Something Beyond Reason

Lcia, the eldest by just over a year, was the only one who spoke to her. Her
cousin Jacinta could hear her; Francisco, her brother, could just about see her. She
frst came to them in a pasture owned by Lcia's parents, the exact location of the
apparition now marked by a glass-enclosed idol that stands before a small chapel.
Today this modest building is but one part of a vast complex dominated by two
separate places of worship, built to accommodate the four million pilgrims who travel
here each year. A white strip runs from the far end of the site up towards the basilica,
for those who wish to make the journey on their knees. And on the right-hand side of
the Sanctuary, visitors unexpectedly come across a segment of the Berlin Wall,
intended to stress a connection between the fall of communism and her request for
the consecration of Russia. Beside it, a fagstone is engraved with a quotation in
Portuguese from the man who donated the piece:

Thank you, heavenly shepherd,

for guiding the people to freedom
with maternal kindness.
-John Paul II, 12th May 1991, in Ftima

On the centenary of the frst visitation, Pope Francis travelled to the Sanctuary
of Ftima and led a large outdoor mass marking the offcial canonisation of Jacinta
and Francisco de Jesus Marto. In his homily, delivered before a crowd of half a
million people, he commended the fdelity and ardor with which they embraced the
signifcance of their vision, emphasising the importance of nurturing the potential of
children within the Church. The congregation listened in complete silence and with
frm concentration. Later that afternoon, as Francis took a driven procession from the
Basilica of Our Lady of the Rosary and into the streets of town, thousands ran
behind and alongside his motorcade, and openly wept, and cried out his name. He
waved and beamed into the throes as he slowly disappeared from view, and was
escorted to a nearby air base.
He often speaks of doubt and periods of uncertainty in his faith. Like so many
before him, he teaches that doubt and its tribulations constitute the inevitable and
necessary path to a subjective and deeper understanding of the spiritual: Doubts
which concern the faith, in a positive sense, are a sign that we want to deepen our
knowledge of God, Jesus, and the mystery of His love for us. In his Introduction to
Christianity, his predecessor Benedict XVI proposed seeing the believer and non-
believer as components of a dialectic, both caught between varying degrees of faith
and doubt in their respective interpretations of the world; that, just as even the most
devout Christian may struggle with what St. Thrse of Lisieux called the worst
temptations of atheism, the nonbeliever is troubled by doubts about his unbelief,
about the real totality of the world he has made up his mind to explain as a self-
contained whole. In other words, a sense of and deference to the unknowable is the
natural disposition of all mankind. From all sides we pass by one another, invariably
trapped, navigating the diffcult in-betweens of our not knowing.
What Camus tried to do in response was make peace with this, and fnd
reasoned, inherent freedom and value in an existence lacking any certain order or
direction. Breaking from theologians as well as other existentialists, he chose to stop
trying to make sense of the ontological void, and instead take its inscrutability as a
given, placing the onus of meaning on the individual. He described it as living in a
state of 'rebellion'. We can never resolve the internal confict of faith and doubt, so let
us disregard the matter entirely (but not as a gateway to nihilism! Perhaps the most
appealing aspect of Camus' viewpoint is the fusion of this disavowal of a higher truth
with the innate will to live, that he sees meaninglessness not as torturous but as
profoundly liberating...)

Jacinta Marto was described by her cousin as a good-hearted though overly

sensitive child, prone to strops and upset. All three of them were raised in the village
of Aljustrel, in homes not a fve minute walk from one another, in large and devoutly
Catholic families. Illiterate, the children came to know the Bible though stories Lcia's
mother would tell them. Jacinta in particular was deeply affected by tales of the
crucifxion, and threats of the infernal that were used to chastise children who
misbehaved. Even before the apparitions she was intensely preoccupied with sin. She
would burst into tears considering the suffering Christ underwent for all the world's
sinners, and the punishment awaiting those who did not recognise His sacrifce.
It is still possible to visit where they grew up, following a path from the town
centre through some farmland for twenty minutes or so. The way is marked with
roughly a dozen small chapels, engravings of quotes from Our Lady recounted by
Lcia in her memoirs, and a larger shrine at the site of a later visitation. The homes
are small and bare buildings with low roofs; you frst enter a main room, with chests
of drawers and a dining table, and doors to bedrooms on all sides. Both of the houses
are very dark. In Lcia's home you can still see her crucifx, which hangs next to
various photos of her as a child and in Carmelite habit. A large oil painting of
Francisco and Jacinta adorns the wall of the Marto home. Some hours after attending
Francis' mass, a woman who has travelled from South Africa enters the side bedroom
where Francisco died and suddenly cries out, nearly collapsing onto the wooden foor.

At the frst apparition, the children spoke of seeing hell suspended between her
opened hands. Lcia described the image as a sea of fre, flled with demons and
souls in human form, like transparent burning embers, all blackened or burnished
bronze. The Lady told the children, terrifed by this momentary vision, to pray for
forgiveness, to be saved from the fre of hell and lead all souls to Heaven. The
vision had resembled hell in the way Lcia's mother had often described it to them,
that cave of sinners and beasts consumed by a great bonfre.
In the wake of this revelation, Jacinta lost interest in the games she had
previously enjoyed playing in the pasture; she began to dedicate nearly all of her time
to refection and prayer. Of particular interest to her was the concept of eternity, that
those condemned to hell never died or turned to ashes, and that those granted access
to heaven never had to leave it behind. Later, confned to a Lisbon hospital bed, she
remarked to the Mother Superior of a local orphanage: What is it all for? If only
they knew what eternity really was... How changed they would be, if they knew what
awaited them.
Jacinta and Francisco became dedicated to disciplined rituals of self-
mortifcation, far more so than their cousin. They would give their lunches away to
poorer families in the community and to their focks; Jacinta would eat acorns, even
forgoing those from holm-oak trees, to deliberately choose the far more bitter acorns
of oaks. She would refuse water and shade to induce headaches and nausea. The
three of them wrapped cords around their waists, keeping them on tightly for vast
stretches of time.
Initially, the local parishioners and the children's parents did not believe their
stories. After Lcia refused to confess that she had lied before two priests, the three of
them were imprisoned in the nearby town of Ourm and told they were going to be
burned alive. Jacinta suffered greatly from having been abandoned by her parents;
though Francisco reminded her that the pain of the experience could be offered for
the conversion of sinners, Lcia recalled that Jacinta was ultimately unable to say the
Rosary in their prison cell, crying for want of her mother.

Lcia was not always certain that her visitations were genuinely divine; it was
during this period of scrutiny by the Church that she became concerned she had
been deceived by a demonic apparition. She had a dream in which a laughing demon
attempted to drag her into the depths of hell; awaking her mother with her screams,
she spent the rest of the night wide awake from fear. A footnote in the offcial edition
of her memoirs stresses that her doubt should not be seriously considered, it merely
being the result of trying familial circumstances and the suggestion of an
unconvinced local priest that she may have been misled. We should also remind
ourselves of Lcia's age at the time of the apparitions, and the susceptibility of
children to pressure and persuasion from fgures of authority.
Camus also had stretches of doubt with his concept of rebellion. He asserts his
commitment to what is undeniable, what he absolutely cannot reject or doubt, yet still
speaks frustratedly of an irrepressible desire for unity, this longing to solve, this need
for clarity and cohesion. I can refute everything in the world surrounding me that
offends or enraptures me, except this chaos, this sovereign chance and this divine
equivalence which springs from anarchy. A silent universe, however self-evident,
remains a dissatisfactory and restrictive resolution, a half-answer. He does not settle
the question of interpretation but simply begins his investigation at a different point,
identifying a foregone conclusion but still having to fnd the right path towards it. For
those like Lcia, those who instead have seen the universe open up to them and
speak, the same dilemma exists.

Jacinta fell ill, along with her brother, a year after the frst apparition, in the
midst of the infuenza epidemic. She continued to refuse water in the early stages of
her illness, accepting milk and broth only because it hurt so much to swallow them.
Francisco died at home in April 1919. Jacinta was later transferred to hospital, not
long after having been visited by Our Lady and told she must go not to be cured, but
to suffer further for the love of God, and then to die alone, an instruction which
inficted perhaps the deepest emotional toll.
Already thinner from fasting and penitence, her condition worsened
considerably throughout the year. She developed pleurisy and an abscess in her chest
cavity, and although this caused her monumental pain, it was a suffering she endured
readily, later remarking to a nun that we must be willing to suffer if we want to go to
heaven. In a further act of sacrifce, she continued to leave her bed every night to
pray, despite having become so weak she could no longer push her forehead to the
foor (this practise she only stopped when a priest told her it was permissible to
continue her assaults on heaven from a prone position). When briefy home from
treatment, she would continue to walk to weekday Mass, emaciated and exhausted.

Later, she returned to another hospital in Lisbon, where she died in March
1920, three weeks before her tenth birthday.
Today the Church celebrates and remembers Jacinta as a strikingly frm
believer; of three exceptionally pious shepherd children, she was the most devout, the
one who possessed the most resolute dedication to her convictions and to God. In the
second half of her short life, she suffered monumentally from neglect and disdain,
from self-denial, from the unbearable weight of a perceived responsibility for the
crimes of mankind but never from doubt, that which even bishops of Rome, or
Camus for all his empiricism, can never circumvent. This is perhaps why Francis
spoke of the virtue of children during his homily: it is a combination of the depth of
their imagination with the innocent smallness of their worldly experience that allows
them to believe unwaveringly in the truth of what they are doing.
I often wonder what I would have said to her, given the chance. If I had been
with her in Aljustrel as she gave all her food away to her fock; in the prison cell the
clergy condemned her to; at her bedside as she awaited death in the hospital, and
lamented how much more she could have offered. There is an implacable desire to
intervene, to prevent; to say that it need not all weigh so much, that even those with
the purest intentions cannot account for a world of sin. She wouldn't have listened.
Children can be so tenacious, and are so easily led by the tenacity of others. Some
doubt can allow us to put matters in perspective, and prevent us from acting
unreasonably, lest we do harm to others or to ourselves. There is so much that we are
unsure of, that we cannot help or foresee. I wish she could have known it was not her
fault.