Kept on this device only and never sent anywhere. There are no notifications and never will be — if you want a reminder, set a repeating calendar alert for the first Saturday of the month.
Four things, on the first Saturday of five consecutive months, offered in reparation to the Immaculate Heart. It is the Fatima request almost nobody has heard — and the only one an ordinary person can actually carry out.
Fatima is remembered for two things: the consecration of Russia and the secret. Both are somebody else's job — a pope's, or history's. The third request is the one addressed to whoever is reading, and it went to a young woman in a convent parlor in Spain.
In December , at Pontevedra, Lúcia dos Santos — by then a postulant with the Dorothean sisters, eight years after the apparitions at the Cova da Iria — gave an account of Our Lady appearing to her and asking for this practice: confession, Communion, five decades of the Rosary, and fifteen minutes of keeping her company, on five consecutive first Saturdays, with the intention of making reparation for blasphemies and offenses against her Immaculate Heart.
We describe her account rather than quoting it. Her memoirs and letters are held by the Carmel of Coimbra and the Fatima shrine, and this site does not reproduce material under copyright.
Two dates that are often collapsed into one. The apparitions at the Cova da Iria happened in and were declared worthy of belief by the Bishop of Leiria in . Pontevedra was , in another country, and the 1930 decree was not about it. The First Saturdays are not weakened by saying so — every act the devotion asks for is ordinary approved Catholic practice, and devotion to the Immaculate Heart has been universal since Pius XII consecrated the world to it in and gave it a feast in . But the request itself rests on Lúcia's testimony, and that is worth knowing before you begin rather than after.
Lúcia was asked this later, and the explanation she gave — recorded in correspondence with her confessor around — was that the five answer five distinct kinds of offense against the Immaculate Heart: against her Immaculate Conception, against her perpetual virginity, against her divine motherhood, against those who work to put contempt for her into the hearts of children, and against those who insult her directly in her sacred images.
That is her explanation of the number, not part of the original request, and we pass it on with that label attached. It is worth reading once. Four of the five are about someone else's malice; the fourth is about children being taught to sneer. Reparation in this devotion is not apologizing for yourself. It is standing in for absent people, which is a strange thing to be asked to do and the reason the practice has any weight at all.
Read this before you begin, because four requirements give anxiety four times as much to work with as one.
Reparation is a love response, not a debt you are servicing. Nothing is owed and nothing is short. You cannot make up a deficit on anyone's behalf, because there is no deficit — and a devotion offered on behalf of people who mean it as an insult is, by construction, not about your own performance.
So: if this starts producing anxiety about whether the fifteen minutes counted, or whether the confession was near enough to the Saturday, or whether your attention wandered in the third decade, put it down. That is not permission to be lax. It is what the devotion actually is. Five Saturdays kept out of fear are not reparation, and the Heart they are offered to is not keeping score.
And the other failure mode, which is more common in people who have found this page: it is not evidence that you are a more serious Catholic than the people in your parish who have never heard of it. Almost none of them have been told. That is a failure of catechesis and not a fact about them.
This is the part that stops people, and the instructions everywhere else are some version of meditate on the mysteries for fifteen minutes, which is a description of the goal rather than a way to reach it.
Two things to know first. It is in addition to the five decades, not the same act — you can pray the Rosary and still owe the fifteen minutes. And it is keeping company, which sets the bar somewhere other than where a beginner assumes: sitting with someone in silence counts. You are not required to produce insights.
What works, if you have never done it: take one mystery, not twenty. Read the scene. Then stay in it — where you would be standing, what you would be able to hear, what the people there did not yet know. When your mind wanders, come back to the scene rather than to the fact that you wandered. Fifteen minutes is short. Set a timer so you are not checking a clock.
One suggestion per Saturday, chosen to give the five months an arc rather than five unrelated pictures:
If none of those hold you, use the one that does. The devotion asks for company, not a curriculum.