This year, Pope Francis will visit Fátima in Portugal, where 100 years ago, Mary appeared to three shepherd children. Chris Maunder explains why such events are unlikely to occur in the same way again

With its great basilica and pilgrimage square, Fátima is the most celebrated of twentieth-century Catholic pilgrimage sites. It was built following the six apparitions of the Virgin Mary to three shepherd children 100 years ago, between 13 May and 13 October 1917. Only Guadalupe and Lourdes rival Fátima as apparition shrines in the global Catholic consciousness.

In the 1920s and 1930s, it became Portuguese Catholicism’s most important shrine, integral to the continued self-understanding of Portugal as a Catholic country, an identity which had been threatened during the First Republic (1910-1926). Fátima represented a renewal of Marian devotion both nationally and regionally; nearby shrines such as Nazaré and Santarém had been popular for centuries, but Fátima eclipsed them.