The House of Sister Lucia, in Aljustrel, Fátima, which receives 300,000 visitors a year, will be reopened to the public on Friday, after eight months of restoration and museology work, which cost more than 338,000 euros.
Marco Daniel Duarte, director of the Department of Studies and Museum of the Shrine of Fatima, explained that “from the point of view of museology”, the House-Museum was prepared by looking at the property “from the perspective of what pilgrims are looking for”.
“Not the Dorothean or Carmelite [nun] Lucia, but the Lucia of childhood.”
The intervention was based on Lucia de Jesus’ accounts in her Memoirs and “other writings, where she mentions what was in each room”.
Thus, visitors to this House-Museum, just over two kilometers from the Cova da Iria shrine, will find the home of a rural family from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with bedrooms with period furniture, a kitchen with its artifacts, a living room with a loom and a sewing machine, a storage room with a chest for grain and, in an annex, the oven house.
In each room, phrases written by Sister Lucia, the eldest of the three shepherd children who were the protagonists of the events of Fatima in 1917, are projected.
“Lucia is an unavoidable figure in a history that has been globalized since the very beginning,” so “it’s not surprising that narratives have been created around her that don’t correspond to the truth,” said the director of the shrine’s museum, during a visit to the house for the media, ahead of the official inauguration of the works, scheduled for late Thursday afternoon.
To avoid inaccuracies, the entire intervention was supported by written documents.
Marco Daniel Duarte stressed that the work was multidisciplinary, adding that the house of Saints Francisco and Jacinta Marto – Lucia’s cousins – 200 meters away, will also be subject to restoration and museum intervention.
The house where Lucia de Jesus was born and lived in her early years with her parents and siblings was the scene of the first interrogations of the seers.
The reopening of the House-Museum of Sister Lucia takes place in the middle of this year’s summer course at the Shrine of Fatima, whose theme is “Lucia de Jesus: from an anonymous child to a major figure in contemporary Catholicism”.
The aim of this edition is to delve into the biography and historical context in which the seer of Fatima lived, with a special focus on the religious institutions to which she belonged.
Carlos Cabecinhas, rector of the Shrine of Fatima, Marco Daniel Duarte, António Araújo, from the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences of the New University of Lisbon and the Francisco Manuel dos Santos Foundation, Manuela Mendonça, from the Portuguese Academy of History, and Sister Ângela Coelho, vice-postulator of the Cause of Canonization of Sister Lucia, are some of the speakers in this course aimed at those who want to study the phenomenon of Fatima.
The 13th marks the first anniversary of the reading of the decree proclaiming the “heroic virtues” of Sister Lucia, whose promulgation was authorized by Pope Francis on June 22, 2023.
The promulgation of this decree, read out in Fatima by the Bishop of Coimbra, Virgílio Antunes, “paves the way for the beatification of Sister Lucia of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart (…), a central figure in the knowledge and dissemination of the Message addressed to humanity by Our Lady in the Apparitions at Cova da Iria in 1917, now lacking a miracle”.
Sister Lucia, the eldest of the three seers of Fatima, is considered by those in charge of the Cova da Iria shrine to be “a central figure in the knowledge and dissemination of the Message addressed to humanity by Our Lady in the Apparitions” in 1917.
Lucia de Jesus was born on March 28, 1907, in Fatima. After the death of her cousins – Saints Francisco and Jacinta Marto – Lucia joined the Institute of the Sisters of Saint Dorothy in 1925, where she remained until 1948.
Her journey as a Dorothean religious was mostly spent in Spain, where she had the two apparitions that complete the cycle of the Fatima message, with the requests for the Devotion of the First Saturdays (1925), in Pontevedra, and the Consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary (1929), in Tuy.
“During this time, by order of the Bishop of Leiria, he wrote his first Memoirs, thus beginning one of the means by which he would spread the message of Fatima: his written work,” according to his biographical notes.
He entered the Carmel of Santa Teresa in Coimbra on March 25, 1948, where he remained until his death on February 13, 2005.
