Alexandrina might have remained in the undramatic capacity of
a seamstress, buried away in the wild and beautiful Portuguese countryside, had
not a fateful event occurred in March 1918 which utterly transformed her life.
While she was working one day in an upstairs room in her home
with Deolinda and another girl, there was a
sudden knock at the front door.
Alexandrina peered through the window, and to her dismay saw three men standing
outside, one of whom was her former employer again. A glance at their
impassioned faces told her the worst. She locked the door of the room at once.
The men broke into the house and began forcing open a trapdoor on the floor of
the upstairs room.
The girls quickly moved a heavy sewing-machine over the trap
door. Not to be thwarted so easily, the men pounded the door with clubs. The dry
wood splintered, the sewing-machine toppled over. One by one, the men levered
themselves into the room. Deolinda and her friend were seized and Alexandrina
was cornered by a third man.
"Jesus help me!" she screamed, lashing out at him with her
rosary. Like St Maria Goretti, she was ready to die rather than consent to the
man's lust. Frantically, she looked round for a way of escape. Behind her was a
window, thirteen feet above the hard ground. It was her one chance. Desperately
she jumped.
The pain was shattering. Gritting her teeth and wiping the
blood from her face, she seized a stout piece of wood and staggered back into
the house to defend her companions. Several well-aimed blows were enough. The
startled men took to their heels, bruised and shaken by her courageous
counter-attack. Fortunately, the other two girls were unmolested.
But Alexandrina's spine had been irreparably injured. Long
months of increasing pain, incapacity and depression followed, though she never
yielded to despair. In 1923 a specialist from Oporto, Dr Joao de Almeida,
confirmed the family's worst fears. Total paralysis set in and on 14 April 1924
she became bedridden for life.
The awful predicament clutched at her heart and severely
tested her faith and courage. Confined to a tiny upstairs room in an obscure
house hidden from the outside world by a high stone wall was tantamount to being
buried alive. Fortunately she had already practised the virtue of detachment;
her only desire being for flowers and for the church. Deolinda settled down to
become her nurse and secretary while their mother worked to earn money for food.
"I had moments of discouragement," Alexandrina says of this period, "but never
one of despair." When there were singing lessons in the church, the two sisters
became sad, one because she had to leave her charge and the other because she
could not go. But the crippled heroine conformed very quickly to the will of God
and regarded her bed as "my beloved cross".
At first, she tried to distract herself by inviting friends
in for a game of cards. But the novelty soon wore off and she resolved to try to
storm heaven for a cure. She promised to give away everything she had, to dress
herself in mourning for the rest of her life, to cut off her hair, if only she
was cured. Her anguished family and cousins joined in the assault on heaven, but
the paralysis stayed.
Worse still, her condition began to deteriorate until the
slightest movement caused her agonising pain. Once again she hovered on the
brink of death, and the last sacraments were administered several times. The
medicine she took had no effect, except to soothe and calm her. Looking back at
this distressing period she wrote later that "I would have done better to have
stayed united to Jesus because he alone is the true life and the true joy."
Every evening the Costa family gathered round her bed and
lighting two candles before the statue of Our Lady recited the rosary on their
knees, followed by night prayers. During the day, whenever there were no
companions to distract her, Alexandrina would meditate, pray and weep, imploring
Our Lady to heal her. Sadly, she would sing the Tantum Ergo as in church, and
not having the blessing of Benediction, she would ask Jesus for it from heaven,
"and from all the tabernacles in the world". The parish priest lent her a statue
of the Immaculate Heart of Mary for the month of May, and afterwards Alexandrina
scraped together every penny she could to buy a similar statue of her own. In
time, this statue was almost kissed smooth.
Her growing love of prayer led her to abandon her innocent
distractions. She began to long for a life of union with Jesus. This union, she
perceived, could only be realised by bearing her illness and incapacity for love
of him. The idea of suffering being her vocation suddenly dawned on her. Without
knowing how, she offered herself to God as a victim soul for the conversion of
sinners.
In 1928, a local pilgrimage to Fatima was organised and
Alexandrina implored Our Lady to let her accompany them. The fast-growing shrine
was already a magnet for hundreds of thousands on the thirteenth of each month
from May to October, and the numerous miracles occurring there gave the sick
woman a surge of hope. But the doctor and parish priest were adamantly opposed
to the idea. How could she be conveyed some 200 miles, they argued, if to touch
or turn her caused her unspeakable suffering ?
In the face of their inflexible stand, Alexandrina brokenly
closed her eyes in prayer and offered to God the crushing sacrifice of her
abandonment and isolation. Gazing fixedly at the statue of Our Lady, she prayed
her heart out for a cure at home. She promised that on being healed, she would
become a missionary and she told her friends that if they heard singing in the
streets, it would be her thanking God and Our Lady for a miracle.
Week after week she prayed imploringly. Month after month she
pleaded and wept for a cure. But the paralysis remained. Gradually, little by
little, the desire for recovery died in her and she began to think only of
loving God. As she prayed, her thoughts strayed longingly across to the Blessed
Sacrament in the nearby church, and suddenly she realised 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 in union with Our Lady, keeping watch
with unceasing love, prayer and self immolation, to console his Sacred Heart and
obtain the conversion of sinners. To Jesus through Mary became her constant
watchword. For long hours she meditated on the spiritual crisis in the world
until she was fully conscious of the enormity of modern sin and the crying need
for its expiation in union with the suffering Christ.
Pope Pius XI had underscored this need that very year in his
encyclical Miserentissimus Redemptor. His Holiness wrote :
« Although the copious Redemption operated by Our Lord has
superabundantly forgiven all sins, yet through that admirable disposition of
Divine Wisdom, there must be completed in us what is missing in Christ's
suffering on behalf of his Body, that is, his Church (Col 1:24). We can and we
must add to the homage and satisfaction (expiatory suffering) that Christ
renders to God, our own homage and satisfactions on behalf of sinners... While
men's malice incessantly increases, the breath of the Holy Spirit wonderfully
multiplies the number of the faithful who generously try to repair so many
outrages made to the Divine Heart, and they even do not hesitate in offering
themselves to Christ as victims... »
Alexandrina realised that while this vocation applied to
everyone in an elementary degree, the intense reparation of a victim soul was a
very special vocation, reserved by God for the favoured few. The deeper she
pondered, the more she became convinced that this was her exalted vocation. With
a surge of tearful love, she implored Our Lord to accept her as his victim, to
allow her to stand as a surety for sinners before the bar of divine justice, to
cause her to suffer to the limit of her endurance if thereby sinners could
escape 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 offences against the Immaculate
Heart of Mary."
Despite the fierceness of her pangs, she persevered with her
prayerful oblation, day after interminable day, month after prolonged month. Her
ardent devotion to Our Lady which she had cultivated since childhood, became a
springboard from which she was able to leap more securely into the arms of
Christ. She asked for a little altar to be fixed to the wall by her bed where it
was graced with the statue of Our Lady of Fatima and decorated with flowers and
candles. During each month of May, she tried to make herself the most beautiful
flower of May by offering little "spiritual flowers" to the mother of God. She
would offer the whole day with its sufferings, and her intentions would range
from the needs of the parish to those of the entire world. At the end of the
month she placed these petitions at the feet of the statue, together with an
affectionate letter to Our Lady. One such letter read :
« Little Mother, I come humbly to your feet to lay down the
little spiritual flowers which I have collected during this month. Behold the
state in which I offer them to you! They are so faded and leafless. But you, O
Heavenly Mother, could transform them. Speak to your Divine Son of my distress
and affliction... Repeat to him on my behalf all my supplications, and grant
that my poor flowers may be acceptable, so as to benefit those for whom they
were offered. In particular, I beg you to make a beautiful garland of them to
offer to the Holy Father on his birthday.
Mother dear, on the last day of your blessed month, since I
have nothing to offer you, I give you my whole body. I ask you to take charge of
it and take it on your arm as you would take that of a beloved daughter. Bless
me, dear Mother. Ask Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament to bless me. Ask the Holy
Trinity to bless me. Goodbye dear Mother, and forgive me everything. »
Every day in May she recited the following act of
consecration to the Blessed Virgin :
« Mother of Jesus and my Mother, listen to my prayer. I
consecrate my body and all my heart to you. Purify me, most holy Mother, fill me
with your holy love. Place me near the tabernacle of Jesus in order that I can
serve as a lamp as long as the world lasts. Bless me, sanctify me, O dear Mother
of Heaven! »
Many times during the long and lonely days she would turn her
thoughts to the tabernacle in the village church, and repeat :
« My good Jesus, you are a prisoner and I am a prisoner. We
are both prisoners. You are a prisoner for my welfare and happiness and I am a
prisoner of your hands. You are King and Lord of all and I am a worm of the
earth. I have abandoned you, thinking only of this world which is the
destruction of souls. But now, repenting with all my heart, I desire only that
which you desire, and to suffer with resignation. O my Jesus, I adore thee
everywhere thou dwellest in the Blessed Sacrament. Where thou art despised, I
stand by thee. I love thee for those who do not love. I make amends for those
who offend thee. Come into my heart. »
Her severe pain continued with only occasional periods of
relative relief. Frequently she was seen quivering and moaning with agony.
Finally in 1931, the throbbing red haze dissolved and for the first time she
entered into a state of ecstasy. Reputedly, she heard the voice of Christ over
flowing with love and tenderness, inviting her to "Love, suffer and make
reparation." Alexandrina bravely and generously consented. She begged Our Lord
to give her renewed strength and patience to endure on behalf of sinners
whatever further sufferings he might have in store for her.
She did not have long to wait for an answer. The priest who
brought her daily Communion was replaced by a Fr Mateus, a strict, legalistic
priest who maintained on principle that she should only be permitted to receive
Communion on the first Friday of each month. The anguish of being deprived of
her beloved Eucharist was almost more than she could bear. The daily visit of
Our Lord had been the one thing that had kept her spirit going. Tearfully, she
begged the priest to come more frequently, meanwhile offering the sacrifice for
those who neglected the Bread of Life. Finally, Fr Mateus relented slightly and
agreed to come every fifteen days.