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The saints

Sts. Francisco and Jacinta Marto

Two shepherd children of Fátima, among the youngest non-martyr saints in history.

Feast: 20 February (date from the Roman Martyrology; not on the universal calendar) · 1908 to 1920 · The modern era · Fátima, Portugal

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Black-and-white photograph of Francisco and Jacinta Marto standing by a stone wall.

Fallaner, 2018. Wikimedia Commons, Public domain.

Home / The saints / Sts. Francisco and Jacinta Marto

The Cova da Iria, Fátima, 1917

Francisco and Jacinta were brother and sister, shepherd children in Portugal.1

In 1917, with their cousin Lucia, they saw Our Lady six times at Fátima.1

She asked them to pray the Rosary and make sacrifices for sinners, and they took it very seriously.

Patronage No official patronage we can cite yet. The Church remembers them as the shepherd children of Fátima.

01Sts. Francisco and Jacinta Marto

Little sacrifices

Francisco loved to pray alone to console Jesus, and Jacinta offered her hunger and pain for sinners.1

Both died young in the flu epidemic, and were canonized in 2017.1

Live it this week

Offer one sacrifice a day

The Fátima children offered small sacrifices for sinners. Each day this week, give up one small thing (a snack, a complaint, the last word) for someone who is far from God.

Notes

How we know · 1 source for this page
  1. Franciscan Media, Saint of the Day: “Saints Jacinta and Francisco Marto”. franciscanmedia.org. franciscanmedia.org

The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913) is in the public domain; we quote the New Advent edition. Texts of the Holy See are quoted briefly from vatican.va. Scripture: World English Bible, Catholic edition (public domain); Verse numbers are modern, with Douay-Rheims numbers in brackets where they differ. Photographs: Wikimedia Commons, credited under each image; full list on the photo credits page.

Lines in the narrator’s voice, without a note, are our reflection, not a historical claim. Stone & Incense restates Church teaching in plain words; our wording is not an official Church text. Report an errorCorrections.