The aim of this article is to reveal the decisive influence of the priest Manuel Nunes Formigão in the process of creating and establishing credibility for the Marian sanctuary of Fátima. From September 1917 to the 1930s, Nunes Formigão (who also used the pseudonym Visconde de Montelo) devoted himself to the construction, through words and deeds, of a historical, religious and ideological message for the apparitions at Cova da Iria, which the senior hierarchy of the Catholic Church has officially acknowledged and disseminated since 1930. It was to be a Catholic nationalist message that abjured the liberal and republican discourses of a secular and secularizing matrix. Thanks to the prudent and persistent action developed in the press by this priest, in the physical and social space of Fátima parish and of Vila Nova de Ourém municipality, as well as by the Catholic hierarchy, the ‘apparitions’ of Fátima eventually gained a reputation as the Portuguese Lourdes and achieved the status of a universal Catholic Marian shrine.