Spirituality

Jacinta’s attitude of compassion is central. We recognise in her a heart with depth and passion, completely dedicated to the mission entrusted to her by Heaven. Her words have come down to us: “If only I could put into everyone’s heart the fire that I have inside my chest burning and making me love the Heart of Jesus and Mary so much!” (MIL 130). From the beginning of the apparitions, she developed a deep devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

In the words of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, we can understand how love for Our Lady shaped Jacinta’s life: “To have devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary is to approach this attitude of the heart, in which the fiat – your will be done – becomes the conforming centre of all existence”. In fact, the little shepherd Jacinta learned from Mary and at the school of her Immaculate Heart to make God’s will the conforming centre of her existence: she learned from her to “do as our Lord does” (MIL 44).

This desire to conform her existence to the Heart of Jesus led Jacinta to want to follow him, travelling the same path as the Master. Our Lord didn’t shy away from the agony of Gethsemane, the loneliness and abandonment of the Cross. And little Jacinta didn’t reject the loneliness of illness, the aridity of being denied Eucharistic communion – which would have been her last possible consolation at the moment of death – she didn’t escape the open wound in her chest, resembling the pierced heart of Jesus, whom she loved so tenderly. And she lived all this with serene joy and in a surrender of love, as those questioned in her canonical process testify.

Little Jacinta, who “loved to think so much” (MIL 61), meditating and keeping everything in her heart, as the Lady who was now her “teacher in the school of holiness” (John Paul II) had done, “and who introduced her to the intimate knowledge of Trinitarian Love” (Benedict XVI), learnt to have a universal heart. During her stay in prison in Ourém, when Lucia asked her to choose an intention for which to offer sacrifices – for poor sinners, or for the Holy Father, or in reparation to the Immaculate Heart of Mary – Jacinta didn’t hesitate to reply: “I offer for all, because I love them all” (MIL 53).

She developed a deep sense of compassion for all forms of human suffering that she realised in the intense light of God and through the Immaculate Heart of Mary. She was insatiable in her thirst to pray and offer sacrifices for sinners. Her soul burned with this “zeal” for the salvation of humanity, which she felt to be her own. Listening to Jacinta, in her countless expressions of compassion for all kinds of suffering and misery, makes us grateful to the Father, because he has hidden these truths from the wise and intelligent, and revealed them to the little ones (cf. Mt 11:25).