…a great many people have been raised with the story that Our Lady of the Rosary told Lucia dos Santos at Fatima that Lucia’s seven-year-old friend – who had died – would be in purgatory till the end of the world. This naturally causes people to ask what on earth a seven-year-old could have done to merit such prolonged purification, and the answer is usually a vague-but-stern reminder that all sin is bad and purgatory is serious business.

The friend, was, in fact, eighteen years old.

I only discovered this because I happened to read a footnote in a book entitled ‘A Woman Clothed with the Sun.’;The footnote quoted Lucia herself correcting an interviewer who quoted the case of the seven-year-old at her.

Well, it doesn’t take much imagination to see how an eighteen-year-old might merit prolonged purification (especially when you bear in mind that, for some souls, duration is the punishment, rather than intensity). The question is – who turned her into a seven-year-old, and why? What were they thinking? 

Anyway, I mention this on the off-chance that someone out there has hurt his brain trying to convince himself that the child-in-purgatory report wasn’t a little disturbing.

There’s no need to worry about it! That report is false!