"Child-saints rejoice you, small immaculate souls"

The thought occurred to me that I might mention the newly-canonised visionaries of Fatima during the consecration at mass this morning, but I realised I couldn’t remember which two of the three children it was. Was it Jacinta who was canonised yesterday or Lucia? I asked the Roman Catholic parish priest as he was on his way out (we share the church building with the Papists). Scandalously, he didn’t know either. The office computer and Professor Google came to my aid.

There are other child-saints in the annals of the Church, of course, but they’re mostly a bit distant (the Holy Innocents, for instance), or actually adolescents (St Agnes, St Pancras), or completely legendary (St Romwald, who preached a sermon on the Trinity as a newborn and died at the age of three days). Siblings Jacinta and Francisco Marto are the youngest saints declared in modern times, dying during the influenza epidemic of 1918 at the ages of 7 and 9 respectively. This only became possible after the Vatican relaxed the rules a bit in 1981: previously candidates for sainthood had to have achieved a degree of maturity, but now the regulations recognise that a child can be ‘precocious’ in faith and awareness. In fact, the resolve of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints crumbled in this respect precisely because of the campaign to canonise the children of Fatima. 

I've never paid that much attention to the Fatima manifestations, partly because I'm not that much of a Marian devotee and partly because they've become so embedded in the imaginary world of ultra-reactionary Roman Catholicism. There are still Catholics who believe that the Vatican has suppressed texts of the visions revealed to the three children in 1917, texts that suggest the Church of Rome will go into apostasy and that the end of the world will follow soon afterwards. Even leaving aside the conspiracy theories and nutcase enthusiasms, the illiterate peasant children who met the Virgin Mary in the pasture outside their village so epitomised the piety of their culture and age that they’ve become (literally) icons for that piety, a sort which is a bit of an embarrassment to modern Catholicism. The surviving photographs of the children (here, for instance, or here, or here) do show them somewhat as eerily adult and theatrically pious, though perhaps that’s what coming across the Virgin Mary in a field will do to you. It would be fairer to reflect that they’ve been dressed up in their best clothes by grown-ups, and their disconcerting expressions are what any poor children would have adopted when confronted with a camera around that time. If you look at photos of British schoolchildren lined up in classes just before the First World War, they scowl in the same way. They’re just being serious. One gets the slight impression that the children were already icons even during their lives, and, while nobody doubts their genuineness, they were clearly surrounded by an awful lot of people who had certain expectations of them. As an antidote, compare this photo of a tired St Jacinta being carried through a crowd. She’s not enjoying herself much, is she?

But the point about children is that they aren’t that serious, and roping the visionaries of Fatima into grown-up ideas of what religious people should be like would be a shame. Jacinta, Francisco and Lucia (yet to be canonised, her) would have run about and played and laughed around the early twentieth-century village of Aljustrel like children everywhere. Thankfully some of the art that’s emerged around the children is less weighted with the significance they must have had to bear at the time of their visions and since. The tombs at the Fatima basilica where Pope Francis went to pray are actually rather nice, especially the statue of St Jacinta, surrounded by stylised hills and sheep.

I hope the holy children of Fatima will, in their sainthood, be allowed to be children. Because that’s the radical, subversive quality of their witness: the fact they were poor, and the fact that they were young. Contemplating them might remind us more of God’s clear bias towards the child and the childlike. It might act as some reparation for a Church that, at the same time as it idolised some children, ignored and damaged others: the shadow side of the festivities yesterday in Portugal.

As for me, I’ll wait for the canonisation of Blessed Antonietta Meo, who was even younger than the Marto siblings: she died of cancer at six in 1937 a year after having a leg amputated. She looks like a little Louise Brooks. She would skip in front of the tabernacle at church and say ‘Jesus, come and play with me!’ and I defy you to repeat that without your eyes stinging more than is dignified for a grown-up.