During his trip to Portugal for the centenary of the Fatima Marian apparitions in May, Pope Francis will canonize the Francisco and Jacinta Marto, during his visit to Fatima making them the youngest non-martyrs to ever be declared saints.
Pope Francis will also canonize six others during 2017.
Though children aren’t normally beatified or sainted because of their young age, Pope John Paul II beatified the two children and proclaimed them “blessed” in 2000.
The brother and sister, who tended to their family’s sheep with their cousin Lucia Santo in the fields of Fatima, Portugal, witnessed the supernatural apparitions of what they believed to be Mary, now commonly known as Our Lady of Fatima. Francisco and Jacinta became sick with the deadly Spanish flu in 1918. Francisco died in April of 1919 and Jacinta in February 1920 from complications of Spanish flu. In another supernatural vision before their deaths, the alleged virgin told the children that she would take them to heaven soon.
The third children Lucia spent her life as a nun in a Carmelite convent. She died in 2005. She is now being considered for beatification. The five-year waiting period after death was waived after three years.
The whole system of praying to dead people called saints to ask them to intercede with God for them is blasphemy because it counters the very words of Christ who said, “No man cometh unto the Father, but by me,” John 14:6. To offer another method of access to God and salvation is nothing less than making the Bible invalid.
“The Roman Church now presents a fair front to the world, covering with apologies her record of horrible cruelties. She has clothed herself in Christlike garments; but she is unchanged. Every principle of the papacy that existed in past ages exists today. The doctrines devised in the darkest ages are still held. Let none deceive themselves.” The Great Controversy, page 571.