The last of three children who claimed to see the Virgin at Fatima and who revealed a vision the Catholic Church said foretold the attempt to kill Pope John Paul died last night, the Church said.
Lucia de Jesus dos Santos (97) who later became a nun, was the eldest of the shepherd children who in 1917 told of seeing apparitions of the Virgin Mary six times.
She died at her Carmelite convent at Coimbra in central Portugal. "She had been weak for several weeks and had not left her cell," Coimbra Bishop Albino Cleto told the Church's Radio Renascenca.
Sister Lucia dos Santos who died yesterday
The Vatican interpreted one part of the visions as foretelling the attempt to kill the Pope and Communism's persecution of Christianity.
The apparitions took place the same year as the Russian Revolution. The Pope believes the Madonna of Fatima saved his life on May 13th, 1981, when Turkish gunman Mehmet Ali Agca nearly killed him in St Peter's Square.
The shooting took place on one of the anniversaries of the 1917 apparitions. In a sign of gratitude a year after the assassination attempt, the Pope had one of the 9mm bullets that Agca fired at him placed in the crown of the statue at Fatima.
Dos Santos was said by believers to be the main recipient of prophecies from the Virgin about key 20th-century events. The first two parts of the prophecies were known for decades. The first saw a vision of hell, the second predicted the outbreak of World War Two.
But it was the third part, the so-called third secret of Fatima, which kept the world intrigued for more than 80 years.