"Poor Holy Father ...
They Throw Stones at Him"
Someone had said in Jacinta's hearing that perhaps some day Lucy would be called to the Holy Father. She greatly envied Lucy this good fortune.
The Lord wished to render her still more fervent and generous in sacrifice for the Head of the Church and accorded Jacinta two special visions that Lucy describes for us:
"One day, we went to spend the hours of siesta near my parents' well. Jacinta sat on the flagstone that covered it. Francis went with me to look for some wild honey in the bushes that covered the neighboring hillock. After a little while Jacinta called to me::
:Have you not seen the Holy Father"' No!'
'I do not know how it happened, I saw the Holy Father in a very big house on his knees before a little table, his face between his hands; he was crying. Outside the house there were very many people; some of them threw stones at him, others cursed him and said many bad things about him and Poor Holy Father! We must pray much for him!"
"Then some days after, along came the two priests who spoke to us of the Pope. Jacinta said to us:
" 'But it is really he whom I have seen cry and of whom the Lady spoke to us in secret, isn't it? The Lady must have shown the Holy Father to these two priests! You see that I am not mistaken and that we must pray much for him.'
Some time later, all three were prostrate in the 'cave' of Cabeco in the act of reciting the prayers of the Angel. All at once Jacinta sat erect and called Lucy.
" 'Look! . . . Do you not see many roads and many paths and many
people who cry, from hunger and who have nothing to eat? . . . And the Holy Father in a church before the Immaculate Heart of Mary in prayer? And . many people together in prayer with him?
After these two visions the afflictions of the Holy Father were still more keenly felt by the delicate soul of the little shepherdess. The Lord and His Mother had, so to speak, dramatized before her eyes the miseries announced in the great warning of July 13th. From now on, all the sufferings of Christians and even of all men in the war, amassed and concentrated in the heart of the Vicar of Christ, resounded in the heart of the little confidante of Our Lady.
As to her last vision, did it not announce the consecration of the World and of Russia that Pius X I] was to pronounce 25 years later at the moment when Hilterian power was at its height and foretell unnumbered "displacements" of people,? (Pius XII made this consecration for the first time by radio message to the pilgrims of Fatima, October 31, 1942; he was recompensed for it by the first defeat of Hider's power the very next day at El Alameim.)
In her ardent zeal, Jacinta longed to be able to tell the whole world what she had seen in order to stimulate prayer for the Holy Father. Lucy dissuaded her from doing so because it would touch on things they knew through the secret and there would be danger of disobeying the Lady on that point.
"We must pray earnestly for the Holy Father!" Such is the lesson the shepherds give us, and through them, Our Lady. Not that this admonition comes directly from Our Lady's lips, but it is indeed in her name that the example of the shepherds transmits to us.
His Holiness Pius X11 noted a coincidence that he recalled from time to time and which gave him the impression that Providence had willed to establish a kind of secret bond between the Papacy and Fatima: he had received the episcopal consecration in the Sistine Chapel on the day and at the verv hour that Our Lady descended for the first time on the holm oak of the Cova da Iria. At a papal audience in Rome he deigned to identify himself as "The Pope of Fatima.".
In a letter of Sister Lucy to Bishop Jose da Sflva, the good and pious Bishop of Fatima, the surviving seer wrote: "Jacinta was very much impressed by certain things revealed in the secret, and in her great love for the Holy Father she often said: 'Poor Holy Father!' " And Lucy adds: "May her recommendations to pray for the Holy Father and for priests be heard and put into practice in all the corners of the earth!"
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