A papal visit of a few hours to Fatima to pray for peace in Ukraine

Francis is the fourth pope to visit Fátima, after Paul VI, John Paul II and Benedict XVI. He first visited in 2017 on the centenary of the first Marian apparitions to canonize two of the three children to whom Mary had appeared, Jacinta and Francisco. Earlier this year, he declared the third witness, their cousin Lucia, who was a cloistered nun and died in 2005, “venerable,” putting her also onto the path to sainthood.

The pope apparently opted not to read his prepared speech or the prayer to Our Lady that had been given in advance to journalists. Instead, “I prayed in silence for peace, with pain [in my heart], before the Madonna,” Pope Francis told Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni on the helicopter as he returned to Lisbon. Francis also gave a brief and off-the-cuff catechesis on Mary, who, he said, “always hastens to us whenever there is trouble” and who told the disciples “to do whatever Jesus asks” and invites us to do the same. “She points us to Jesus,” he said.

Before the trip to Lisbon, the patriarch of Lisbon, Cardinal Manuel Clemente, revealed in a Zoom interview with Vatican-accredited journalists that Pope Francis specifically asked to come to Fátima during his visit to Lisbon for World Youth Day, and that he expected the pope’s prayer at the shrine to be “a moment of great intensity.” He recalled that already on March 25, at the request of the Catholic bishops of Ukraine, Pope Francis had consecrated Russia and the Ukraine to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, while Cardinal Konrad Krajewski, the papal almoner, did likewise on that same day at the Fátima shrine.

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