"On the evening of the First Sunday of Lent, John Paul began his annual week-long retreat, along with the senior members of the Roman Curia .... That same day, ninety-seven-year-old Sister Lucia dos Santos, last surviving child-seer of the apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Fatima in 1917, died in her Portuguese convent in Coimbra. John Paul sent Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, S.D.B., the archbishop of Genoa, as a special envoy to her February 15 funeral. There, Cardinal Bertone read a message from the Pope, in which John Paul said that he liked 'to think that it was the Blessed Virgin, the same one whom Sister Lucia saw at Fatima so many years ago, who welcomed her on her pious departure from earth to Heaven.' Many would soon think similar thoughts of another spiritual voyager."
(George Weigel, God's Choice, pp 23-24)
