20th century
Feast: February 20
A seven-year-old who saw hell in a vision and spent the rest of her short life — three years — doing penance for people she would never meet.
Jacinta Marto was seven when she, her brother Francisco, and their cousin Lucia saw the Virgin Mary at Fatima in 1917. Of the three children, Jacinta was the most affected by the visions — particularly the terrifying glimpse of hell that Mary showed them in July. After that, Jacinta became consumed with praying for sinners. She was a child — she still played, still laughed, still fought with her brother over silly things — but she also gave away her lunch to poorer children, wore a rough rope around her waist as penance, and refused to drink water on hot days, offering the discomfort for the conversion of sinners. The Spanish flu epidemic reached Portugal in 1918. Both Jacinta and Francisco fell ill. Francisco died first, in April 1919. Jacinta lingered for another year, enduring a painful operation on her ribs without anesthesia (the doctor refused to give it to a child so young). She was transferred to a hospital in Lisbon, where she died alone on February 20, 1920, at nine years old. She had told Lucia she would die alone and in a hospital — one of several small predictions that proved accurate. She was canonized alongside Francisco in 2017.