Our Lady at Valinhos: The Apparition They Could Not Prevent
On the 13th of August 1917, many thousands of people stood in the Cova da Iria and waited for three children who never came.
At the usual hour there was a clap of thunder and a flash of light. A small white cloud settled over the holm oak, rested a few minutes, and was gone. Colours ran strangely over the faces of the crowd, over their clothes and the ground. Then the air was ordinary again, and the people were left in a field with no children in it.
Our Lady had come. She had not found the shepherds. They were nine miles away, shut in a room at Vila Nova de Ourém until they gave up her secret.
The man who set out to end it
Artur de Oliveira Santos was the Administrator of the district of Vila Nova de Ourém, a Freemason who had founded the lodge in his own town and governed as he pleased. The crowds gathering month by month on a hillside in his territory were, to his mind, a problem to be solved.
There was more than personal spite in this. The Portuguese republic was barely seven years old and openly hostile to the Church, and its officials read the crowds at the Cova as a political danger. He appears to have suspected that the secret three shepherd children were keeping was a secret about the republic.
Three days earlier he had interrogated Lucia, demanding the secret and a promise she would never return to the Cova. He got neither, and sent her home saying he would have his way even if it cost him her life. On the morning of the 13th he came to Aljustrel himself, all courtesy, told the fathers he wished to see the miracle with them, and put the children into his carriage. It set off toward the Cova, then swung about and went the other way at speed, the children wrapped in a rug so pilgrims on the road would not see them.
Nine interrogations and a cauldron of oil
At his house they were locked in a room and told they would stay there until they gave up the secret. The next day they were questioned nine times over, together and apart, and got nothing wrong and nothing crooked.
So he sent them to the public prison, into a cell with grown men, and had a cauldron of oil heated where they could see it. A prisoner urged Jacinta to save her life by telling what she knew. She said she would rather die.
He took her out first, then returned and told Francisco and Lucia she was dead. Then he took Francisco. Then he came for Lucia, who believed both her cousins had been killed, and who still would not tell him. None of them was harmed. The cauldron was a lie. He had frightened three small children half out of their wits and learned nothing.
The Rosary in the cell
Before any of the threats came, something else happened in that cell, and Lucia set it down years afterwards in her memoirs. The children decided to pray the Rosary. Jacinta took the medal from around her neck and asked one of the prisoners to hang it on a nail in the wall for her. They knelt in front of it and began. The prisoners knelt and prayed with them.
Nobody saw it but the men in that room. No hillside, no crowd, no apparition. Three children robbed of their meeting with Our Lady gave her the only thing they had left to give, and a cell of criminals knelt beside them and joined in. It is the shape of nearly all the witness any of us will ever be asked to give.
Afterwards Jacinta cried for her mother. Francisco minded something else more. What he could not bear was that he had missed Our Lady.
Sent home on the feast of the Assumption
On the 15th of August, having got nothing, he had the children driven back to Fatima and set down at the parish rectory. It was the feast of the Assumption. He never tried again. It was the only serious attempt the civil power made to stop what was happening at Fatima, and it failed on Our Lady's own feast day.
Our Lady came to Valinhos
The following Sunday, the 19th of August, Lucia was pasturing the sheep at Valinhos, on the hillside above their hamlet at Aljustrel. Francisco was with her, and his elder brother John, Jacinta having been kept at home.
The air cooled. The sun paled. Lucia felt, in her own words, something supernatural approaching and enveloping them. She knew what was coming, and that Jacinta was not there. She asked John to run and fetch her. He did not want to go. She offered him two small coins, and he ran.
Then came the flash of light they always called lightning. Jacinta arrived, and a moment later Our Lady was standing on a holm oak.
Lucia: What does Your Grace wish of me?
Our Lady: I want you to continue to go to the Cova da Iria on the thirteenth of each month, and to continue to pray the Rosary every day. In the last month I will perform the miracle so that all may believe.
Then her face changed. Lucia said she became serious, and more than serious.
Our Lady: If they had not taken you to Ourém, the miracle would have been greater.
She promised that some of the sick would be cured. Then, sadder still:
Our Lady: Pray, pray much, and make sacrifices for sinners, for many souls go to hell because there is no one to sacrifice and pray for them.
She rose toward the east as she always did. The children cut the branches from the tree she had stood on and carried them home, and they gave off a sweetness that belonged to no tree.
What she meant by it
Our Lady was not prevented. She came six days late, on a different hillside, and everything she promised still came to pass. In October the sun danced over seventy thousand people. Heaven was not defeated by a locked door and a heated cauldron. And yet something was lost, and she said so, and said it sadly. The obstinacy of one hard man in one small district cost the world some part of a mercy God had meant to give it.
The Church proposes Fatima for our devotion rather than imposing it as an article of faith, and we should not press this further than it will bear. But if obstruction can cost a miracle, fidelity can obtain one.
She closed with sinners, and with the fact that many are lost for want of anyone willing to pray for them. What she asked in answer was simple: prayer, and small sacrifices offered on purpose. She had already given them the words.
O Jesus, this is for love of Thee, for the conversion of sinners, and in reparation for the sins committed against the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
Written into our own foundations
In September 1844, at the first Provincial Synod in Sydney, Archbishop John Bede Polding and his bishops placed the Church in Australia under the patronage of Our Lady, invoked under the title Help of Christians. For the colony's first decades there was scarcely a priest to be had, and what kept the faith alive in Catholic households was, in very large part, the Rosary said at home by people who had nothing else.
We are not a country that gaols children for saying they have seen Our Lady. We are something milder and harder to resist: a country perfectly content for faith to be kept private, quiet, indoors, and nowhere anyone might have to notice it. The pressure here is a raised eyebrow. It works on most of us far better than the cauldron ever worked on Jacinta.
On Saturday the 10th of October, the nearest Saturday to the anniversary of the Miracle of the Sun, Australians will pray the Rosary aloud in public places across the country, in what we are calling Public Rosary 2026. That is a small thing next to a cell at Ourém. But it is the same act, in the same cause.
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What you can do
- Pray the Rosary every day. It is what Our Lady asked for at Valinhos, before anything else.
- Offer your ordinary difficulties for sinners, using the prayer above that she taught the children.
- Pray for those who set themselves against the faith here. The Administrator of Ourém has long needed our prayers.
- Pray the Rosary publicly on the 10th of October, or lead a public Rosary in your own town.
A last word on the children
Francisco and Jacinta Marto, the two children told the oil was heating for them, were canonised at Fatima on the 13th of May 2017. They were nine and seven when they refused to talk. The Administrator's name survives only because of what he did to them.
O my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell, and lead all souls to Heaven, especially those in most need of Thy mercy.
Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us.
Our Lady Help of Christians, pray for us.
Saints Francisco and Jacinta Marto, pray for us.
References
- The Apparitions of Our Lady of Fatima, America Needs Fatima.
- What Our Lady Said at Fatima on August 19, 1917, The American TFP.
- Czwarte objawienie Matki Boskiej Fatimskiej trójce pastuszków, Przymierze z Maryją (Stowarzyszenie Kultury Chrześcijańskiej im. Ks. Piotra Skargi).
- The Seers Kidnapped (August 13 to 15, 1917), The Fatima Center.
- Antonio A. Borelli, Our Lady at Fatima: Prophecies of Tragedy or Hope?
- Frère Michel de la Sainte Trinité, The Whole Truth About Fatima, Volume I: Science and the Facts.
- Sister Lucia, Fatima in Lucia's Own Words (Second and Fourth Memoirs).
Last updated: 18 August 2026 08:17