The First of Six Appearances, Fixed as the Feast

Our Lady of Fatima falls on the thirteenth of May, the date this rule records, commemorating the first of a reported series of six Marian apparitions to three shepherd children, Lucia dos Santos and her cousins Francisco and Jacinta Marto, in the countryside near Fatima, Portugal, beginning on this date in nineteen seventeen and continuing monthly through October of the same year. The final apparition on the thirteenth of October is remembered for the reported Miracle of the Sun witnessed by a large crowd gathered at the site, an event widely reported in the Portuguese press of the time regardless of how the phenomenon itself is explained.

The local bishop opened a formal canonical investigation into the reported apparitions and, after several years of inquiry, approved the events as worthy of belief in nineteen thirty, permitting public devotion at the site, and the feast on the anniversary of the first apparition was subsequently established for the Catholic calendar. The observance is specifically and exclusively Catholic, resting on a set of twentieth century reported events and a diocesan investigation rather than on ancient scriptural or conciliar grounding, and it carries no equivalent observance in Orthodox or Protestant tradition, which recognize no comparable apparition or its resulting feast.