Msgr. Roger J. Landry
National Blue Army Shrine, Ashbury, NJ
109th Anniversary Celebration of the Second Apparition of Our Lady of Fatima
June 13, 2026
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The outline for this talk was:
- It’s a great joy to be back at this Shrine to mark Our Lady’s appearance to the three shepherd children 109 years ago today on June 13. I’ve been asked to focus fundamentally on the June apparition.
- Today particularly special because it coincides with the Memorial of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, which is so connected to what Mary revealed to the pastorinhos as the remedy for the problems she indicated the human race was in, and we’ll have a chance to ponder that connection more in the homily at the Mass to follow.
- Let’s turn to what occurred on June 13, 1917.
- June 13, as you know, is the Feast of St. Anthony. Most call him St. Anthony of Padua, because he spent he died there and his remains are there, in the beautiful Basilica built to house them, the site of so many miracles. But he spent just the last two years of his life there. He spent the first 17 years of his life in Lisbon, born right across from the Cathedral. He spent the next nine years of his life in the royal city of Coimbra. And so 26 of his 35 years were spent in Portugal. And the Portuguese have an intense love for him. His feast day is the feast of young people and Jacinta, Francisco and Lucia were expected to take part in the feasts.
- The previous month, when Mary had appeared to them, she asked them not only to pray and sacrifice for the conversion of sinners, but to come each 13th of the month for six months to see her where she was then appearing to her. They committed. But many of those around them did not believe what had occurred and were hoping the distraction of the feast of St. Anthony would keep them away. But it didn’t. At around 11 am, they went, with some who had come on foot from far away, to the Cova da Iria, prayed the Rosary, and then saw our Lady again.
- Lucia asked her to tell her what she wanted of her. Our Lady replied, “I wish you to come here on the 13th of next month, to pray the Rosary every day, and to learn to read. Later, I will tell you what I want.”
- Lucy asked for the cure of a sick person. Our Lady replied, “If he is converted, he will be cured during the year.”
- Then she returned to something she had sought the previous month, to find out whether she, Jacinta, Francisco would go to heaven and whether some whom they knew who had died were there.
- Lucia said, “I would like to ask you to take us to Heaven.”
- Our Lady said, “Yes. I will take Jacinta and Francisco soon. But you are to stay here some time longer. Jesus wishes to make use of you to make me known and loved. He wants to establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart.”
- “Am I to stay here alone?” Lucia asked, full of sadness.
- “No, my daughter,” Mary replied. “Are you suffering a great deal? Don’t lose heart. I will never forsake you. My Immaculate Heart will be your refuge and the way that will lead you to God.”
- Lucia recalled that as Our Lady spoke these words, she opened her hands and for the second time, she communicated to them the rays of that same immense light. They saw themselves in this light, as it were, immersed in God. Jacinta and Francisco seemed to be in that part of the light which rose towards Heaven, and Lucia in that which was poured out on the earth. In front of the palm of Our Lady’s right hand was a heart encircled by thorns which pierced it. We understood that this was the Immaculate Heart of Mary, outraged by the sins of humanity, and seeking reparation.
- Let’s look at various elements and try to learn from them.
- What did Mary ask?
- Mary asked for them to come on the 13th of every month
- The children committed to it, even when it would cause difficulty, like it had that morning and would especially grow over the months to come, particularly in August.
- Why Our Lady was asking for that commitment on a specific day, not to mention the 13th, will always be shrouded in mystery. Was it to overcome the superstition tied to the number 13? Was it to feature St. Matthias, the one who took the place of Judas, and to indicate to us how we’re called to continue the apostolate of the 12 apostles Jesus had chosen? Was it to connect her to Queen Esther who’s interventions on behalf of the Jews in Babylon was to prevent their destruction on the 13th of the month of Adar? We have no idea.
- But she was asking for a commitment on a specific day and the children committed and did everything they could to keep that commitment.
- It was a sign of the other commitments she would ask.
- It also pointed to the commitment she would eventually ask all of us through Sister Lucia on Dec 10, 1925 in Pontevedra when she was a Dorothean.
- Mary showed her her Immaculate Heart and stated:
- “See, my daughter, My Heart surrounded with thorns with which ingrates pierce me at every moment with blasphemies and ingratitude. You, at least, make sure to console me and announce that all those who for five months, on the first Saturdays, go to confession, receive Communion, say five decades of the Rosary and keep me company for 15 minutes meditating on the mysteries of the Rosary, with the purpose of making reparation to Me, I promise to assist them at the hour of death with all the graces necessary for the salvation of their souls.”
- Can we keep that commitment to prioritize an appointment with Mary on first Saturdays, starting with five, perhaps beyond five. Can we prioritize the Mass and confession on those days? Can we pray the Rosary as the shepherd children did and meditation for 15 minutes on the mysteries?
- To pray the Rosary every day
- This is a commitment to enter into Mary’s school not occasionally, but daily, to immerse ourselves with her in the mysteries of her Son’s life, to look at those mysteries from her perspective. The Rosary is a compendium of the Gospel. We see in those mysteries light for our life and the life of others. Annunciation. Visitation. Nativity. Presentation. Finding. Baptism. Cana. Kingdom and Conversion. Transfiguration. Eucharist. Agony. Scourging. Crowning. Cross. Crucifixion and Death. Resurrection. Ascension. Pentecost. Assumption and Coronation.
- Learn to read
- This seems like a strange commitment at first compared to the other two, but it’s obvious, retrospectively, that she was needing to learn how to read so that she could likewise write and help spread the message Mary was entrusting.
- Most of us don’t need to be asked by our Lady to learn how to read because we have had the privilege of being raised in homes where our parents taught us to read and in schools that built on that training.
- But there is a larger focus: are we using our learning, our capacity to read and write, to grow in faith and to help the faith grow in others? Do we read things that expand our soul, our knowledge of the faith, our capacity to spread it? Do we read the Bible? Do we read the writings of the Popes, like Pope Leo’s recent encyclical? Do we read what Sr. Lucia has left us as well as the lives of the saints and good spiritual books? Similarly, do we use our capacity to write to write about the faith, to email or text or handwrite letters to our friends and families, to write articles and blogs, perhaps even books, that can help others come to know Jesus?
- Intercession
- Lucy asked for the cure of someone who is sick. She was praying for that intention and bringing it to God through our Lady.
- We should always be praying for others.
- The call to pray and sacrifice for the conversion of sinners must always be accompanied by people’s concrete faces.
- Our Lady’s response is telling: “If he is converted, he will be cured during the year.” Our Lady was far more concerned about her son’s conversion than cure. She likely knew that his illness was opening him to prayer, to God, to what God was asking, and that if he was cured physically too soon, he would continue to take his relationship with God for granted. Like with the paralyzed man in the Gospel, the most important thing Jesus could give him was the gift of absolution, not healing of paralysis. Our Lady was training Lucia to pray for the most important stuff first.
- We, too, are called to intercede. It’s easy for us to pray for those with cancer diagnoses, or difficult pregnancies, or who are in the ICU. But do we pray for others’ conversions even more fervently? Would we rather than be in intense physical pain but in the state of grace, or would we want them pain free but in the state of sin?
- Since Mary was going to be asking them to pray and sacrifice for the conversion of sinners, she needed to help them to learn how to prioritize that conversion.
- She likewise wants to help us to make that same prioritization in our intercession. Yes, to pray for physical miracles and healings. But to pray for the more important spiritual ones far more. And when physical cures are given, to make sure that unlike the 9 cured lepers in the Gospel, they come back like the one to thank the Lord who gave that miracle.
- Desire for Heaven
- It’s very healthy for us to ponder their great desire for heaven.
- We remember the conversation one month early, when Mary appeared to them for the first time.
- After our Lady said, “I am from Heaven,” and Lucia asked “What do you want of me,” to be told about coming on the 13th for six months, she immediately asked:
- “Shall I go to Heaven too?”
- “Yes, you will”
- “And Jacinta?”
- “She will go also.”
- “And Francisco?”
- “He will go there too, but he must say many Rosaries.”
- Then I remembered to ask about two friends who had died recently.
- “Is Maria das Neves in Heaven?”
- “Yes, she is.”
- “And Amélia?”
- “She will be in purgatory until the end of the world.”
- Lucia, we could say, was laser-beamed on heaven. Her questions were not so much of curiosity but something of huge stakes for her, her cousin and her friends.
- On June 13, her desires were even firmer, “I would like to ask you to take us to Heaven.”
- Our Lady said, “Yes. I will take Jacinta and Francisco soon. But you are to stay here some time longer. Jesus wishes to make use of you to make me known and loved.
- Such a desire for heaven was not a desire to escape from the world or from responsibility. But they desired God. They desired eternity. They desired the saints, like St. Anthony.
- It’s important for us to have similar longings for heaven. It was essential for them to be able to receive her message, the following month, about hell, about the rise of atheistic communism, about the ravages of war, about the attacks against the Church, and even about the importance of devotion to Mary’s immaculate heart. Life has great stakes. Heaven and Hell are real, not mythical fancies. What matters most in life is the direction to which we’re heading and whether we get arrive.
- Jesus himself to try to stoke that desire with his words on eternal life, the joys of God’s eternal kingdom, the fact that he was going to prepare a place for us and come back again, with the prayer he put on our lips, “Our Father in heaven, thy kingdom come!,” with his words on judgment and what it takes to get to his eternal right side.
- Every Mass is supposed to stoke our desire for heaven when we lift up our hearts to the Lord, seeking the things that are above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.
- The celebration of Jesus’ ascension and Mary’s assumption and the feast of the saints like St. Anthony are all meant to help us focus on heaven. The prayer of the Rosary, particularly the glorious mysteries, is supposed to anchor our hearts beyond the cloud and correspond to the world of the Holy Spirit to go on mission to help everyone learn how to do so and to live in this world with our hearts set on the next, on heaven, holiness and eternal happiness, on communion with God and his saints.
- Do we ask the question they do? Will I go to heaven? Will my husband or wife, will my boyfriend or girlfriend, will my mom and dad, son and daughter, friends, family members, students, parishioners, enemies, those who serve us in public office, the celebrities on television, the athletes on the sports field, the people who sit next to us on planes, trains and buses, the people stuck in traffic with us, even the people here with us today at the Blue Army Shrine.
- Do we have the capacity to say, with Sr. Lucy, “I would like to ask you to take us to Heaven.” That’s obviously what Mary wants. But for her to get what she wants, like with the person for whom Lucy was praying, they need to respond to the grace of conversion.
- Life in this world with Mary
- For most of us, unlike Francisco would die the following year after many Rosaries, prayers and mortifications, unlike Jacinta who would die in 1920, we will not be taken soon, even though we don’t know the day or the hour. Lucy would come to live another 87 years, dying a month short of her 98th
- How are we to live in this world the right way?
- Lucy, full of sadness, asked our Lady, “Am I to stay here alone?”
- Mary had previously told her that God wanted her to remain to “establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart.” And so she replied, “No, my daughter. Are you suffering a great deal? Don’t lose heart. I will never forsake you. My Immaculate Heart will be your refuge and the way that will lead you to God.”
- As she spoke, Our Lady opened her hands from which can rays of immense light that immersed them. They saw themselves in this light as if they were immersed in God. Jacinta and Francisco, Lucia recounted, seemed to be in that part of the light which rose towards Heaven, and Lucia herself in the light that was poured out on the earth. In front of the palm of Our Lady’s right hand was a heart encircled by thorns that pierced it, which they understood to be her Immaculate Heart, wounded by the sins of humanity and seeking reparation for the sins against her Son.
- Our Lady revealed to Lucia that she wanted her Heart to be Lucy’s refuge and path, that it would be the way she would live in the light and become a herald of that light on earth. Our Lady wanted to be Lucy’s companion and, as she would reveal the following month, consecration to her Immaculate Heart would be the way Lucy would live in that loving friendship and journey with Mary to the heaven for which she longed. Lucy would indeed experience that accompaniment of our Lady, would live out her consecration, and then, even from the cloister, help establish in the world devotion to Mary’s Immaculate Heart.
- Our Lady similarly wants to accompany us. She wants her heart to be our refuge and compass for our earthly life. She wants us to consecrate ourselves to her and to have us spread devotion to her Immaculate Heart, as the whole Church seeks to do today on the Memorial of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
- So there are five great lessons of June 13, 1917.
- Commitment at our Lady’s request
- Daily Rosary
- The importance of using our ability to read and write for the faith
- Intercession
- Desire for Heaven
- Mary’s luminous accompaniment throughout life on the way to heaven
- Spreading and establishing devotion to her Immaculate Heart
- I would like to focus in particular on the way someone in particular showed us to live this.
- Archbishop Fulton Sheen
- On September 24 this year, Archbishop Fulton Sheen, my predecessor for 16 years as National Director of the Pontifical Mission Societies in the USA, will be beatified in St. Louis. I hope you all will be there. Tickets are expected to become available this week.
- Two days ago, on June 11, the day on which the US bishops consecrated our country to the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Orlando, we marked the 75th anniversary of Sheen’s episcopal consecration.
- Sheen had a tremendous devotion to our Lady.
- As a four-day-old baby, he was consecrated to our Lady by his mother.
- He made that consecration his own 12 years later on the day of his first communion.
- He referred to her as “The Woman I love.”
- And he was a big supporter of this National Blue Army Shrine, founded three years before he became National Director and moved to New York, and was a friend of its founders. When Shrine co-founder John M. Haffert wrote his beautiful work Mary in Her Scapular Promise in 1940, later republished in 1971 as Sign of Her Heart, he asked then Monsignor Sheen to write the preface, which he did. In it Sheen brought us back to the essential importance of Mary in our Catholic faith. He wrote:
- “Mary has been constituted by her divine Son as the intermediary between our needs and his wants; such is the roles she played at the Marriage feast of Cana, when she interceded for the needy guests to the miraculous power of her divine Son. It’s a singular fact that in answer to her request, our Lord addressed her, not as Mother, but as woman, as if to imply that once she began interceding for the humanity whom he was about to redeem when ‘the hour’ would come, she entered into a larger relationship than merely that of being his mother, namely, that of ‘Woman,’ the new mother of redeemed men. On the Cross, the title is confirmed again when our Lord addresses her as ‘Woman behold thy Son!’ She had brought forth her first born in the flesh at Bethlehem, now she was to bring for her first born in the spirit at Calvary, namely, John, the beloved disciple. He was the symbol of men whose motherhood Mary purchased at the foot of the cross in union with her divine Son. It’s not by a figure of speech, nor by a metaphor, that Mary is our mother, but rather by virtue of the pangs of childbirth. As a woman can never forget her child of her womb, so neither can Mary forget us!”
- When we look at Sheen’s life, we see seven of the characteristics Mary asked of Lucia, Francisco and Jacinta 109 years ago today.
- Commitment at our Lady’s request
- On the day of his priestly ordination, alongside his famous commitment to make a Eucharistic holy hour each day, he made a similar commitment to celebrate a votive Mass of our Lady every Saturday.
- Daily Rosary
- He not only prayed the Rosary, but 75 years ago this year, he created the World Mission Rosary to pray the Harvest Master through the intercession of the Queen of the Apostles for the needs of the missions and missionaries across the globe. He became a great apostle of the Holy Rosary, writing meditations and leading people across the world in this prayer.
- We will pray this right before his beatification Mass.
- Pope Leo in the Central African Republic launched the World Mission Rosary, made out of helium balloons, into the heavens, to show how it leads us to heaven.
- The importance of using our ability to read and write for the faith
- He was one of the most learned priests in US history, with his agregé from the University of Louvain, Belgium.
- He used his formidable mind to get to God through Mary and then his capacity to write to write 66 books, 3 columns a week, and many pamphlets, sermons, texts for his radio and television programs and more.
- Intercession
- He prayed often for the conversion of the world.
- He urged to be priests and victims, offering themselves together with Christ for the conversion and salvation of others.
- Desire for Heaven
- He had a huge hunger for heaven and helped others to calibrate their heart toward heaven.
- Mary’s luminous accompaniment throughout life on the way to heaven
- When he was consecrated a bishop, he chose as his motto, “Da per matrem me venire,” “Grant that I may come to you through your mother.”
- He wanted to do everything through his consecration to her, including come to heaven.
- He said that when he died, he hoped our Lord would say to him, “My mother has told me about you!”
- Spreading and establishing devotion to her Immaculate Heart
- Of all 66 of his books, he said his favorite was his 1954 book, “The World’s First Love,” about Mary, in which he wrote extensively about the importance of Fatima. He wrote about her so that many could come to God through her.
- In it, he wrote extensively about the meaning of her Immaculate Conception and how, through devotion to her heart, we could learn how to seek purity and holiness of heart.
- He likewise supported the establishment of this Shrine and its founders.
- For all these reasons, soon to be Blessed Fulton Sheen is a good model for us about how to respond to Mary’s summons. During this time in which we prepare for his beatification, let’s ask his intercession so that we might make Our Lady of Fatima the woman we love, and like the pastorinhos and like Sheen, commit and consecrate ourselves to what Our Lady asks, to grow in daily love for her and the blessed fruit of her womb through the Rosary, to use all our learning to become better disciples and apostles, to intercede constantly for our own and others’ conversion and salvation, to hunger more and more for heaven, to recognize with gratitude her accompaniment through life, and to help establish ever firmly devotion to her immaculate heart, for which we now prepare to thank God at Mass on her feast.
- Commitment at our Lady’s request
- Mary asked for them to come on the 13th of every month
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