One hundred years ago, on 13 October 1917, crowds gathered outside a dusty little Portuguese village, soon to become famous throughout the world. Word had got round that, on the thirteenth of each of the past five months, Our Lady had been allegedly appearing to three primary-school-age children: siblings Francisco (9) and Jacinta (7), and their cousin Lucia (10). Our Lady, it was rumoured, had promised a kind of grand finale in October. Accordingly, tens of thousands poured into Fátima. Some, like Fox Mulder, came wanting to believe. As Lucia later recalled with some embarrassment, many humble souls would kneel in the presence of the three children, asking for cures, for conversion, and for many types of favours from Our Lady. But others – perhaps very many of them – came, in that resonant scriptural phrase, to scoff and wag their heads. The cynical and hardbitten hacks covering the jamboree for the anti-clerical newspaper, O Século, were unsurprisingly among the latter. The full events of the day are difficult to summarize, but O Século’s headline on the 15th (no twenty-hour newscycle then!) day does a pretty good job: