11 february, 2014
| As usual since about 30 years till today, the Shrine of Fatima will hold, next June 9 to 10, the Children’s Pilgrimage. The Prayer Area will once again get full of color and life with the presence of thousands of children, coming from all over Portugal to honor Our Lady, Who spoke here to the Little Shepherds, Who in turn passed the Message of the Lady on to us. This year, according to the Shrine’s pastoral project for the celebration of the Centennial of the Apparitions, the main event recalled shall be Our Lady’s Apparition of July 1917. The inspiring sentence chosen for the Pilgrimage is part of the prayer taught, in that third apparition, to the Little Shepherds for when they made a sacrifice: “O My Jesus, it is for the love of You!” It is around this intention proposed by Our Lady that all the other moments of the Pilgrimage will be built. Everything will be done to awaken in children the reparation value of their deeds done and offered up to the Lord, for the love of Him, in the spirit of reparation and for the conversion of sinners, just like the Little Shepherds used to do. In another words, everything will be done to awaken in them the awareness that all of us can and should help, with our gestures and deeds of repairing love, to restore this world so wounded and disfigured by sin. Thus, even our sacrifices and hardships gain a new meaning, because they are our response to the love of God for us. May’s campaign, which will arrive in the parishes on time, will help the children to interiorize this sense of reparation and to better attend catechesis in Fatima, for those who come to the Pilgrimage. Ir. Maria Isolinda |
