Hundreds of thousands of people turned out for an outdoor mass celebrated by the pope today at the Portuguese shrine of Fatima.
The mass was the centrepiece of pope’s four-day visit to Portugal and marked the anniversary of the day 93 years ago when three local shepherd children reported having visions of the Virgin in the small farming town.
The May 13th celebrations are one of the Catholic church’s major annual pilgrimages to a site where, many believe, the Virgin still works miracles.
“I have come to Fatima to pray, in union with Mary and so many pilgrims, for our human family, afflicted as it is by various ills and sufferings,” the pope, the third to visit Fatima, said to an audience of up to 500,000 people.
Urging the infirm to take heart, he told the crowd it can “overcome the feeling of the uselessness of suffering which consumes a person from within and makes him feel a burden to those around him when, in reality, suffering which is lived with Jesus assists in the salvation of your brethren.”
His message struck a chord with many in the huge gathering, among them elderly and infirm people who, with their heads bowed, fingered rosaries.
Like Lourdes in France, Fatima attracts millions of pilgrims a year seeking cures. One of the rituals pilgrims perform at Fatima involves casting replicas of body parts - eyes, lungs, hearts - on sale at local shops into a bonfire while reciting a prayer asking for healing.
The pope blessed more than 400 infirm people after the mass. He also visited the tombs of the shepherd children in the shrine’s basilica, where he knelt and
prayed.
Pope Paul VI visited Fatima in 1967. Pope John Paul II - who was shot in St Peter’s Square on May 13, 1981 - came three times before his death, believing that the Virgin’s “unseen hand” had “rescued him from death,” the pope said today.
The bullet that almost killed John Paul forms part of the crown of Fatima’s statue of the Virgin. The statue, decked with white and yellow roses, was carried shoulder-high through the crowd by soldiers before the mass.
The pope has spoken repeatedly about the sufferings of the world and even the church’s troubles during the trip, saying the “sins of the church” were responsible for the clerical sex abuse scandal.
Portugal is nearly 90 per cent Catholic, but about a fifth of them describe themselves as practising Catholics.
Since arriving in Lisbon yesterday, the pope has scolded society for failing to care for the needy. He said the global economic crisis demonstrated the need for greater moral responsibility in running the global financial system.
A mass of people filled the shrine’s bowl-like square sloping down from the Holy Trinity church, which can hold close to 9,000 people, to the tiny Chapel of the Apparitions and, behind it, the 210ft basilica with a golden crown and a cross on its bell tower.
AP