Victim of the Spanish Flu Pandemic, Francisco always maintained a supernatural perspective on life, suffering, and death.
Newsdesk (06/10/2025 11:42, Gaudium Press) Our Lady appeared in Fatima to Lucia, Francisco and Jacinta. However a grave prediction hovered over Francisco and Jacinta: Our Lady had foretold that they had only a short time to live before they would go to Heaven. Who would be taken first and under what circumstances? They themselves did not know. Meanwhile, they lost no opportunity to offer sacrifices in reparation for the offences committed against the beautiful Lady and her Son Jesus.
A placid, meditative and religious child
Francisco was the first to die, on April 4th, 1919, victim of the famous influenza that took on pandemic proportions at the end of the First World War. He was almost eleven years of age, a year and a half older than Jacinta. They were the two youngest children of Manuel Pedro Marto and Olympia de Jesus dos Santos. At play and in grazing the sheep and cattle, they were always accompanied by their cousin Lucia, whose house was close to theirs.
In her Memoirs, Sr. Lucia says that “Apart from his features and his practice of virtue, Francisco did not seem at all to be Jacinta’s brother,” on account of the contrast between his quietness and her vivacity. He happily took part in games, but he readily yielded to the preference of others, and placed little importance on winning. When the other children denied him the title of victor, he would reply: “You think you won? That’s alright! I don’t mind!”
Singing and playing the fife was much more to his liking; he was content to withdraw from childish circles and amuse himself with his music. During the long hours of shepherding, he would climb up on a rock and alternately play and sing popular airs praising the charms of the Portuguese hill country.
Together with the two girls, he awaited nightfall so as to watch Our Lady and the Angels lighting their lamps, as they called the stars. They would count them, one by one, until they could no longer number them. But what he most liked was to contemplate the sunrise and sunset, more beautiful in his mind than the moon or the stars: “No lamp is as beautiful as Our Lord’s,” he remarked to Jacinta, referring to the sun, knowing that his little sister preferred the moon, taken as Our Lady’s lamp, because it did not hurt the eyes.
The Most Religious
A superficial observer of Francisco might judge him to be a boy like any other, even a bit of a daydreamer. But the events that unfolded in the Cova da Iria revealed the true stature of the seer who, among the others, was “the most religious of them all.”
The boy’s overflowing love for Jesus and his determination to comfort Him can be traced back to the Communion administered to them by the Angel and, above all, to the apparitions of June, July and October, in which Our Lady showed them the inaccessible light of the Trinity. This grace attracted them in a definitive manner, prompting unsurpassed awe: “We were on fire in that light which is God, and yet we were not burnt! What is God?… We could never put it into words. Yes, that is something indeed which we could never express! But what a pity it is that He is so sad! If only I could console Him!…”
This yearning, born in his virginal soul, was not merely the fruit of a fleeting ecstasy. Blessed Francisco Marto had decided to console Jesus by every means in his reach, particularly by his own conversion.
Meeting the Queen of Heaven, Francisco begins to live on another plane: his affections are entirely for her and her Divine Son, his thoughts soar at every moment to the Tabernacle and to the hidden Jesus, as he refers to the Blessed Sacrament, and his actions are born of a continual and deeply rooted interior relationship with the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
Change of Life
How could he be the same and return to his former amusements after feeling the most sweet gaze of the Lady of the Rosary upon him? Thus, beginning to sing the first lines of one of the songs that had previously so delighted him, he decides: “Let’s not sing any more. Since we saw the Angel and Our Lady, singing doesn’t appeal to me any longer.”
Francisco’s sporadic domestic negligence or bouts of laziness vanish; they give way to a penitential and contemplative spirit, avid to console Jesus and collaborate with the offering of his life for the magnificent victory of the Holy Church in the events that had been revealed to him.
At the end of October of 1918, Francisco and Jacinta fell gravely ill, never to recover. A strong fever ravaged them. At first there was hope of a cure, but it soon became clear that their condition was irreversible.
The Heavenly Lady visited the Marto family house to comfort them, as Jacinta told her cousin Lucia: “Our Lady came to see us. She told us she would come to take Francisco to Heaven very soon.” From that moment on, the two siblings awaited with ardent love the joyful day of their departure for eternity.
On April 3rd of 1919, a priest came from Fatima bringing the Viaticum to Francisco, who had been requesting it ardently for months. That was his second Communion, preceded by that which he received from angelic hands. The vehement desire to receive Communion, during his illness, was the sole incentive that encouraged him to live and, when he was finally able to receive the Eucharist, he confessed to Jacinta: “I am happier than you are, because I have the hidden Jesus within my heart. I’m going to Heaven, but there I will ask Our Lord and Our Lady to take you there quickly too.”
On the following morning, without agony or death-rattle, with the serenity of one who enters the gentle repose of the just, Francisco Marto died a saintly death in Aljustrel. The funeral procession of the little shepherd was accompanied by only a few friends, reciting the Rosary in simple homage on the way to the cemetery of the village of Fatima. Who could have imagined, at that time, the throngs of pilgrims who would gather at the tomb of this confidant of Mary, to beseech his intercession?
Text extracted, with adaptations, from Heralds of the Gospel Magazine No. 114, April 2017. By Sr. Carmela Werner, EP.
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