The Portuguese Carmelite nun known worldwide as Sor (Sister) Lucia de Jesus dos Santos, who has died aged 97, was an icon to devout Catholics everywhere and one of the church's most influential women of the 20th century.
She was the last survivor of the three pastorinhos, or little shepherds, who claimed to have had a series of visions of the Virgin Mary near the Portuguese town of Fatima, south-east of Leiria, in 1917.
In later life, Sister Lucia was a close friend of Pope John Paul II. Vatican sources said her death had shocked the pontiff just as he was recovering from his recent illness.
Portuguese churchmen doubted the apparitions for years after Lucia and the other children reported them. But Vatican recognition in 1930 of the visions, declaring them to be "worthy of belief", and of prophecies Lucia said the Virgin Mary had made to her, turned Fatima into one of Catholicism's most revered pilgrimage destinations, making it Portugal's third most popular tourist attraction.
The two other little shepherds, cousins of Lucia, both died while still children, in the flu pandemic of 1919-20 and were eventually beatified by the Pope in 2000 during a visit to the shrine.
Lucia dos Santos, later given the name Lucia of the Immaculate Heart by the Carmelite order, was born in Aljustrel, near Fatima. She was 10 when she and her younger cousins, brother and sister Francisco and Jacinta Marto, were tending the family's sheep in May 13th, 1917, a date now commemorated by Catholics as the Feast Day of our Lady of Fatima. They said the Virgin Mary appeared to them on an oak tree, telling them to return to the same spot on the same day, the 13th, of every month. They did so, Lucia later recorded, until October 13th that year, after which the vision no longer appeared.
On every day of the 13th until then, the three children told their parents and priests, the Virgin reappeared, although only Lucia heard her voice. She later wrote down the "three secrets", the first two of which were revealed by the church after they appeared to have come true.
The first secret was interpreted as forecasting the end of the first World War and the second World War. The second appeared to predict the clash between Bolshevism in Russia and Catholicism and the eventual conversion of Russia. Lucia quoted the Virgin Mary as saying: "Russia will spread its errors around the world, promoting wars and persecution of the church," though she said later that, being a child, she had assumed at the time that "Russia" was "a woman, a bad woman".
The third prophecy had the Virgin Mary speaking of "a bishop dressed in white", who would "fall to the ground as though dead under gunfire". It was kept secret for decades by the Vatican, officials fearful that it might encourage an attack on church leaders, including the Pope.
Only in 2000 did the Vatican reveal the prophecy, suggesting that it referred to the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II by Mehmet Ali Agca in St Peter's Square in 1981.
The date of the attempt, May 13th - the same as the first apparition back in 1917 - added credibility to the theory, and the Pope subsequently visited the shrine at Fatima to give thanks for his survival. He took with him one of the gunman's 9mm bullets, which he placed in the crown of the Virgin's statue. The Pope often made it clear that he believed Lucia's visions had saved his life. It seems likely that she, too, will be beatified.
Sister Lucia, who had been deaf, blind and ailing for several years, died in her room in the Carmelite convent of Santa Teresa in the city of Coimbra, where she had lived since 1948. The Pope visited her there in 2000. The initial hostility to her accounts from Portuguese clergy drove Lucia to a convent school in Oporto in 1923, and then to a novitiate in Spain, where she took the name Lucia de Jesus on ordination in 1928. Two decades later she moved to Coimbra.
After initial burial in the convent grounds, her remains are expected to be transferred to the shrine of Fatima, close to where she saw her visions, the last of which reportedly attracted 50,000 onlookers, with millions visiting since. Portugal declared a day of mourning for Sister Lucia.
Lucia de Jesus dos Santos: born March 22nd, 1907; died February 13th, 2005