Thousands of Catholics congregated before dawn at Portugal's Fátima shrine where Pope Francis prayed with them
The 86-year-old pope skipped reading a speech that was on the programme of his two-hour visit to the world-famous shrine north of Lisbon, and which was expected to have been the centrepiece of the day.
Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni said the pope's apparently last-minute decision to skip the speech had nothing to do with Francis' eyesight. Later, on Francis' account on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, the Vatican published part of the unread speech, which before the trip had been billed by Vatican media as an appeal for an end the war in Ukraine.
Siblings Francisco and Jacinta Marto died several years later and were declared saints in 2017. The third, Lucia Dos Santos, became a nun and died in 2005 at the age of 97. Efforts are underway to make her a saint too.The first two were revealed soon after and concerned a vision of hell, seen by believers as a prediction of the outbreak of World War Two, a warning that Russia would "spread her errors" in the world, and a need for general conversion to God and prayer.
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