Fatima Vigil on the 100th Anniversary.

100 years ago Our Lady, the Holy Shepherdess, appeared to three little shepherd children.

I'm so happy Pope Francis is there, that the kids will be canonized - on the exact day of the first apparition - when Our Lady promised to take them to heaven.  Everyone in heaven is a saint ...  Our Lady took them to heaven and the Church affirms that in the canonization.

I've never really thought of Fatima in terms of the end of the world, but rather an intervention of the Mother of God - very much like the signs and prophecies of the Old Testament - to call humanity to reform their lives, to amend their lives, to repent and be converted, because God is so gravely and consistently offended in modern times.  God loves us and sent his Mother - the Mother of Jesus - to call us to repentance and devotion through acts of penance and reparation.  God has revealed the Blessed Virgin as the Great Sign to the world - the revelation of the Immaculate Heart of Mary as our refuge and way that will lead us to God is for me at the heart of the message of Fatima.  Her Immaculate Heart is the paradise of God, the garden enclosed, at the center of which is the tree of life, Jesus Christ - our way, our truth and our life.

St. Louis de Montfort explains what I am trying to say more clearly and doctrinally:

Mary is God's garden of Paradise, his own unspeakable world, into which his Son entered to do wonderful things, to tend it and to take his delight in it. He created a world for the wayfarer, that is, the one we are living in. He created a second world - Paradise - for the Blessed. He created a third for himself, which he named Mary. She is a world unknown to most mortals here on earth. Even the angels and saints in heaven find her incomprehensible, and are lost in admiration of a God who is so exalted and so far above them, so distant from them, and so enclosed in Mary, his chosen world, that they exclaim: "Holy, holy, holy" unceasingly.

[T]here is no place where God can be more present to his creature and more sympathetic to human weakness than in Mary. It was indeed for this very purpose that he came down from heaven. Everywhere else he is the Bread of the strong and the Bread of angels, but living in Mary he is the Bread of children. - Secret of Mary

Don't associate the Blessed Virgin with doom and gloom.  Don't make up or pay attention to stories and conspiracy theories about the Blessed Virgin and her messages, don't buy into the cultish lies and speculations, or the anti-papist, anti-clerical secrets claimed to be embedded in approved texts.  That is sinful and does not make reparation for the sins committed against Our Lady's Immaculate Heart.

St. Francisco, St. Jacinta, pray for us.