By Francis
Johnston
Without
anticipating the final judgment of the Church, there seems a distinct
possibility that the name of Alexandrina da Costa, who died as recently as
1955, may one day blaze among the brightest stars in the celestial firmament.
Her extraordinary life as a victim soul,
punctuated by incredible flashes of the supernatural, prove that the prodigies manifested by the great mystical saints
of history still survive, even in
this skeptical, self-sufficient age of nuclear energy and space flight.
Such is the repute
of her sanctity that in the early 1970's, her cause for beatification had
advanced beyond that of the revered Padre Pio and the ecclesiastical
authorities had taken the unprecedented step of erecting a chapel over her tomb. "The
finger of God is here," averred
Cardinal Cerejeira, Patriarch of Lisbon, acknowledging the storm of
miracles reported from her shrine at Balasar, in northern Portugal. Thousands
from all over the world flock there every
year, imploring the intercession of this outstandingly holy woman
whose life reminds one of St. Catherine of Siena.
EARLY LIFE
Alexandrina was
born on March 4, 1904 of devout, hard-working peasants in the obscure
Portuguese village of
Balasar, some 40 miles north of Oporto. As a child, she was gay, attractive and
full of lively wit and humor, though without compromising an almost precocious
spirituality which few suspected, judging from her spontaneous joviality. By
the time of her first Communion when she was seven, she had already acquired a deep love of the
Blessed Sacrament, visiting the village
church with unusual frequency and making Spiritual Communions
whenever she was unable to attend daily Mass. When an aunt suffering from cancer
begged Alexandrina to pray for her, the child responded with such perseverance
that the habit of prayer became entrenched in her young soul.
After only
eighteen months at school, Alexandrina was sent to work on a farm at the age of
twelve. Though a strong,
capable child, the heavy manual labor, shot through with incessant bad
language, proved too much and five months
later, she was brought home. She became a daily communicant, but shortly after
fell dangerously ill with typhoid. When the end seemed near, she was given a
crucifix to kiss, but she shook her head, insisting that she wanted nothing but
the Eucharist. She finally recovered, but after a spell in a sanatorium at
Povoa, was pronounced unfit for physical work again. She finally settled down
as a seamstress in Balasar, joined by her sister Deolinda. She might have
remained in this undramatic capacity, buried away in the wild and beautiful
Portuguese countryside, had not a fateful event occurred in 1918 which utterly
transformed her life.
THE HEROINE
While she was
busy sewing one day in a neighbor's house with Deolinda and another girl, three
men approached and demanded admittance in suggestive language. Alexandrina
recognized one of them as her former employer who had previously tried to
assault her, and whom she had driven off with an unexplained force in her
rosary-clenched fist. She quickly bolted the door. But the men broke their way
in through a trap door in the roof and attacked the girls. Deolinda and her
companion managed to escape, but Alexandrina was cornered in an upstairs room.
"No! No!" she screamed, edging back to the wall. Like St. Maria Goretti,
she would rather die than consent. Behind her was a window, thirteen feet above
the ground. It was her only chance. Desperately she jumped.
The pain was
shattering. Gritting her teeth, Alexandrina seized a stout piece of wood and crawled
back to the house, lashing out fiercely at the startled men, who promptly fled.
But her spine had been irreparably injured. Long years of increasing pain,
incapacity and depression followed, though she never yielded to despair. Total
paralysis set in and on April 24, 1924, she became bedridden for life. Her
anguished family prayed desperately for a cure, but her condition remained
critical: several times she hovered close to death and received the Last
Sacraments.
Towards the end
of the year, she was seized by an unaccountable desire to offer herself to God
as a victim soul for the conversion of sinners. With St. Paul, she yearned to
"make up in her own body what was lacking in the Passion of Christ."
After praying earnestly for guidance, she felt inwardly certain that God was
calling her to a life of love and reparation through suffering willingly
offered up to Him on behalf of sinners.
Meanwhile, news
had filtered into the village of Our Lady's apparitions at Fatima, some 200
miles to the south, and the numerous miraculous cures reported there. A local
pilgrimage was organized and Alexandrina, wishing to be certain of God's will
regarding her vocation of suffering, asked Our Lady to let her accompany them.
But the doctor insisted that the journey would be suicidal, and the pilgrimage
left without her.
VICTIM SOUL
After most of the village had gone, Alexandrina brokenly closed her eyes in
prayer and offered to God the crushing sacrifice of her abandonment and
isolation. As she prayed, her thoughts strayed longingly across to the Blessed
Sacrament in the nearby church, and suddenly she realized that Our Lord in the
tabernacle was also a prisoner. This touching link with Christ led her to visit
Him in spirit, to remain constantly before Him, keeping watch with unceasing
love, prayer and self-immolation, to console His Sacred Heart and obtain the
conversion of sinners. With a surge of tearful love, she begged Our Lord to allow
her to stand a surety for sinners before Divine Justice to suffer to the limit
of her endurance if thereby sinners could escape the fire of Hell.
Seemingly in response to this remarkably courageous request, her pain
steadily intensified until it became almost unendurable. Night after feverish
night, she would lie awake gasping and struggling to pray, her head soaking the
pillow, her fingers clenching her rosary with tight desperation as if squeezing
relief from the clamped beads. "O Jesus”, she would pant, repeating the
prayer taught by Our Lady at Fatima, "this is for love of Thee, for the
conversion of sinners, and in reparation for the offenses against the
Immaculate Heart of Mary."
Finally in 1934, Alexandrina reported hearing for the first time, through
the red haze of her agony, the compassionate voice of Christ, overflowing with
love and tenderness.
Give me your hands, because I want to nail them with mine.
Give me your head, because I want to crown it with thorns, as they did to me.
Give me your heart, because I want to pierce it with a lance, as they pierced mine.
Consecrate your body to me; offer yourself wholly to me.
Alexandrina bravely accepted. She begged Our Lord to give her strength and
patience to endure whatever further suffering He might have in store for her.
From then on, she began to manifest extraordinary signs of mystical, besides
physical agony, culminating in a series of unprecedented ecstasies of the
Passion of Christ which she underwent for three hours every Friday from October
3, 1938 to March 27, 1942. Awed witnesses would see her recover the use of her
paralyzed limbs and, leaving her bed, undergo the agonizing motions of Gethsemane
to Calvary. While she staggered under the crushing weight of the invisible
Cross, several strong men tried in vain to lift her, though her weight was only
seventy pounds.
The ecstasies were filmed and the pictures form an important part of the
deposition of her cause in Rome. Her spiritual director, Fr. Mariano Pinho, S.
J., felt it prudent to keep the ecstasies secret, but word of them leaked out
and by 1941, thousands were flocking to see the "Victim of Balasar,"
as she became known throughout Portugal.
APOSTLE OF FATIMA
Alexandrina's life continued in a fiery world of pain. Every breath was a
struggle and the long dragging hours, especially at night, were like an
interminable torture session. Nor did Our Lord abandon her when the relentless
agony threatened to-overwhelm His victim. At such times, she would be consoled
by radiant ecstasies in which the Suffering Christ filled her with profound
mystical illumination. The mission entrusted to her corresponded with the
message of Our Lady of Fatima. To the thousands who flocked to seek her counsel,
she repeatedly urged frequent Communion and the devout, daily recitation of
the Rosary as the cure for the world's ills. Penance was her insistent refrain
and she never tired of urging consecration to the Immaculate Heart of Mary
through the Brown Scapular of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Beside her bed hung a
beautiful picture of Our Lady of Fatima and another of Jacinta Marto (one of
the three children who saw Our Lady at Fatima in 1917). Alexandrina would draw attention
to these two pictures and beg her listeners to heed Our Lady's message and the
heroic example of little Jacinta.
As for sin, Alexandrina would plead in a heartbreaking voice for its
permanent renouncement. To offend God, she stressed, was the supreme evil in
life and the most resolute personal efforts must be made towards its total
elimination, cost what it might in prayer and sacrifice. "Oh,
sinners," she would weep, "I am enduring a life of terrible suffering
on your behalf. Convert yourselves! Sin no more! Sin no more!" Great
numbers complied, as evidenced by the long queues at the confessional in the
village church. According to Alexandrina, Our Lord told her, "Your house
has become the Calvary of sinners."
In response to a command that she reportedly received from Our Lord in 1939,
Alexandrina wrote to Pope Pius XII asking for the consecration of the world to
the Immaculate Heart of Mary. The Holy Father had already heard of Alexandrina
and a favorable report on her by the Archbishop of Braga further impressed His
Holiness. After receiving a similar request from Sister Lucia, the last
survivor of the three children who saw Our Lady at Fatima, Pope Pius XII
undertook the consecration in 1942.
Alexandrina's concern for sinners was manifested in a special way towards
youth, and she joined the Third Order of the Salesian Congregation (known as
Salesian Co-operators) to further her efforts to help teenagers combat sin.
According to Alexandrina, Our Lord told her in 1938:
My daughter, I chose you from your mother’s womb...
I watch over you in your great difficulties.
It was I who chose them for you, that I might have a victim to offer me much reparation.
Lean on my Sacred Heart and find therein strength to suffer everything.
Lean on my Sacred Heart and find therein strength to suffer everything...
Keep me company in the Blessed Sacrament...
I remain in the tabernacle night and day, waiting to give my love and grace to all who will visit me. But so few come...
I am so abandoned, so lonely, so offended...
THE DEVlL STRIKES
The patent success of Alexandrina's life of expiation for sin provoked a
violent response from the powers of darkness, reminiscent of the assaults
sustained by the Cure of Ars a century earlier. In the presence of Fr. Pinho
and numerous witnesses, she was repeatedly hurled from her bed and flung
against the wall by unseen hands. At night, she was assailed by hideous visions
and howling, blasphemous taunts that God had abandoned her, that suicide was
the imperative alternative to a life of agonizing futility. Shaken witnesses occasionally
saw Alexandrina's bed wreathed in black, billowing smoke from which issued an
insufferable stench. Fr. Pinho himself was sometimes attacked. When, in the
Name of God, he demanded the identity of his invisible assailant, everyone in
the hushed room heard the fearful reply: "I am Satan. Do not doubt it is
I." The devil cursed the priest and threatened to tear him to pieces.
One morning after Mass in her room, Alexandrina suddenly felt she could
endure no more. Tearfully, she begged Our Lord to intervene and end the
attacks. Gently and compassionately, Alexandrina said, He explained how He
wanted this further suffering of hers to help more sinners. Finally, in 1944,
after ten years of unremitting savagery, the devil abandoned her; but by then,
Alexandrina was suffering fresh torments, having offered herself as a victim
for peace in World War II. Her condition grew so grave that she was given the
Last Sacraments. Once again she rallied, but her agonizing pain continued to
rack her night and day, bringing tears of compassion to the eyes of endless files
of pilgrims who came from all over the Iberian Peninsula, pleading for her
prayers and favors.
LHE EUCHARIST ALONE
There now began a marvel which illumined Alexandrina's poignant life with a
white glow of the sublime. For the last 13 1/2 years of her lite, she ate and
drank nothing but the Eucharist, which she received with moving devotion every
morning. News of this fresh wonder spread far and wide and eventually reached
the ears of Rome. The Holy See requested the Archbishop of Braga to investigate
the reported prodigy and Alexandrina was invited to enter a hospital in Oporto.
For forty days and nights, she was watched round the clock by an impartial team
of doctors and nurses (many of whom were skeptical or even hostile to her), to
insure that no food or water reached her. At the end of this period, her health
and weight remained unchanged and the stunned physicians were compelled to
certify the prodigy as "scientifically inexplicable". Alexandrina
disclosed that Our Lord had told her:
You are living only by the Eucharist because I want the world to know the
power of the Eucharist and the power of my life in souls."
She reputedly underwent a mystical sojourn in Purgatory, experienced several
mystical deaths, transports of the Resurrection and the Ascension, and sublime
mystical union with the Most Holy Trinity. Like several of the greatest saints,
her heart was exchanged with Our Lord's Sacred Heart and she underwent a
mystical matrimony with Him. She received a piercing gift of prophecy,
foretelling many events which subsequently happened. Frequently while in ecstasy,
she was heard praying and lamenting for the Church, which she saw in danger of
a great crisis and threatened by a "wild beast." In a searing vision in
1948, according to Alexandrina, Our Lord showed her a vast expanse of ruins
with lost souls lying dead in the debris. Snakes, representing sin, were
sliding over them. Alexandrina reported she was told:
The chastisement will be as never before. The destruction you have seen will come when Marxism has taken over the entire world.
It is perhaps significant that only "lost" souls were seen lying
dead in the devastation engendering the fervent hope that a singular protection
will be accorded to the just when and if divine punishment overwhelms a
sin-drenched world. Certainly a number of saints have indicated this in their
prophetic utterances, underlining the words of Scripture:
I will not destroy the just with the wicked.
Alexandrina further revealed that Our Lord had pleaded for more victim
souls in the present permissive age, to turn the scales of Divine Justice. She
herself admitted that she felt as if she was carrying a mountainous burden
almost alone. Occasionally, she would cry out in anguish that she was literally
"poisoned" by humanity's sins. The word "sinners" in the
Ave made her shudder involuntarily.
Shortly before her death, Alexandrina reported that Our Lord appeared to
her in all His radiant glory and disclosed that "many thousands" had
been saved by her terrible sufferings. "After your death” He added "I
will make your name widely known. I shall see to it myself... If anyone should
invoke your name when you are in Heaven, they will never do so in vain... I
appoint you a protectress of mankind. You will be powerful with the All-Powerful."
HER FINAL PLEA
In 1955 Alexandrina's condition suddenly deteriorated. Through the long hot
summer, her condition steadily worsened and on the morning of October 13th, the
38th anniversary of the miracle of the sun at Fatima, it was clear that the end
had arrived. Her unremitting agony racked her to the very end, but she
withstood the quivering pain with dogged, prayerful serenity. Pressing the crucifix
to her ashen lips, she murmured with indomitable steadiness: "Do not weep
for me. I am so happy today... I am going to Heaven at last." To the
priests, pilgrims and journalists crowding the hushed stillness of her room,
she gave a last piercing message to all mankind in this perilous nuclear age:
Do not sin. The pleasures of this life are worth nothing.
Receive Communion; pray the Rosary every day.
This sums up everything.
Finally, at 8:29 that evening, after a last embrace of her crucifix, she
expired peacefully.
Twelve years later, the process for her beatification was solemnly opened
by the Archbishop of Braga, and in 1973 it was successfully completed and
forwarded to Rome. Meanwhile, the Church authorities had erected a chapel over
her tomb and throngs of pilgrims from all over the world have since flocked
there and visited her nearby room - "that altar of great sacrifice," –
as Cardinal Cerejeira termed it. Of the dramatic cures reported there, Fr. L.
S. Mascarenhas, a local Blue Army priest, exclaimed: "She is doing wonders...
wonders. It is almost as if anything asked through her intercession cannot be
refused by Jesus." Cardinal Cerejeira disclosed that he had received
"two incredible graces" (one concerning the foundation of a Catholic
University in Lisbon against all odds), after praying in Alexandrina's room.
Shortly before she died, Alexandrina dictated her epitaph, underscoring the
yearning that animated her tormented body. The moving words have been engraved
on a white marble slab covering her tomb and they echo the final plea of Our
Lady of Fatima on October 13, 1917:
Do not offend God any more, for He is already too greatly offended.
ALEXANDRINA’S EPITAPH
Sinners, if the ashes of my body could be useful to save you, approach ...
If necessary, pass on the ashes, trample on them – but do not sin any more.
Never again offend our dear Lord...
Convert yourselves.
Do not lose Jesus for all eternity.
He is so good.
Published by
Washington. N. J. 07882
With Ecclesiastical Permission
First printing May 1978
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