You’ve written about the apparitions in 1925 to Lucy of Fatima, but you didn’t say anything about her being a nun. When did she become a nun and what do we know about her life after 1925?
First, let us return to the apparitions and the request from Our Lady to make public the devotion of the Five First Saturdays. Lucy understood that the devotion was part of the secrets Our Lady had revealed to her and therefore she was not at liberty to make it public.
On 17 December, seven days after the apparitions, she went to the tabernacle and asked Jesus what she was to do. She records that Jesus told her unequivocally: “My daughter, write what they ask of you; and everything that the Blessed Virgin revealed in the apparition in which she spoke of this devotion, write that down as well. As for the rest of the secret, continue to keep silent.” And so, she revealed the devotion, which has been popular ever since.
Lucy in fact was a nun when Our Lady appeared to her in December 1925. Less than two months before, on 24 October 1925, she entered the Sisters of St Dorothy as a postulant in their convent in Pontevedra, Spain. On 20 July 1926, she moved to Tuy, also in Spain, where she began her novitiate. She received her habit on 2 October of the same year, and she made her first profession of vows on 3 October 1928.
The following year, on 13 June 1929, Sr Lucy had a vision during which the Blessed Virgin told her: “The moment has come in which God asks the Holy Father, in union with all the bishops of the world, to make the consecration of Russia to my Immaculate Heart, promising to save it by this means.” She made her perpetual vows on 3 October 1934, taking the name “Sr Maria das Dores”, Sister Mary of Sorrows.
On 25 January 1938, an unusually bright aurora borealis, or northern lights, described variously as “a curtain of fire” and a “huge blood-red beam of light”, appeared in the skies over Europe as far south as Gibraltar. Sr Lucy believed this was the “night illuminated by a strange light in the sky” of which she had heard Mary speak as part of the Second Secret of Fatima, predicting the events which would lead to the Second World War and requesting acts of reparation, including the First Saturday Devotions and the Consecration of Russia.
Sr Lucy returned to Portugal in 1946, visiting Fátima incognito. In March 1948, after receiving special papal permission, she entered the Carmelite monastery of St Teresa in Coimbra. She remained there until her death. She made her profession as a Discalced Carmelite on 31 May 1949, taking the religious name Maria Lucia of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart.
Sr Lucy returned to Fátima on the occasion of four papal pilgrimages, all on 13 May. The first was that of St Paul VI in 1967 and the other three of St John Paul II: in 1982, in thanksgiving for having survived the assassination attempt on that day the previous year, in 1991 and in 2000 for the beatification of her cousins Jacinta and Francisco.
Sr Lucy wrote six memoirs, the first four between 1935 and 1941, the fifth in 1989 and the sixth in 1993. The English translation has been published in two volumes under the title Fatima in Lucy’s Own Words. An additional book was published in 2001, variously known as Calls from the Message of Fatima and Appeals from the Message of Fatima.
In her last years, Sr Lucy was ailing and eventually she became blind and deaf. She died at age 97 on 13 February 2005 at the Carmelite monastery in Coimbra, where she had lived since 1948.
On 13 February 2008, the third anniversary of her death, Pope Benedict XVI announced that, in her case, he would waive the five-year waiting period established by canon law before opening a cause for beatification. On 22 June 2023, Pope Francis approved the decree on her heroic virtues, thereby declaring her Venerable.
