Fatima postulator gives advice to healthcare workers

By Tanya Connor | The Catholic Free Press
    
Developing a relationship with Jesus, through his Mother, was at the heart of two talks given to healthcare professionals May 10 and 11.
Sister Angela de Fatima Coelho, a medical doctor from Portugal, was special guest at the 14th annual Divine Mercy Medicine, Bioethics & Spirituality Conference, held at the College of the Holy Cross. Other healthcare professionals, religious and clergy, including Bishop McManus, also spoke. Most are regular speakers at the annual conference.
Sister Angela was vice postulator and postulator for the causes of SS. Jacinta and Francisco Marto, who were canonized last May. She is vice postulator for the cause of Sister Lucia de Jesus dos Santos, said Marie Romagnano, founder of Healthcare Professionals for Divine Mercy, sponsors of the conference. As children, these siblings and their cousin received apparitions of the Blessed Mother in Fatima, Portugal, in 1917.
For her first talk, Sister Angela, a member of the Congregation of Aliança de Santa Maria, showed photos of people and places associated with the Fatima visionaries and drew lessons from their lives.
“Fatima, for Francisco, started with a simple act of obedience,” she said. Though he didn’t see the Blessed Mother at first, he did what his sister and cousin said she was asking: he joined them in praying the rosary.
He could have said, “Why pray now? Let’s go home; a storm is coming,” Sister Angela said, noting that in the health field there are many “why” questions.
Jacinta offered her suffering for others, Sister Angela said. When she died, her body smelled like flowers. An atheistic doctor said he found no explanation for that from the science he knew or the spirituality he didn’t know.
A man who later lived in the facility where she died revealed that priests came to pray at his bed, because it had been Jacinta’s bed, Sister Angela said.
She said the visionaries weren’t born saints, but when they were willing to suffer, the process of conversion started. They could do this because they felt God’s love and tried to respond to it. They weren’t saints because they saw the Blessed Mother, but because of their response.
Sister Angela told the healthcare professionals that sometimes they are the only way their patients feel God’s love. She also said Jacinta claimed that doctors don’t have “the light” to cure the sick because they don’t love God.
“We as healthcare professionals can learn from Francisco how to console our patients,” even if unable to cure them, Sister Angela said. Francisco wanted to console Jesus.
Francisco teaches people how to distinguish between essential and secondary things, she said. The tabernacle was his school. He used to pray there instead of going to classes. The rosary was his treasure.
“The essential thing is our relationship with God,” Sister Angela said. But people spend more time on secondary things, which are also important. She said healthcare professionals must take time to pray, after spending hours caring for patients.
In her second talk, Sister Angela advocated for healthcare professionals to nurture their relationship with Jesus through a Marian spirituality.
The Fatima visionaries saw God’s light coming from the Blessed Mother, and knelt before her, but prayed to him, she said.
“I think the rosary’s one of the most important prayers for our sanctity,” she said. She told of trying on her own to become like Christ and failing. Then she read that the rosary mystically transports people to Mary’s side, where she molds them until Christ is formed in them.
When the Blessed Mother appeared to the visionaries, Lucia asked who she was, Sister Angela said. Mary said to come back for six months, then she would tell them; “she asks first for the encounter.”
An excited Jacinta broke the news about the apparitions, becoming the first witness of Fatima, Sister Angela said.
“This is the resurrection effect in our lives,” she said, and asked why people leave the Church. “You know the word ‘lukewarm’? It’s a horrible word.”
She told how Mary promised Lucia she would not be alone when her cousins died: “I will never leave you; my Immaculate Heart will be your refuge.”
The Blessed Mother also revealed the importance of her Immaculate Heart in the history of salvation and for world peace, imparting secrets and warning of war if she was not heeded.
Her solution for peace surprised Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI), Sister Angela said. But instead of saying, “It’s strange; let’s forget it,” he said, “Let’s face it.”
Sister Angela spoke of devotion to the Immaculate Heart as saying “yes” to God like Mary did. She noted that Scripture tells of Mary pondering Jesus’ life, which the rosary focuses on. And at Fatima she called for praying the rosary daily.