Carmelite Sister Lucia dos Santos, the last of three Fatima visionaries, died Feb. 13 in her cloistered convent in Coimbra at the age of 97.

The Portuguese government declared Feb. 15, the date of her funeral, as a national day of mourning.

On May 13, 1917, when she was just 10 years old, Sister Lucia and her two younger cousins claimed to have seen the Blessed Virgin Mary at Fatima, near their home. The apparitions continued once a month until Oct. 13, 1917.

Passionist Father Ciro Benedettini, a Vatican spokesman, said that Pope John Paul II, who began his Lenten retreat Feb. 13, offered special prayers for the nun, whom he met three times at the Shrine of Our Lady of Fatima.

The pope also asked Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone of Genoa, Italy, to preside at the nun's Feb. 15 funeral in the Coimbra cathedral. The cardinal, former secretary of the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, met with Sister Lucia and discussed the apparitions with her several times in preparation for the 2000 publication of the so-called "third secret of Fatima."

While her cousins Francisco and Jacinta Marto died at a young age --- as Our Lady of Fatima apparently told them they would --- it was left to Sister Lucia to transcribe the messages of Fatima, including the third section.

Sister Lucia wrote down the third part of the message, sealed it in an envelope and gave it to her local bishop. The message was sent to the Vatican in 1957, where successive popes read it, but decided not to reveal its contents.

Sister Lucia's last meeting with Pope John Paul was in May 2000, when he traveled to Fatima to beatify her cousins and to announce that he was revealing the final piece of the Fatima message.

Bishop Serafim de Sousa Ferreira Silva of Leiria-Fatima told Radio Renascenca, Portugal's main Catholic radio station, that Sister Lucia was exemplary for her "witness, vivacity, fidelity and courage."

The bishop said that to the very end of her life she was concerned about "the problems of humanity" and dedicated her life to praying for "reconciliation, conversion and peace."

Born March 22, 1907, in Aljustrel near Fatima, she and her cousins, Francisco, 9, and Jacinta, 7, were caring for their family's sheep May 13, 1917. After reciting the rosary at midday, the children saw a "woman brighter than the sun" holding a rosary in her hand.

The woman told them they must pray much and they must return to that spot at the same hour on the 13th of each month.

With some 70,000 gathered around the children Oct. 15, 1917 --- what was to be the final apparition --- the woman told the three youngsters that she was Our Lady of the Rosary and asked that a chapel be built in her honor.

The three children had not been to school and could not read and write at the time of the apparitions. Lucia first went to school in 1921.

In 1928, she took first vows as a Religious of St. Dorothy and made her perpetual vows in 1934. She transferred to the Coimbra Carmel in 1948.

In the late 1930s, Sister Lucia made public the first two parts of the messages from Mary, which the children had kept secret.

The first two parts included a vision of hell shown to the children, along with prophecies concerning the outbreak of World War II, the rise of communism and the ultimate triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, including a triumph over Russia if the country were consecrated to her Immaculate Heart.

According to the Vatican's interpretation, the third part of the secret predicted the 1981 attempt to assassinate Pope John Paul.

The pope, in thanksgiving that his life was spared, had one of the bullets that wounded him embedded in the crown of the statue of Our Lady that stands at the shrine in Fatima.

Releasing the third part of the Fatima message in June 2000, Vatican officials said it described the violence and persecution that afflicted the church and individual Christians under Nazism, communism and other totalitarian systems.

At the time of the message's release, then-Archbishop Bertone revealed that he had met with Sister Lucia and that she "repeated her conviction that the vision of Fatima concerns, above all, the struggle of atheistic communism against the church and against Christians and describes the terrible sufferings of the victims of the faith in the 20th century."

Archbishop Bertone said he felt he had to ask Sister Lucia why she had given instructions that the secret should be revealed only after 1960, an instruction many people claimed was an order that it be published then.

Archbishop Bertone asked Sister Lucia if Mary had fixed the date.

"Sister Lucia replied: 'It was not Our Lady. I fixed the date because I had the intuition that before 1960 it would not be understood,'" the archbishop wrote.

Sister Lucia continued having visions of the Virgin Mary and hearing messages from her as late as the 1980s and perhaps beyond, the archbishop said in 2000.