Translated by the Dominican Nuns of the Perpetual Rosary. Fatima.

There are not too many biographies written about ten year olds, indeed many biographies about the great and the famous barely give a nod to their subject before this age. It is as if childhood is a sort of netherworld, a sweet but awkward hiatus between the embryo and the adult.

Most of us would be hard pressed to write a readable book about our own childhood so one must tip one's cap to Fr. Leite for assembling the details of his subject's short life and laying before the reader a charming, informative though essentially devotional biography.

If a reviewer was forced to make a criticism I suggest it would be to question the use - not excessive, just a touch - of that adulatory approach to his subject that has given hagiography a bad name. Francisco was all boy and when his immersion in prayer came to dominate his life he didn't glide into a genderless world of pastels and holy pictures.

Indeed, he was all the more boy. Hagiographers would be for sticking a palm in his hand and placing him on a pink cloud. He's still not beyond throwing stones at the boys from Boleiros, but because that offends the One he has set his heart on he eschews stone-throwing as he would a satanic rite.

Fr. Leite, as I've suggested, is not immune to this colouring-in, but such is his sincerity and love and understanding of his subject that the reader wants to forgive him. If he was on trial for using too much sugar you would acquit him with a gentle hint that he might restrict his measures in future, then give the prosecution a lengthy tongue-lashing about wasting judicial time.

Fr. Leite is very familiar with his sources. Lucia's Memoirs have a central place on his desk, and quite rightly. Father di Marchi's Fatima from the Beginning, the interrogation and canonical processes and Eu Vi Nascer Fátima by Humberto Pasquale. Several quotes from this writer, Fr. Pasquale, shed light into corners of Francisco's life which I have long puzzled over, particularly the reasons why he had not made his first communion until he received the viaticum the day before his death. This, apparently, Fr. Pasquale got from Francisco's mother whose strictness, Fr. Leite tells us, was in keeping with the spirit of Jansenism which had still not disappeared from Fatima.

Another mystery this book clears up is why Jacinta's remains were translated to the Basilica on the 1st May 1951 and Francisco's weren't taken there until 13th March 1952. They had been buried, after all, in a communal grave in Fatima cemetery in 1935. The fact is they couldn't find his bones. Humble and unknown in life and even after death!, as Fr. Leite exclaims. But eventually Francisco's bones, hidden like his beloved Jesus, came to light.

One lesson of Francisco's life, and there are many, that comes over forcefully in this book is his constant thinking of heaven, yearning for heaven, living, as it were, in heaven. If heaven is the goal, the boy seems to be saying, there is no point in wasting time dribbling the ball around centre field or cutting a smart figure before the spectators.

The action takes place on the field of prayer, the rule book is found in the Mysteries of the Rosary. The Joyful Mysteries, home and village life, teach the tactics of humility. The Sorrowful Mysteries, the suffering, chosen and imposed, are the fight, but the Glorious are the object, the reason, the fulfilment of all. The goal justifies everything that takes place on the pitch; if your whole attention is focused there, everything else makes sense.

The book, as I say, is a devotional biography. But this is an observation, not a criticism. It does what it sets out to do and does it very well. I personally gained much from it and have already started reading it again. But the time is ripe, one feels, for an more analytic biography, such as Ida Friederike Görres wrote for Thérèse of Lisieux or Robert Bernard Martins for Gerald Manley Hopkins.

The material is available and has been marinated, so to speak, in the subsequent developement of the Shrine. The very unlikelihood of this illiterate peasant boy (who died of Spanish Flu at the age of ten years and ten months after having done nothing more spectacular than minding the family sheep and throwing stones at the boys from Boleiros) being one of the tools for its establishment tells of the apparent topsy-turveydom of divine organization, of the workings of grace, of the power of prayer.

Francisco Marto's life, like the life of any saint, is the Cinderella story retold. The difference is that the saints' lives are unnervingly true.

Published in Soul Magazine 2000

First English translation of fourth revised edition. Braga. 1986. First Portuguese edition 1946. Editorial A.O. Braga. 1999.

© Leo Madigan - Leo Madigan Homepage

Theotokos Catholic Books - Book Reviews Section - www.theotokos.org.uk