Sts. Francisco and Jacinta Marto

Who they were

Jacinta and Francisco Marto were seven and nine, shepherding the family flock with their cousin Lucia outside Fatima in Portugal, when the apparitions of 1917 began: six appearances from May to October of the Lady who, in the final one, before a crowd of tens of thousands, gave her name. I am the Lady of the Rosary. Her repeated request to the children was to pray the rosary every day, for peace, in the middle of the First World War.

The two children lived it in opposite keys. Francisco, quiet, was told he would need many rosaries, and spent his remaining months slipping away to console God, dying in the influenza of 1919 at ten. Jacinta, tiny and fierce, absorbed the apparitions' weight most deeply. Hospitalized alone in Lisbon, she offered every suffering deliberately, and died at nine, alone as she had foreseen, in 1920. They were canonized together in 2017, the centenary, and are the youngest non martyr saints in the Church's history.

Why people turn to Sts. Francisco and Jacinta Marto

Children who pray, and the parents teaching them, because a canonized seven year old changes what a child thinks prayer is for. The sick who offer it up have Jacinta by name. And anyone praying the rosary for peace is doing the thing the Lady of the Rosary asked these two to start.

How to ask their intercession

The request itself: one rosary today, for peace. With children, this is the natural place to start, since the two who were asked were children.