SOYEZ LES BIENVENUS SUR LE SITE DES AMIS D'ALEXANDRINA - SEDE BEM-VINDOS AO SITE DOS AMIGOS DA BEATA ALEXANDRINA

Victim soul

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.

   

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