The Fatima Prayer and the Five Prayers of Fatima

“Most in need of thy mercy”, or “most in need”? Both are in use and neither is wrong. Lucia’s Portuguese, as the Shrine prints it, ends principalmente as que mais precisarem, “especially those who are most in need”, with no word for mercy. The English most widely printed adds “of thy mercy”, as this site’s Rosary guide does, and so does the Shrine’s own guide to praying the Rosary: “lead all souls to heaven especially to those who are most in need of Your mercy.” The meaning is the same. Say the version your parish says, so that you can pray it aloud together.

Which souls are “most in need”? The setting answers it. The children had just been shown what it is to be lost, and told that souls could be saved. The prayer asks first for sinners in danger of being lost for ever. Many Catholics also hold the souls in purgatory in the same intention, and nothing forbids it; there is a whole page on praying for the souls in purgatory.

Is it required? No. It is a custom, and a very widely kept one, but not part of the Rosary’s definition. When the Church sets out what the Rosary is, in the Apostolic Penitentiary’s Enchiridion Indulgentiarum, she names decades of Hail Marys with the Our Father between them and meditation on the mysteries; the Fatima Prayer is not mentioned. The U.S. bishops’ list of the prayers of the Rosary gives the Creed, the Our Father, the Hail Mary, the Glory Be and the Hail, Holy Queen, and does not include it either. The Shrine of Fatima, naturally, prays it after every decade.

When was it added to the Rosary? Not by any decree. The words date from July 13, 1917, and the custom spread with the Fatima message itself, which the Bishop of Leiria recognized in 1930 (see below). Today most English-speaking Catholics learn the Rosary with it built in. If you learned the Rosary without it, you did not learn it wrong.

What the Church does attach to the Rosary is an indulgence: plenary when five decades are prayed without interruption in a church, in a family or with others, with the mysteries meditated; partial otherwise (Enchiridion, concession 17). Where Marian devotion sits in Christian worship at all, the Catechism says in one line: the Rosary is “an ‘epitome of the whole Gospel’” (CCC 971).

Its first line is faith, hope and charity, with adoration at their center. Its second line turns them outward: it asks pardon for the people who, for whatever reason, do none of those things. It is a prayer of standing in for others, not of judging them, and it is short enough to say in a waiting room. At his second visit, that summer, the angel told the children he was the guardian angel of Portugal. The Church’s teaching on the angels who guard people and places is on the Guardian Angel prayer page.

“Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity” is the Church’s own way of saying that the whole Christ is present in the Eucharist. The prayer does what the Mass does: it offers the Son to the Father, and asks mercy for sinners because of that offering, not because of the one praying. It is the natural prayer for a visit to a church or a holy hour. The same logic of offering, made each morning for the whole day, is the Morning Offering.

It is the shortest of the five and the easiest to carry: a genuflection in words. At the children’s canonization, Pope Francis spoke of their desire to remain ever near “the hidden Jesus” in the tabernacle. The same day ended with the request the Lady repeated at every apparition: “Pray the Rosary every day, in order to obtain peace for the world, and the end of the war.”

A “sacrifice” here means something small, freely given: the last word in an argument not taken, a cold morning not complained about, a dull duty done well. The prayer turns the small thing into an offering by naming who it is for. It is not a way of seeking out suffering, and nobody is asked to add to a burden they are already carrying.

Francisco died at home on April 4, 1919, and Jacinta in a Lisbon hospital on February 20, 1920, both having fallen ill in the influenza epidemic of 1918. John Paul II beatified them at Fatima on May 13, 2000, and Pope Francis canonized them there on May 13, 2017, the centenary. Lucia became a Carmelite nun, wrote her memoirs at her bishop’s request, and died in Coimbra on February 13, 2005; her cause for beatification opened in 2008.

The “secret” has three parts. Lucia wrote down the first two in her Third Memoir, dated August 31, 1941, and the third on January 3, 1944. It was published by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, with a commentary by Cardinal Ratzinger, in The Message of Fatima in 2000. John Paul II, shot in St. Peter’s Square on May 13, 1981, the anniversary of the first apparition, attributed his survival to Our Lady’s protection. For another apparition the Church has recognized, with its own prayer and feast, see Our Lady of Lourdes.

Required, no. Fatima is what the Church calls a private revelation, and the Catechism is precise about their standing: “They do not belong, however, to the deposit of faith. It is not their role to improve or complete Christ’s definitive Revelation, but to help live more fully by it in a certain period of history” (CCC 67). Cardinal Ratzinger’s commentary of 2000 draws the practical line: such a message “is a help which is offered, but which one is not obliged to use.” Its test is whether it leads to Christ.

So a Catholic may pray the Fatima prayers every day, or never, and be equally Catholic. What cannot be done is to treat them as charms: to attach an outcome to the words themselves is what the Catechism calls superstition (CCC 2111). The prayers ask; they do not oblige God. Their own content, conversion, adoration and mercy for sinners, is simply the Gospel’s: “Repent, and believe in the Good News” (Mark 1:15).

“The refuge of sinners and the way that leads to God” is the promise of June 13, 1917, turned into a petition. The prayer asks Mary to lead, and gives the glory to God: the same order as every approved Marian prayer.