Tradition

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Visionaries gathers the three children behind the two best known Marian apparition accounts in this atlas, and the group is defined entirely by what happened to them afterward rather than by the apparitions themselves, which belong to the sites they reported.

Lucia dos Santos was the eldest of three children who reported the 1917 apparitions at the Cova da Iria near Fatima. Her two younger cousins, Francisco and Jacinta Marto, both died within three years of the events; Lucia outlived them by more than eighty years, entered religious life as a Carmelite nun at Coimbra, and became the principal source for the tradition's memory of what the three children said they saw, since she alone survived to record it at her superiors' request.

Melanie Calvat and Maximin Giraud, a fourteen year old shepherdess and an eleven year old cowherd, together reported the apparition of a weeping woman on the mountain above La Salette-Fallavaux, France, on 19 September 1846. The bishop of Grenoble approved the apparition after a five year canonical investigation in 1851, though unlike the Fatima children neither La Salette visionary was ever canonized. Their adult lives diverged sharply: Melanie entered religious life and spent decades publishing disputed longer secrets she said the apparition had entrusted to her, while Maximin's life was markedly less settled, including failed attempts at seminary and medical study, and he never entered religious life.