made of porcelain; she was very easily moved, wearing her whole heart on her sleeve. Already at 5 years old she would ask her cousin to recount the story of Our Lord's Passion; upon hearing again and again the narrative of the sufferings of Our Divine Redeemer – Lucia tells us – she would be moved to tears, and would weep and in her grief she would say – Our poor dear Lord – she repeated – I’ll never sin again! I don’t want Our Lord to suffer any more.

Quite often she would say: I like to tell Jesus that I love him so much! Many times, when I say it to Him, I seem to have a fire in my heart, but it doesn’t burn me. (…) I love Our Lord and Our Lady so much, that I never get tired of telling them that I love them. Jacinta had an exquisite soul, full of very delicate feelings, said her father.

She loved the sheep that she watched over and called each one by name. There was “Dove” and “Star” and “Beauty” and “Snow” – the most beautiful names in her vocabulary. The little white lambs were her favorites: “She used to sit with them on her lap, -- says Lucia – holding and kissing them, and at night she would attempt to carry a little one home on her shoulders to save it from getting tired, like the pictures of the Good Shepherd that she had seen in a holy picture that was given to her.”

Jacinta in the Enneagram
With a message for the whole human race, Mary appeared at Fatima to three children who represent this humanity; an incomplete humanity who peers at and relates to reality and others through a reductive and reducing prism. Lucia was clearly cerebral; with memory and intelligence as her strength. Francisco was visceral instinctive who did not give too much time to thoughts, and lived by vision, perception and contemplation; very few things mattered to him. Jacinta was emotional, all of her was emotional sensitivity.

What number could she be in the Enneagram? She cannot be a two since she had a basic personality that was quite egocentric, which the twos do not possess; not a three either because she did not seek success nor was she pragmatic; in my opinion, Jacinta is a four in the Enneagram.

Lucia knew Jacinta better than anybody else in the world and she described her in fact as being quite self-centered and absorbed in herself. Furthermore, as we shall see, the conversion of Jacinta came with the decentralization of her life when she realized that the center of her life was not her but Him, Jesus, who suffers for the sins of mankind which need reparation. It was then that she understood when Jesus said, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me”. (Luke 9:23)

Like the fours, Jacinta was an overly tragic, romantic and sentimental figure, an individualistic dreamer with a fondness for beauty, as it is shown above by her reaction to the little lambs in imitating Jesus the Good Shepherd. Like all the fours, she fled from the ordinary. Jacinta did not accompany anyone except her dear Lucia, because she found other children to be vulgar who said stupid, ordinary things; in addition, she hated the lack of integrity. At home, she preferred and would seek the company of her peaceful brother Francisco, and avoided at all cost the company of her older brother John.

Another characteristic of the fours that we find in Jacinta is the fear of being alone and the feeling of abandonment as she expressed when she was put into the prison of Ourém and at her stay at Dona Estefânia Hospital in Lisbon where she repeatedly stressed, with tragic and dramatic overtones proper of the fours, the fact that in that hospital she would die alone.

Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît pas -- The heart has its reasons of which reason knows not. After meeting with the parish priest of Fatima, Lucia who like her mother saw him as a holy man and held him in high regard, started to doubt herself and at her own perception. For being cerebral and rational, Lucia began to wonder that perhaps the parish priest was right and these manifestations could be from the devil trying to deceive her. Jacinta, however, as she saw and knew things with her heart, disagreed with Lucia and strongly defended the veracity of the apparitions.

Since the parish priest had put the thought of the devil in Lucia’s head, she started to dream of him and had a nightmare of the devil dragging her down to hell all the while laughing at her expense. Finally when July 13th came she refused to go to Cova da Iria, and the cousins cried and begged her as they did not want to go alone; Jacinta especially said that she felt sorry for Our Lady who would be displeased with them.

Despite her earlier decision, when noontime, the hour of the apparitions, came Lucia's fears dissipated as if by a miracle, and she went with her cousins in the direction of the Cova, passing by thousands of people who were already heading that way.

Jacinta the reparatrix
“I understood that Love comprises of all Vocations and that Love is everything! (...) then, in a transport of delirious joy, I exclaimed: I have finally found my vocation, my vocation is Love! In the Heart of the Church My Mother, I will be Love, thus I will be everything, and thus my dream will be fulfilled.” Saint Therese of Child Jesus

I like so much to suffer for the love of Our Lord and Our Lady! They like very much those who suffer for the conversion of sinners. Jacinta

If the young Jacinta had known Saint Therese of the Child Jesus she would have certainly seen herself in Therese and identified well with her. We have said that each little shepherd embodied in their lives, and in their story of conversion an aspect of the message of Fatima. If Francisco embodied the love of prayer for the consolation of the Lord by spending limitless time with Him, then Jacinta was the heart of the message of Fatima.

Of the three, she was the one who empathized the most with the broken hearts of Jesus and Mary for the outrages and sins with which they are offended. From the moment Jacinta became aware of the brokenness of the hearts of Jesus and Mary, she offered herself to mend them with the glue of her love. Love is in fact the only glue that can unite humans among themselves and with God, and repair the broken and offended hearts as well.

“Whoever is committed to love, is in for suffering” – Or as Jesus says, “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one's life for one's friends.” (John 15:13) Jacinta was very aware of this and gladly accepted all the sufferings that came her way in reparation for all the sins that the Lord is offended.

Therefore, when she was crying in the prison of Ourém because she missed her parents very much, the suggestion from Francisco and Lucia to offer this as a sacrifice was enough to immediately make her wipe away her tears, and gladly and even with some pleasure to offer this sacrifice for the conversion of sinners. When the pain from her illness became almost unbearable, she would confide to her friend Lucia that Jesus must be very happy with her because this has cost her quite a bit.

Already when she and Francisco were sick in bed, she called with urgency for Lucia to tell her: Look, Lucia – Jacinta said to her all excited – Our Lady came to both of us and said that she is going to take Francisco very soon to Heaven. And she asked me if I would like to convert more sinners (by means of suffering). I told her yes, I wanted. Then after the hospital cold-blooded surgery, she said in an outburst prayer to Jesus, "Now, you can convert many sinners, for I suffer a lot."

Only God knows what she went through at the hospital in Ourém where she was operated on without anaesthesia; only God knows what she suffered with an ever-open wound in her chest already oozing with pus. And yet, her body was found to be incorruptible when it was exhumed in 1935 for the cause of beatification.

With his death on the cross Jesus restored the human race, and repaired our union with the Father. Jacinta who loved to imitate Jesus the Good Shepherd carrying the lost sheep on his shoulders in the midst of the flock, ended up also imitating him in the three-year length of time of his public life, the sufferings of his passion, and in the agony and loneliness of his death. She passed away three years after the apparitions and died alone in a hospital with an open chest wound just like her Lord.

Therefore in her short lifetime, Jacinta not only imitated Christ the Good Shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep, but also imitated Christ the sacrificial Lamb who takes away the sins of the world because the conversion of sinners was the only motivation for her sufferings and short life.

Paraphrasing a sonnet by the Portuguese poet Camões, much more would she had loved if not for such a great love so short a life. She died three years after the apparitions on the 20th of February, 1920, at just 10 years of age.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

Fatima: Francisco, the Contemplative

Human profile
Francisco de Jesus Marto was born on June 11, 1908, in Aljustrel, a little hamlet belonging to the parish of Fatima, municipality of Ourém in Portugal. He was the youngest son of Manuel Pedro Marto and his wife, Olimpia de Jesus dos Santos.

He was the brother of Jacinta, who like her, did not exhibit the rustic characteristics of their cousin Lucia. He was a handsome and sturdy boy with an oval face, high cheekbones and a full lower lip like his sister’s. Unlike her, however, he was gentle and a pacifist, but not one with “peace of the soul”. On the contrary, he was energetic, strong, purposeful and robust.

Typical of most children at that age, Francisco liked to play; however, unlike his sister he was not a poor loser, to the point that it almost seemed that he did not want to win at games at all. In fact, when someone broke the rules at a game or stubbornly denied him his personal rights, he yielded without resisting by simply saying, “Do you think it was you who won? That’s alright! I don’t care!”

And whenever someone took advantage of his calm nature to rob him of something, he would say, “Let him keep it, I do not mind.” His calm temperament used to exasperate his cousin Lucia; she could order him to do anything and he would do it without questioning.

He was not at all a coward, however. He could go out at night all alone without any fear or otherwise. He used to play with lizards and snakes that he found, and would get them to roll themselves around a stick and make them drink the sheep’s milk that he poured into the holes in the rocks, . He was passionate about music which he played on a reed pipe during the quiet hours, and like Jacinta, he was also a lover of flowers and nature.

Morally he was irreproachable – One morning – Mrs. Olimpia tells us – as he was going out to pasture the flock, I said to him: -- “Go today to the little hill at your godmother Teresa’s place, she is not there today, she went to the village.” And right away he answered: -- “Ah, that’s what I will not do!” I gave him a slap on the face but he did not flinch. He turned to me and said in a very serious voice, “So, it is my mother who is teaching me to steal?”

Francisco and the Enneagram
It is commonly understood that there are three centers of intelligence – the brain, the heart and the body; we are therefore cerebral, emotional, or visceral i.e. instinctive. While we all register reality, and relate to it and to others from all three intelligence centers, we always have one that is, somehow, default or preferential to the other two.

In the Enneagram´s psychological theory, there are nine types of personality, three for each of the personality center mentioned above; each personality type is identified by a specific compulsion, drive or tendency of which the person is unaware but influences and even determines his or her behaviour.

Whether it is by coincidence or providence, these three centers are very well represented by the three little shepherds. Lucia is cerebral, Jacinta is emotional and Francisco is visceral or instinctive. Each one of them incarnates the message of Fatima in their own way according to their basic personality and intelligence center. Within his instinctive center, Francisco is definitely not an 8 whose compulsion is to be strong or a 1 whose compulsion is to be perfect but is very clearly a 9 whose compulsion is to seek out peace and harmony, avoiding conflicts at all cost.

The nines in the Enneagram tend to forget themselves by accommodating the agendas of others. Lucia in her memoirs noted this of Francisco that he obeyed without questioning almost as if like a robot. The nines are excellent “peacemakers” because they have learned to minimize conflicts which we also note in Francisco. In order to avoid conflict, he was even capable of depriving himself of something dear to him, as is recounted in the following:

On one occasion, Francisco was gifted with a lovely handkerchief on which was stamped the image of Our Lady of Nazareth, which he prized dearly and displayed it with pride among his friends. The handkerchief was passed from hand to hand, and in a few minutes it disappeared. – “He liked the handkerchief very much” – says his mother – “and spoke about it very often”. When, however, they told him that the handkerchief was in the possession of another boy who claimed it to be his, Francisco made no effort to get it back: -- “Let him have it! What does a handkerchief matter to me?”

The nines avoid conflicts at all cost and seek tranquility, peace and harmony (internal and external). Francisco lived detached from everything and everyone, a little in the stratosphere; there were very few things that truly mattered to him who was quiet and impartial to people and things, a self-absorbed contemplative.

Eucharistic and contemplative
“I loved seeing the Angel and I loved still more seeing Our Lady. But what I loved the most of all was to see Our Lord in that light from Our Lady which penetrated our hearts. I love God so much… But He is very sad because of so many sins… We must never commit even the smallest sin!...” (…) “In a little while Jesus will come for me to take me to Heaven with Him and then I will always be looking at Him and consoling Him. How wonderful!  -- (Francisco)

-- We were burning, in that light that is God, and we were not scorched. – Francisco spent hours in adoration before the Blessed Sacrament which he called “the Hidden Jesus”. Penance and prayer summarize the message of Fatima; both Francisco and Jacinta did penance and prayer, but Francisco was more inclined to prayer while Jacinta to penance. While Jacinta in her penance was busy saving sinners, all Francisco wanted to do in his prayer was to console Jesus.

So just like Jesus did with the apostles, Francisco would from time to time without anyone realizing it leave the company of his sister and cousin and hide behind a wall or go to a deserted place and there he would pray alone. When Lucia and Jacinta found him, Lucia would ask, “Francisco, why don’t you tell me to pray with you, and Jacinta too?” – “I prefer praying by myself,” he answered, “so that I can think and console Our Lord who is so sad!”

Already after the apparitions, Lucia recalls that on their way to school, sometimes on reaching Fatima, he would say to her: -- Listen, you go to school, and I’ll stay here in the Church, close to the Hidden Jesus. It’s not worth my while learning to read, as I’ll be going to Heaven very soon. On your way home, come here and call me.

Despite the love for the Eucharist, for the Hidden Jesus, the parish priest of Fatima refused to give him Communion. But while the priest refused him, the angel in one of the earlier apparitions did not deny him the blessed sacrament, and upon receiving the Communion, Francisco exclaimed, “I felt that God was in me, but I didn’t know how.”

After the apparitions, the lives of the two siblings changed drastically. Jacinta never missed an opportunity to offer all the sacrifices to God for the conversion of sinners. Francisco, on the other hand, never missed an occasion to isolate himself from his sister, cousin and other children to spend long hours alone praying the Rosary and consoling Jesus. He said, “Do not come here; let me stay alone.” – But what are you doing here so long? – I am thinking about God who is so sad, because of so many sins! If only I was able to give Him joy!

I live without living in myself, and is so sublime the life I am hoping to live that I am hastening to die. (St. Teresa of Avila)

So deep was Francisco’s relationship with the “Hidden Jesus”, that he no longer thought or wanted anything else. All the time was yet not enough to be with Him, and to console Him. One day he was asked if he would like to become a carpenter, a soldier, a doctor, or even a priest and he responded that he would like to die instead and go to Heaven.

When Francisco and Jacinta were already very sick and confined to their rooms, oftentimes, Lucia was the one carrying messages between them. Since it was known to them that Francisco would die first, Jacinta sent words to remind him not to forget to pray for her and Lucia when he got to heaven. To which he responded that he was afraid he would forget when he saw Our Lord face to face. He was foreseeing that upon seeing Our Lord he would be so engrossed and absorbed by the vision of Him that everything would be completely erased from his mind.

And to Heaven in fact he did go on the 4th of April, 1919, two years after the apparitions and after some time of illness during which his parents were certain that they could save him. One day his godmother Teresa promised that if Our Lady would cure him she would offer Her his weight in flour; Francisco responded with an angelic smile, “Our Lady will not grant you this grace”.  To any word of hope of improvement, he answered, “It is useless, Our Lady wants me with her in Heaven”; he would not say it with a sense of tragic resignation, but joyfully smiling, and in good spirits.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC