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
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