Alexandrina of Balazar

Alexandrina Maria da Costa was born on 30 March 1904 at Gresufes in the rural parish of Balazar, near Póvoa de Varzim in the Archdiocese of Braga, Portugal, into a hardworking peasant family. She was baptized on Holy Saturday, 2 April 1904. Her father abandoned the household when she was very young; her mother raised her and her sister Deolinda in the Christian faith. After only about eighteen months of schooling—she had been sent briefly to Póvoa de Varzim because Balazar lacked a school—she returned home and, from the age of nine, worked on a farm. In her teens she became a seamstress with her sister. When she went with other girls into the countryside she gathered flowers to make carpets for the Church of Our Lady of Sorrows in Póvoa de Varzim. At twelve she fell gravely ill and nearly died; her health remained permanently weakened.

On Holy Saturday in March 1918, when she was fourteen, three men—including a former employer—forced their way into the room where she was sewing with Deolinda and another girl, intending to rape them. To preserve her purity Alexandrina jumped from a window some four meters (about thirteen feet) to the ground. She barely survived; her spine was injured. For several years she could still drag herself, bent and crippled, to church, where she remained long in prayer to the astonishment of the parishioners. She first begged Our Lady for a cure. Progressive paralysis confined her to bed from 14 April 1925; she remained bedridden for roughly thirty years until her death. The parish priest lent her a statue of the Immaculate Heart of Mary for the month of May. In time she ceased asking for healing and offered herself to Christ as a victim for the conversion of sinners and for peace in the world. Mystical experiences of union with Jesus and Mary began in this period.

From 3 October 1938 until 24 March 1942 she lived the sufferings of the Passion every Friday. Biographers relate that in ecstasy she once fell to the floor under the weight of the cross; two men could not lift her, though she weighed only about thirty-four kilograms, and she told her spiritual director that she bore "a world-wide weight." At the invitation of the Jesuit Father Mariano Pinho, her director until 1941, she wrote down what Jesus said to her. In 1936, through Father Pinho, she asked Pope Pius XI for the consecration of the world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary—a request Portuguese bishops renewed until 1941. Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, later Pope Pius XII, was then Secretary of State; on 31 October 1942 he consecrated the world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

According to her Vatican biography, from 27 March 1942 until her death—about thirteen years—she took no food except daily Holy Communion; her weight fell to roughly thirty-three kilograms (seventy-three pounds). Physicians examined her without finding a natural explanation. In 1943 church authorities ordered a forty-day clinical isolation at the hospital of Foz do Douro near Porto; under strict watch no intake of food was observed, nor any pathology or mental illness that would account for her state. Her sister, advised by a priest, kept a diary of Alexandrina's words and experiences. Jesus is reported to have told her: "You will very rarely receive consolation… I want that while your heart is filled with suffering, on your lips there is a smile." He also asked her to be his victim: "How many victims I have chosen… and how many have refused! … If you love me, if you are all mine, do not refuse what I ask. Be my victim."

In 1944, under the Salesian priest Umberto Pasquale, who became her spiritual director, she joined the Union of Salesian Cooperators, offering her sufferings for the salvation of souls and the sanctification of youth and of Cooperators throughout the world. Despite pain she cared for the spiritual good of her parish, especially the poor, and promoted triduums and Forty Hours devotion. The Archbishop of Braga forbade visits between 1944 and 1952, yet popular devotion grew. On 7 January 1955 she was told that that year would be the year of her death. On 12 October she received Extreme Unction. She died at 7:30 p.m. on 13 October 1955.

At her request these words were placed on her tombstone: "Sinners, if the dust of my body can be of help to save you, come close, walk over it, kick it around until it disappears. But never sin again: do not offend Jesus anymore! Sinners, how much I want to tell you…. Do not risk losing Jesus for all eternity, for he is so good. Enough with sin. Love Jesus, love him!" Tradition holds that in June 1946 the Lord promised that souls who visit her tomb with the right disposition would be saved. Her body rests to the left of the high altar in the parish church of Saint Eulalia in Balazar, which became a place of pilgrimage. The cause of beatification opened on 14 January 1967; she was declared Venerable on 21 December 1995 (or 12 January 1996 in some accounts) and beatified by Pope John Paul II on 25 April 2004. Her liturgical memorial is 13 October. Pope John Paul II declared that "her secret to holiness was love for Christ."

May Blessed Alexandrina obtain for us a love of the Eucharist that turns every suffering into an offering for sinners, and let us practice today the virtue of patient, smiling sacrifice united to Jesus.