A Novena to Our Lady of Fatima

The three visionaries were Lucia dos Santos, then ten years old, and her cousins Francisco and Jacinta Marto, nine and seven, all from families of shepherds near the village of Fatima in central Portugal.

The instruction to pray the Rosary daily was repeated at every one of the six apparitions reported between May and October 1917, the only request made on every occasion.

The apparitions occurred during the third year of the First World War, and the request for prayer for peace and for the conversion of Russia came five months before the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917.

The children practiced voluntary penances, including giving away their lunch and wearing a rough cord around their waists, until their confessor and Church authorities told them to moderate the practices as excessive for their age.

On 13 October 1917, a crowd estimated at between thirty and seventy thousand people gathered at the Cova da Iria, including journalists from secular newspapers, and reported an unusual solar phenomenon later called the Miracle of the Sun.

Francisco Marto reported seeing the apparition but not hearing her speak; he died of influenza on 4 April 1919, aged ten, and was canonized by Pope Francis on 13 May 2017, the hundredth anniversary of the first apparition.

Jacinta Marto died on 20 February 1920, aged nine, in a hospital in Lisbon, having been separated from her family for medical treatment; she was canonized alongside her brother Francisco in 2017, both becoming among the youngest non-martyrs ever canonized by the Catholic Church.

Pope Pius XII consecrated the world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary in 1942, and Pope John Paul II performed a further act of consecration of Russia and the world in 1984, both acts tied directly to requests reported from the 1917 apparitions.

At the final apparition on 13 October 1917, the figure identified herself, according to Lucia's account, as the Lady of the Rosary, the same title under which a chapel and later a basilica were built at the Cova da Iria.